As previously reported on this blog, the production of caviar is no longer a strictly Caspian region affair. Far from it. Sturgeon farms turning out the valuable fish eggs are now operating in South America, China and even in the desert of Abu Dhabi. We can now add South Korea to the list of countries that are part of the caviar club. Reports the New York Times:
When Han Sang-hun brought 200 sturgeons on a chartered plane from Russia in 1997, South Korean officials regarded the alien fish with a level of suspicion that the owner of a fish pond might reserve for an invasion of sharks. After all, the sturgeon, because of its prickly looks, is called the armored shark in Korean.
“They said if any of them escaped into the rivers, they would ruin the local ecosystem, attacking and devouring other fish,” Mr. Han recalled with a pained amusement. “The sturgeon is a slow-swimming fish with no teeth to speak of.”
When he finally extricated his fish from customs, he placed them at a riverside farm in this town 90 kilometers, or 56 miles, southeast of Seoul. For the next 12 years, Mr. Han spent $1 million a year feeding and looking after a stock that grew to 50,000 sturgeons, all children of the original 200. But he got little in return until 2009, when the fish were old enough to yield caviar — one of the world’s most expensive delicacies, selling for as much as $400 per ounce, or $14 a gram.
On a recent spring harvesting day, a farmhand gently massaged a sturgeon’s belly as Mr. Han traced a slender steel device up its egg-laying duct and popped a bulging egg sack inside. Roe poured out like so many black pearls into a bowl.
Tbilisi-based tipster E.O recently sent me a link to a wonderful piece about adjika, a red pepper based hot sauce that is the pride of Abkhazia and an essential part of the region's cuisine. The piece, by Oliver Bullough, a former Reuters correspondent based in Moscow, tells the story of how he first discovered adjika, got hooked on it, and then ended up having numerous conversations about the sauce whenever he went on reporting trips to Abkhazia after the Russian-Georgian war of 2008. From his article:
After the war, Russia recognised Abkhazian independence, and the territory became something of a pawn in the struggle between Washington and Moscow. This was always the nominal topic during interviews with politicians but, quite often, we ended up talking instead about adjika. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Chirikba, for example, strongly recommended buying some from a woman called Seda in the market in Sukhum, the capital. “Everyone knows her, she makes the best adjika,” he said, with a degree of passion that had been missing from much of our previous discussion of Abkhazia’s strained foreign relations. “Just ask when you get into the market and they’ll tell you how you find Seda who sells adjika.”
That was a controversial viewpoint, however. Ruben Migranyan, spokesman for the prime minister, did not think much of Seda’s adjika at all.
“Seda’s neighbour in the market has much better adjika. Look out for her, she has blonde hair, though I can’t remember her name,” he said, as we waited for his boss to turn up. He pointed out that, as an ethnic Armenian, he was neutral in the Abkhaz adjika dispute, so his viewpoint was one you could rely on.
“Seda is a brand name. Buy it from Seda by all means, maybe it’s good, but you can find any other person who makes it better.”
Anyone who's ever eaten in a school cafeteria has been exposed to mystery meat, the strange substance used to make hamburgers and other dishes that are staples of the classic school lunch. Turkish officials, though, may have just added a new item to the school lunch repertoire: mystery milk.
According to reports in the Turkish press, a newly-launched government effort to distribute free milk to Turkey's 7.2 million schoolchildren started off on a disastrous note, with more than 1,000 kids going to the hospital on the program's first day after complaining of food poisoning-like symptoms. The reason? According to some doctors who treated the kids, it was a case of drinking spoiled milk. A member of the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), went even further and suggested government-affiliated "partisan" milk firms were to blame.
In Turkey, the victim often gets blamed when something goes wrong, even if that victim is a child. Not surprisingly, government officials quickly dismissed the possibility that the children drank tainted milk, saying instead that many of them simply were not used to drinking the liquid or were allergic to it. Turkey's Education Minister even told reporters that perhaps some of the sickened students simply drank their milk too fast. Either way, samples of the supposedly long-lasting ultra pasteurized milk, which was distributed in individual cartons, were taken to a lab and results are expected on Friday.
