The Bizarre Truth

by Andrew Zimmern

  She served the rondon with coconut rice and beans, coconut bread, and two homemade beverages made from cassava and seaweed. These drinks are called seaweed pop and cassava pop. The seaweed pop was crafted from a puree of local seaweed, rehydrated with water, and seasoned with nutmeg. It’s more of a sludge than anything else. I politely accepted the nearly inedible beverage, but in my head I wanted to run screaming from the table.

  Finally, on our last day, I had the ultimate uplifting food experience I was hoping for in this country of redemptive experiences. We traveled south to Granada, a city where everything comes together—the Pacific, North, Central, and Atlantic regions—both in their food and heritage. Granada is a colonial Spanish town that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years. You can climb to the top of the public church’s bell tower and look out over the rooftops. It’s a sea of gorgeous curved clay-tiled roofs, not an antenna or satellite in sight. The smell of cooking fires wafts through the streets. It’s an absolutely charming place, with artisanal chocolate shops, cozy city parks teeming with people and performance artists everywhere you look. The narrow cobblestone streets are a challenge to navigate, only because you spend the whole time craning your neck gazing at all the stunning Spanish Colonial architecture.

  We were there the night of a big annual poetry and arts festival, where I had the pleasure of meeting the Nicaraguan vice president as well as a bunch of local dignitaries. I took a short break from the action to check out some Nicaraguan baseball T-shirts I felt I had to buy. As I sifted through the shirts, I noticed this Chinese guy running toward me. He immediately began screaming at me in Chinese. His interpreter eventually caught up, as did his security detail. Turns out this was the ambassador from Taiwan, berating me for not liking the stinky tofu I had eaten in his country. I’m just sort of holding my own, smiling and apologizing—I don’t want to get involved in some international kerfuffle in Nicaragua. All of a sudden, his wife appears and starts chewing him out because, as the translator told me later, he was tearing me a new one over a food he himself did not even care for! Imagine, an American in Nicaragua getting a tongue-lashing in Chinese, translated into English, over a meal I didn’t like from two years ago. It was pretty funny, and ended up morphing from an awkward altercation into a big lovefest. But I had to go, because dinner was at eight o’clock sharp and I couldn’t be late.

  I ended my night at a sleepy little restaurant and hotel where, I admit, my expectations were low. At first glance, Casa San Francisco, a quaint, family-run hotel about three blocks off the main square, was nothing special. However, once I entered the ancient courtyard, I changed my tune. Quiet and beautiful with a plunge pool surrounded by bougainvillea, the place just had that old Spanish western feel. I half expected to bump into Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And the surroundings were nothing compared to the food. Upon learning of my arrival, Chefs Octavio Gomez and Vernon Hodgeson went out of their way to up the ante a little in the kitchen. Vernon decided to reinvent a few rural dishes and raise them up on the altar, so to speak, exhibiting the kind of gastronomic and aesthetic flair that you expect from a New York City chef.

  They kicked off dinner with historical local fruit flavors, serving a platter of nispero, pera de agua, green mangoes, and star fruit. We washed that down with a batido, a sapote fruit milk shake. The main dish was quintessentially Nicaraguan with a modern twist—wild iguana, marinated sour orange, cumin, achiote, and garlic. They roasted the lizard whole, crisping the skin just like duck à l’orange—it was outstanding.

  Aged Chontales cheese was the real star of the meal. It’s a small wheel of soft, Muenster-like cheese, served in the ancient style of the Caribbean coast. You allow the cheese to age in the heat of the day, just long enough to produce large maggots. When you open the cheese, these juicy cheese worms, as they call them, are then eaten right along with the cheese, just hundreds of these suckers wriggling on the end of your knife. It’s one of the most horrific and wonderful things I have ever seen on a plate.

  The worm origin somehow remains a mystery, scientifically speaking. But I did manage to get the cultural story. One of the chefs explained that the cheese process originates from the time of the very first Sandinista Front. During that period, people near the front wouldn’t throw away old cheese because it was so difficult to obtain any food at all in that time of war. Instead, they let the cheese ferment, hanging it in a sack to eliminate the suero, or liquid, from the fresh cheese. Once the cheese lost its liquid, it began the process of decomposition. It’s at that time that the cheese develops and produces the worms, which continue to grow as long as you let the cheese ferment. Some people remove the worms and eat them fried; others eat them in their natural state. The whole idea of eating maggot-laden cheese is enough to boggle most anyone’s mind, but what I couldn’t shake is the idea that a traditional food like worm-filled Chontales cheese has been eradicated from this part of Nicaragua. Octavio admitted he’s been clueless on how to make it, consulting aged family members to resurrect the delicacy. The cheese wasn’t a dying breed—it was already dead and in the ground. When the chef learned I was coming to town, he saw the perfect opportunity to re-create this cheese for an audience that might actually enjoy eating it.

