I’m at a street festival in a city known as the Squid City, and within the hour the citizenry will be enthusiastically performing the Ika Odori (translation: Squid Dance), a lively dance dedicated entirely to squid, at nearly every street corner in the city.
But none of the food stands at this street festival are serving squid.
They’re serving fried chicken. They’re serving okonomiyaki. They’re serving a staggering array of greyish-looking meats on sticks. And of course, they’re serving bananas coated in chocolate and decorated with candy to look like cute cartoon characters. But not squid. No squid anywhere.
This has been my experience all day. Okay, there’s squid at the Asaichi Morning Market, but much of it is served as a ‘dancing’ dish (confoundingly ALSO named Ika Odori) where the squid’s head is chopped off and its muscles contract in a morbid ‘dance’ as soy sauce is poured over it, usually accompanied by wide-eyed, madly Instagramming tourists, and I’m super not into that.
And, okay, there’s squid in most seafood restaurants, but as sashimi it’s too chewy for me. I certainly don’t want a repeat of that sashimi restaurant in Asahikawa where I lost all the face in the world by unsuccessfully covering up my unchewable octopus with an insufficient pile of daikon radish.
I just want some casual, cooked squid. Straight-up grilled. As tempura. Legs akimbo in a pile of soba noodles. Even on a stick, spiced so aggressively I choke on it (this happened in Hunan, China).
It takes me all day to finally find it, after many false starts, including being refused seating at an outdoor restaurant for not wanting to order alcohol. It’s in an alley paralleling the festival called Daimon Yokocho, and has no recognizable name, but on its window is taped a picture of a grilled, sauced squid sliced into perfect strips like a big fat squid-shaped piano.
I order the version with liver and organs intact, and wait. It comes out bigger than expected, perhaps three-quarters the length of a forearm. Its triangle-shaped head’s angles are curled and crispy from the grill, and it lies in a pool of liver-tinged sauce. It’s cut into rings, as in the picture, but since I ordered it with organs, it looks like it’s stuffed with paté. Ankimo (monkfish liver) is one of my favorite dishes to order in sushi restaurants, and this is like ordering two plates of it served inside a squid.
Some of its other organs taste and feel to-the-note like miniature mussels. Maybe they are. Maybe Hakodate stuffs their grilled squid with mini mussels. Maybe they FEED their squid de-shelled mussels. I don’t know how Japan works, or how squid works, or how any of this works, but I know I like this squid and I like its organs. I wish some of my paté-loving relatives could try this, in the same way I wish they would try balut, which also tastes a bit like paté. A liver is a liver is a liver, even if it’s a squid liver, a monkfish liver, or a fetal duck liver.
Full, pondering squids and livers, I wander back to the street festival, where a crowd has gathered around a Hakodate-Singapore Friendship Float, all ready to dance the Ika Odori. We’re all dancing the Squid Dance, but I might be the only one dancing the Squid Dance literally full of squid.
Showing posts with label squid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label squid. Show all posts
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Cold day, hot udon: Marugame Monzo
There is a stark divide among the patrons at Marugame Monzo.
Half of them are fighting their instincts. Their instincts tell them to be restless. They tell them to feel irritated at the long wait, the shoulder-to-shoulder closeness, the space for exactly two people to wait inside and no more, this coupled with the freezing (for L.A.) temperatures and threat of rain. Even once they're seated, the overwhelming smell of dashi, butter, and seaweed coupling with their own empty plates, their instincts tell them to be urgently, impatiently hungry.
Their bodies want to fidget, their fingers to seek their phones, their voices to rise, but their brains won't let them, because their brains are firmly directing their eyes to stare at the Udon-Making-Man.
The Udon-Making-Man is a wonder. He is perpetually on display - behind a large glass pane at the bar - and perpetually moving. He isn't a blur, for he moves at a steady, careful pace, but his limbs never stop rolling, patting, flour-sprinkling, stretching, chopping, and rinsing. Not once does his hand derail to wipe his brow (a kerchief takes care of that) or do his eyes leave his station (despite the pairs of eyes all directed at him). He displays no evidence of being unsettled by the attention.
