Nearby, a bakery was turning out golden pastries impressed with patterns from their wooden moulds, and stuffed with a scintillating sweet pork flavoured with fermented tofu and garlic. Legend has it that this sweetmeat was born out of a labour dispute in the late Qing Dynasty. A disgruntled baker, so they say, stormed out of his job after an attempted act of sabotage, having mixed all the ingredients in the storeroom together: fatty pork, peanuts, sesame seeds, garlic, syrup, flour, fermented tofu and wine. The boss’s wife noticed that the mess had a captivating aroma, so she used it as a stuffing in the next day’s cakes, which were received by their customers with rapturous approval.
In one of the backstreets, I came across a few old ladies sorting tea-leaves with their hands on bamboo trays, and countless tea vendors. Chaozhou is the original home of gong fu cha, a tea-drinking practice that has become fashionable all over China. Roasted Iron Buddha teas are brewed in miniature pots, and the caramel-coloured infusion poured into tiny bowls. The bittersweet liquid is as sharpening as an espresso coffee. In the Chiuchow region, it is served before and after meals, and at any time of day. In the slow streets of the old city, shopkeepers sit all day on wooden chairs outside their establishments, their tea gear arranged on china trays, sipping tea, smoking cigarettes and chatting.
Every morning, one lane in the southern part of the old town was thronged with market shoppers. Goose vendors stood before glass cabinets hung with their glossy birds, still warm from the pot, ready to chop them to order. A couple of sellers offered cooked, cooled fish arrayed in bamboo baskets. There were freshly made snacks: fluffy heart-shaped rice cakes stained green by mulberry leaves, rice-paste dim sum stuffed with fragrant chives, and little cups of steamed translucent dim sum stuffed with minced pork that had been fried with a salty pickle. A woman stuffed raw minced pork into pockets of tofu and sections of hollow bitter melons that customers could take home and cook for their dinner.
Even for a well-travelled Chinese foodhound like me, Chaozhou was full of surprises. Most amazing was the urban goatherd I met on a busy thoroughfare near my hotel. His four white goats stood, tethered, on a wooden cart on the back of his bicycle, looking curiously around at the traffic and the neon signs, their udders bulging. He milked them as they stood there, bagging up the milk and selling it to passing customers. ‘Just boil it and it’s good to drink,’ he told me.
By the end of my visit, I was beginning to have a richer sense of the Chiuchow style: of its cold, cooked fish with their pungent dips, fresh steamed seafood, rich congees, rice noodles, cakes and sweetmeats. From the outside, it might seem to be collapsed into a generic Cantonese style. From the inside, it was a vibrant culinary region with a proud sense of its own identity. Chaozhou, and Shantou too, were places to throw out all one’s preconceptions about Chinese food, and open one’s eyes to the seemingly infinite variety of the country’s regional cuisines.
MARCUS SAMUELSSON is a five-time James Beard award-winning chef and author. He is the owner of Red Rooster Harlem, the co-founder of Three Goats Organization, and the co-creator of Food Republic, the online community for men who want to learn to eat and drink well, and live smart.
FACE TO FACE WITH FUGU
Marcus Samuelsson
The story was always the same with these young cooks. After fifteen-hour shifts chopping and peeling, sautéing and braising, we were always looking for ways to blow off steam. I’ve cooked in France, Switzerland, Sweden, and on cruise ships, but the need to turn down the intensity after you left the kitchen didn’t need any translation. We wanted to have fun.
When I was first starting out, beers with the guys meant looking for girls and showing off our battle wounds from hot pans and sharp knives. But after a few years of working hard and partying hard, I started to get an itch for something stronger. I wanted to taste the world outside of the same sauces I was making day in, day out. Everyone insisted the best food was French food (and I wasn’t about to argue this point with my chefs at Georges Blanc), but I also knew there were flavors I hadn’t experienced yet. The late nights out with the other chefs became fewer and fewer. I was saving money to travel to Japan and eat fugu—a potentially deadly puffer fish that could kill you if it wasn’t prepared the right way.
