Lao-Hmong three color dessert (kao la song / nab vam) in Fresno, California (2013)

Because it’s sandwiched between San Francisco and Los Angeles, you don’t hear that much about Central California. Which is a shame, because it’s an amazing place. I’m not just talking about the coast, though areas of Big Sur are nearly identical to the Island of Capri in Southern Italy and the area around Monterey could stand in for Lazio with its cypress trees and artichokes, then of course you have the Central Coast wine country inland. Those things are all great, but I’m talking about the small towns many have never heard of, spaced between thousands of square miles of farmland that grow a huge percentage of the food for the whole country. Places like Lemon Cove and Exeter with endless fields of citrus fruit and pomegranates. Earlimart, McFarland and Traver, which are covered by orchards of almond, walnut, pistachio and nectarine trees pollinated in the spring by mobile beehives. The list of towns (and the foods they grow) could go on and on. One of the least obvious attributes of Central California though has to be the Asian enclaves in places like Marina or the town of Fresno, which has a huge Southeast Asian population from Laos, Thailand and Vietnam – particularly of Hmong descent. There are markets in Fresno that look like something straight out of Vientiane, selling things you don’t find in other Asian markets, and all kinds of Southeast Asian food. The photo above is a three color dessert that was marked with its Lao name kao la song, but the Hmong call it nab vam. On the bottom are tapioca pearls and the top has bags of sugar syrup and coconut milk to add – but what is in the middle is what catches your eye. These green rice flour noodles, colored and flavored with pandan, are very common in Southeast Asian desserts like cendol or Burmese mont let saung. Their Thai name is lod chong, Vietnamese call them bánh lọt. Some versions are made with alkaline limestone water for texture, others are not, but they are all related somehow… if not in name.

A street vendor selling koulouri bread in Athens, Greece (2012)

Ten years ago when I began this journey, I had a clear purpose in mind. Instead of going to culinary school, I would travel to learn about the cuisines of the world. I started taking photos for documentation, mostly so I could reference them later. My galleries are like a textbook that I made up as I went, allowing me to study things after the fact. I’m still learning from things I saw in the beginning. For this reason, my photos have been more of things rather than people. I do take the occasional photograph of people though, especially when I find someone with undeniable character. The man in this photo is one of those people, a street vendor selling κουλούρι or koulouri, a kind of Greek sesame bread popular at breakfast time. Where in America you might pick up a bagel or a donut in the morning, the streets of Athens are filled with vendors selling koulouri, especially outside train stations and beside newsstands. This guy had a serious operation going, he looked as if he had been selling this bread on the same corner for his entire life. When I passed on my way to the Agora (Central Market), I held up my camera to ask permission and he smiled and held up a piece of bread. I was honored that he allowed me to take his photo, so I walked up and bought this bread from him and had it for my breakfast.

Like so many other people on the street that morning.

A cup of Turkish coffee in Kusadasi, Turkey (2012)

I drink about 10 cups a day, so needless to say I like my coffee. The thing is, I pretty much like all coffee, truck stop diner coffee, café con leche made with instant coffee, Vietnamese iced coffee, Ethiopian spiced coffee… you name it. There has long been a special place in my heart though for Türk kahvesi or Turkish coffee. I had my first sort of by chance sometime in the late nineties. After a meal of kebabs I ordered a coffee and was asked if I wanted regular or Turkish (you can guess which one I chose). From then on if the Turkish version was an option that is what I had. So when I arrived in Kusadasi, finding a proper cup of Turkish coffee was high on my list. I wanted to find other things too, like the chewy Turkish ice cream known as salep dondurma and fresh-baked lahmacun and found other things I didn’t even know about, like tulumba. Much like every other day of my life though, on this day, coffee was first.

Swordfish and tuna at the Ortigia Market in Siracusa, Sicily (2012)

Tradition is a powerful thing. It connects people over huge distances and over thousands of years. In some places, the foundation of tradition is so strong it supports bridges to the past that seem to lead all the way back to the beginning. Sicily is one of these places and in Siracusa you can take a bridge into the past, to the old city on the island of Ortigia. Here, fishing is one of the oldest traditions. The market is lined with numerous pescherie, with the fishmongers calling attention to the best of the days catch. They sell fish here I’d never even heard of before, like pilot fish (fanfole or nfànfaru) and pearly razorfish (pesce pettine), but when it comes to the tradition of Sicily two fish stand alone… tuna and swordfish. During my visit to the Ortigia Market, this display of pesce spada (swordfish) and tonno (tuna) at Casa Del Pesce Fratelli Cappuccio was hard to miss, in the background the owners are having a rather lively discussion.

If you hear them say pisci spata or tunnu – they’re speaking Sicilian.

