Tag Archive for: Cooking

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Anchovy is of the essence – Garum, Colatura d’alici and Nam Pla

I noticed recently Mana was advertising for a ‘Chef of Fermentation’. That’s quite a specific job title in a hospitality marketplace that’s struggling to find sous chefs and KPs. But when you’re on a mission to net that second Michelin star it’s best to stay true to your culinary direction and gut feelings (sic). 

Garum will certainly be on the kitchen to-do list for the new recruit. It entered the conversation early on in my first visit to the Ancoats Manchester game-changer. I’d already been impressed by dishes such as smoked yakitori eel, glazed with roasted yeast and blueberry vinegar, and Dungeness crab baked in hay celeriac and masa.

Underneath that shell the oyster dish that leant on chicken garum

Chef patron Simon Martin had talked us through both. Next up was a raw oyster tucked taco style into a cabbage leaf with fudge miso, chicken fat, English wasabi, pine salt and chicken garum. In mid-explanation he was surprised by my knowledge of garum’s back story – the fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of Ancient Greece and Rome, not a million miles away from Thai fish sauce Nom Pla..

Simon had adapted garum to incorporate chicken. At his culinary alma mater, Rene Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen, they offer a whole palette of garums. Look at this beauty: rose and shrimp garum with a suitably rose-tinted description of what is essentially a whack of umami-rich funk. 

Rose shrimp garum symbolises Noma’s innovative take on ancient traditions

“We take shrimps, water and salt, with fresh roses and blend it. It is naturally fermented by the enzymes inside the shrimps. During the foraging season last year, the fresh roses were added and they have been fermenting together ever since. The garum is quite intense by itself but the roses bring balance to it with its floral notes and sweetness.”

There’s a whole chapter on garum in The Norma Guide To Fermentation (Artisan, £30) by Redzepi and David Zibler, the man he entrusted to run the restaurant’s Fermentation Lab. Another member of the team convinced them to diverge from fish as the base. Hence, chicken, bee pollen and grasshoppers. All made is temperature controlled cylinders, leaving nothing to chance in this stinkiest of production processes.

That would probably be heresy to John Niland, chef owner of St Peter in Sydney, Australia. His ethos, laid out in his cookbook/manifesto, The Whole Fish, is to use all of the creature. Like Nose to Tail meat cooking, the object is not to waste the 60 per cent or so of  a round fish that is routinely discarded in a western restaurant. Again one of the team (so democratic this new wave in the kitchen) came up with a sustainable garum.

“To produce the garum, start by adding 50 per cent of water to the total amount of heads, bones and scraps you have from small fish, such as sardine, mackerel, anchovies or trevally, then to this total quantity add 20 per cent of fine salt. Mix together, transfer to a mason (kilner) jar, seal and place in a circulator bath set to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Leave for seven days in the dark, stirring once daily. Make sure that the gall bladder is removed as it will make the finished sauce extremely bitter. This recipe is versatile and can be adapted to produce scallop, prawn (shrimp) or cuttlefish garums.”

In Niland’s follow-up book, Take One Fish: The new school of scale-to-tail eating (Hardie Grant, £26, to be published August 5) he goes one challenging step further with a recipe for custard tart, made with a sardine garum caramel made using the head, bones and scraps of sardines.

Imperial Rome was an enthusiastic consumer of garum (or liquamen)

Leaving aside today’s state of the art equipment, it is a method the Ancients would have recognised. Garum was a fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Liquamen was a similar preparation, and at times the two were synonymous. It enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Roman world.

Pliny the Elder derives the Latin word garum from the Greek γαρός (garos), maybe a type of fish, and states that it was crafted e from fish intestines, with salt, creating a liquor, the garum, and a sediment named (h)allec or allex. A concentrated garum evaporated down to a thick paste with salt crystals was called muria – packed with protein, amino acids, minerals and B vitamins, so not far off today’s soy sauce.

After the liquid was ladled off of the top of the mixture, the remains of the fish, called allec, was used by the poorest classes to flavour their farinata or porridge. 

The finished product—the nobile garum of Martial’s epigram—was apparently mild and subtle in flavor. The best garum fetched extraordinarily high prices, and salt could be substituted for a simpler dish. Garum appears in many recipes featured in the Roman cookbook Apicius. For example, Apicius (8.6.2–3) gives a recipe for lamb stew, calling for the meat to be cooked with onion and coriander, pepper, lovage, cumin, liquamen, oil, and wine, then thickened with flour.

The traditional way of creating Colatura d’alici from salt and anchovies

And so to Colatura d’alici. I hastened to purchase a vial of this intense stuff (it translates fetchingly as anchovy drippings) after one of my favourite chefs, Jeremy Lee of Soho’s legendary Quo Vadis recommended it in Observer Food Monthly.