I had first heard about fugu from my high school sweetheart’s family. Christina’s father was Swedish but her mother was Japanese, and dinnertime at their house was a virtual passport into a whole other culture. While my own mother might have opened a can of peaches and drizzled the syrup over some whipped cream (a delicious, if not safe, treat as she wasn’t the best cook), snacks at Christina’s meant dried and seasoned cuttlefish or cold cucumber salad tossed in white miso and topped with bonito flakes.
These were flavors I wasn’t used to—fish at the Samuelsson house was usually smoked, cured or folded into mashed potatoes. Sure, we had access to the freshest fish (some of my best childhood memories were fishing with my father and Uncle Torsten in Smögen), but having it sliced raw and presented with nothing more than a drop of soy sauce and a dab of wasabi forever changed me. And there was a fish that could actually kill someone? I knew I had to discover this creature for myself.
By that time I was twenty-one and working as a junior chef at the Victoria-Jungfrau Interlaken resort in Switzerland. While my friends were saving money for cars and other spoils, I didn’t have enough money to take a girl out. I wanted to pinch every penny and save every bill for the trip to Tokyo that would invariably change my perspective. My focus was razor sharp and I even picked up extra shifts to get to my goal faster. Here was a challenge that pitted man against a potentially slow and painful death brought on by an improperly prepared dish. My head couldn’t be clearer.
Curiosity doesn’t have a number to it. As a cook you’re rich and poor. Your palate is rich but getting to experience all the flavors in the world can cost you. In this case, I had two things that I needed to precisely plan—saving enough money to get me to Tokyo and scheduling the time when I would go. Fugu is only available October through January so I had to make sure everything lined up perfectly. Luckily, Christina had family in Japan who could host me, so all I needed to do was pack a few clothes, running shoes, a notebook, and enough money to keep me in Japan for ten days and a meal of blowfish.
Here was this place that was all about the other—a new culture, a language I couldn’t understand, and a dish whose safety was in the hands of another chef. If it’s not prepared properly to remove its toxins, one lick of the wrong part and you’re a goner. But I didn’t even have the bandwidth to think about all the odds against me. Even though it felt like I was the only black person in this homogeneous country, I was like a kid in a cultural candy store. I remember walking into the basement of the famed department store Takashimaya and experiencing what a real Japanese tea ceremony was about. Three hours of sitting on your knees makes a bikram yoga session look easy. I walked around the basements of department stores for hours, taking in all the colors and smells of the bento boxes and rice cakes that were put on display. Trips to Tsujiki, Tokyo’s (if not the world’s) most notable fish market, meant sushi for breakfast, and I ate more ramen that week than I have in the past two years. (And I really love ramen.)
To keep me busy and help me curb my spending before the big meal, I was allowed to observe chefs in a sushi restaurant. Mind you, I say observed, not worked with. These were strictly ‘Look, Don’t Touch’ hours and I was instructed to stand silently in the corner while these small men with big voices shaped hundreds and hundreds of perfectly crafted bites of sushi.
In the middle of my trip, Christina’s aunt walked me over to a fugu restaurant in Setagaya. I remember thinking we were in the wrong place because here I was standing in front of a nondescript office building, this woman pointing down to below the ground. I ventured down to the sub-sub-basement of this building and into the foyer of a fugu restaurant. Since these specialty spots are only open the three months out of the year you can get the fish, one might wonder what the
chefs do for work the other nine months. But with the kind of precision, skill and craft they have to have to handle fugu, who cared? All I knew was that I had made it here.
Forget about asking for a menu; here fugu is the star and they will let you know how you should eat it. First, they bring out the whole fish to show you. If you’ve ever seen what puffer fish looks like, it’s a speckled creature with two large beady eyes on the sides of its head. The spiked exterior is used as a defense mechanism and, when threatened, they can fill up their extremely elastic bellies full of water, immediately stabbing their predator. The puffer that was brought to my table knew what was about to happen, its clear and perfect eyesight bore right into my psyche.