Bintje potatoes for sale in Brussels, Belgium (2011)

Did fries originate in Belgium or France? That’s an argument I wouldn’t get in the middle of. While it would be difficult to avoid French while visiting Brussels (even the street names are both in Dutch and French) calling fries French would be high on a list of things not to do. Yes you can get your frietjes (Dutch word) at any number of friteries (French word), but when in Belgium call them as the Belgians do. You may speak English, but do you eat bangers and mash or sausage and mashed potatoes? I guess it depends on what kind of English you speak. One thing’s for sure, when people feel they have a claim to the origin of something the debate can get heated – sometimes to the point of no return. Some dishes are so beloved that even the slightest deviation from the recipe someone grew up with can inspire outrage, even if the dish itself was born in another place entirely. Fried potatoes exist all over the world, but there is little agreement on the best way to cook them or which potato is best for what. These local bintje potatoes were still covered with soil at a tiny shop in a square known as Bloemenhofplein in Dutch or as Place du Jardin aux Fleurs in French (both roughly translating as Flower Garden Plaza). In Belgium (and France), the bintje potato is the most highly prized for making fries.

So, if you’ve never had a fry made from a bintje potato… have you ever really had a fry?

View outside the Chegworth Farm Shop in London, England (2011)

Making an accurate assessment of anything is pretty difficult without a point of reference. Imagine having to find the distance between two places and not knowing where either of them are… sometimes you just have to find things first. This is especially true when it comes to food, how can you know when you’ve had true Italian or Chinese food, for instance, until you’ve had it made the way it was intended to be made, with the ingredients it was intended to be made with? In Italy the vegetables may have just been pulled from the soil and taste like they were injected with the concentrated flavor of that vegetable, in China the chicken used in your dish may be from an ancient breed and may have been slaughtered right before it went into the pot. In the end, many of the dishes we eat that originated in other places will only be approximations, limited examples that can at the very least give us a point of reference to later compare with other things. For example, before visiting England I had only had versions of things that people called British cuisine – approximations of Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, etc. When I finally got to visit, not only did I find that there is so much more to British cuisine than I ever knew, I found that I had never really even tasted the real thing. The markets here were absolutely bursting with ingredients from small regional farms, lamb from Essex, cheeses from Somerset, pork from Yorkshire, seafood from Scottish waters, aged wild game and beautiful fruits and vegetables to rival any I’ve ever seen. No doubt these are the ingredients that British dishes are intended to be made with, and they didn’t disappoint. One of the biggest shocks to my system were some tiny plum tomatoes from the Chegworth Farm Shop in the photo above, a little place that sells ingredients grown on a farm in Kent. I’ve had tomatoes all over Italy and often straight off the vine on the farm I grew up on. These were some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten anywhere.

That was certainly unexpected.

Scrambled eggs, home fries and braised pork (chashu) in Culver City, California (2010)

The more I learn about the cuisines of the world the more similarity I see between them. I used to think that things like Japanese cuisine and the cuisine of the American South, for instance, couldn’t be more different. It turns out that, in many ways, there is less distance between them (and every other cuisine) than meets the eye. Part of the reason for this is that basic cooking techniques all over the world are relatively similar. Another reason is that cuisines are always evolving and this often stems from the introduction of new things brought in from far away lands. Not so long ago there were no tomatoes in Italy, no hot chilies in Sichuan Province. These things are now so traditional that it’s hard to believe there was ever a time that dishes made with them were, for lack of a better term… fusion. People have always traveled and taken root in places far from their homeland and brought things with them that end up mixing with things already there, a perfectly natural progression. After enough time has passed no one even remembers what it was like before. Human evolution may be relatively difficult to watch in progress – but the evolution of world cuisines is something that is happening right before our eyes, and the planet sometimes even seems to spin in reverse. Japan is eating Southern fried chicken at Christmas and loves good whiskey, while Kentucky is making soy sauce in Bourbon barrels. Hong Kong-style cafés are twisting Western cuisine to Asian tastes in much the same way American-Chinese restaurants twist Asian cuisine to Western tastes. Vietnamese from New Orleans are opening Cajun-Vietnamese joints in California, which makes perfect sense once you consider the role of seafood and the heavy French influence in both cuisines. In my travels I’ve seen Filipino restaurants in Rome, Italian restaurants in Japan, Chinese restaurants in India, Indian restaurants in Paris and Korean-French bakeries in America serving Italian coffees. So this breakfast plate from the Tokyo 7-7 Coffee Shop in Culver City, California seems pretty normal. Yes, that’s the same braised pork (chashu or チャーシュー) found in a bowl of ramen with teriyaki sauce, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes and a cup of coffee.

If it was a pork chop with steak sauce would there even be a question?

