If there’s one plant that symbolises South-East Asia, it is, of course, the lotus.

One of the miraculous things about the lotus is that almost every part of it is edible. The beautiful flowers can be eaten.

The leaves are most often used as natural, biodegradable food wrappers — but you can eat those too, as well as the stems (sometimes sold pickled in brine).

And that white, perforated rhizome — what we think of as “lotus root” — transforms into everything from salads to crisps to, yes, flour.

These green things, that you’ll see sold by the bundle in markets and on the street in pretty much any country where the lotus is grown for food? They’re lotus seed heads, packed with wonderful, fresh lotus seeds.

Lotus seed-heads don’t just look lovely, when tied into neat little bunches with ribbon, but are excellent fun to eat.

The seed-head has an almost rubbery texture to it, but the ripe lotus seeds will pop from their slot as if by magic when you squeeze them — you don’t need to rip the entire head apart (though that’s fun, too).

Peel away the bitter pith and what remains is a mild, white, slightly sweet seed with a taste between pine nuts and green almonds, packed with protein.

And if you’ve only ever come across the flavour of lotus seed as a bland paste filling a mooncake, trying the real thing is a must.

For cooking, you can buy dried lotus seeds and rehydrate them — if you’re eating them plain, you need the glorious, roadside, real deal.

Because, just as with oysters, pistachio nuts and sunflower seeds, when eating fresh lotus seeds the fiddly bit is all part of the fun.

The post Lotus Seeds appeared first on Worldfoodist.

To say I’m a little obsessed with Beijing duck would be putting it mildly. Almost every city in China has its own way of doing roast duck (and, in some parts, roast goose), but it’s Beijing duck that we foreigners think of when we think of Chinese roast duck.

You don’t just smell Beijing duck on the streets of Qiamen. You hear it, the cry of “KaoYa” (roast duck) blazing from the tannoys to lure in domestic tourists, as keen as the foreigners to try Beijing duck in Beijing.

Now, at the risk of committing blasphemy, it is pretty much impossible to find bad Beijing duck in Beijing. The humblest kaoyadian (the local name for a restaurant that specialises in roast duck) will beat the hell out of any duck joint outside China.

And such a cheapskate am I that I’ve typically gone somewhere that smells good, has a lot of locals in it, or out of town spots that locals recommend, spent around 100 kuai (£10) for a duck with trimmings, and never been other than satisfied.

That said, this weekend was time to step it up a little, and check out a few candidates for the title “best Beijing duck in Beijing”.

The competition for best Beijing duck in Beijing is fierce, but some regularly cited contenders are, from the new style, Da Dong and Duck de Chine, and from the old school Quanjude and Li Qun.

All of these serve Beijing duck that’s tender and succulent, with a rich layer of fat topped by crispy skin, and at all of these you can see your duck being carved with varying degrees of theatre: Duck de Chine announces the duck’s arrival at your table with a gong!

Quanjude, on the touristy pedestrian street Qiamen Dajie, is undoubtedly Beijing’s most famous duck restaurant, where luminaries from Stalin onwards have dined in high style. It’s also almost certainly Beijing’s oldest continuously operating roast duck restaurant.

But, after being greeted with frowns and stares from Beijingers, and told that Quanjude was “too expensive”, “not that good” and “only for tourists”, we were diverted to Li Qun.

And I’m glad we did. Quanjude has real style and elegance, and I still want to eat there for the theatre.

But Li Qun is a courtyard restaurant in one of Beijing’s few remaining hutongs. The hutongs are low-rise warrens of peasant houses, built during the imperial era, when buildings above one storey were forbidden, lest someone might look down on the emperor from an upper window.

Today they are rapidly being knocked down and replaced, in an oh-so-Chinese piece of utter weirdness, with new, fake hutongs, so for me at least Li Qun’s hutong location is a major selling point.

The history of Beijing duck is disputed. What is clear is that roast duck has been served in China for thousands of years, and was enjoyed at the imperial court for several dynasties, probably even before the imperial court moved from Nanjing to Beijing.

Today’s Beijing ducks are prepared from a specific breed of duck (the Pekin duck), which are forcefed to get their fat layers up to scratch without becoming oversized.

To get the preferred balance of crispy skin, a lot of smooth fat and incredibly moist, succulent flesh, chefs pump air between the skin and the fat, and, over a lengthy preparation period, carefully dry and glaze the duck with a simple syrup.