  He started out with fresh country cheese, caso cassero or caso creolo. It’s important you use raw-milk products from rural areas, because dairy products in the city use too much homogenization and scientific methodology to kill the bacteria and avoid decomposition. He crafted a basket of plantain leaves, hanging the fresh cheese from it to remove the suero for three days. Next, he rolled the cheese in fresh plantain leaves to hold its shape. On the seventh day the cheese started to decompose and produce eggs, which resemble fine grains of rice. It takes an additional twenty-four hours to hatch the worms. Luis served it to me four days later, which allowed the worms to grow to quite a decent size. Although nature does much of the work for you, it takes a lot of patience to stick out the two-week-long decomposition period. That, in addition to the fact that the cheese tastes like a rotten foot bomb went off in your mouth, has a lot to do with its phasing out. The cheese flavor is strong and pungent, which I adore. It reminded me of the washed rind cheese, The Stinking Bishop, that I eat whenever I can find some, but this one has the bonus of the wriggling worms busting out of it. Suffice to say, there’s not a big market for Chontales cheese riddled with maggots. Despite the desirable protein in those worms, this process can goof up on you if the cheese doesn’t lose its liquid. If that happens, the flavor will be kept even more rotten and putrefied and you can’t eat it. So there is a very fine balance here. This isn’t Fear Factor food, this is good cooking.

  I lit up when I heard this story. For Luis to spend fourteen days creating this dish made me want to cry. Who goes to that kind of trouble for a stranger? People who are proud of their culture and want to share it with you, that’s who. Octavio Gomez of Granada, Nicaragua, resurrected a regional, traditional dish that had died and gone to food heaven because no one was up to making it anymore. He breathed life back into a lost art form, and believe it or not, we devoured this cheese. It was fantastic; even the crew, who often forgo the bizarre fare for those faux-chocolate protein bars, liked it. The most disgusting-looking food is often the best-tasting. As foul an idea as it is to shove a runny, smelly fromage, riddled with something you’d rather bait a fishing hook with, into your mouth, it was pretty darn tasty. Eating outside your comfort zone allows you to acknowledge the baggage that you carry into each meal, that evil corruptive contempt prior to investigation, which thankfully can disappear pretty quickly.

  That’s why I love doing what I’m doing. When I have those moments and I realize there are people like Octavio Gomez who share the same food mission as me, it makes me glow. My hat is off to him for putting his money where his mouth is, so to speak, by not only acknowledging a culinary dead end but doing something about it. And the best news of all came several months later when we heard that now the chefs at the Casa San Franci
sco are making this wormy Chontales regularly. Like the phoenix, it is reborn, one mouth at a time.

  Herve This gives Andrew an exclusive tour

  of his chaotic Parisian kitchen.

  Paris

  Best Food Day in My Life?

  n the world of professional travel, as in life, some days are better than others. There are a lot of days that just don’t measure up, and I’ve discovered that timing oftentimes makes the difference between a movingly memorable and an infamous experience. Nothing is more disappointing than flying into a Canadian lodge and being met by your fishing guide, who gushes about how many fish they caught yesterday. “You’re going to be pulling them into the boat two at a time,” he tells you. Up in the morning, big breakfast, down to the dock, and out in the boat.

  All day under a hot sun with nothing but warm, soggy sandwiches for fuel and you haven’t even had a nibble. “Ya should a been here yesterday,” his mate calls to you from the gunwale as you putt back to the lodge, and you are reminded that this syndrome has reached epidemic proportions in the life of people who travel like you do. You finally score a table at some white-hot restaurant in another city, only to discover upon arrival that the chef whose food you are dying to eat is doing a charity dinner halfway across the country. It’s hard to manage expectations when you’ve had your heart set on something for months, years, decades. You finally get to some remote corner of the world, only to find that whatever it is you’re looking for just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. And there are many restaurants and food stalls, eateries, even types of dishes that have lived off of twenty-year-old reputations and are, as my friends in Texas like to say, “all hat and no cowboy.”