Kentucky Tavern Straight Bourbon Whiskey in Owensboro, Kentucky (2010)

Bourbon has always been a part of my life. I grew up in Kentucky and my first sip of whiskey came from my grandfather when I was pretty young. He hasn’t been with us for a while now, but is still sorely missed. Of course that first sip burned my insides to the point that I wouldn’t touch the stuff again for many years. Now I generally drink it neat with a side of ice, adding a cube at a time so it doesn’t get watered down. Needless to say, drinking Bourbon in Kentucky is standard practice – but cooking with it is common enough that I’d go as far as to call it a pantry staple. It’s used in all kinds of desserts and sauces for meat as well as vegetable dishes like baked beans and yams. In this photo is a bottle of Kentucky Tavern Straight Bourbon Whiskey produced by Glenmore Distillery in my hometown for over a hundred years. This was my grandfather’s Bourbon of choice, it’s hard to find outside Kentucky. He just called it KT.

Black Poplar Mushroom dim sum dumplings in Monterey Park, California (2010)

It’s no secret that menu translations can often be wildly inaccurate. This could be for any number of reasons, including the fact that some words just don’t have equivalents in other languages. While traveling, I personally just translate words the best I can and hope people understand what I mean – so I imagine everyone does the same thing with their menus. There’s another thing to consider though, sometimes translations differ so much from the original text for practical reasons. In many cases if we were given an exact, word for word translation it might do more harm than good. Every language has names for things that require interpretation and more often than not such names require knowledge of aspects of the culture a non-native speaker just won’t have. This is just as true of English as any other language. Take the dish from the American South called Hoppin’ John. That name doesn’t convey any of the ingredients in the dish and would likely be pretty confusing to a non-English speaker. Though if you were to just list it as black-eyed peas and rice you lose all the history and cultural significance. That’s pretty much what happens with things like the dim sum dumplings in this photo. They were on the menu in English as Mushroom Dumplings with Meat along with the Chinese name 茶树菇海棠果, which literally translates to Tea Tree Mushroom (茶树菇) Crab Apples (海棠果). The mushrooms turn out to be a special variety known in English as Black Poplar Mushrooms, highly prized in Chinese cuisine as well as others. Crab apples in this case refers to the shape of the dumplings (especially resembling the dried version), in English this shape is often called a Beggar’s Purse. While the name Mushroom Dumplings with Meat might avoid confusion for those of us who don’t speak Chinese, much of the beauty and nearly all the information is in the Chinese name, hiding in plain sight.

Ridged luffa, smooth luffa, opo squash and fuzzy melon in Marina, California (2010)

By far the hardest thing I’ve had to do when it comes to learning about food and cooking is break myself from seeking comfort, particularly when it comes to other cultures. This means going to the market and instead of looking for things I know and love, I buy ingredients I’ve never tasted and have no idea how to cook. When you bring something new home, what you learn from the research alone is invaluable, much less what you learn from the failure when cooking it for the first time. For instance, it used to be that many of the green vegetables and leafy greens in an Asian market all looked similar to me, though since I learned the fundamental differences between things that has changed. The photo above was taken at a farmers’ market in Marina in Central California, a place where everything grows. In the center is ridged luffa (or loofah) and directly to the right is smooth luffa, different varieties of the same plant. The spotted squash on the left is known as fuzzy melon, a very young version of winter melon. The solid light green vegetable in the top left is called opo squash, also known as bottle gourd or calabash. Each of these has many names in many languages. They are eaten everywhere from India to Thailand to Taiwan, but in the U.S. are most often labeled in Chinese. They even eat bottle gourd in Sicily, where they have a very long version called Zucchetta Serpente di Sicilia (Serpent of Sicily).

BTW, the luffa you eat and the loofa you wash with are the same thing. :)

Bolivian empanadas (salteñas) in Washington D.C. (2009)

Along with things you might expect, for me Washington D.C. will always mean things like delicious Ethiopian food in the U Street Corridor, butchers at the historic Eastern Market, vendors at the Capital City Market and the Bolivian empanadas known as salteñas. I went here with a picture in my head of what it would be like and found that picture was missing all sorts of details. It’s funny how your mind plays tricks on you, taking certain aspects of a place you hear about from a distance and pretty much blinding you to everything else. For instance, what comes to mind when you hear the words Bolivia or Bolivian cuisine? If it doesn’t include savory baked pastries filled with ingredients like shredded chicken, boiled eggs, green olives and potatoes… maybe take another look.

The Union Square Green Market in winter, Manhattan, New York (2009)

I’ve been to New York a few times now, beginning somewhere around 2003. The first couple of times I was pretty much a typical tourist, checked out Chinatown and Little Italy – walked through Soho and the like. I didn’t really have the frame of mind back then to dig into the details, but these “overview” trips and the other traveling I’d done after them prepared me to go back in 2009. Most definitely, living in Los Angeles and hunting down places by car spread out over an area of thousands of square miles made once overwhelming places like Manhattan feel far more condensed and easier to navigate, the same is true of my old home of Chicago. One of the places I finally made it to in 2009 was the Union Square Green Market, it was December, just a few days before the New Year and extremely cold. I was surprised to find this farmers market was still operating. Not only was it open, but the variety of produce here in the dead of winter was pretty unbelievable – everything from leeks and celery root to apples, turnips, potatoes, carrots, onions and even several types of seasonal leafy greens. What I like most about the photo above is the contrast, these small temporary structures selling things like pasture raised heritage pork from Shushan, NY and items from biodynamic farms in Columbia County against the backdrop of structures of concrete, glass and steel. Like plants sprouting through cracks in the sidewalk.