Then they roast it in a proper, fired oven. I didn’t realise quite what a fine art there was to roasting Beijing duck until we walked into Li Qun to see ducks roasting in a brick wood oven, and a chef tending to them with a metal duck hook.

And not just any wood. Li Qun uses apple wood, peach wood, plum wood plus wood from a range of fruit trees neither my Chinese nor the manager’s English extended to (one of them is rendered as “menthod” on the menu, if that helps).

Although Li Qun’s walls are lined with photos of celebrities who’ve eaten here, from every Hong Kong film star you can shake a stick at through to captains of industry and politicians from around the world, the feel is, frankly, down-at-heel.

There are fridges in the main area. Beer, wine and fizzy drink bottles lined up against chipped window frames. The floor tiles are grimy.

The kitchen would win no prizes for hygiene, the chefs’ whites are anything but and the loos, while atypically clean, are in other ways a typical shared hutong affair with nary so much as a partition to spare your blushes.

But with its courtyard layout – small rooms spinning off a central courtyard – Li Qun has a grimy appeal that rather floated my boat.

It feels, well, lived-in. Well-loved…

We went for one of Li Qun’s set options, the “traditional”, though you can consume every part of the duck but the feathers here, from bones cooked to a crunch or made into a soup, right through to the head, feet and intestines.

Some restaurants serving Beijing duck in the “traditional” style start with slivers of skin with sugar to dip them in and follow the meat with duck soup made from bones. This isn’t Li Qun’s take on the traditional, an area which, like the history of Beijing duck, or, for that matter, the best Beijing duck restaurant in Beijing, can inspire heated debate.

In addition to pancakes (perfectly thin, but disappointingly cold), plum sauce, spring onion and cucumber, the traditional option includes broccoli, egg rolls, salted duck liver and duck wing in hot sauce.

Our duck arrived in its tray without especial ceremony, and the server set to work carving it at a sideboard.

There is a fine art to carving a duck so almost every slice contains the preferred blend of 50% flesh and 50% fat and skin (Beijing duck is not a dish for those who worry about their cholesterol).

Getting the pieces to this level of precision is no small thing, even if you do do it day in, day out, as these guys do.

And the flavour?

Absolutely exceptional. I like my duck Chinese-style, which is to say a lot fattier than some Westerners will tolerate it (though if you’re calorie-counting, you can always pull off the fat and eat the meat alone). And Li Qun’s was by miles the best Beijing duck I’ve tried yet.

What makes the difference here is, yes, you guessed it, that wood oven, and in particular the fruit wood.

In addition to the crunch of the skin, you get a smoky, earthy tang – an earthiness that’s also replicated in the dark plum sauce, which stays firmly on the umami end of things, with an ample hit of five spice and soy, and none of the crude sweetness you’ll find in a Chinese restaurant overseas.

And the meat, of course, is tender, succulent, duck-a-licious and to die for. Duck times a gadzillion.

The salted duck liver? Not overly salty. Worked well with the sauce. But a bit dull. Honestly, I prefer duck liver as pate or foie.

Paradoxically, precisely because of the smoky flavours that I loved, I’m not sure I’d recommend Li Qun as the first place to try Beijing duck in Beijing.

But if you’ve had true (Beijing-style) Beijing duck before and loved it, I’d thoroughly recommend Li Qun. And, if you’re packing a vegetarian, they have a reasonable selection of veggie dishes too.

You’ll need to book ahead at meal times, but if you’re happy having lunch at 3pm, spaces are easy enough to find. Expect to pay around 500 kuai for a duck, a bottle of decent house wine and plenty of trimmings.

Li Qun Kaoyadian
11 Beixiangfeng Hutong, off Zhengyi Lu, Chongwenmen, Beijing
Metro: Chongwenmen
Tel: +86 (0)10 6705 5578

Chinese name: 利群烤鸭店
Chinese address, with directions: 崇文区前门东大街北翔凤胡同11号 (正义路南口)

Walking and get lost? Try saying “Lee Choon Cow Yah”.

The post The Best Beijing Duck Yet – Li Qun, Beijing appeared first on Worldfoodist.

When it comes to food, I like to think I’m a fairly Catholic eater. Innards of all sorts hold no fear for me, though I have yet to visit a penis restaurant.

