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.

The mysterious case of lattes to go and sportswear only nominally designed for sport

Ever since there was no real skiing this December because there was no real snow in the Alps, I’ve been wearing my hiking socks; something you’ll undoubtedly have your own thoughts on but hear me out. If more of us were wearing hiking socks, I figure, less of us would be bearing blue-grey ankles to the cold, which, even if not so cold, is cold enough to turn your exposed ankle blue. Maybe there would even be less of us wearing those clashing techno-coloured pink and fluro-yellow sneakers because these, you could argue to the evidently, even if not at first, obviously, fashion conscious, would clash with the grey. And it’s the sneakers, I suspect, which are the gateway. 

The gateway to lunching in Lycra and nipping out to the Albert Heijn to pick up the exact ingredients you need for tonight’s dinner and certainly no more unless, perhaps, there’s something in the bonus. The gateway, too, to putting on (worse) or remaining in (a little better) your yoga kit to ‘grab a latte’; though I appreciate this is an act that is also mercifully frustrated by the fact you live in Amsterdam, a city not set up for the to-go culture because, depending on how you look at it, is either 1) proud and independent, or; 2) incredibly slow on the uptake and, at any rate; 3) because its people are already ‘going’ on bikes, making lattes to go even less enjoyable than normal**. (Alternatives 1 and 2 are also, I think, factors frustrating the types who would, in a flash of neon, be swapping their lattes in yoga pants for brunch in full sporting regalia. It is, after all, very difficult to find decent brunch or even breakfast here).

And even if we could forgive the sneakers, and you could, I suppose, be forgiven for thinking they’re meant for running (ha) errands in organic stores — they’re comfy, after all, and the only thing alongside your expense account that’ll get you through New York — a form-fitting, phosphorescent, Dri-Fit T-shirt (i.e. blazingly bright gear designed to get men up mountains and not to the wine store before closing time) is harder to excuse. And at any rate, you just look silly; even if you do occasionally do actual exercise. 

**And by 'less enjoyable than normal' I mean not at all enjoyable given that even walking with one of those damp cardboard cups, let alone biking, all the while navigating people, curbs, cars and bikes while also trying to take, without spilling sips of an expensive, by-now— cold coffee that the barista took ages to make and which, in all likelihood, you probably did have the 3 minutes it would take to drink, hot, on the spot, is just not enjoyable.

Illustration by Carson Ellis.

Breda, Amsterdam

It’s the kind of place that makes you wish that you, personally, and the nation, generally, had a deeply rooted lunch culture. Of course that’s only if you don’t already and also if by ‘lunch culture’ you mean more than a broodje kaas, which, even if not one to be admired, is as deep rooted a culture as any. Appropriate or deliberate, then, that the restaurant’s name is Breda, a town in the ‘Bourgondisch’, bistro-friendly, lunch-loving half of the Netherlands. 

But this and the fact that everyone running the place originally comes from there, is probably Restaurant Breda in Amsterdam’s strongest link to Breda, Breda. Not that one cares. Not when one is sitting on a beautiful green couch with one’s wine glass reflecting outside’s high grey skies and you consider, finally out of the wind, what a marvellous thing it is to have a proper lunch. A proper lunch on a Friday afternoon in a proper, high as those grey skies-ceilinged, dining room. One that is elegant (the light fixtures are stunning) without being fussy (you might be out for lunch but this is still Amsterdam) and built around a long bar (important). 

Our reservation was for 1 p.m. but with last night’s not nearly as chic dinner feeling only hours away, we chose for the 3-course menu (€29.50) over the 4 (€36.50) or 5-course (€42.50) options. And that, and the name of the wine in your glass (unfortunately vin naturel only comes by the bottle) is all you are to choose; the object being to settle yourself back down on that couch and enjoy watching the chef, whose other restaurant, Guts & Glory, bases its menus on one animal at a time, exercise his skill and new-found freedom in cooking with all kinds of beasts (fin, feather, shell) at once. 

Toast

The buttered side of one’s proverbial piece of (nowadays probably sourdough) toast hitting the floor has made wisdom status, but what about when you water the plants, already late, on your way out the door, now very late, and they start dripping and your floor’s wood? Or when you take out the bin, don’t put a swizzle-thing thing on it like you’re supposed to, you know you are, because you’re going to take it down immediately, sure you will, ok, so, just for a second you put it down in the hall, making, of course, sure it’s balanced and when you’re back, 1.5 seconds later, ok maybe more, it’s all over the place? Or what about when you’re vacuuming and see there’s all kind of crap on the windowsill because who even cleans there, think hell, I’ll give it a quick swoop, aren’t I good, but darned if I’m going to move all the small pieces of sentiment, memory and oddly shaped love-token-rocks before I do so, I’m not that good, and you swoop and SWOOP, there go your memories, whizzing around in the vacuum cleaner bag. How about that quiet morning to yourself, no one home, you in bed reading the papers, a coffee cup balanced on your mattress - a balancing act so obviously impossible to anyone else that one should read ‘impossible’ as ‘forbidden’ - and then the cat jumps up, cute purr purr cute, and there’s coffee all over the bed just as you warned would happen to everyone but yourself, because somewhere deep inside you think you’re just that little bit better or at least more in control of the universe? 