A vendor of Mexican ingredients in the Grand Central Market, Los Angeles (2008)

During my first couple of years in Los Angeles I discovered the wonders of regional Mexican cooking. What I once thought of as a singular cuisine revealed itself to be just as location based as Italian food. Dishes from places like Oaxaca, Jalisco, Veracruz and Baja are now among my favorites along with specialties typical of places like Mexico City and Guadalajara. In Southern California, if you added up all the Mexican street vendors, markets and restaurants they would easily number in the tens of thousands. This shouldn’t be a surprise, considering California was once part of Mexico, but it still amazes me what can be found here. I’d say something like if it exists you can probably find it here, but the truth is if something isn’t here you’ll just never know – there are just too many places to check and not all of them officially exist.  There are some places though where you can find all sorts of things side by side, like the Grand Central Market in downtown LA. There are dozens of vendors here selling hundreds of classic ingredients. The stall in the photo above offers dried jamaica (hibiscus flowers) which you see on top of the jar of camarón seco (dried shrimp), dried guajillo chiles, ancho chiles and cumin (comino) line the shelves topped with jars of chía seeds, amaranth (amaranto), ground barley (cebada) and powdered pico de gallo. There are two mole pastes for sale on the counter, the well-known mole poblano plus mole Teloloapan, named for the city in the Mexican state of Guerrero.

There are also great places to eat in the GCM, some of the vendors have been in operation for decades.

Finocchiona and Fontina on Focaccia in Florence, Italy (2008)

I take some things for granted. Like that I didn’t have to harvest wheat to make bread or butcher a pig for curing meat or have the skill it takes to make a good aged cheese. Only occasionally do I think about all the work that goes into these things. If you go to the right places in Italy, it’s certain that multiple people with generations of wisdom paid attention to every ingredient you’re eating, from the moment it first walked or sprouted from the ground to the time it landed on your plate. Taking ingredients this seriously is a common practice here. Things like Florentine-style steak (Bistecca alla Fiorentina) in Tuscany and fresh buffalo milk mozzarella (mozzarella di bufala) in Campania owe so much to the farmers, butchers and cheesemongers that produced them, long before they ever reach the cook. Besides, when ingredients are this good, you really need only slice and serve... which puts this sandwich into perspective. It’s just 3 ingredients, fennel salami (finocchiona), Fontina cheese and olive oil focaccia bread. Simple right? Yeah, not really. It’s humbling to think that, while I certainly could have made this sandwich, there’s no way I could have made the individual ingredients, not even the bread – not this well. The fact that there are people who can make these things and grow the wheat, butcher the pig and make the cheese reminds me how far I have to go to catch up with the knowledge of the past.

Simplicity is one of the most difficult things.

The Rialto Fish Market in Venice, Italy (2008)

Venice was the first city in Italy I ever visited. It was as beautiful as I had ever heard, more so even. Though there were things of beauty other than canals and architecture I found in Venice… like the seafood. My knowledge of Italian seafood dishes was pretty limited before traveling here and I knew even less about traditional Venetian dishes or the bounty of the sea they represent. Here, for the first time, I experienced pasta with an entire sauce of fresh squid or cuttlefish ink. The little snacks known as cicchetti served in the bàcari (cicchetti bars) like creamed dried cod (baccalà mantecato), fried sardines with pickled onions, raisins and pine nuts (sarde in saór), fresh anchovies – not salted or canned – marinated in vinegar (alici marinati) and octopus salad (insalata di polpo) were all revelations. Partly because these dishes were so different from the ones I knew and partly because the seafood from these waters was of incredible quality. Having visited Tsukiji in Japan, I thought my days of being blown away by fish markets were over, not so. The Rialto Fish Market in the photo above was an amazing place, filled with everything from branzino to scorpion fish, live eel to mantis shrimp – all pristine and key to the local cuisine. Known as the Mercato del Pesce al Minuto in Italian or simply La Pescarìa in Venetian, this is the place I would send anyone who wanted to see the heart of Venice.