Istanbul is probably one of the few cities in the world where a person armed with little more than pluck, a tuxedo and a set of four-foot-long skewers can build an empire out of selling grilled intestines (or kokorec, as they are called in Turkish). That is the story of Vahap Usta, a nattily dressed Turkish culinary entrepreneur who, starting with a single food cart in the heart of old Istanbul, went on to own a mini kingdom of some 33 stands selling kokorec and drive around town in a white Mercedes. After peaking in the 1990's, though, the legendary Vahap Usta somehow lost it all and ended up disappearing from Istanbul's culinary scene.
That is, until now. Istanbul Eats recently caught up with what they describe as the "Willy Wonka of kokorec," finding him once again slinging intestines dressed in his trademark tuxedo and trying to make a new start with a new cart in one of Istanbul's tonier neighborhoods. From their report:
The legend of Vahap Usta lives on in Facebook pages (“Vahap Usta Neredesin?/Where are you Vahap Usta?” asks one) and through claims of recent sightings and nostalgic blog posts of encounters long past. But for quite a while no one seemed to know what exactly happened to the kokoreç King himself. Our attention was brought to this story by friend and fellow trencherman Salih abi, author of the great food blog Harbi Yiyorum. We followed false leads for a year before we finally found Vahap Usta, working at his kokoreç counter on a commercial strip in the Sisli neighborhood.
Vegetarians in Central Asia must often explain to well-meaning restaurant staff that chicken and lamb (even when it’s ground) are meat. The idea that someone would purposely choose to avoid eating meat can be perplexing in a region where lamb, beef and sometimes horse are considered the heart of any good meal. Vegetarians have been known to swoon with joy over a plate of fried eggs at a truck stop -- after politely pushing aside the greasy hot dogs, of course.
Vegans? Stay at home.
In this desolate landscape, impoverished Tajikistan offers some traditional peasant fare that gives solace to Central Asia’s meat-avoiders, and anyone else looking for an alternative to shashlik.
Not just any eatery will do. In Dushanbe, seek out a café called Hojiyon – “pilgrims” in Tajik – in the city’s 112th “micro-district,” a Soviet-built suburb of faded, five-story cement blocks surrounded by kitchen gardens and rusting playgrounds.
Hojiyon’s specialties are kurtob and shakarob -- similar dishes, both eaten from shared wooden bowls, usually by hand. Kurtob is a jumble of flaky bread called fatir, fresh tomato and onion, oil (your choice of flax seed or vegetable) and kefir, a mildly fermented milk drink. A bit lighter and less soupy is the shakarob – fatir, tomatoes, onion and yoghurt, without the oil. Add salt and slices of hot, green pepper to taste. The result brings to mind a Central Asian take on Tuscan panzanella, a mushy salad of day-old ciabatta, tomatoes, onions and vinaigrette whose name comes from the word for “little swamp.”
In a previous post, this blog linked to a great Boston Globe article that told the story of doner's rise in Germany from a simple and affordable meal for Turkish guest workers to a fast food juggernaut that is now giving McDonald's and other international fast food chains a run for their money.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal takes a further look at the big business of doner, visiting a trade fair devoted just to this fast growing industry, in which Germany has now become a heavy weight player, producing some 400 million tons of meat cylinders a day and sending them out all over Europe. Naturally, big business breeds innovation, with the best example being the somewhat terrifying "doner robot," a machine does away with centuries of tradition and lets for a machine, rather than a knife-wielding mustachioed man, slice the doner. The WSJ, meanwhile, found all kinds of interesting new products at the fair, such as the curiously named "Doner Streaker," a truck specifically designed to deliver the logs of meat without them rolling around.
The full article can be found here, while an Istanbul Eats roundup of where to eat the best doner in Istanbul can be found here.
Tbilisi-based photographer Uta Beyer has a thing for pig carcasses and other assorted cuts of meat. A previous post on this blog featured her lovingly rendered photos of pig heads on display in Tbilisi's main meat market, but Beyer appears to have been so captivated by what she saw at the butcher's that day that she's started an ongoing project called "Flesh," a collection of meat-based still lifes. Here's how Beyer describes the project:
Animal still lifes are one of the oldest genres in art history.They touch upon questions of transience, mortality, and death, and are, at the same time, among the most masterful paintings, always with a clear focus on the aesthetic presentation of the depicted dead animals. This photo essay is a modern, photographic interpretation of the animal still lifes genre, an exploration into this sphere between beauty and death.
