der mann ohne eigenschaften

Last monday I read that a Danish company makes a vodka with a few grain of caviar from my home county in it. Adding some really obscure caviar to vodka, have we reached peak hipster? Ok, I am not sure if “hipster” is the right word. Anyway, I think you should buy the vodka. You don’t have to drink it. Just support the poor fishermen (fisherwomen?) here in Västerbotten county. Haha

Now I have to write I haven’t been here. I have hardly read anything of your entries. I have other things going on, including trying to make something of my (wordpress) blog. It’s just sometimes I feel like write down an observation about movies, books, public art, or like here food and beverage. However it seems unfair of me to do that. Not reading, just posting perhaps 10 posts a year. Maybe I will become a better Dreamwidth user again soon.

I thought I had a deadline for the course yesterday, but it turned out to be next Wednesday. Today I decided to take one day off from the course and now I’m writing here instead. Down in the centre of the my town there are walking roads over the river that flows through the town. And that’s feels safe since it has been cold, between -10 and - 20 C (10 to -4 F), the last weeks. Being this cold means I’m craving hot food, something I didn’t thought about when I made kimbab. The recipe I followed was, rice, cucumber, daikon, carrots and cheese in nori. It just happens to be so that I have a cookbook named Grönt (meaning Green) there some recipes are from two Korean sisters that have (had?) a restrung in Stockholm. So that’s why I made Korean sushi, because I’m sure we can call it Korean sushi without anyone complaining. Now I can also share that I think my new neighbor is Korean. Their name looks Korean to me, but it might be so bad that the only reason I think that is because the name isn’t obvious Chinese or Japanese.

Another thing I have made is Worcestershire sauce. Vinegar, anchovies, sugar, soy sauce, spices and tamarind concentrate. They say worcestershire sauce should ferment. First I thought: “there’s a lot of acetic acid and salt in this, microbes can’t ferment that”. Then I realized that microbes are life and "life find a way", some microbe will colonize the sauce. The cool thing to see is if bubbles will start forming in the sauce. That should be a proof of fermentation. The definition of fermentation is metabolic process that doesn’t use oxygen as reaction agent, or wait, maybe it was oxygen as oxidation agent. Or maybe the word “agent” shouldn’t be there at all. It was some years since I was at the university.

Anyway since fermenting food is to work with microbes, I could pretend I’m good at that. I have taken one course of microbiology. At least I could be an irritating know-it-all person. Bloggers writes that home fermentations is about being “clean not sterile”. Thereupon I could add, of course, if you want to work under sterile conditions you have to have filters that sterilise the air. You need UV-lights. Bleach. Pressure cooker. And if you want to sterilise the spices you use, you need to soak them in bleach and alcohol for quite some time. I have done micropropagation of plants, where the work area needs to be sterile. I know it’s not something you do in an ordinary kitchen.

Or on one blog written by diy-scientist they suggested isolating microbes from for example yogurt and beer. Then you could use the microbes for fermentation of food. Sounds doable. But the question they asked is that companies can have patent on microbes. If you isolate patented microbes and use them for fermentation - of for example Worcestershire sauce - are you breaking the law?

I can post a new post about a book like I did with the bike book. Joseph Wechsberg Blue trout and black truffles and with the telling subtitle The  Peregrinations of an Epicure.

1. Joseph Wechsberg wrote that his favorite dish was cottage cheese dumplings. I googled for a receipt on cottage cheese dumplings. And here we have a good way of using the internet. Namely find recept on dishes you read about in books. I find a receipt on Hungarian cottage cheese dumplings. Then the thought that if I had a food blog it should be about cooking all receipt from Joseph Wechsberg book. Then I remembered many dishes mentioned had foie gras and truffle in them.

2. I wonder what an epicure really is? Consuming lots of wine, tobacco, food ... are a diseases nowadays. Plus they all gives you cancer. I mentioned I had read Remarque biographies. One biography mentioned that alcohol and women was two of Remarques “passions”. Another biography, written like thirty year later, said that Remarque was an alcoholic and had a compulsory sex life. You see what I am saying. The difference in wording, the question if it is healthy to be a epucure.

3. My favorite part of the book however was when Joseph visit a truffle producing area in France and one guy there says it’s great that Americans were starting to get interested in good food. See, Joseph was born in today's Czech republic, that then was a part of Austria-Hungary. Then he was educated in Vienna and Paris and only come to the US in 1940 as an asylum seeker. He was Jewish. A man with a very European background, who speaks better French and German than English, gets called American. It says something.

My next book post will be about a Gandhi biography.