The disc of dough grows, it stretches, it's floured. It's floured A LOT. "Floury," murmurs my mom from her spot at our hard-won table. I detect a hint of judgment in her voice that may just be me, projecting my own. It looks like the noodles are going to taste like a used rolling pin. 90% flour, 10% dough.
They do not.
For the other half of the patrons, those who have received their half-bowl, half-platters of noodles, have a different air entirely.
Their bodies and brains are in harmony: both dedicated wholly to eating udon. They're wearing constant grins, grins visible even through rapid chopstickfuls of noodles and the motion of conversation.
Mirroring the Udon-Making-Man's, the customers' hands don't stop moving until the job is done. The job, in this case, is to get every last snake of udon into their mouths. Every last spoonful of roe-speckled, lightly spicy butter, every last textured tiny tongue of urchin, every last strip of pork fat or duck breast or green onion.
As for me, I look like everyone else - robotically yet wonderingly raising chopsticks to my mouth - but I'm also marveling at the slow build of the spice in the mentai (cod roe) and how well the tiny eggs stick to the noodles, as though the noodles had microscopic gaps made just for them. I'm wondering how the squid came to be so butterfly-edged and tender, almost like a whitefish, and how the cook coaxed all the rubber band texture out. I'm staring at my sauce, thinking how even though it looks like melted butter, I still somehow want to eat it with a spoon.
And perhaps most strongly of all, I'm enjoying the udon like I've never really enjoyed it before. Secretly, I've historically dismissed udon as unnecessarily beefed-up pasta: the steroid-injected gym rat of the noodle world. This particular udon, though, retains none of the excess flour I watched poured onto the wooden rolling-mat. It has three textures: the outer bite, the slight give afterwards, and the final chew, which feels like the most satisfying sort of sourdough.
My appetite is hardly ever as big as my tastebuds want it to be, but here I am left with a tiny, penny-sized pool of butter-broth and nothing else.
Half of them are fighting their instincts. Their instincts tell them to be restless. They tell them to feel irritated at the long wait, the shoulder-to-shoulder closeness, the space for exactly two people to wait inside and no more, this coupled with the freezing (for L.A.) temperatures and threat of rain. Even once they're seated, the overwhelming smell of dashi, butter, and seaweed coupling with their own empty plates, their instincts tell them to be urgently, impatiently hungry.
Their bodies want to fidget, their fingers to seek their phones, their voices to rise, but their brains won't let them, because their brains are firmly directing their eyes to stare at the Udon-Making-Man.
The Udon-Making-Man is a wonder. He is perpetually on display - behind a large glass pane at the bar - and perpetually moving. He isn't a blur, for he moves at a steady, careful pace, but his limbs never stop rolling, patting, flour-sprinkling, stretching, chopping, and rinsing. Not once does his hand derail to wipe his brow (a kerchief takes care of that) or do his eyes leave his station (despite the pairs of eyes all directed at him). He displays no evidence of being unsettled by the attention.
The disc of dough grows, it stretches, it's floured. It's floured A LOT. "Floury," murmurs my mom from her spot at our hard-won table. I detect a hint of judgment in her voice that may just be me, projecting my own. It looks like the noodles are going to taste like a used rolling pin. 90% flour, 10% dough.
They do not.
For the other half of the patrons, those who have received their half-bowl, half-platters of noodles, have a different air entirely.
Their bodies and brains are in harmony: both dedicated wholly to eating udon. They're wearing constant grins, grins visible even through rapid chopstickfuls of noodles and the motion of conversation.
Mirroring the Udon-Making-Man's, the customers' hands don't stop moving until the job is done. The job, in this case, is to get every last snake of udon into their mouths. Every last spoonful of roe-speckled, lightly spicy butter, every last textured tiny tongue of urchin, every last strip of pork fat or duck breast or green onion.
As for me, I look like everyone else - robotically yet wonderingly raising chopsticks to my mouth - but I'm also marveling at the slow build of the spice in the mentai (cod roe) and how well the tiny eggs stick to the noodles, as though the noodles had microscopic gaps made just for them. I'm wondering how the squid came to be so butterfly-edged and tender, almost like a whitefish, and how the cook coaxed all the rubber band texture out. I'm staring at my sauce, thinking how even though it looks like melted butter, I still somehow want to eat it with a spoon.