It was the first and last time I hesitated during that meal. After twenty years I can’t remember the name of the restaurant, but I remember those seven courses. First up was sashimi, delicate and almost sweet, followed by pieces fried in a super-light tempura batter that didn’t feel greasy. Next up, a piece of poached fish. The main course was a rustic, almost soupy, dish, composed of rice and dashi, that wonderfully simple yet complex-tasting Japanese broth, which was made with the fugu bones. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together when I was done, but it was so worth it. That meal was close to perfection for me.
It also really messed me up.
You know the moment when you realize you’ve been missing the party? I was there and I did something that took me on a different path; once you see something great, you’re even further away from it. How did they do this? These guys weren’t French, they weren’t Michelin-starred and they didn’t wear tall chef hats. I was a young black chef and I was taught the best food came from France. This meal threw a big wrench into what I knew up to that point and my future didn’t seem so planned out for me. Guess what? That made it better.
Nowadays you can see almost every corner of this earth on Google maps, and even learn how to fillet a fugu on YouTube. Advancements in travel and technology give us access to things our parents never dreamed about. With so many new and even newer versions coming out so fast, we often gripe if authenticity gets lost in translation. But it’s not about mourning how things used to be done—you have to go and experience these things for yourself, whether it’s finding ways to preserve a tradition or thinking of different flavors that will make a dish your own.
Through all my travels around the world, one thing has always stayed true: I don’t eat. I taste. And this ever-long journey of taste hits me the same way whether I’m at a nasi goreng stand in Singapore, eating warm beef tartare in Ethiopia, chowing down on a fish sandwich on the beach in Barbados, or eating a fugu dinner. It’s my curiosity about different cultures that keeps me tasting and seeking, and I don’t ever want to lose my constant search for the next bite that I have to have.
DANIEL VAUGHN is the barbecue editor for Texas Monthly magazine and the author of The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue. He is a trained architect living in Dallas, Texas, with two young children and his beautiful wife Jennifer.
HIGH ON THE HOG IN GEORGIA
Daniel Vaughn
Warner Robins, Georgia, or Wichita Falls, Texas? My boss gave me the choice between two air force bases with equally dull renovation projects to oversee and, like most of the travel choices at that point in my life, barbecue was the tie-breaker. Georgia’s foreign soil seemed full of possibilities. I was still working as an architect, but I could feel my design career winding down with every passing month. I was in the midst of writing a book on barbecue during my free nights and weekends. Everyone warned me about quitting a very good job for the prospect of steady book sales. Regardless, my mind couldn’t help but wander toward dreams of making my living from my passion: barbecue. In the meantime, company-funded expeditions in search of foreign barbecue traditions were a welcome diversion. Traveling across my home state of Texas and writing about its rich barbecue culture had become second nature over the last several years, but my only Georgia barbecue guidebook was Atlanta magazine’s ‘BBQ 2010’. In the opening article Jim Auchmutey wrote that ‘Atlanta and Georgia are chameleons of “’cue”. He contended that the only barbecue constant around the state was Brunswick stew. The Georgia style was going to be hard to pin down, but my job would take me there monthly and barbecue would be a constant on the itinerary.
April: With so many other options, the only pork that ended up on my plate at Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q was a few deep-fried ribs. Jonathan and Justin Fox hail from Fort Worth and opened this namesake joint in 2007 after they couldn’t find brisket to their liking in town. How very Texan. Thick slices of smoked brisket arrived, some from the lean end and a few from the fatty point end. All of it had an overt smokiness from the blackened crust surrounding each slice. The fat clinging to the ‘lean’ slices was adequately smoked to need no trimming, and the slices from the point were laced with wonderful fat that just required the additional heat from my tongue to hit its melting point. This was comfort food for a Texan, so it was surely some of Georgia’s best. Side items, I would come to discover, are anything but an afterthought in Atlanta. The soul food traditions inform the menu offerings in ways that go from comforting to irreverent. Take the Fox-a-roni—a creamy mix of large pasta shells and cheese is dunked into a bowl of traditional Brunswick stew. Mix and enjoy.
May: Could lightning strike twice at Fox Bros.? Texas style spare ribs beckoned from the specials board. The ends of each rib were snarls of melted fat and smoky pork with a pleasant chewiness. Picking at the pockets of pork between bones and tendons is like a meaty scavenger hunt that can continue as long as you’re willing. Bathing in the familiarity I moved from rib to rib, but I would spread my wings on the next visit to Georgia.