Ha.

When you’re thinking your darkly prejudiced thoughts like that, coffee and cat all over the place, you obviously forgot the time you vacuumed (a different time) and then dropped three bags of sugar, or all those times you just had to sample whatever you were cooking you were so hungry and of course it was way too hot and you knew that but you did it anyway and you burned your mouth so you could no longer taste dinner which was ready a whole three minutes later, and you certainly haven't  paused to consider the way in which lentils have a tendency to take a dive off your fork (you are once again sampling at the stove) once it’s reached its zenith, the fork I mean, and of course they all roll teeny-weeny into all the places you not only cannot reach but you JUST CLEANED.

It’s a good thing I don’t really eat toast. 

If you like the idea of drinking rubies drink Sébastian Riffault "Raudonas" 2011

I like drinking wine out of plastic cups more than probably most anybodies. I like my wine cloudy, unstable and fizzling and if it’s a really good day it’ll be all three plus red and cold. Give me rough and unsettled or watered down with spritzy water to drink during the harvest time, wine. But I also like wines that make you 

s 

i

n 

g 

cus they're so clean.

Wines as crisp as the sound of you biting into an Autumn apple straight from the tree crap-bit-of-juice-got-in-your-eye can be; precise as we think the Germans to be. Patrick Bateman ebony handled razor blade sharp and also just normal sharp. 

Last week I drank Sébastian Riffault’s "Raudonas". I say my god but here I’ll say my gosh because this was definitely something made on earth and I don’t think the earth gets enough credit. You could taste it. The earth I mean. Earth and flint (Sancerre, Loire), spice, cranberries and rubies. Like Thanksgiving but better or at least easier. Singing almost singeing — sides of your tongue gettin’ all juicy — acidity, a long finish and whistling Indian arrow straight purity. In a word, for the sake of adding one more word: 

unctuous. 

And no, I don’t drink everything out of plastic cups.

//

Sébastian Riffault "Raudonas" 2011

Pinot Noir
Loire

From: La Officina

Mana Mana

There was enough vinegar on the grilled vegetable salad for even me to comment which will only mean something to you if you knew how every salad is a battle between me and the rest of the world, me being on vinegar’s side. But we'll get there.

The last time I’d been to Mana Mana was maybe a year ago, maybe less, I don’t exactly remember. What I do remember is that we’d passed the place when it was still at its previous place (Hemonystraat) a million times and wanted to eat there for another million. It was, however, always shuttered up but for the one time, which is how I knew it was a restaurant to begin with and not the shutters of a person with the good fortune of having their family crest being a big steaming pot (see their logo). I remember being in a very bad mood and going was meant to be both a surprise and to cheer me up. It did. 

On fish

I felt shiny. I was mopping up the oil from the last can of sardines everybody brings back from Lisbon and felt shiny. This, if not indicative of January’s strain on one’s psychological well-being, at least shows you the power of advertising. I was feeling how the back of your average tin of cat food promises your cat will feel after nom-nomm-nomming its Extra Fancy Fishies in Real Oil or whatever, which is to say, bright-eyed and silky-furred. 

A week later I was feeling angry. Angry that the salmon we’d bought from the fish man didn’t have its skin on. Angry that I hadn’t checked whether it had its skin on, and angry that I had to check. Why would you cook something without its skin?

Now I felt guilty. That eyes-cast-down-at-your-middle-leg-region kind of guilt. 

“…and of course none of you eat fish, right?”

The room had only just faintly gargled its non-answer to the first of the rhetorical questions it had just been slammed with just a moment before, the “Of course you’re all smart enough not to eat meat, right?”.

Shit. 

We were at the opening speeches of the Youth Food Movement’s year, and I knew that in a week’s time we will have picked up a pig, brought it to slaughter, hung it, brined it and roasted it (although thank god for the surprise element of life, because it turned out we’d also be roasting it out in the snow). I was also feeling very aware of last week’s salmon incident, sardine lunch, a side porting of kibbling to go and two bites of a herring served on the tail (plus pickles and onion though I prefer it cut up). On all counts then, I eat both meat and fish. 

Le Carton throws supper

Because we don't know anyone who cooks with enough garlic, we decided to start a sort of supper club. A place to sit people next to strangers around a family table and drink lots of wine. 

So we found a squat, hung a branch and gave everyone kefir cocktails. There was a three course menu, a storyteller and a herbalist and Ploussard from Overnoy-Crinquand on tap. 

'La Bidode' 2014 is from a 5.5ha vineyard tended by Mikael Crinquand in Pupillin, the village up the hill from Arbois where we were camping for a week in October. A rustic chug-chug red that's lean and earthy with a fermenting strawberry fizzle plus a spitter-spatter of manure on your boots with some hay stuck on. Very danceable.

Photos by Sophia van den Hoek

More of our pop up parties:

Dead Sheep, Living Wines

Le Carton @ Dirty Art Dept. Grad Show

The Southern Supper

The Extra Supper

For future events: @helloLeCarton

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.