I’ve braved insects, including, yes, grubs (which appear in our local Chinese supermarket rather disconcertingly placed between the green leafy vegetables and the mushrooms).

I’ve eaten snake, crocodile, kangaroo, reindeer, goat, sea urchin, jellyfish, snails and rabbit, though not yet guinea pig, horse, donkey or dog, and forced Icelandic dried fish crispy snacks past my gag reflex (yes, they do taste as bad as they smell).

I’ve eaten in restaurants with pigs grunting in the dirt at my feet and bought and consumed meat in markets where the main concession to hygiene is waving a plastic bag on a stick when the flies cluster too closely.

I can’t pass a new green vegetable or fruit without trying it to see how it tastes, or a steaming vat cooking on the pavement without investigating further.

I like eating curry for breakfast, whether with roti canai or as a vegetarian dhal, actively appreciate the Vietnamese way with snails, can gorge on steak tartare, sashimi and oysters, and am rather a fan of various seaweeds.

AKA, I’m adaptable.

Yes, those are red beans. Yes, that is a dessert. And, yes, it was very nice, thank you.

So, China should really hold no fear for me when it comes to holding up my end at table on a social engagement.

Well, that’s unless I get invited to a banquet and they want me to eat bear paw (yes, it happens, and, no, she didn’t).

Further, I genuinely like almost all varieties of Chinese food. I can’t quite come to terms with cartilage, but I’ll eat it if I inadvertently order something with it (say a chicken kebab with cartilage sections where the onion slivers might sit).

I adore the spicy flavours of Sichuan, up to and including mouth-searing hotpot, the earthy yak, spuds and maize cuisine of northern Yunnan, I pig out on Shanghai dim sum, one of my favourite restaurants in Beijing is Anhui-style, and we are regulars, right now, at our local Chinese barbecue, where we feast on chicken hearts and kidneys.

I can even brave Chinese attempts at Western dishes. Like this one. Can you see what it is, yet?

So you would think that, when my landlord’s son and his girlfriend invited us out to dinner, and I said, “We eat everything! I’d love to try north-eastern food”, we’d have the restaurant covered.

Wrong.

Because, so far, there are three Chinese menu items up with which I cannot put.

1: Chicken feet, sold here in plastic wrappers as a lunchbox snack for little kids, a staple in supermarkets, and a vital ingredient on every train food cart, however posh the train. I find them an absolutely repellent blend of slimy skin, disgusting fat and cartilage, with bugger all by way of flavour to mitigate it.

2: Grubs. Again, I’ve tried these once — the big ones. They were vaguely bitter, with a texture like soggy cardboard, and quite hard to get past the gag reflex, not least because you had to chew them. They are quite possible very bearable when fried to a crisp, as these little ones are here (yes, it’s a snack, like a packet of crisps).

3: Sweet sausages. Now, the combination of sweet and meat is not anathema to me: cf duck à l’orange, Beijing duck, foie gras with Sauternes and pretty much every jus you can think of. And mincemeat originated in medieval England as a blend of dried fruit, meat and spices.

But sweet sausages? I don’t mean sausages with a hint of sweetness (pork and apple, honey and mustard…) – but sickly sweet sausages, a full-on blare of sugar sweetness. I can’t abide them.

In fact, in a choice between the two evils in the pic above (taken in a regular northern Chinese corner shop), I’d go with the grubs over the sausages, any day.

In fact, I’d go with chicken feet over sweet sausages. Provided they had chilli.

“Well,” says the girl, musingly. “There is a very, very delicious Dongbei dish…”

“Excellent!” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s a type of sausage, a meat sausage. And it’s so sweet, so very, very sweet, and so delicious…”

“Ummmm…” I say. “We don’t actually like sweet sausages.”

We ended up, sadly enough, eating Korean in the mall. Because, Jesus, if these crazy laowai won’t eat sweet sausages, who knows what else they will not eat?

The post You Just Had to Pick That, Didn’t You?! appeared first on Worldfoodist.

I adore Negronis. And, when it comes to travel, they’re one of the perfect cocktails.

Why? Because they’re pretty much impossible to screw up.

Of course, they can be made stunningly well. But they’re not like Martinis or Old-Fashioneds, the kind of cocktail you really need to know your stuff to do well.

