Koreans love pork

There are a few things from my past that I am deeply embarrassed about. One is that as a teenager, long, long ago, when I didn’t know much about anything, I was a big fan of New Kids on the Block. The other is that also when I was a teenager, long, long ago, when I didn’t know much about anything, I spent most of my time eating out at TGI Friday’s. At least with my bad taste in music, there wasn’t much lost other than my dignity. But with my bad taste in food, while growing up in Seoul, Korea, I lost a thousand and one opportunities to eat a meal as delicious as the one I had last night.

Last night, my cousin Young and I went to 사월에보리밥 , or Sawhuleh Boleebap, which translates into something like “Barley Rice in April.” The fact that it has a name that sounds sissy in English is a hiccup of cultural translation; it doesn’t say anything about the food, which is as simple and assertive as the best Korean food has to offer.

Koreans love pork. We love it so much some people have convinced themselves it prevents hypertension and eliminates toxins. It’s true that 보쌈, bossam, one of the best manifestations of Korean pork, has a surprisingly clean flavor. It’s simply boiled, sliced pork, with nothing on it or under it or in it, not even salt. I think it also tastes purer than it deserves to because of the way we eat it. Like many Asian cuisines, Korean food values a contrasting balance of flavors and textures. If you’re eating a tender hunk of pork with glistening lumps of fat, you’re not supposed to douse it in gravy and eat it with potatoes. You’re supposed to place it in a crisp piece of napa cabbage or spry shiso leaf or even just a very fresh piece of red-leaf lettuce with a good piece of spicy bossam kimchi. Some people might even add a small piece of hot green pepper or raw garlic, or raw oysters dressed in spicy sauce, or just a bit of soy sauce to add some acidic saltiness. In any case, the raw, bright, fresh flavors in your mouth make that fatty pork taste almost as virtuous as salad. And it may even make your skin glossy!



While we ate our pile of pork, we also cleansed our systems with bowls of barley rice, into which we mixed various sautéed vegetables and red pepper sauce, a variation on the bibimbap many Americans know. I loved the nutty flavor of the barley, especially combined with the slightly bitter greens, the bean sprouts, and the chewy root vegetables.



And since Koreans rarely eat rice without soup or stew, there was also a very good bowl of hot 된장찌개, daenjang jjigae, a stew made from Korean fermented soybeans, filled with potatoes, squash, and cubes of firm tofu. Daenjang is a good example of a Korean food with the fifth flavor of umami, beyond salty, sour, sweet, and bitter, the unmistakable sense that a food tastes full.



We washed it all down with a comically large jug of 동동주, dongdongju, a creamy, sweet liquor made out of rice. My cousin, like the good Korean she is, had most of it.

I have so much lost time to make up for! I gained 10 pounds in Spain. I may just have to gain another ten here.

Cook and Taste in Barcelona

I had been a little apprehensive about what the cooking class might be like at Cook and Taste in Barcelona. It was listed in my Lonely Planet, and a poster on Chowhound had recommended it, but I had been afraid that it was a school targeted to tourists wanting to swill sangria and that it would inevitably avoid “scary” ingredients. When I saw the menu, I wasn’t really reassured: tortilla espanola (the eponymous potato omelet), paella (the eponymous rice dish), sopa de tomates (suspiciously like the eponymous gazpacho), and crema catalana (suspiciously like flan). I wanted to learn how to make food that was essentially Spanish, but also to learn more about Spanish food than I could in New York.

But as I’ve learned so often on my travels, my pessimism was greatly misplaced. Bego, our teacher, was instantly likable, a somewhat serious woman with a quiet but sharp sense of humor. She had been an engineer for years and had started the cooking school as a major career change, but she kept her kitchen clean and her knives sharp like any professionally trained chef. And there was cuttlefish in the paella, bought fresh from La Boqueria that morning.

The class wasn’t big, three middle-aged women traveling through Italy and Spain together from Los Angeles, me and Anne, one young guy who was clearly a foodie from Australia, and then one motorcycle instructor from England, who it turned out never cooked but had been sent there as part of a tour package. We cooked through the recipes together, two volunteers at a time joining Bego, but all of us watching on, which was a nice change from the team-approach at other cooking schools I’ve been to.



What I loved best was definitely the sopa, the cold soup that she served in little glasses, with a pungent garnish of garlic aioli, hazelnuts, and a hard grated cheese. The tomatoes were almost raw, having only been blanched in boiling water to remove their skins, but sweet and red. It was as beautiful as it was good.



Tortilla espanola, I have never particularly cared for, since potatoes are not my favorite vegetable. Bego revealed that the question of whether onion should be added to the potatoes cooked in oil was a controversial question in Spain, one that could even divide families. When I asked Isaac, Mao-Mei’s husband about it, he said, “Huh, that’s funny. I never eat tortilla without onion,” proving her point. But this tortilla, so expertly flipped by Anne, did have a lovely golden crust, and although I still will order almost anything else at a tapas bar, I can see how it’s the kind of everyday food that I love, simple, cheap, filling, and tasty.



The other controversy in Spanish cooking is apparently whether lemon should be squeezed on paella or not. Bego warned us, if we’re invited to a Spanish home and served paella without lemon, not to ask for it. Anne and I had avoided paella up to that point, since it’s the kind of thing that tends to get advertised by garish backlit photographs at tourist restaurants, and we both loved what the lemon juice added to the prawns and the cuttlefish, the tomatoes, and almost al dente rice. I loved how the grains felt in my mouth, as if each grain had its own integrity.