He  wrote: “Alici is the essence of anchovy and it’s a very precious condiment. It comes in a very small bottle, like a bottle of perfume. It’s not cheap, but it’s relatively easy to get, and a little goes a long way. It’s never gone off – well, not that it lasts long enough to find out. I get it from Andy Harris at the Vinegar Shed (£26.50) and use it sparingly. It’s an elegant variation on using Worcestershire sauce in something, but it’s not so overwhelming. There’s a softness to it that’s amazing, it adds a roundness. You just need a few drops.

“It’s extraordinary in braised lamb and hogget dishes – lamb and anchovy is such a fabulous combination. Pork too. I add the alici to porchetta tonnato as a final flourish, much as you would add a squeeze of lemon juice. I find the combination of alici and lemon juice incredible in all sorts of dishes. It’s an extraordinary ingredient and one I cherish.”

Colatura d’alici works well as a simple dressing for spaghetti

Like traditionally made Southeast Asian-style fish sauce, but with a much longer ageing process, colatura is concocted with just anchovies and sea salt. For colatura anchovy fillets and salt are layered in wooden barrels (chestnut is good) and then set them aside in a temperature-controlled environment to ferment for up to three years. The liquid exuded ages into colatura, which is surprisingly unfishy. Still a health warning – this is mega pungent. But worth it.

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Tree spinach – one giant leap forward for my Mexican kitchen magic?

Why have I allowed an invasive native of the Yucatan peninsula into my kitchen? The immediate answer is the thunderstorm outside. It’s freaking out our chihuahua (fellow Mexican), who is cowering in a corner, while I’m equally frightened our new Chaya plant (also known as Tree Spinach) will be devastated if left out in the deluge in its flimsy pot.

When it hits maturity as a 12ft tall rival to Japanese knotweed the Chaya will hold its own but, as a stripling freshly arrived from a Lincolnshire herb nursery, we’re giving it shelter. And that kind act is causing ructions all of its own. Because I have briefed the rest of the household on the pluses and minuses of harbouring such a nutritious plant.

So already I’ve slipped in its major selling point. Chaya has high levels of protein, calcium and iron, while  the leaves are also crammed with carotene, potassium and vitamin C, putting normal spinach or Chinese cabbage in the shade. Superfood status? This is a hype-free zone.

All this nutritional benefit is for the future, of course, when my plant grows enough foliage to cook with. 

Wild tree spinach grows abundantly around Hartwood restaurant

You could just juice it or, like our spinach, stew it in butter, one minute minimum. I’ll start with legendary food writer Diana Kennedy’s Tamales de Chaya and then proceed to Grilled Coronado Fillets with Piña and Chaya from Eric Werner and Mia Henry’s Hartwood restaurant between the jungle and the sea in the hippest stretch of Yucatan (if you can’t get there their cookbook is highly recommended).

Culinary bucket list logged but let’s first fit in the downside, which is causing some domestic consternation. As a major convert to indigenous Mexican regional cuisine during lockdown I hunt down authentic ingredients zealously, but some do come with a health warning. Not all the insects surprisingly. Cue Chaya. When mature, the leaves can be tough with microscopic stinging hairs, which can irritate the skin for days, so handle with latex gloves when cleaning. Unless very young, best not to eat it raw since, like spinach or almonds, it contains a toxic compound, a form of hydrogen cyanide. That’s easily sorted, I’m telling my wary nearest and dearest, simply by boiling, frying or drying the leaves.

This is my tree spinach in search of jungle conditions in the Calder Valley

I will be charting my progress – in the garden and the kitchen – with this vigorous perennial, which I’ve been slow to catch on to. A decade ago Guardian gardening correspondent Alys Fowler vividly described the beauty of the Tree Spinach Chenopodium giganteum or Magenta Spreen Lambsquarter in her garden: “The tree spinach is a brilliant bright green with each new set of leaves blushed a shocking magenta.”

Attractive, but Alys warns: “It will reappear everywhere. It is not exactly a thug, but if you’re not prepared to eat it, that’s an awful lot of weeding. If you sow it as seed, consider sowing it in modules or seed trays and planting it out as this will give you more control as to where to grow it. If you want full-height plants, it needs to go at the back of the border.”

Maybe it needs a WALL.

TOP FOODIE DOCUMENTARY TIP

Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy (available to rent on Amazon Prime for £3.49) tracks the now 98-year-old expat Brit to her lair deep in the Mexican forests. This fiery, formidable cookery writer is the foremost champion of authentic Mexican cuisine and Elizabeth Carroll’s inspiring warts and all profile does her proud.

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