And perhaps most strongly of all, I'm enjoying the udon like I've never really enjoyed it before. Secretly, I've historically dismissed udon as unnecessarily beefed-up pasta: the steroid-injected gym rat of the noodle world. This particular udon, though, retains none of the excess flour I watched poured onto the wooden rolling-mat. It has three textures: the outer bite, the slight give afterwards, and the final chew, which feels like the most satisfying sort of sourdough.
My appetite is hardly ever as big as my tastebuds want it to be, but here I am left with a tiny, penny-sized pool of butter-broth and nothing else.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Snacking across Asia, part II: China
(...continued from Part I.)
1. Fenghuang, Hunan: Candied ginger
Fenghuang is known for its ginger crafting. That much is clear with a simple Google. However, further information about what type of ginger is hard to come by. Pickled? Candied? Sugared?
The shops along the obviously-tweaked-to-look-ancient-but-still-striking streets of Fenghuang sold white sticks that looked like bleached bark. This might have been ginger. We walked past a man in practically medical garb working a taffy machine like a jumprope, twirling it and lassoing the air gracefully.
This may have been ginger, too. Who knows?
What I eventually bought was a baggie of crystallized ginger from shop tucked way off the main road, just because that was the image in my head of how ginger ought to be consumed. It looked just like the kind you get at Trader Joe's: soft, chewy, and sugared - except that instead of big crystals of sugar, it was powdered sugar. And also, there was the small matter of it tasting so fresh and dewy and spicy that I may have gathered a handful straight from a passing fluffy ginger cloud.
My fatal error was buying only one bag, thinking it would last me the rest of my trip (about 6 weeks at that point). It lasted me three days: just long enough that I was on the train to Kunming by then, regretting my decision strongly.
Ruili had something similar, imported from Malaysia, and so did Vietnam, in gigantic plastic bulk containers at the market, but nothing ever quite reached the magic of Fenghuang's.
2. Weishan, Yunnan: Sweet cornbread with fig filling
The dominant sweet in Weishan, The Friendliest City in China, was a jiggly white Jello-like cake lump that inexplicably, when cut into, formed a jagged, baklava-like square, as though phyllo dough were hidden in the midst.
It tasted like paper and soy. I wished it were interesting. It was offered as a sample by a pair of friendly (of course) sisters under a cardboard awning.
The rarer sweet carts only came out in the morning, disappearing entirely by about 10am. From one of these epheremal vendors came something wholly un-Chinese, so utterly random as to almost seem unreal.
This square of cornbread, stuffed with a sweet brown fig filling, would have seemed more at home somewhere in the Mediterranean. We were soon to see figs in Dali, in the same province, but they were plump, green, and looked almost like apples. This filling looked like it came straight from a Black Mission.
It was a welcome respite from the bracingly sweet red bean cakes that popped up in every Yunnan bakery we would pass for the next 3 weeks. Too bad respites work better when they come after the routine, not before.
3. Ruili, Yunnan: Shandong squid skewers
Yeah, that's a lot of place names.
I specify that this squid skewers originate from Shandong because the man who grilled them never stopped talking about his hometown. He insisted that his skewers were the best in Ruili because he grilled them the way he had learned to grill them all the way across the country - really all the way across, over 1850 miles away.
Here he is, grilling squid the Shandong way, arm-muffs and all:
I don't purport to be able to distinguish squid skewers by grilling style, but I do know that these were more than worth the wait in the tropical rain. He had the squid divided up into legs and bodies. I had chosen to try one leg skewer and one body skewer, but he insisted that I choose both legs, since they were 'better'.
He soaked his grill with oil, scraped it flat, placed the squid on, coated it with oil, pressed it hard with his metal press, then let all the juices that pressed out soak up the oil and spices left over from previous orders. Then, he scooped up the now-fried juices and poured them back over the squid, pressing them out again and repeating the process four or five times, adding garlic and powdered spices towards the end.
Again, I regretted only ordering two after I had returned to the dryness and coziness of my hotel room, and was disinclined to venture out and get more. We looked for him the next night, but as it goes in China, he'd moved on to a different corner and was never to be seen again.
4. Dali, Yunnan: Fried goat cheese
What we initially thought were tortillas on a stick were thinly-sliced sheets of goat cheese, stuck in the fire until they blistered and crisped! (And they weren't on a stick, they were shoved ingeniously in the center of one split chopstick.)