The natural choice is to drink natural wine

“It would spoil people’s perception of wine” is, both inevitably and ironically, what got me first thinking about ‘it’. Before I heard that, all I thought about when I thought about wine was taste. That and whether or not this should be my last glass.

These were the (subtitled) words of a (French) grower in a documentary about how we manipulate wine and, armed with the terms ‘extract of pig pancreas and dried swim bladders of fish’ and a word I have since learned how to spell (Polyvinylpolyryrrolidone), I set off to tell my wine drinking friends. Not that anyone seemed to care. Most people seemed to think that even if this was true, that it probably wasn’t for the sort of wine that they drink. In fact, there seemed to be a direct correlation between the people who profess to enjoy wine the most and a confidence that this didn’t apply to them. And because all I’d seen was a documentary, for all I knew, they were right.

And so I bought a book.

I figured that if it was difficult to learn about what was being added to conventional wine, then I should start with natural wines and learn about all the stuff that’s categorically not in them. This, to cut a long list of additives short, is everything except (in some cases) a little sulphite at bottling. There’s no added water, no sugar, no tannins, no gelatine, no phosphates, no added yeasts. No (surprise!) dimethyl dicarbonate, acetaldehyde and not even any hydrogen peroxide. There are no animal derivatives, no iyoszyme (from eggs) or casein (from milk). And there have been no pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, insecticides or fertilisers used to treat the vines. There is, incidentally, also no legal definition as to what counts as natural, nor is the addition of any of the above to wine, illegal. 

Awkward on both fronts then. 

Legal definition, even recognition, aside; the point is that at one end of the make-wine continuum there are those that manipulate wine via heavy processing, additives or aids, and those at the other end that produce wine without adding or removing anything.

And so, armed with this new information, I return to my friends who, grateful for my concern as ever (not), ask, How do you even know that stuff’s in this wine? 

I don’t. And that’s the whole thing (ok, one of the things): we don’t know what’s in our wine.

On the popular culture of cookbooks

Fast food’s not in fashion anymore, everyone’s telling us to go slow. Restaurants too. They’re blocking mobile signal, reservations and you from Instagramming your food. They’re sitting you at communal tables and serving you their mamma’s-mamma’s recipes. They’ve been cultivating a lifetime of sourdough starters and the single estate coffee is made by a single barista one. single. cup. at. a. time. Slow food can be as simple as drip coffee – crazy, huh, how your parents had it right the whole time? New-school breweries are serving pickled eggs instead of peanuts and putting beer in wine casks. Noma went back in time to learn from Japan and if you’re not preserving, pickling, smoking or fermenting everything, have you checked you’re even alive? It goes without saying that you have the time, space and required amounts of sunshine to grow your own vegetables.

Like any fashion, versions of this trickle down to our homes, too. Christ, I’ve had a sheep’s skin lying under a heap of salt on my balcony for four weeks. Every time a workman comes to tell us how expensive double-glazing is (expensive), I pray he won’t comment. We’re brining the two cucumbers we managed to grow on land that, for all legal intent and purposes, we’re squatting, and the other day we found swiss chard growing there long after we'd abandoned it for winter. Come spring, there's talk of us putting bees there and we almost killed our kefir babies – honey is a bully.

We are where we eat and our souls belong to those whose cookbooks we have on our shelves. I suppose we should be happy print is not dead, long live print; but too many of these bestsellers are formulaic. Celebrity so and so with so and so million followers and oh, here’s a recipe for a juice and the secret to long lasting health or at least good skin.

“I’ve never met a hungry atheist”

‘The theme was world hunger and we were in a salad bar’ is not the opening of a macabre joke but what happened. We had been invited to listen to Spanish journalist Martin Caparró tell us about the making of his book, ‘Hunger’, some of what he learned and who he met along the way. Hunger, he told us, was something that happened to others, not to us. It’s a cliché, the solving of which is on the eternal to-do list of every Miss Universe, and something that is easy for us to ignore.

Remember where we were sitting.

Caparró told us a story. He told us about the time he asked a woman what she would ask for if she had magic powers. “A cow”, she answered. And if she could ask for anything, no matter what or how much? “Two cows?” This incident, he said, showed him how small someone’s world can be. How simple. Surely, we can improve such a simple problem? Our own worlds are so big.

When lunch was brought to the tables, three big salads full of rocket and other non fork-friendly salad leaves, Caparró told us “There is no hunger in abstract. There are people who are hungry” at a time where, for the first time in history, we have been producing enough food for everyone living on Earth (7 billion when we have the capacity to produce for 12). Hunger, therefore, is not from a lack of food.

Hunger is a symptom of wealth distribution, or a lack thereof. It’s a symptom of the way we live and what we expect from life. Of the way we use the resources we have and the way we use those of others, those that don’t have. Let’s take meat: every 1 kg of flesh needs 10 kg of grain. When you choose to eat that kilo, there are a lot of people not eating grains. Worldwide, forty per cent of grain is used to feed livestock. I don’t know the percentage of the people – worldwide – that don’t get fed.

Bear with me, we'll get to the salad bit.