Crema catalana, in the end, turned out to be a Catalan version of crème brulee, complete with blowtorching of the sugar on top. I liked it, as I like almost all custards, but I think you can imagine what it was like without much more description.

I had to admit, what was typical was still real and still good. I left New York to be humbled, to stop being so sure of what I like and what I don’t. It’s happening.

Playing with amaranth

You, dear friends and family, know that the word “macrobiotic” makes me itch. It is only slightly higher than the bottom-rung words “raw food” and slightly below “vegan” in my hierarchy of words that describe things I want to eat. I love quinoa, I love those Heritage Flakes made by Nature’s Path made of “ancient grains,” even as I’m tittering at my cereal box, but amaranth is, in the U.S., the province of people who need gluten-free foods, and although I would never sneer at other’s misfortune, I’ve never felt a need to share in their misfortune. So I’d never tasted amaranth beyond what was put into the aforementioned Heritage Flakes until last Monday. And now I’m eating amaranth until it comes out of my ears.

¿Por que? It’s my volunteer job to cook it, play with it, and of course, taste it. It’s the best volunteer, nonpaid job I’ve ever had, even more evidence that the gods are smiling on me.

Amaranth, or amaranto en espanol, is one of those forgotten plants that seem to promise everything. It has incredibly high amounts of protein, calcium, and other essential nutrients, much more than corn, and these nutrients manifest themselves in a form more easily digestible and absorbable than in other foods. When combined with corn or other grains, it even forms a complete protein. It’s native to Mexico and Latin America, but amaranth was significant in religious rituals for indigenous peoples here, and so was stamped out by the Spanish.

Puente’s work in community health in rural Oaxaca therefore has a simple, straightforward message: eat more amaranth. They’re working with farmers to grow it, especially since it commands four times the price of corn, and they work with women in the communities to develop new recipes incorporating amaranth into their diet. Malnutrition in Oaxaca is more the result of a lack of variety in the diet rather than a straightforward lack of food; in fact, obesity and diabetes are leading causes of death here.

Although the organization has already developed a fair number of recipes using amaranth flour, amaranth leaves, and puffed amaranth, which is usually sold in Oaxaca in honey-amaranth bars called “alegrias,” meaning “joys,” but they haven’t done much experimenting yet with the seed or grain itself. So everyday, I think about what typical foods in the pueblos could incorporate some amaranth grain without being too strange, without requiring foreign or expensive ingredients. That means most American hippie-gluten-averse-health-nut recipes are out, and even a fair number of ingredients that I think of as Mexican but aren’t really available to poor rural Oaxacans, like cheese or tomatillos or chicken. In any case, since this is my first time actually trying to create recipes, it’s a relief not to have the whole world at my disposal.



They don’t expect me to perfect recipes, just to see what works and perhaps more important, what absolutely doesn’t work, before they encourage the women in their communities to experiment themselves. So I started by just cooking amaranth straight, trying to understand what basic properties it had, what basic flavor it had, and thinking about how it would complement the flavors in existing rural Mexican food. The moment I tasted my first mouthful, I learned something very elemental: wash it first. It was so embarrassing to eat gritty, gummy amaranth, even standing alone in the kitchen.

I did eventually find a better way to cook it: either to boil it, covered, in twice as much water as amaranth for 15 minutes, or to boil it uncovered in a lot of broth, like rice or pasta soup, for 25 minutes. This way, the grains stayed distinct, even if they still stuck together, and they retained a pleasantly nutty flavor. At this point, though, I don’t know how well the flavor and texture are going to go across with the communities. As the program director put it, while tasting the chicken soup with amaranth, you’d have to be okay with having millions of tiny little grains in your mouth. (My friend Sharon, who has a fear of small, round things, would absolutely die.)



One of the best things about this job is that I’m forced to get over my fear of cooking really basic Mexican food. I thought amaranth, even when gummy, would taste pretty good mixed up with nopales, or cactus, and diced tomato, lime juice, and cilantro, like the salad I’d been served when I visited a community with the executive director a month ago. So I went out and bought cactus paddles, already de-spined and cleaned, at the Gigante grocery store in the neighborhood. Most Mexican recipes for nopales don’t even bother telling you how to cook it, they just say, “Cook the nopales and then…” So I had to Google some English-language recipes. Although Rick Bayless says they’re best when grilled, I thought I should cook it in the way they would most likely be cooked in the pueblos and boiled them with some water and salt for 15 minutes, until tender. I rinsed them carefully to minimize their slimy tendency and was surprised to find they had a tart, bright flavor of their own, separate from the lime juice and cilantro I was ready to add. Nopales are usually sort of slimy anyway, and the gumminess of the amaranth wasn’t too weird in combination. This was successful enough that a couple of Puente staff had it for lunch with salsa and tostadas.



But most exciting of all, I’m being forced to make tortillas from scratch! Tortillas, tamales, and atole all come from the same base, dried corn kernels that are boiled with limestone to remove the tough outer husks and then ground very finely and combined with water to make a dough for tortillas or tamales, or added to boiling water and sometimes chocolate to make a filling hot drink, like champurrado. Puente would love to know if a handful can just be thrown into the pot to make masa. My first attempt was okay, tasty the way a whole-wheat, crunchy piece of bread can be tasty, just not tortilla-like at all. I had another pot sitting overnight, so we’ll see what happens today with a different ratio of corn to amaranth.