Turkey is rife with urban legends about the kebab maker who slips donkey meat into his mince to lower costs or the sausage maker whose sucuk (spicy beef sausage) is actually made of horse meat. Turns out these tales are not just the product of the Turkish imagination, with recent inspections made by Turkey's Ministry of Agriculture indicating that several products found on supermarket shelves contain some very troubling ingredients.
The ministry's investigation first took aim at three brands of honey, which were selling at prices that seemed too good to be true. It turned out that what was being offered as honey was actually mostly glucose syrup. But the investigators' further discoveries were even more disturbing, turning up a "beef" product made of horse meat and several other meat products made with a kind of "white slime" (chicken bone and skin). From Today's Zaman:
The Food, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Ministry has named six companies that its audits have discovered are deceiving customers by providing misleading information about the ingredients of the products.
In a written statement before the weekend, the ministry said laboratory analysis of the companies’ products had revealed that there was vegetable oil in “tulum” cheese, horsemeat in “fried beef,” white meat in “100 percent beef bologna” and undefined tissue as well as internal organs in “skinless sausages.”
Muslims in northeastern Kazakhstan have been scandalized by the appearance of a new brand of vodka bearing the name of God.
KTK television reports that vodka bottles with the Arabic inscription, “Allah’s strength is enough for everybody," have appeared in shops all over the city of Semey (formerly Semipalatinsk) for approximately $4.40 a pop.
“Imams are outraged: They haven’t seen a bigger sin,” says the report.
“It’s difficult for me to even speak about this. The only salvation for those who did this is to repent. After all, Allah is against alcohol. And here you have such mockery,” Imam Bekzat Boranbai uly told KTK.
A representative of the Aktobe factory that produces the vodka denied intentional blasphemy, insisting the labels and caps are manufactured in Russia.
Drinkers in the former Soviet Union often have dozens of choices when it comes to vodka, which enjoys pride of place in any self-respecting corner store. In Khorog, Tajikistan, I once saw Marlboro Vodka, with a red and white label that looked like a pack of the American cigarettes. Sitting next to that was Mercedes Vodka, stamped with the iconic luxury car emblem.
Has the White House inadvertently stepped into one of the Mediterranean's oldest unresolved conflicts, namely: which country in the region gets to claim itself as the inventor of baklava?
The issue has been heating up over the last few years. In 2006, for example, Turkish makers of the flaky dessert were outraged when European Union tourism posters featured baklava as a, gasp, Cypriot invention. But the baklava battle has opened up a new front after a March 22 White House dinner in honor of Greek Independence Day. Although it was a closed affair, Maria Loi, a New York-based Greek chef who prepared the evening's dinner, told a Greek-American publication that President Barack Obama "loved baklava." Picked up by the Turkish press, the story became one of the President saying how much he loved "Greek baklava," leading to angry denunciations from columnists who suggested Obama brush up on his Balkan culinary history and that Loi's entire menu for the affair -- moussaka, stuffed grape leaves, Greek salad and the offending baklava -- was comprised of nothing more than Turkish dishes dressed up as Greek ones.
Worried about the Greeks claiming other cross-border staples as their own, some Turkish foodmakers are now taking preemptive action. Reports Turkey's Cihan news agency:
The İstanbul Simit Tradesmen Chamber has launched a process to get an international patent for the number one Turkish street food, the simit, a ring of chewy bread coated with toasted sesame seeds.
For many of us, the real action in Eurasia is happening in the region’s kitchens. From noodles in Kyrgyzstan to doner in Turkey and everything else edible in between, Kebabistan brings you the latest developments in Eurasia’s food culture.
About The Author
Kebabistan is written by Yigal Schleifer, a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. Between 2002 and 2010 he was based in Istanbul, where he worked as a correspondent for EurasiaNet, covering Turkey and the surrounding region. Schleifer is the co-creator of IstanbulEats.com, a guide to Istanbul's "culinary backstreets" and also one of the authors of the 2009 Fodor's guide to Turkey.
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