Vietnamese bánh mì sandwich in San Gabriel, Los Angeles County (2007)

One of the first things you notice when getting to know Los Angeles is its sheer incredible size. You quickly learn that Los Angeles really means Los Angeles County in which the City of Los Angeles is just one of more than 90 cities, not nine… ninety. I saw a map once that showed you could fit Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh within the borders, and still have room left. Of those 90+ cities more than 30 are in the San Gabriel Valley and of those about 5 entire cities have a population that is overwhelmingly Asian. The largest segment of that population is Chinese, but the SGV has more than its share of Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Korean, Thai, Japanese and other Asian nationalities – including numerous Vietnamese. Though it’s no Little Saigon (located in Westminster, Orange County) the SGV also has more than its share of Vietnamese restaurants serving everything from noodle soups like phở and bún bò Huế all the way to the elaborate 7 courses of beef known as bò 7 món. The photo above was my first bánh mì sandwich in Los Angeles, in the city of San Gabriel. I’d had these before in the Uptown area of Chicago, but here in L.A. is where I learned the most about them. I had no idea before this that “bánh mì” could refer to just the bread alone or to the sandwich made with the bread. I also previously didn’t know that the baguettes were made with rice flour or that the tins of liver pâté and butter used in them were often literally imported from France. Thanks to the SGV I quickly learned to appreciate the harmony of cold cuts and pickled vegetables in a whole new way.

Who knew a sandwich could hold so much information?

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/11/banh-mi-in-san-gabriel/feed/ 0 cphotoj Banh Mi in San Gabriel http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/10/peruvian-saltado-de-pollo-hollywood/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/10/peruvian-saltado-de-pollo-hollywood/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2012 02:30:24 +0000 Nate Gray http://cphotoj.com/?p=403 ]]>

Peruvian-Chinese Saltado de Pollo in Hollywood, California (2007)

 Before I moved to Los Angeles in 2007, some things had completely different meanings to me. Hollywood meant movie stars and people trying to become movie stars and Peruvian Cuisine meant little more than roast guinea pig. My perception of so many things has changed since then, experience so often proves that what I thought I knew was almost completely wrong… or at the very least incomplete. These days, Hollywood means Thai Town, Little Armenia and Filipino food with Oaxacan, Guatemalan and Salvadoran joints just a few streets above Koreatown and Little Bangladesh. Peruvian cuisine now means delicious roast chicken (pollos a la brasa), spicy and colorful sauces made from chilies like aji rocoto, amarillo and verde along with heavily Chinese influenced Chifa dishes. The one in the photo above is called Saltado de Pollo, which is basically a stir fry of chicken and French fries (likely made with Peruvian soy sauce). The soda in the background is Peruvian Inca Kola which is flavored with lemon verbena, an herb known as cedrón in Peru.

One of the first meals I ever had in Hollywood.

Lady street vendor on an island in Mumbai, India (2006)

Street food is a way of life in India and Mumbai is no exception. There’s no shortage of restaurants in Mumbai but food still ruled the streets. From block to block you could get anything from fresh sugar cane juice to donut shaped vada fried on the spot to fresh young coconut. Street vendors also blanketed the coastal areas around places like Chowpatty Beach selling things like the fried potato sandwiches known as vada pav. Most of the street vendors were men, but the lady in the photo above was one of the exceptions. Mumbai has a number of islands off the coast and on the one I visited this lady street vendor had a stand setup selling grilled corn. The little cow in the background seems to be waiting for a chance to wander in and have a taste. I’m sure the vendor wouldn’t mind though, I’m told it’s considered good luck for a cow to visit your place. For this reason owners of shops often have food ready and waiting especially for them.

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/09/lady-street-vendor-mumbai-india-2/feed/ 0 cphotoj IMG_0528 http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/06/khichdi-in-ahmedabad/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/06/khichdi-in-ahmedabad/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 03:47:28 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=297 ]]>

Baked khichdi in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India (2006)

A visit to Gujarat shattered any notion I had that I knew anything at all about Indian cuisine. Up to this point I had been eating dishes in Rajasthan that were somewhere within my realm of understanding. Experiencing Gujarati cuisine was the first time I really understood how different the regional cuisines of India could be from each other. First of all meat all but disappeared from menus (Jain vegetarianism is widespread), despite this Gujarati dishes were packed full of flavor from the use of various spice mixtures along with lentils, rice and pulses. That may sound something like the dishes at your favorite Indian restaurant – but the food in Gujarat was noticeably different in a number of ways from what most us know as Indian food. Ordering a Gujarati thali, sort of like a circular bento box filled with several individual dishes where vegetables take center stage, is probably the best way to understand what I mean. In Ahmedabad I had so many dishes that I had never seen nor heard of before, to say that I had a hard time identifying some of the ingredients is an understatement. In the photo above is a classic Gujarati dish known as khichdi (ખીચડી) made of mostly rice and lentils, it is usually served with a side of sour yogurt sauce known as kadhi, but in this case a version of that sauce has been baked on top. On the side are some classic accompaniments – chilies, lime, onion and achar (pickles).