Fundamentally, any bar that has gin, Campari, rosso vermouth and reasonable ice can make a Negroni – push comes to shove, you can order the individual ingredients and assemble it yourself.

Well, when I say they’re impossible to screw up, I mean they’re impossible to screw up unless you ignore the recipe. The Cave Bar in Petra managed that, which was a shame, as I was very much looking forward to enjoying a Negroni in a Nabatean tomb.

But, fundamentally, a Negroni is this: equal part of gin, Campari and rosso vermouth. Pour them over ice in a rocks glass, give it a token stir with a straw and, if you’re posh, add an orange zest twist. Done.

It’s a perfect balance of bitter with a hint of sweet, one of the classic cocktail balances, with a gorgeous jewel-like colour (some pretty pictures from the Four Seasons Florence here) and rich notes of orange and fruit.

This one’s from Glen Bar, a Japanese-style cocktail bar in Beijing.

The Negroni, in fact, has a long history. A bartender named Fosco Scarselli created it at what was then the Cafe Casoni in Florence, for a man named Camillo Negroni, shortly after the First World War.

A louche aristocrat, who spent time as a professional gambler and a cowboy, and once ran a fencing studio on Madison Avenue, Count Negroni was a hardcore drinker – Scarselli claimed he could drink as many as 40 cocktails in a day.

He asked for an Americano, a popular drink at the time – a mix of vermouth, Campari and soda, it had been known as the Milano-Torino until it became popular with American visitors, but made “po piu robusto”, or “a bit stronger”.

It’s unclear whether Scarselli substituted gin for the soda or added gin to the blend. Though the Negronis we drink today – a few drink their Negronis Martini style – rarely include soda, Negroni’s original might have had soda in it as well.

The drink took off, rapidly, with other bar-goers ordering “Negroni’s drink”. And so the drink was named – a friend wrote to Negroni in 1920 reminding him not to drink more than 20 in a day.

I couldn’t drink 20 Negronis in a day. But whether it’s in a Bangkok skyline bar, a basement bar in Soho, or our local steakhouse in Kathmandu, it’s a blast of old-school style in a glass.

And, if you’re a Bourbon fan, the various permutations of a Negroni with bourbon in lieu of gin, are worth a try as well.

Cheers!

The post Why the Negroni is MY Drink appeared first on Worldfoodist.

As an obsessional fan of theme restaurants, the concept of visiting a robot restaurant was, well, frankly irresistible. Particularly when followed by an afternoon of ice sculptures, which are, of course, what Harbin, China, is most famous for.

Though for these kids the robots were what it was all about.

And, I have to say, for mine too.

Because the Robot Restaurant in Harbin features not only robot waiters but robot chefs as well! (With, whisper it, rather a lot of assistance from real chefs.)

You’re not supposed to take pictures of the robo-chefs, so this one’s a bit rubbish, sorry.

But, to be honest, the chefs don’t actually do that much. They fiddle with pan lids, cook rice and stir pre-prepped food.

The real cooking happens behind the scenes with the real chefs.

Which doesn’t stop the Robot Restaurant being absolutely worth the visit.

As a fan of themed restaurants, I was hoping for something a little more 2001: A Space Odyssey, if not Star Trek, than the fairly typical Chinese restaurant layout.

But then, at 12 kuai (£1.20, or well under $2) for a plate of dumplings, “cooked” by a robot and delivered by one, they probably didn’t have much budget left for the décor.

What I loved was the expressions of the waiting robots, as they trundled around the room on their white line tracks.

This one looked really worried, as though he might drop something at any time, or bump into the girl who was on her way out.

This one looked stoned, or as though he’d been hit on the head with something heavy, and was about to fall on the floor in a circle of cartoon stars.

And this one… Well, this one clearly thinks he’s the Terminator.

And this one’s just a sulky teen.

Now, I’ve seen credulous Western journos quote a cost of $800,000 for the fitout (fact fans! If a Chinese number has an 8 in it, that’s because it’s lucky, not because it’s true).

Believe you me, a trip to the grimy loo, outside in the communal courtyard, along with the very reasonable dish pricing, should confirm that that ain’t the case.

Even by the standards of Chinese bathrooms, China’s robo-lav is more Bladerunner than Star Trek

It seems a little churlish to point out that the robots do require some help from their friends. They can’t leave their tracks to get to your table, so either you help yourself from their serving tray or a waiter does it for you.

