food Archives - Page 5 of 6 - In Search Of Umami

Made in Argentina

In Europe everything is "Made in China". Well here not, it's "Industria Argentina". Coca Cola, cigarettes, tools, machines, cheese, you name it. Due to import restrictions it's actually difficult to get any foreign products and if you find them they are really expensive. Like for example nuts of all kind which come from Brasil, their prices are truely nuts, way more expensive than in Holland (and noone would call Holland a cheap country). The same goes for chocolate of any kind which hurts us the most:( and pure chocolate we still haven't found!!! But it goes further than that: Argentinian government wants to encourage the people here to spend vacation in their country and to do so they established a 35% tax on tickets abroad and everything you spend abroad. So for example going on vacation you buy a ticket to USA for 1000 dollars and in fact you have to pay 1350 dollars and than 35% on everything that you pay by card. If you would like to take some dollars with you, you need to request dollars explaining why you want them and if you don't earn enough, you won't get them. Also if you would like to buy something online from abroad, it's tax free only under 20 dollars, above that you have to pay ridiculous taxes.
For rich people it gets complicated too. Say you're Argentinian and you want to buy yourself a Ferrari while you're on vacation in Italy. Well first you will pay a lot to actually enter the country with it and than you will have to pray that it doesn't break because if yes it will be impossible to get the parts to fix it. Tough life:)

Eggplant conserve

Argentina is a country that wants to stay independent and not use products from abroad. That's why everyone is dependent on local produce and seasons. And what's better to enjoy fruit and vegetables that are out if season than conserves.
Fruit is typically used to make a marmalade and vegetables are boiled in vinegar with spices and later on used on bread. Especially cooking in vinegar was a bit of a strange technique for us and even a more surprising result. Now eggplant conserve is our absolute favorite conserve which we would like to share:)

Recipe
Ingredients:
- 4 big eggplants
- salt
- vinegar
- water
- a few garlic toes
- oregano fresh or dry
- Chili powder or fresh chili
- oil

- peel the eggplants and cut them in about 1.5 cm thick slices
- lay them flat and put salt on them to extract water and bitterness from them
- after 20 min remove all the water from the eggplant with some kitchen towel
- make a solution of about 200 ml vinegar to 20 ml water in a pan and bring to a boil
- boil the slices of eggplant in the solution until they are translucent and cooked
- put the cooked slices into a glass pot add oregano, slices of garlic, Chili powder, some salt and pepper and cover it with oil let it cool off and put it in the fridge overnight
- put the delicious slices onto a piece of bread with cheese

Enjoy!

If you want to be able to store it for a longer period you should, before adding the eggplant slices to the jar, either put the jar in boiling water for 10 min or use some alcohol (around 70%) to kill all the germs

Foodie in BA

Buenos is a really interesting place when it comes to food. The cow is the queen here with 55 kg per capita per year. In every supermarket you can buy every cut of beef possible and it's cheap. There are also numerous meat shops and shops with veggies, fruit and meat in one. The quality of their meat is amazing and we have been enjoying it everyday for the past 2 weeks. Until yesterday when we got food poisoning from choripan (grilled chorizo in bread). But even the best Argentinian meat needs something more, it needs Chimichurri!!!!:) it an absolutely delicious mix of dried spices like oregano, parsley, rosmary in olive oil, water and vinegar with a big dose of fresh garlic. Especially after a few days it's something absolutely incredible. But there is much more than meat.
Around 48% of the population of Argentina is from Italian descent because of various waves of migrations that brought Italians here. It all started in late 17th centry but the biggest migration took place between 1880-1920. And it's visable in their cuisine. We have seen many shops making fresh ravioli, differently shaped pasta and gnocchi and all of that on really big scale with industrial machines. For lazy ones, supermarkets offer gnocchi dough in a package. And not just usual ones, no! There is of course a variety of gnocchi so there is even a pumpkin gnocchi dough. The same goes for pizza. I don't think many people use it as we saw many people in all the pizzerias enjoying freshly made pizza. And since fall is quit a warm period (it's 32°C now) I can imagine that they need a good ice cream all year long. And that's what you can get on every corner. Amazing ice cream, thousands of flavours. And since it's Argentina and people here love to eat a lot, you buy a 1/4 kilo, 1/2 kilo, 1 kilo rather than a small scoop. 🙂

