Repost: Istria -- to whet your appetite

Hello again, world! It's been a minute since I've said much at all on the Internet.

My grandfather's health has taken a marked decline. Being that everyone in our family is a busy adult, and taking care of a strong dude with advanced Parkinson's really makes one understand just how ill-equipped they are for taking care of a strong dude with advanced Parkinson's, he has consented to go into an elder care home. Thankfully, he seems to be a big hit. "We could have a hundred of these guys!" said the head nurse.

That move marked an undoubtedly sad day, with grown men and women shedding powerful tears, but  I have faith that he's receiving professional care. My family is just a numpty bunch of people who are interesting, but not doctors or nurses. Fingers crossed that he is in much better hands.

I'm a bit wistful at the moment. I never really got to truly prod him about his childhood in the former Yugoslavia, or about his time in Paris, as a very young father who had just fathered my father, or San Franmcisco in the 1960s. I have but a few stories, merely the select, unguarded ones he felt comfortable sharing. And even now, I can't really ask him to fact-check those tales. Deda was always such a quiet man, thus I'm not sure what I would have gotten out of him if I did take the initiative to thoroughly interrogate him.

So, for now, here's a repost. A brief snippet of my experiences of the region he came from, nearly 50 years after his rowboat departure. For now.

When I can pull myself together, I'll braise some rabbit. Easily the best thing he ever made, and one of my fonder childhood food memories. And I shall post, right here. In the meantime, enjoy my sophomoric attempt to make Istria sound worth an expensive plane ticket.

On Istria -- February 2015

That's where I was for most of September last year. It's the northernmost part of the Croatian coast, and it looks like this:

So. Yeah. That? Oh, that's Draguch, some dinky little hilltown. There's a small chapel with a fresco in there. Not really worth it (Worth it. The road past Draguch makes the Sierras look like a toxic waste dump).

The streets of such towns look like this:

Motovun, Istria, Croatia.

And everything is really pleasant. For the most part. When the curator of a local museum hisses at you, hoping you don't "learn too much" about Istria, then maybe that suspicious Slavic character rears its ugly head, the mark of a people under someone else's thumb(s) for too long. But let's not wash history in brushstrokes too broad. This is a lovely region, known for truffles and mushrooms that look like this:

Chantrelles foraged in the forests surround Tinjan, Istria, Croatia.

But yes, Istrians have been under everyone's thumbs. And by "everyone" I mean the Venetians, the French, the Italians, the Austro-Hungarians... So mushrooms like this might make an amazing sauce for your gnocchi, which you will follow up with strudel and Turkish coffee.

It's a cook's dream. A place where many people have their own gardens and produce the best that nature has to offer; where you'll trip over foragers combing the woods around small towns; where you'll trip over truffles; where you'll find some of the best seafood in the Adriatic, because, apparently, the currents wash all of Croatia's garbage to Italy.

I'll get to all of these nuances in separate entries. I just wanted to show the four people who read this blog what's it's like, generally. And only generally.

The Great Sauerkraut Disaster of 2015

I tried to make sauerkraut. And failed. The plan was to have the sauerkraut ready by now, and to have already made cabbage rolls with glorious, homemade, fermented cabbage.  

In a way, it's fitting that the first project I started for this blog was not a success. It provides a window with a view onto cooking's experimental nature. Just how long did it take for some of these early cooks -- members of Germanic tribes, flocking into Europe in the fourth century AD from the Asian steppes,* who existed without ready access to a food-blog saturated Internet, let alone a concept of chemistry -- come upon a chemically-intensive process that preserves this nourishing, abundant vegetable? They did what I did, albeit much, much, much more intensively. Some of those early Germans might not have survived their first few experiments with fermentation.

My grandmothers gave me some ideas, albeit after the experiment died. "You have to use bricks to weigh it down!" "We had it [sic] wooden barrels, and we put it in the ground." I don't have the space to dig, nor do I want to buy barrels, but I can probably procure some bricks.

I followed the restaurant's recipe for sauerkraut, which I had made once before. After thoroughly cleaning the cabbage and slicing it into thin strips, I weighed it. From there, I could determine the amount of salt I would need to add, which is equal to five percent of the cabbage's weight.

This is some salty cabbage.

I combined the cabbage and salt well, with clean hands. The salt will draw out much of the moisture from the cabbage, providing your natural brine. I packed this entire mixture, salty water and all, into a clean container, covering it with a layer of plastic wrap. This was weighted down with a plastic bag filled with water, which would put pressure on the cabbage evenly and entirely. Next time, I will probably use bricks to this end.

My makeshift sauerkraut weight.

Cabbage: cut, salted, packed tight, ready to ferment! Only most of these things actually happened.

After wrapping the entire container with Saran wrap, I left it to ferment for five weeks in a cool, dark garage.

The "sauerkraut," however, was not at all sour. The product of this first experiment was merely a batch of salty cabbage. The cabbage probably needed more time to ferment, during what has been a particularly cold California winter. This recipe was ready in three weeks at the restaurant -- but that was in August, when the dry storage's cooling unit was on the fritz. The heat had allowed the restaurant's batch to, so to speak, mature sooner.