Most of the cooking is done by humans, and rather a lot of button-pressing happens too (you’ll notice the waiters all have buttons on their backs).

All the same, you can’t help but smile as one of the little fellas comes past.

The food?

Well, only a raving mentalist would go to a robot restaurant for the food, even in China, and, after coming with suitably low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised.

If you don’t read Chinese well enough to cope with a tick-box menu, you’ll need to pick your choice from the picture board out the front and ask a (human) waiter to fill in your order card for you: you then pay the (human) cashier and hand a ticket to another (human) waiter.

And, no, full automation will not be coming to the restaurant industry any time soon.

The black fungus looked rather good, but we’d already opted for dumplings and a plate of sweetcorn gloop.

They were, well, OK. Very reasonably priced for a robot restaurant — main dishes cost 30-50 yuan (£3-5), which is to say roughly three times the cost of a full meal in a food court or a noodle shop, and beers are 12 kuai, or roughly four times what they’d cost in a noodle shop.

We paid under ten dollars for our robo-served meal, including a beer, which I consider excellent value.

And, as we wandered past the copyright-infringing “Transformer” and “Wall-E” and the frankly unnerving robotic Chinese dragon at the entrance, I…

… Well, I’m not sure we’ll be back necessarily, but if we have visitors we’ll almost certainly take them, and I’d thoroughly recommend it to you. Particularly, though not only, if you have kids.

We had an absolute bitch of a time finding the address of the Robot Restaurant, so here it is.

The address of the Robot Restaurant in Harbin is 51 Xi Liu Dao Jie (West Sixth Street), off Zhongyang Daojie, Daoliqu: street numbers head upwards from the river. It’s in the basement, just past the corner with Zhongyang Dajie: this pedestrianised street is the centre of town and Harbin’s answer to Oxford Street, so every cab driver will know it.

For more Harbin restaurants visit The Harbin Guide.

The post The Robot Restaurant, Harbin appeared first on Worldfoodist.

Chinese toffee apples, in all their myriad persuasions, are one of my favourite Chinese street sweeties, and add colour to any hutong as they sit threaded on their long, slender sticks. Whether sold from a bicycle, a cart or a street stall, they’re pretty much guaranteed to brighten your day.

I’ve called them Chinese toffee apples, but they’re traditionally made with the sour, astringent, slightly pulpy pinky-red fruit I’ve seen called both hackberry and Chinese thornapple — if anyone knows the correct English name, if there is one, please help me out, as neither of these are right (picture here).

And this is probably still my favourite variant, though I’ve seen Chinese toffee “apples” made with everything from kumquats to strawberries to kiwi slices, pineapple chunks and even cherry tomatoes, which are treated as a fruit here in China.

It’s the sourness, the astringency and the texture — granular and slightly slushy, like an over-ripe Cox’s Pippin — that does it for me.

As with a toffee apple, the process is simple. Thread the fruit on sticks, dunk in a thick brown sugar syrup, leave to dry, then relish the clash of crunchy sugar and soft fruit, of sweetness and tang, and the lovely jewel-like colours of the fruit glowing through the glaze.

I’ve seen them coated in sesame seeds, but that’s gilding the lily IMHO. This one came from a hutong in Qianmen, Beijing, off the north end of Meishi Jie.

THE VERDICT
Cost: 3 Chinese Yuan (30p)
Flavour: 8/10
Presentation: 9/10

EDIT: Thanks to Fiona for giving me the correct Chinese and English names of these gorgeous fruit. They’re a type of rosehip known as the (Chinese) hawthorn.

The post Food for a Quid: Chinese Toffee Apples appeared first on Worldfoodist.

It isn’t hard to spot the dead hand of corporate PR on the menu of a certain type of restaurant.

Ya know.

The world’s most expensive cocktail, with a diamond in the bottom and some gold on top. Or the world’s most expensive pizza, with some disgusting combination of white truffle, imported posh cheese and, yes, more gold. Or the world’s most expensive burger, perhaps with “wagyu” beef and, yes, more truffle and gold.

Gold is, of course, technically the world’s single most expensive food – like the pearls which Cleopatra famously dissolved in vinegar and drank, it’s 100% edible, and costs over $20,000 per kilo.

