A collection of observations on mostly mould

I grew up scraping mould off stuff. Not actively or anything: it’s not like I was handed a pot of something fuzzy and told to go play; but if, for instance, we wanted jam, we’d probably have to scrape off the mould first. That’s just how it was (is, actually) and we were fine with it. What made it funny was when guests wanted jam. What made it funniest was this one time we were playing a board game called Association or something where you have to give your teammates prompts via association, and an old friend of the family prompted ‘mould’ to her son (and teammate) who answered ‘PANTRY’.

See? Funny.

*

Where the US customs office would consider me a young-verging-on-old offender, I’d probably just call myself a mostly short-haired girl with a devil-may-care nonchalance when it comes to ticking the ‘nothing to declare’ box and a healthy disrespect for the FDA’s health concerns. Big men with big guns are not enough to stop us from rolling by with our bags full of whatever we’d emptied from the fridge packed in newspapers, and you can bet your $3,000 fine there’ll always be numerous newspapers wrapped around numerous cheeses (you can only import raw milk cheese into the U.S. if it’s been aged for more than 60 days. This makes the presence of a Mont d’Or or Tomme de Savoie in your suitcase both illegal and, more importantly, perfectly room temperature).

*

Another cheese memory is the time we ate a cheese my parents had been given when I was born. I was born in ’88 and we probably ate it four years ago. It was the best cheese I’ve ever eaten. I eat a lot of cheese. 

*

It was my mom that introduced me to the idea of eating raw egg with raw meat at a pretty young age. Now I’m of age, if I’m also hungover, I want Japanese. Always sukiyaki, a dish where you dip raw slices of wagyu beef into a broth and then raw egg yolk. The otherwise stern waitress smiles approvingly when we ask to have it with egg. Japanese customers get it standard.   

*

Raw milk is another ‘issue’ as I understand it, but not if the animals are healthy and allowed to roam and graze. It will also leave you spoiled for taste and unsatisfied when all you have to  wash down your cardboard cereal is pasteurised milk. I recently made yoghurt from milk that we tapped raw from a tank and have the best intentions not to ever buy yoghurt again. However we all know that this is the same material they used to pave the way to hell and at the very least I will be introducing my water kefir babies to their milk cousins. Read: probably replacing (even if only until its summer sun cocktail time) because at one point one gets worried about the amount of sugar one is drinking when one is drinking water kefir. 

*

The other day I got into an argument with someone because they were looking at the due date on a bag of carrots. This is not the way to live your life. 

Hakata Senpachi and some stuff about sake

This is drinking food. It’s quick-grab, slurp, suck, re-lick your fingers food. It’s unlikely stuff on a wooden stick (eel, pork belly) and genius (salted, crispy-fried chicken skin, also on a stick) food. It’s so-fresh-you-hardly-taste-the-fish food; and the eel, not the one that came on the stick but the one that came last, the one on the plate, is as fatty as foie gras in terms of other food, food.

This is ‘What’re they eating over there I'd like some of that’-food, and ‘Can I try a bit of yours’-food. It’s ‘You need to try this’-food and ‘Can we have more of that one’-food. It’s lots of ‘What’s this?’-food and, ‘Try combining this with the one over there’-food. All of it’s ‘Way better than when we went to that expensive place’-food. It’s hungover food.

And we drank slow-brew sake that tasted like chocolate. 

Here's some stuff you might like to know about sake:

1. To turn rice into sake, brewers use a yeast called Aspergillus oryzae.
2. In Japanese, the word 'sake' is used to refer to any alcoholic drink. The Japanese call what we call sake nihonshu which means 'Japanese alcohol' . 
3. There are several types. These are differentiated by the manner in which the rice was milled.
4. Milling is to do with the rice polishing ratio, i.e., how much of the outer husk and core of each rice kernel has been ground away. To get to white rice from brown rice, you need to polish it to about 90% (i.e. you polish off 10%).
5. A sake with a higher polish (between 50-70%, so that's 30-50% polished off) is generally more expensive. This is because it requires more rice and processing to make the same amount of liquid.
6. Ginjo and Daiginjo sakes are considered premium sakes. 
7. Junmai is the Japanese word for 'pure rice'. Junmai is brewed using only rice, water, yeast and koji – i.e. there are no other additives. Unless a bottle of sake says 'junmai'  (純米), it will have additives.
8. Some other useful words: amakuchi = sweet, karakuchi = dry, genshu = undiluted sake (most are diluted), honjozo = sake to which a small amount of distilled alcohol has been added,
   jizake = sake from smaller breweries or more artisanal brands.

Oh, and we were at Hakata Senpachi.

Illustration by Briony Crane.

Are you drinking beer aged in Mescal barrels yet?

Now that whoever is responsible for identifying trends at Albert Heijn and Jumbo has finally cottoned on to the fact the US makes lots of that thing called craft beer, both supermarkets are, finally, selling some US beer. And I'm grateful, I am, though this is hardly a forecast of what's to come. After all, it's taken them two years too long. More interesting maybe is the speed at which big beer companies are sucking up small breweries (Heineken has just bought a more than a 50% share in Brouwerij 't IJ), similar to the way in which Google buys anything that moves. But for how long will we see any old craft beer as the answer to bad beer?

Because let’s face it, who, when faced with hundreds of beer-runes scratched out on a blackboard, isn’t at least a little surprised that the beer they've finally chosen is actually something they feel like drinking? After all, you didn’t have much to go by when you picked The Great, Big Kentucky Sausage Fest (from Amager Bryghus and Against the rain Brewery) from a host of equally obscurely named others, did you?

But I get it. In a market of hundreds of thousands of beers in the US alone, (the American Brewers Association estimate that there were 4.000 plus craft brewers* in the US in 2015), I get why someone might have thought it necessary to call their beer Flying Dog’s Pearl Necklace Chesapeake Stout with artwork to match (of an oyster dressed up pwetty in poyils of course). They need to stand out. And anyway, I think it's fun. Plus I’ve already forgiven bands from my past life for having names ripped from freeform poetry.

A Sauerkraut Spritz because why not?

It’s noisy and your eyes need a moment to adjust to the dark. There’s no room for elbows and people keep jostling past, the jostle all the more so a jostle because of the full skirts and aprons. Everything is dark wood, copper or printed cloth. And antler. There’s a lot of antler if you count up all the buttons. You smell onions frying and yeasty clouds of beer. It’s cold outside and you feel your face flushing from the warmth, from the beer. Those skirts are swishing back and fourth from the kitchen, their matrons handling big trays laden with heavy food. A bowl is placed is front of you. The cold has made you hungry and everyone around you is already eating. Inside it is a mass of steaming bacon and other pig’s anatomy, slivers of cabbage, juniper berries, bay leaf and thickly cut apple. You have primeval German brot (bread) on the side and are already spooning out yellow senf (mustard) with one of those little wooden spoons.