Tandoori chickens hang from spikes at a restaurant in Jaipur, India (2006)

Before visiting India, I really thought when I got there I’d be eating mostly vegetarian. I thought that meat would be difficult to find or simply not served in most places… I couldn’t have been more wrong. While it wasn’t so common to see raw meat for sale anywhere, I did pass a few butcher shops that had various animal parts hanging from hooks for sale to the general public. More often than not though, animals used for meat were sold still alive only to be slaughtered when it was time for them to be eaten. Cooked meat on the other hand was a common sight, nearly every place I ate there were at least a few meat dishes on the menu – except in places like Ahmedabad where vegetarianism is more the rule. The photo above was taken in Jaipur, just walking down the street. This restaurant (like many others) had no front door – or even a front wall for that matter – it was just open to the street. It specialized in chicken cooked in a tandoor oven, you see the chickens on display hanging from ceiling spikes almost like roast ducks in the window of a Chinese BBQ joint. One of the men at the counter catches your attention by flipping bread around with long skewers – he’s pretty good at it.

A cooking class in the village of Madhogarh, Rajasthan, India (2006)

Of all the cooking classes I’ve taken in other countries, the one in the tiny village of Madhogarh way out in the desert outside the city of Jaipur was one of the most interesting. There is only one place to stay, the 400 year old fort that towers over the village like a castle was turned into a hotel of sorts by the Singh family that owns it. Madhogarh is literally like a green oasis, surrounded by fields of crops and herds of goats roaming the land – they pretty much grow everything they eat out here. In the photo above the wife of the owner is conducting the cooking class, she simply went by the nickname “Cutie” – her real name was rather long. On the tray are ingredients for making a Rajasthani-style masala, a spice mixture used later in the cooking of a dish. Her assistant in the turban is measuring things into a bowl. Everything is cooked over fire here, the fuel for which are patties of dried grass that have made a pass through a cow first – don’t worry there is no smell as there is really nothing but 100% grass in the fire. There’s no firewood in the desert.

A street vendor fries jalebi sweets in Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi, India (2006)

After a visit to Jama Masjid (aka Friday Mosque) you walk out into the markets of Old Delhi known as Chandni Chowk and the streets become increasingly crowded, with street vendors everywhere you look. Some are selling food cooked on the spot, others are selling spices, fruits and vegetables, tea, coffee, cookware - just about anything you can imagine. As you walk through, the market seems to go on forever, with something new every few feet. The cook in this photo is making sweets known as jalebi (जलेबी) by drizzling batter into hot oil and then carefully watching over them as they cook. The fried batter is then soaked in sugar syrup until saturated. The final product is somewhere between a doughnut and funnel cake. In the background you also see a wide pan of sweetened milk boiling, you’ll see this all over the place, the large surface area of the pan allows the milk to evaporate and thicken more quickly. In the end it becomes a dessert in and of itself, nothing but milk and sugar boiled down to a white paste.

A mobile vegetable vendor with his cart in Delhi, India (2006)

When I visit a place I like to get up early, I like to get to markets while the vendors are still setting up, before any customers arrive. That way you never miss anything, everything is still arranged the way the vendor put it out and all the best quality items are still available, because no one has bought anything yet. I also find that in the early morning you run into things you simply might never see otherwise. This vegetable vendor in Delhi was pulling his cart, exploding with vegetables, down the street on his way to somewhere in an area known as Karol Bagh. I stopped him and he posed for this picture and then continued on his way. You probably recognize most of the vegetables on the cart, cabbage, turnips, a few kinds of eggplant and tomatoes along with Indian bitter melon and calabash (bottle gourd) among other things. India is a very colorful place and this street corner is no exception – a little statue of Ganesha watches over us.

Paratha, samosa, pickles and beer in Delhi, India (2006)

Most of the Indian restaurants in the U.S. pretty much serve what would be considered Punjabi Cuisine, that is food from the Punjab region of India – think tandoori chicken and the like. Dishes from Southern India and other regions can be found on menus here and there and occasionally a restaurant will specialize in something else like Gujarati cuisine or Goan cuisine – but for the most part Punjabi is the standard. The downside to this is that is can be difficult to try a diverse selection of dishes from the many regions of India in much of the U.S. – the upside is a really good Punjabi joint can be pretty representative of what you’d actually be served in India. Unlike say Chinese or Italian cuisine in the States, which more often than not can stray wildly from the homeland, if you’ve eaten at a good Punjabi restaurant in America and eat those same dishes while visiting India, they’ll be recognizable. I can’t say exactly why this is. In the photo above you see fried paratha bread and samosas along with a King Fisher beer (the latter of which really is nearly everywhere you go). Also in the photo is a small bowl of achar (Indian pickles) and hiding out of sight are rice and chicken dishes. All very good and very similar to some of the better versions I’ve eaten back home.