June: If Fox Bros. was on the familiar Texas end of the barbecue spectrum, this tiny renovated liquor store stretched all the way to the other end, somewhere in South Korea, where Heirloom Market chef Jiyeon Lee was born and gained fame as a Korean pop star (seriously). She met Cody Taylor in Atlanta and they opened this joint, where you’re as likely to find tempura-fried sweet potato slices—which are stunning—as you are Southern pulled pork.
I was now traveling with my client who was a military man with little knowledge of my barbecue prowess. I needed this place to be impressive for a couple of reasons. I knew I’d be traveling with him for the foreseeable future, so a good meal meant he might defer to me for our monthly dining options (more barbecue, please!). We’d also be driving for two hours after our meal to reach Warner Robins. I didn’t want it to feel any longer than it had to.
The Korean fried chicken was sold out. Able standins were stewed collard greens wrapped in a rich broth that had bite, and the Brunswick stew with corn kernels, large chunks of tomatoes and a hearty amount of barely shredded meat all held together loosely by a thinnish brick-red broth. Worcestershire and sugar stood out too, and the ingredients hadn’t yet broken down into the more familiar smooth texture. It looked like what a trained culinary professional may have arrived at when asked to make a ‘stew’. It had all of the classic elements along with a freedom unstifled by an old Georgia family recipe.
A simple slice of brisket was stunningly well smoked (getting the lean slices to proper doneness while keeping them moist is an art), and, quickly downing half of a very atypical pork sandwich that was too well executed to call a gimmick, I was ready to declare Heirloom Market the future of Southern barbecue. The spicy chili-coated cubes of smoked pork coupled with the crunchy acidity of the kimchee coleslaw tassel on top was a happy marriage of two traditions within a well-made potato bun. Atlanta may have been home to legitimate barbecue joints since the early twentieth century, but the fact that a specific style never took hold of the city has provided it a distinct opportunity for culinary innovation that is not obliged to the yoke of traditionalism. Rise up, Atlanta.
Martin’s BBQ is literally across the street from the jobsite at Robins Air Force Base. Keeping a strong grasp on my notion that good brisket is hard to find outside of T
exas (I can be hard-headed, even with the very positive experiences the month and day immediately preceding) I stuck with pork. The ribs were fair while the pulled pork was chopped earlier in the day and had dried out somewhat. It needed the moisture of the vinegar sauce. I plodded through the meal, content in my assumptions, but curious about the promising slices of brisket in the paper-lined baskets across the table from me. With a full mouth, an extended fork and an inquisitive look from me, I gained a permissive grunt from my generous client. I took a slice. The beef was moist, tender and had a deep smokiness—serious brisket. Outside I found their gas-fired Southern Pride smoker. I’m more of a fan of meat cooked only with wood, but tipped my hat to the pitmaster, who provided superior smoked beef from what I consider inferior equipment.
July: After a mid-afternoon flight, my client and I were to meet Bill Addison, who had authored that Atlanta BBQ 2010 list. Texas thunderstorms had other ideas. Bill was on deadline and his procrastination wouldn’t allow for a late meal, so we were on our own. The previous month’s meals worked out well enough that my client left our choice up to me. To understand the barbecue scene I needed somewhere that offered respectable food whose popularity might outweigh its quality. Bill’s answer was Fat Matt’s Rib Shack. If you’re a movie buff then this joint might sound familiar. When asked for a rib joint recommendation in Atlanta, George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air responds without hesitation, ‘Fat Matt’s. Bring a bib.’
The smells wafting through the air brought back a childhood familiarity that I had almost forgotten. When I was growing up in Ohio we went to church with a woman named Carol. Her husband Jerry never joined her at church, but was instead known for his barbecued chicken and his drinking problem. He would sit for hours beside his charcoal grill with a can of beer in one hand, a jug full of sweet barbecue sauce in the other, just basting away while the entire neighborhood was covered with the smell of grilling, or more specifically the smell of burning sugar from the basting sauce. This was the smell of Fat Matt’s patio.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 10