But if your hard-earned savings account is full to the brim and you’re busting to spend it, here are a few real, genuine food stuffs that might be worth breaking into it for – and a couple that won’t break the bank.

Herewith ten of the world’s most expensive foods, brought to you courtesy of the good folk at Lloyds TSB.

Bluefin Otoro Sashimi

Wild-caught bluefin tuna, some as large as a car, can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, but are also critically endangered.

Fear not! Farmed variants are now available. And, while most farmed animals taste distinctly inferior to the wild variety, connoisseurs of otoro sashimi – the pale, marbled, fatty belly slices that are the most prized parts of the tuna (maguro) – have even more fat than the wild type.

Expect to pay at least $25 for a thin sliver, where you can find it — it’s mystifyingly served here with caviar.

Kobe Beef

Have you just paid through the nose for a pretentious restaurant dish including “wagyu beef”? Then you’ve most likely been stung, for the world’s most expensive beef is not “wagyu”, a term that can apply to any of three breeds of cattle, raised anyhow and anywhere, but “Kobe” beef.

What makes Kobe beef so great? It’s the marbling and the flavour. Kobe beef must be pure-bred Tajima-gyu catttle, a bull or virgin cow, raised on local grasses and water in Hyogo prefecture, Japan, processed in a Hyogo slaughterhouse, and government graded.

There are only 3000 heads of Kobe cattle in the world, and wherever beef is sold, be it in a restaurant or online, it must carry the identification number of the critter it came from.

Looking for it outside Japan? The Old Homestead in New York charges a cool $350 for a 12-ounce steak.

Alba White Truffles

Black truffles from Périgord in France may be known as ‘black diamonds’, but the white truffles harvested in Alba, in Italy, can sell for as much 7000 euros per kilo, making them probably the world’s most expensive foodstuff that isn’t a precious metal.

The smell is most charitably described as “sulphurous” – yes! They stink! And, yes! They’re ugly too – but the flavour, particularly served with scrambled eggs, is divine.

Coffin Bay King Oysters

During the nineteenth century, oysters were poor people’s food – Dickens’ urchins starved on them, while Gold Rush miners stuffed their faces with the Pacific Olympias so prized today.

Oysters are a delicacy from Japan to Blighty, and, as with cheese, every nation has its own most prized varieties. But the most expensive oysters in the world? As far as I can tell, they come from Coffin Bay, Australia, and retail for a wallet-busting $100 EACH, exclusive to the Port Lincoln Hotel.

Why? Well, they’re ENORMOUS: 18cm long and weighing up to 1kg. Which, if you ask me, is just that little bit too large for an oyster, which should never be more than a mouthful.

Wild-“Harvested” Kopi Luwak

Whether you call it civet coffee, monkey poop coffee, or, more correctly, kopi luwak, this has to be one of the weirder expensive foods on the planet.

The palm civet, you see, frequents coffee plantations, where it dines, rather pickily, on only the best and ripest coffee cherries, before excreting the mellowed beans in a form visually not dissimilar to peanut brittle.

After harvesting and careful processing, the coffee has a strong, rich flavour which connoisseurs prize. Farmed kopi luwak is cheaper but less good than the real deal. While the children who collect the droppings from coffee farms in Java, Sumatra and Bali are paid only a few cents, the finished product can sell for as much as $3000 per kilo, making it the world’s most expensive coffee.

Bird’s Nest

The most expensive animal product on the market today? Not lark’s tongues (among other peculiar delicacies loved by Ancient Roman gourmands), but swiftlet saliva.

Yes, saliva.

For the bird’s nests from which the Chinese dish bird’s nest soup is made are composed primarily of saliva. The nests come in three colours: red, yellow and white, with red the most prized. While nests can be farmed, the best are wild-harvested from caves in cliffs across South-East Asia, and can retail for thousands of dollars per kilo.

As often in Chinese food, however, the emphasis is not so much on the taste but the texture and the presumed health benefits: bird’s nests bring long life, apparently. Though not, obviously, to the poor little swiftlets.

Saffron

In medieval times, spices were so highly prized for their medicinal and culinary uses that some were worth more than their weight in gold (even humble cloves were worth more than silver). And the finest Iranian saffron can still sell for thousands of dollars a kilo.

The delicate, dark red filaments of a type of crocus, lovingly dried, saffron has been cultivated for over three thousand years, and it takes very little to impart the delicate strawy scent and bright gold colour to dishes such as paella.