Being paranoid that I had introduced harmful bacteria after disturbing the mixture, I relegated it to the compost. My next experiment with sauerkraut will take a two pronged approach: another stab at the restaurant's recipe, and one more following Sandor Katz's guidelines. Hopefully, these attempts will produce some proper sauerkraut that will find itself into proper recipes.

*See A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat (2009) for more geekworthy food history

Lessons from the pig: an introduction to Paprika and Pork

The pig. For us Germans and Croats, it's the fabric of our cuisine. What would we put in our sausages, our cabbage rolls, our stews, our charcuterie without this animal? What would we snack on if not prshut? Kosher? Pffft. Sorry, couldn't do it in this family. Many cooks call it "God's meat," a snarky but perfect testament to our own love of such an important animal.

I recounted my first time butchering one of these amazing creatures a little over three years ago. There's no better way to start off this blog than to re-post the experience. It embodies the spirit of this site: letting food, family and the past teach us; learning from recipes, traditions and techniques. At its most effective, this can transform our Weltanschauung; if our outlook on life remains unchanged, we can at least find joy in that learning process.

Slaughtering an animal is probably a little too gory for our stomachs, which nourish themselves largely on industrialized farming far removed from our homes. But if you were my Baba, your family created an economy around doing this -- slaughtering pigs in December, then curing their meat in the cold winter air. Come springtime, the food you had raised, killed and made was ready for sale or consumption. Pigs were a sustaining life force.

My grandmother was much closer to the lives that gave her life. The following post describes my most personal experience with producing pork, though it pales in comparison with agrarian life in Yugoslavia. But I'm grateful for an experience that made me appreciate an animal so central to my family. And in our time, we could stand to apply some of that Old World, old-fashioned appreciation.

Sept. 15, 2012
For the first time yesterday, I helped butcher a whole animal -- actually, a few animals. Two lambs and a pig, thus far the most incredible experience of my internship.

This might sound morbid, and I know my veggie friends will curl in horror at my next statement, but it was generally an enjoyable experience, if not full of teachable moments. Butchering forces you to be incredibly attentive, incredibly thorough; to feel the meat with your fingers in order to recognize the different textures of the different muscles, or to feel the seams along which to separate those muscles so that you don't waste any part of the animal. An err in cutting along the ribs could mean a ruined tenderloin, and wasted -- note this -- not product, but life. 

This is where shit started to get real.

You'll start with a whole pig carcass, and it's an eerie thing. You shave it, you feel it, examine it, you treat it delicately. This animal's about to be cooked; it experienced pain so that we could enjoy it. And here it is, on your stainless-steel table, lifeless.

Half of the whole pig we broke down

I had the honor of segmenting the pig's head. With a hacksaw, I first sawed off the snout, then made my way to the skull, following a vertical line in between the pig's eyes. I took out the tongue next, my fingers feeling the ridges on the top of the pig's mouth and the tendons connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth. Yet another strange, indescribable feeling when you're an intern doing it for the first time. It took all of two minutes, but it was gruesome.

I kept reminding myself  I was thankful someone slaughtered this pig, hopefully humanely as possible (it's what we aim for at our restaurant); that it led a good piggy life, and I would be thankful to prepare and enjoy it.

But I wouldn't enjoy it in its entirety. The slaughterhouse made a massive gaffe, and the head didn't match the carcass. The head wasn't fresh, so all of that loveliness we would normally use to make headcheese -- i.e., the entire head, minus the brains and eyes -- were unusable.

Know how I found out it was unusable? Chef tried to simply pop out the brain with his index finger, which should happen easily if the animal was killed recently. No dice.

I had just defiled an animal, one whose lifeless peepers stared me in the face, to no avail. That idea hit me like a wrecking ball at full force.

This journal entry isn't exposing anything new. But I think it provides some insight into why nose-to-tail eating has become popular. We're human, we form bonds with animals. We're also hypocritical, because we eat many of those animals. But if those animals are raised the right way, they can be incredibly healthy for us*; the least we, as humans, could do is show respect for a creature that nourishes us well. Maybe that's why Catholics say grace before a meal, because my grandmother couldn't bear the thought of catching a lamb's blood while her mother killed it. And what better way to show appreciation than to use all of the animal, and not be forced to cringe at the sound of half a pig's head hitting the side of a compost bin?

I'm planning on seeing an animal slaughtered. Not because I want to, be because, if I eat and prepare meat, I have to. It's the only way to actually understand where our food comes from, to truly understand why we should be respectful of the beings we enjoy at dinnertime. And maybe I'll become a committed vegetarian... we'll see.

So perhaps the way I've described this experience doesn't make it sound too enjoyable. But working slowly and carefully with something that was once living is humbling and meditative. And now I am one giant step closer to understanding how that meat gets on my plate.

I wasn't expecting the restaurant industry to do this to me. 

*An animal's diet can alter the fats, compounds and minerals in the meat it eventually provides. Corn provides empty calories, but pigs allowed to forage on nuts tend to produce fat and meat that is higher in those brain-boosting, omega fatty acids. More on this later, I'm sure of it.