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/paratha-samosa-and-kingfisher-in-delhi/feed/ 0 cphotoj Paratha, Samosa and Kingfisher in Delhi http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/sansai-udon-hida-japan/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/sansai-udon-hida-japan/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 22:38:49 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=203 ]]>

Udon noodle soup with wild mountain vegetables and mushrooms in Hida, Japan (2005)

Hida is a small city in Gifu Prefecture, Japan near Takayama. In fact you sometimes see the area called Hida-Takayama. It’s known for a few things including sake breweries, Hida beef and wild mountain vegetables collectively known as sansai (山菜). Many of the traditional ryokan inns here serve an entire cuisine built around these vegetables known as Sansai Ryori which has more than a little in common with Kaiseki Ryori. You don’t have to stay at a ryokan to eat these vegetables though, they are served all over the place when in season. In the photo above is a bowl of udon noodle soup served at a small lunch counter with a couple of different kinds of mountain vegetables and the little slippery mushrooms known as nameko (なめこ) which also grow wild here. Along with the Kirin beer this meal didn’t cost very much, but was made right in front of me and really got the point across.

I don’t smoke, but the Lark cigarette tin in the photo sort of defines (the end of?) an era.

A Korean barbecue joint in the Katsushika suburb of Tokyo (2005)

Before I visited Tokyo I always pictured it as a place where people constantly filled the streets 24 hours a day… not true. While it certainly seems a little more like that in the urban centers, the city does sleep, especially the greater Tokyo area “suburbs” like Katsushika ward. Walk down the street at 5 in the morning here and it’s likely you will not see another soul, just completely silent streets that seem as if the whole place had been rapidly deserted, leaving behind only potted plants and hundreds of bicycles lining the sidewalks and alleys – not a single one chained to anything. If, like me, you can’t read many words in non-roman characters, times like these are when the shops and storefronts become a complete mystery. You can’t go in because they are not open, sometimes you can only guess what’s inside. The photo above taught me one of the most profound lessons in language and expectations I’ve ever learned, not only was this place not what I thought it might be at first (noodle shop?) the sign actually contains 3 languages, Kanji (Chinese characters borrowed by the Japanese), Katakana (a phonetic set of Japanese characters used for foreign words) and Korean characters (Hangul).

The sign says:

炭火燒肉 - Sumibi (charcoal fire) Yakiniku (grilled beef) in kanji

불고기 - Hangul characters for the Korean word bulgogi / pulgogi

プルコギ - Purukogi (Japanese word for Korean bulgogi) in katakana

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/korean-bbq-joint-tokyo/feed/ 0 cphotoj Korean BBQ Tokyo http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/tokyo-soba-noodle-kitchen/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/tokyo-soba-noodle-kitchen/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 21:31:45 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=183 ]]>

The kitchen of the Edo Tokyo Soba School in the Tokyo suburb of Tateishi (2005)

One of the classes that I took in Japan that had the most long-term impact on my cooking was definitely a soba noodle class at the Edo Tokyo Soba School (江戸東京そばの会) in the Tokyo suburb of Tateishi. The school had a machine that cracked the buckwheat and they milled the flour for the noodles fresh on-site. The method they taught for making soba dough in large bowls along with how to roll and cut it by hand I still use to this day – for pretty much any kind of fresh wheat noodles or pasta I make at home. The lesson in how much a difference fresh, high quality ingredients makes in all cooking also stuck with me from this day. I’ve never had better soba since. Above is the kitchen where all the noodles were cooked, on the table are cups of freshly grated daikon radish and small baskets in which the noodles were served. To the left you see a giant pot filled with rapidly boiling water, topped with a huge wooden lid and equipped with a large hood – which cooked the noodles quickly and evenly with plenty of room to separate without sticking. Around the room are various other implements, ladles, draining baskets and wooden handled pans used for other parts of the process.

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/tokyo-soba-noodle-kitchen/feed/ 0 cphotoj Tokyo Soba Noodle Kitchen http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/kiyoko-konishi-cooking-class/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/kiyoko-konishi-cooking-class/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 20:57:11 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=167 ]]>

A home cooked Japanese dish taught in a cooking class by Kiyoko Konishi in Tokyo (2005)

Kiyoko Konishi is a female Japanese chef and author of a couple of books on Japanese home cooking published in the late nineties - by 2005 she had already been teaching classes out of her home kitchen for over two decades. The kitchen was uniquely setup with a small bar overlooking the counter into the kitchen so a handful of students could both watch her demonstrate and then repeat the steps themselves. After cooking you then sat in her living room on the floor at traditional low Japanese tables and ate what you had just cooked. The photo above doesn’t really look like a home cooked dish, but it most certainly was. Chicken breasts were pounded thin, lined with shiso leaves (紫蘇) and rolled into cylinders with ginger cut into thin strips stuffed inside. The rolls were then dipped in egg wash, coated with panko bread crumbs (パン粉) and deep-fried. After cooking the rolls were cut diagonally and arranged on beautiful plates. Believe it or not, this is how mine turned out, the tiny sansho leaf / kinome (木の芽) garnish I plucked from a little plant growing on the counter. The product of a great teacher and a-lot of beginner’s luck.