That cheap powder you’ve been offered at the spice market? Most likely it contains heaping quantities of turmeric, or, if you’re lucky, ground-up marigold petals.

Almas Caviar

No expensive restaurant dish would be complete without a gratuitous heaping of caviar. Caviar is, of course, the eggs of the virgin sturgeon, making it small surprise that the wild sturgeon is critically endangered.

The beluga sturgeon is prized for its large eggs, which grow lighter in colour the older the fish is – the single rarest type is called Almas (from the Persian word for “diamond”), comes from very old sturgeons, and can retail for tens of thousands of dollars the kilo when available.

Until sustainable Almas caviar becomes available, a better choice is farmed beluga, which is painstakingly processed with less salt than other, lesser caviars, and best enjoyed in the pristinely simple company of buttered toast.

Brown-Lipped Abalone

Once a gift for Korean emperors, and one of the eight treasures of Chinese dried seafood, the type of sea snail known as abalone is the world’s most expensive shellfish, and not just for its dazzling iridescent interior. In fact, the various species are so prized in Asia that wild populations are now critically endangered.

Farmed abalone, on the other hand, is rated a sustainable choice by Seafood Watch: opt for brown-lipped abalone, if you can, which makes a sweet and tender sushi. When cooked, it has the sweetness of the best scallops with a fatty richness that’s all its own.

Foie Gras

One luxurious food that most of us can afford, unless you happen to be in a region that bars it for cruelty, foie gras is the offal that doesn’t taste like offal, an unbearably, meltingly soft, smooth and buttery duck or goose liver produced by, umm, force-feeding the poor critter.

Vacuum cooking has transformed the service of foie gras, often best shown to perfection when it’s lightly caramelised on the outside and melting on the inside. The classic pairing is with a glass of Sauternes wine.

And if you have got any spare pennies and you haven’t tried foie, this is the one to go for. It’s not quite the world’s most expensive food, but it sure as hell should be.

The post 10 of The World’s Most Expensive Foods appeared first on Worldfoodist.

One great food find from Everest Base Camp? Sea buckthorn juice.

I knew about this lovely stuff, of course. Sea buckthorn berries are famous for containing more Vitamin C than either cranberries or oranges — 400mg for every 100g of raw berries, although of course harvesting, storage and processing all reduce the quantities you absorb.

But I hadn’t tried it. And, though I knew you could find it in Scandinavia, I had no idea it was to be found in the Sagamartha (Everest) region, where its harvesting and processing supplies employment to some of the poorer families in the area.

But it is. The local name for sea buckthorn is akhrilo, and out here it’s made into jams as well as juice, which, like most things in Asia, can be served hot or cold according to the season. Alongside garlic soup, it makes an excellent cold prevention remedy on the trail.

What does sea buckthorn juice taste like? Well, sea buckthorn makes a thick, glutinous juice, which really does need quite a hit of sugar to make it palatable — it’s a cold-climate fruit, like cranberries or lingonberries, rather than a warm weather one like pineapples or mangos, so the natural sugars aren’t exactly sun-ripened to perfection.

Once that’s added, sea buckthorn juice is delicious. It has a crystal-clear sourness that perks up perfectly with the right amount of sugar (I’d like to try it with honey), but has none of the bitterness that you’ll find in citrus fruits.

The sea buckthorn is known as the Siberian pineapple, and if you can imagine a pineapple with the sweetness removed but the flavour kept in, you wouldn’t be far off. There are hints of sour apple and sour orange alongside a berry freshness and, served hot when you are cold, it’s truly invigorating.

The texture is so rich and fibrous — think pressed pineapple juice, rather than orange juice — that, even before you know it’s high in protein, it really is a meal in a glass.

I’ll be looking out for jams when we next get back in range of them and I’d guess that, like cranberries and sour apple, you could make an excellent sauce for game out of it. The locals also use the leaves in a type of tea.

Thanks to Michael Bertulat for the berry image.

The post Sea Buckthorn Juice: the Ultimate Vitamin C Drink? appeared first on Worldfoodist.

In Orhan Pamuk’s wonderful Istanbul: a Memoir, he records that stuffed mussel vendors, plying their wares along the streets, have been part of Istanbul since early Ottoman times.