Top 4 suprises in BA

1. Buses- we were really positively suprised by the buses in BA. They look really nice, kind of old school American style full of charm and all the colours in the world. You can either buy a ticket with coins or say to the driver where you're going or how much you want to pay and use a special card on which you put money prior to the bus ride. As far as we heard max price with the card is 4 pesos (40 euro cents) but like everything here the rules are not written anywhere (at least not that we know or see). It's also not really clear to us where does the bus stop as only some stops are marked. Once in the bus there is no indication of next stop or the route so it can be adventurous. But what is the biggest suprise is that in this seemingly chaotic system there is an order. Besically waiting for the bus people create a line, really straight line, one by one. If there are multiple buses stopping in one place there are multiple lines. Amazing way to see the city:)
2. Paying by card in a supermarket- everytime we do it we get a different kind of transaction but it's always fun. We always need to show our passport, sometimes before the transaction, sometimes when we say that we pay by card. Many times few workers of the supermarket need to think together how it could be done. Sometimes they need to fill in all of the passport and card info to the cashier machine. And that when the problem starts because our passports are not in Spanish and our passport number doesn't only have numbers...:) and today we discovered that the workers copy the card with a pan and piece of paper.
3. Buying a ticket for a bus to get out of BA- well that's a challenge and a suprise. So it seems easy bacause you can buy in online and pay with all the cards that you can imagine except that you can't... Because when you fill in all the info and go to payment there is no other option than visa. Since we don't have one we needed to go to an office. Seems simple, we entered one, there were many desks and many ladies to sell us the ticket. All of them not really busy. And no wonder because they don't sell tickets... They only give numbers that you have to call to get one and number of a cabin that you can use. So we called.... And than we had to wait and wait and wait. Finally when we proceeded we needed to spell all of our data and on the phone the "p" became "b" etc. Then when we spelled everything we got an option of payment to choose: one was by cash.... Unfortunately when we came to passport details we realised that we didn't have my passport. And too bad because I would love to see how we could pay cash on the phone....:)
4. Fresh fruit and veggies- we expected Argentina to be meaty!! That's for sure (and it is) but we didn't expect it fruity ! There are plenty of small shops run mostly by Bolivians or Peruans which offer a big selection of fruit and vegetables. Everything fresh and for very, very good prices!

In search of umami

Why would we call our website like this? You might ask. Well first of all, umami is considered by many scientists the fifth flavor. We have salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. What the flavor really is, is a bit hard to explain. You can especially find it in meat, mushrooms, cheese and tomatoes. It's basically the savory flavor.

We really like savory food. And we like to search for good savory food. But this is not the reason why we called the website like that. It's actually the old meaning of the word that is the main reason. The word comes from Japanese. And like many Japanese words this one has a lot of weight. I'll try to explain it by telling you some definitions I found.

- A stock market tip with much promise is said to have umami
- A particularly good piece of writing can have umami
- Umami wakens positive emotions
- Umami contains a promise of a pleasurable outcome
- Umami conveys a sense of beauty
- It’s what you begin to understand if/when you mature, a journey

It's something new and unknown. That is why we chose to name our website like we did. The cool names that we actually wanted were already taken 🙂

So beautiful and so touristic

Up till now we actually haven't seen crowds of tourists or street propaganda. It all has changed today when we went to "Caminito". It's a part of La Boca which is not really cosy due to pick pockets (probably because of those crowds of tourists which are an easy target). Caminito used to be just a grey, sad neighbourhood of poor people who didn't escape south of BA when yellow fever came (more wealthy people moved to the north of Buenos). But it changed in the '50 when Benito Quinquela Martin (famous artist from LA Boca) decided to change the boring area into a living piece of art. In result houses have been painted with bright, vibrant colours. And it does look incredible! And when something is that beautiful, it becomes a tourist attraction sooner or later. And this is what happened here. But unfortunately to the extreme. There are plenty of propaganda people inviting to numerous restaurants and in every one of them there is a couple dancing tango. But we still enjoy the view:)