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/kiyoko-konishi-cooking-class/feed/ 0 cphotoj Kiyoko Konishi cooking class http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/tsukiji-masamoto-knife-shop/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/tsukiji-masamoto-knife-shop/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 20:16:15 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=150 ]]>

Tsukiji Masamoto knife shop in the Tsukiji Market, Tokyo (2005)

While the fish section of the Tsukiji market is the most well-known, it is by no means the only section. The other parts of the Tsukiji market extend far into the district of Tsukiji for which the market is named. All around the area there are fruit and vegetable vendors, cookware vendors, knife shops, coffee shops and sushi joints – just to name a few things. One of those knife shops is Tsukiji Masamoto (築地正本), one of the oldest knife makers in Japan, not to be confused with the knife maker Masamoto Sohonten (正本総本店) – the two are only distantly related. There are a number of significant things to notice in the photo above. The shop is being run today by the young apprentices, the older master is not around. The banner above the store displays the Masamoto logo (正本) as well as the character (秀) in a circle – which roughly translates to “excellence” – the same circled character is stamped into the knives. The display case out front contains knives known as wa-gyuto (和牛刀) with Western-style blades but traditional Japanese handles. One apprentice is sharpening knives on wet stones known as toishi over a water basin while the other is hand hammering names and inscriptions into knife hilts.

I bought I knife from here, a santoku (三徳), the only carbon steel knife I own and by far the sharpest.

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/tsukiji-masamoto-knife-shop/feed/ 0 cphotoj Tsukiji Masamoto Knife Shop http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/fish-for-sale-at-tsukiji-market/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/fish-for-sale-at-tsukiji-market/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:27:57 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=130 ]]>

Beautiful fish for sale at Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo (2005)

The selection of fish at Tsukiji Fish Market simply has to be seen to be believed, I visited in 2005 and it took me years to identify most of the fish in my photos… even then I can’t say for sure that I’m 100% correct. The fish above with visible eyes are striped jack (shima aji / シマアジ) at the top, Pacific saury (sanma / サンマ) on the bottom left and kinmedai (golden eye snapper / キンメダイ) on the bottom right. I rarely use flash, but this photo is one of the few times it was either use it or lose the picture – it was just too dark to hold the camera still and I had no tripod. When I finally got a look at a larger version of the photo I noticed the eyes of the kinmedai fish were unusually light in the black areas, about 30% lighter than everything else. I “fixed” it thinking it was some version of “red-eye” from the flash,  but that was before I had any idea what the fish was. It turns out maybe the eyes were supposed to look that way after all, I’m still not certain if it was a trick of the light. In any case I saved over the original and only had one shot of the fish because back in 2005 memory cards were much more expensive and held relatively few pictures – you had to choose wisely .

A digital lesson for me.

Filed under: Photos ]]> http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/fish-for-sale-at-tsukiji-market/feed/ 0 cphotoj Fish for Sale at Tsukiji Market http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/a-barman-in-paris/ http://cphotoj.com/2012/12/01/a-barman-in-paris/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:36:10 +0000 Nate Gray http://aculinaryphotojournal.wordpress.com/?p=117 ]]>

A barman in Paris prepares coffee at Le Bistrot in the Passage Verdeau (2004)

During my first trip to Paris in 2004, I was staying at a hotel in the 9th arrondissement in a district known as Opera and stumbled upon the Passage Verdeau, one of the many covered passages in Paris which are long shopping alleys hidden between buildings. I stopped at a little restaurant inside the passage called Le Bistrot for coffee, it was the very early morning and they had just opened. In this photo you see a classic French bar counter, on the bar is today’s newspaper, a cup of coffee, a tin of sugar cubes and a basket of fresh croissants – the barman is preparing coffee in the background filled with shelves of cups, teapots, drink glasses and bottles of liquor. Hanging above the bar is a small paper sign that says La Maison ne fait pas crédit – no tabs, settle your bill in cash.

Knives hang in the kitchen of Auberge La Fontaine in Venasque, Provence, France (2004)

In 2004, I visited a tiny walled village named Venasque on top of a mountain in the Vaucluse area of Provence in southern France to take cooking lessons at an inn and restaurant called Auberge La Fontaine. At that time the inn had been run for more than 25 years by chef Christian Soehlke and his wife Ingrid. The restaurant’s pantry was diversely stocked with everything from the best French butter to tins of Indian garam masala. In this photo you see some of the pantry items but mainly the knives that hung on a magnetic rack on the wall. Many of these knives were gifts given to Christian by his students, so along with French-style boning, paring and bread knives you also see a traditional Japanese yanagiba sashimi knife with a traditional Japanese handle, a Western-style Japanese chef’s knife (gyuto) and a Global knife with the typical grip pattern on the handle.