And Turkish stuffed mussels, known as midye dolma, are one of the world’s great street foods. Seriously, even if you’re an addict to Belgian moules and moules marinière (I am), these will transform your view of shellfish. And they’re sold everywhere from the street side to tourist restaurants.

Typically, stuffed mussels sell for two to the Turkish lira (roughly 35p or 55 cents): we paid a bit more for this bundle for the presentation, and location, on a touristy alley off Istiklal, Istanbul.

The flavour of midye dolma is mild and surprisingly delicate, the succulent rice infused with hints of saffron, cumin and a mild sweetness from the raisins and pine nuts that typically go in the pot, but the mussels still packed with the taste of sea.

And, like all the best street food, they’re great fun to eat. Squeeze the lemon on to add tang, use the top half of the shell to scoop out the mussel and rice from its bed, and enjoy.

These weren’t the best midye dolma we had in Turkey. Those mussels came from a street vendor in Çannakale, the jumping off point for Gallipoli: you can find him on the square on the road that leads up from the port.

But they were pretty fabulous. And if I could only eat one of Turkey’s dolma (stuffed) dishes, this beats out even Imam Bayildı — and I do not say that lightly.

THE VERDICT
Cost: 3 Turkish Lira (£1.05)
Flavour: 7/10
Presentation: 9/10

The post Food for a Quid: Turkish Stuffed Mussels (Midye Dolma) appeared first on Worldfoodist.

My apologies for the abysmal lack of updates over the last few weeks. I’ve been trekking in the Himalayas, and, while there’s more internet than you’d think up there, there really isn’t a lot.

And so, in lieu of more appetising material, I bring you the answer to the question everyone’s asking, “What’s the food like on the Everest Base Camp trek?”

Not wishing to give the game away too much, when I first saw the fat, juicy Himalayan Snowcock (it’s a bird, you dirty-minded people!) wandering the hillside, the first thought that entered my mind, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “That looks tasty!”

They are, apparently, delicious.

Which is more than can be said for most of the food on the Everest Base Camp Trek.

To be fair, it’s not that the food on the Everest Base Camp Trek is exactly bad. And I’m told the range has improved beyond recognition over the last 15 years or so.

It’s the repetition that begins to pall, and the range becomes increasingly limited the further up you go.

By about day 6, you’ll find that you know the menus of every lodge by heart.

And, as budget trekking lodges achieve their 200 rupee ($2.20) room pricing by insisting that you eat both breakfast and dinner in their restaurant, you’re unlikely to be able to shop around for food.

So… What to expect?

Ironically, given the electricity situation in most of Nepal, you can buy T-shirts saying “Dal bhat – 24 Hour Power”.

And dal bhat tarkari – a soup of lentils or, higher up, millet with rice and a vegetable curry – is the staple trekking food. Sherpa stew, a mess of pasta, vegetables and meat if it’s about, is also good fodder.

Meat becomes rarer the higher up the trail you go. While Lukla and Namche Bazar feature sophistications such as espresso coffee, imported gin, exotic curries, pizza and meat that’s not yak, most of the time you are looking at progressively duller combinations of starch, a very limited range of seasonal vegetables, and egg and/or nak cheese.

You can have fried potatoes with veg, fried potatoes with egg, fried potatoes with cheese, or fried potatoes with all or some of the above. You can have noodles with veg, noodles with egg, noodles with cheese, or noodles with some or all of the above… Other starch options are rice and pasta, known here as macaroni, and, at lower elevations, spaghetti with tomato sauce.

Momo made with either tinned tuna or vegetables sometimes feature, as does the regional cold cure, garlic soup ,and, very occasionally, yak curry. Breakfast comprises pancakes and

Fundamentally, food on the Everest Base Camp trek comprises gigantic piles of carbohydrates with the odd hit of vegetarian protein. It does the job. But, Jesus, after a few days it becomes tedious.

Which is when the Yak Sizzler, a dish I believe to be unique to the better-touristed regions of Nepal, comes in bloody handy.

What is a Yak Sizzler? It’s a sizzling hot plate with a slab of rapidly frying yak, served with a handful of chips (potatoes used to be central to the Sherpa diet, until they became able to afford rice and tourists replaced tubers as the cash crop), a selection of vegetables and a gravy packed with MSG-goodness.

It arrives at the table in a terrifying cloud of steam and, at least at the beginning of your trek, it really, really hits the spot.

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