  Of course, when an experience lives up to the hype, it is truly a wonderful thing. Prowling through the dumpling shops of Taipei, deep-sea fishing expeditions off the coast of South America, strolling through Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, touring the caviar vault at the Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg, Russia (where I was able to take a horn spoon and literally feast out of one-kilo tins of the best beluga caviar in the world), were some of the most notable eating experiences of my life. However, if you held a gun to my head and made me pick one food day as my all-time best, I’d without a doubt say it happened on my second-to-last trip to Paris. Imagine a one-day period spent hustling around the City of Light, stuffing my face all over town in some of the most famous eateries in the world. From a quality, variety, and sheer level of brilliance standpoint, the food purveyors and chefs that I encountered that day were simply mind-blowing.

  Paris seemed the perfect place to create a phenomenal Bizarre Foods show. Many people thought it would be a tough sell. Unlike Asia and Africa, where a lot of the food is exceptionally strange to most Westerners in terms of recognition and sex appeal, Paris seems so tangible for any traveler. But I thought it would be the perfect spot to showcase what this show is all about. It’s not about shock value or eating Fear Factor style. It’s about exploring a city or region by experiencing the culturally significant foods that you find real people eating when you get there. I knew in my heart of hearts that so many things in Paris were bizarre (and I use that word on purpose, because I like to broaden its definition at every turn) because of the level of excellence and the brash boldness of chefs who create dishes that, from an intellectual standpoint, are incredibly challenging for people to wrap their heads around. And let’s not discount the classics. Tête de veau, a potted calf’s head in its own gelatin, is a staple of the Parisian traiteur and is certainly as crazy as any of the bits of rotted flesh, bugs, or entrails I’ve eaten on the show. Paris, with its culinary greatness as the main character, made a fantastic story.

  We started out the day at six in the morning, heading around the corner from our hotel to the basement baking and proofing rooms of Poilâne Bakery, buried deep under the ancient streets of the city. Poilâne has been a Paris staple since it opened its doors in 1932. The French can argue forever about who has the best bread, the best croissant, the best pastry for hours on end. There are so many good ones, I’m not sure how you could begin to conclude which one is the best. But Poilâne’s history gives their bakery more clout. So do the awards. And the claim by so many others about its greatness. Frank Sinatra and Lauren Bacall were members of the Poilâne fan club, and Robert De Niro loves to pick up a loaf at any opportunity. In 1969, owner and baker Lionel Poilâne was summoned by Salvador freaking Dalí to create sculptures made of bread. However, their biggest bread devotee is an anonymous New Yorker who coughed up a whopping $100,000 to Poilâne, requesting that his children and grandchildren receive a loaf a week for the rest of their lives. Seriously. It’s one thing to be great for a couple years or a decade; it’s another thing to achieve greatness for the better part of a century, to the point where hungry carbohydrate addicts regularly make a pilgrimage from all over the world to worship at the culinary altar of what they are baking at Poilâne. Now, that’s something to brag about.

  I may have had a better almond tart, pain chocolat, or baguette in my life, but I couldn’t tell you where. I think that says a lot about Poilâne’s greatness. Poilâne has three bakeries scattered all over Paris, but the original is located on Rue du Cherche-midi in the artsy Saint-Germain district. We rolled up to the shop and went inside. It took some time for our crew to set up, during which I found it painfully difficult, coffee cup in hand, to resist the temptation of snacking on all of the warm breakfast pastries and breads coming up from the basement kitchen. By the time I finally got to go downstairs, I must have looked like an elephant that hadn’t had a drink in a week, such was the madness in my eyes—like I was on the verge of diving into the ovens. They didn’t speak English, and I only speak kitchen French, but I’m certain that when my chin dropped to my lap with my tongue splayed on the floor it was the international sign for feed me, s’il vous plaît. The building had to be a thousand years old, with the giant granite stone floor even older. I couldn’t help but think about all the bread that’s been pulled out of those ovens and the folks who ate it, the famous and the ordinary. How many lives had this bread touched? Amazing.

  I get swept away with stuff like that. We build memories around foods because of the romantic relationship that we have with them. I love the idea of going into an ancient building, staffed with sixty-five-year-old ladies who have worked there since their teens, and eating bread that comes from a bakery whose sour starter still has the essence of the bacteria from decades ago, or longer! The sum of the parts here is greater than the whole. If you don’t think that is true, then bread is just bread. But for me, there was no better place to start the morning than merrily chomping away on a baguette at Poilâne Bakery, watching the ballet of bakers deep in the bowels of the building as the world of Paris began its day a hundred feet above us. Sweep to the proofing box, trays in the oven, rotate the bread, adjust the racks, pull bread, cool, lather, rinse, repeat.