Now, my thoughts on Dali cuisine are well-documented, but occasionally these tangy, pungent snacks would be well-made and when they were, they were otherworldly. They'd crunch and then melt, leaving a bite on your tongue not unlike Swiss cheese, but with a brown sugar aftertaste.
Next time: Vietnam and Cambodia!
1. Fenghuang, Hunan: Candied ginger
Fenghuang is known for its ginger crafting. That much is clear with a simple Google. However, further information about what type of ginger is hard to come by. Pickled? Candied? Sugared?
The shops along the obviously-tweaked-to-look-ancient-but-still-striking streets of Fenghuang sold white sticks that looked like bleached bark. This might have been ginger. We walked past a man in practically medical garb working a taffy machine like a jumprope, twirling it and lassoing the air gracefully.
This may have been ginger, too. Who knows?
What I eventually bought was a baggie of crystallized ginger from shop tucked way off the main road, just because that was the image in my head of how ginger ought to be consumed. It looked just like the kind you get at Trader Joe's: soft, chewy, and sugared - except that instead of big crystals of sugar, it was powdered sugar. And also, there was the small matter of it tasting so fresh and dewy and spicy that I may have gathered a handful straight from a passing fluffy ginger cloud.
My fatal error was buying only one bag, thinking it would last me the rest of my trip (about 6 weeks at that point). It lasted me three days: just long enough that I was on the train to Kunming by then, regretting my decision strongly.
Ruili had something similar, imported from Malaysia, and so did Vietnam, in gigantic plastic bulk containers at the market, but nothing ever quite reached the magic of Fenghuang's.
2. Weishan, Yunnan: Sweet cornbread with fig filling
The dominant sweet in Weishan, The Friendliest City in China, was a jiggly white Jello-like cake lump that inexplicably, when cut into, formed a jagged, baklava-like square, as though phyllo dough were hidden in the midst.
It tasted like paper and soy. I wished it were interesting. It was offered as a sample by a pair of friendly (of course) sisters under a cardboard awning.
The rarer sweet carts only came out in the morning, disappearing entirely by about 10am. From one of these epheremal vendors came something wholly un-Chinese, so utterly random as to almost seem unreal.
This square of cornbread, stuffed with a sweet brown fig filling, would have seemed more at home somewhere in the Mediterranean. We were soon to see figs in Dali, in the same province, but they were plump, green, and looked almost like apples. This filling looked like it came straight from a Black Mission.
It was a welcome respite from the bracingly sweet red bean cakes that popped up in every Yunnan bakery we would pass for the next 3 weeks. Too bad respites work better when they come after the routine, not before.
3. Ruili, Yunnan: Shandong squid skewers
Yeah, that's a lot of place names.
I specify that this squid skewers originate from Shandong because the man who grilled them never stopped talking about his hometown. He insisted that his skewers were the best in Ruili because he grilled them the way he had learned to grill them all the way across the country - really all the way across, over 1850 miles away.
Here he is, grilling squid the Shandong way, arm-muffs and all:
I don't purport to be able to distinguish squid skewers by grilling style, but I do know that these were more than worth the wait in the tropical rain. He had the squid divided up into legs and bodies. I had chosen to try one leg skewer and one body skewer, but he insisted that I choose both legs, since they were 'better'.
He soaked his grill with oil, scraped it flat, placed the squid on, coated it with oil, pressed it hard with his metal press, then let all the juices that pressed out soak up the oil and spices left over from previous orders. Then, he scooped up the now-fried juices and poured them back over the squid, pressing them out again and repeating the process four or five times, adding garlic and powdered spices towards the end.
Again, I regretted only ordering two after I had returned to the dryness and coziness of my hotel room, and was disinclined to venture out and get more. We looked for him the next night, but as it goes in China, he'd moved on to a different corner and was never to be seen again.
4. Dali, Yunnan: Fried goat cheese
What we initially thought were tortillas on a stick were thinly-sliced sheets of goat cheese, stuck in the fire until they blistered and crisped! (And they weren't on a stick, they were shoved ingeniously in the center of one split chopstick.)
 |
| That makes more sense than there being tortillas in China. Duh. |
Next time: Vietnam and Cambodia!
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