  Next, I moved on to what the French like to call léche-vitrines, which literally means “window licking.” And there is no better place to window-lick than the Place de la Madeleine, home to some of the greatest food shops in the world: Caviar Kaspia, Maison de la Truffe, Fauchon, Maille Mustard. Quite frankly, I really didn’t know where to start. Luckily, I had a bicycle. When in Paris, window licking by bike is the way to go.

  I decided to start at Kaspia, a tiny café that offers up caviar to eat in the café or take to go. I opted to eat in the shop, standing like a dork with a horned spoon in hand. After my carbohydrate feast at Poilâne, I couldn’t imagine eating more bread, but when a plate of delicate blinis, miniature toasted bread crackers, and brioche toast points arrived with assorted caviars of all sizes and salt ratios (along with some hand-cured smoked fish), I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was my third visit to Kaspia, and for me, a trip to Paris is not complete without stopping there. These folks know how to do caviar right. And the customer who wants to suck the most out of the experience ought to go big or go home. The gorgeous silver servic
e, as expensive as caviar is, is best served in a luxurious manner. The silver platters, the paper-thin vessels holding the caviar, the crushed ice to keep it cool, the funky little forks, spoons, and paddles to scoop and dress each and every bite—it’s a beautiful way to eat. If you’re not going to go all out, what’s the point of pressing those delicate eggs up against the roof of your mouth to begin with? You can’t imagine what a treat it is to start off the day dining on some of the world’s best caviar, including the increasingly hard-to-find Iranian caviar. Shopping for anything Iranian in the States is a delicate political issue; however, the French have an ongoing relationship with the former Persian empire, and God bless them for it, because it allows me the opportunity to eat Iranian caviar. I had only a few minutes to spend at Kaspia, but I made short work of four ounces of quality salted and cured sturgeon eggs.

  Luckily, I didn’t have far to go when I left. I moved two doors down to Maison de la Truffe. This restaurant and fine-foods shop has amassed a global reputation for not only supplying its customers some of the greatest truffles from Italy and France, but for its truffle-infused goods. Truffle butter, truffle oil, truffle salt, truffle cheese, and if you take a seat at one of their little tables, you can feast on truffles with scrambled eggs, gravlax of salmon cured with truffles—really anything you can imagine. I tried a fabulous black-footed cured Spanish ham rubbed with truffle paste, the meat shaved paper thin by hand and placed on little toasts schmeared with triple-cream-truffled cheese. If there is a truffle that should be paired with a food item, the folks at Maison de la Truffe have done it.

  A shaving of truffle is like the aroma of a musty basement stuffed with seven million pounds of the earthiest mushrooms. Just one thin slice of these oversized mold spores packs that kind of punch. With good truffles, the aroma and the flavor are absolutely explosive and huge in scope. It feels as if the flavor literally grows funkier and deeper inside your brain. While many purists, myself often included, consider the only way to enjoy fresh white truffles is paired with one or two other ingredients at the most, some of the best truffle flavor comes from the great culinarians and their ability to coax more flavor out of the truffle by pairing it with certain items, then layering those truffle flavors. That bite of truffle paste rubbed on cured Spanish ham was one of the most intense flavor moments of my life. Tasting the complex variety of truffle flavor compares to looking at a great painting where an artist has painted a sunset, then sanded away a bit and painted over it, then sanded away some more and continued painting. It creates such a vibrancy of color, a depiction that so closely resembles a real sunset. Layered and nuanced. Not just reddish orange, but hundreds of versions of that color, many of which are almost close to being the same, but not. It was said that the impressionist painters painted only their vision of reality, not reality itself, with many of them adapting a style that was completely juxtaposed to how it actually existed in nature. I can’t help but look at Seurat’s Island of La Grande Jatte or Monet’s Impression, Rising Sun and think they’ve completely captured the way it looks in real life, despite the artist’s liberty with our reality. And that is how it was with those truffles. I know it wasn’t simple, I know it was a lot of ingredients, but those levels of truffle flavor still haunt me today. I nursed my tiny container of truffle salt, truffle mustard, and all my little truffle goodies that I brought home from Maison de la Truffe for months after I got home.