Wonderfood in Arnhem
June 8, 2007
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Rosemary and violet candy by Katja Gruijters, photo by Annemarieke vd Broek used entirely with permission
Last Saturday I was invited to experience the opening dinner of Dudok in Wonderfood. Café Dudok is a very forward thinking brasserie that during the Arnhem Fashion Biennial participates in the city-wide embrace of design and fashion. Dudok doesn’t just pull out all the stops for ‘fashion month’ either, they do this several times a year. It’s rare and commendable that a classical café/bar is so devoted to regularly breathing fresh life into their venue, that they make it a habit of dispensing with the classical grand café atmosphere and cuisine. They change their menu, train the kitchen staff to adapt, and alter the interior and service. It’s as if Dudok actually believes that rot about collaborating with designers!
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Coreander candies by Katja Gruijters, photo by Annemarieke vd Broek used entirely with permission
This year the theme of the fashion biennial is ‘happy’ (no comment, I’m a bitch) and designer Katja Gruijters was called upon to design the ‘food concept’ that became Wonderfood.
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Okay, I’ll drink you. I’ll drink you up.
Without giving away any secrets, and there are secrets worth keeping, I can tell you a bit about a menu which will put your mind to wondering, in the most positive sense of the word. It’s an embellished 3-course menu fixe with options for peskies and vegetarians. I had the vegetarian menu because this year I’m making something of a career of lording my ethical superiority over all of the omnivores I know. From a culinary standpoint, vegetarians are well aware that the veg-option is rarely the most delicious, but because I’ve been a porkatarian for so long I feel qualified to say that the Wonderfood lacto-ovo mains is wing-flapping delicious, non, je ne regrette rien!
I can go on about one flavour or another, and say that this was great or that was great, but what I actually really liked is that Wonderfood worked so harmoniously within the context of a café that also wants to put on its best Beligan designer outfit for fashion month. This is the success, that the dinner, the menu, even the place settings, appropriately position Dudok as a platform within the Biennial. Bravo.
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Raspy…
Maybe the wonder in wonderfood stands not so much for wonderment as wondering. And though it would be unfair to compare this menu to a Michellin-starred dinner, it is fabulous to be confronted with uplifting combinations and narrative-rich ingredients and formats. Elixers and tears, sweet and salty crystals hailing from all manner of mines, Gruijters’ Wonderfood is truly a happy-making dinner, and not just because of the mysterious rockin’ silverware or the cock-ring – which ends up being totally useful, by the way!
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I want candy…
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The cock-rings that end up being totally necessary!
- Wonderfood by Katja Gruijters, a food concept for Café Dudok in Arnhem on the occasion of the Internationale Fashion Biennial (Mode Biënale) 2007
- Food designer, Katja Gruijters
- Dudok in Wonderfood
June 1-30
Koningstraat 40
6811 DH Arnhem
t +31 (0)26-3511872 - Ontwerp Platform Arnhem initiated the project and collaborated with Dudok to produce Wonderfood
- Annemarieke van den Broek Fotografie
- Graphic design of Wonderfood by Roel Vaessen and Marloes de Laat from In opdracht van designers
debra at 19:02 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
Capture the yeast within
June 5, 2007
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That’s a chopstick for stirring, not a straw for slurping.
My girlbud and twisted lifecoach K’tje has been baking bread for hoards of guests and is in desperate need of yeast. Fresh yeast. Down in Occitania it seems that many a masterbaker is in fact a boulanger truqué. Dang faker bakers don’t even have a proper block of yeast on the premises! K’tje asks if I’ll bring some on down next time I come by to water my garden. But considering the amount of yeast this girl piles through, it’s prolly better she learn how to make her own dang yeast.
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A few days on, evidence of the breath of life
This quote is from Allrecipes.com, used entirely without permission.
Wild Yeast and Starters
Before yeast was available in grocery stores, bakers kept colonies of yeast for making bread. These colonies were known as starters, and were sometimes passed on from generation to generation. You can make your own starter using commercial yeast, by using potato water (from boiled potatoes) to attract and feed wild yeasts present in the air around us, or by using the yeast found on the skins of organic grapes or organic raisins. Keep the starter in a one-quart crock, jar, or airtight container.
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Stir it up
How to capture a wild yeast
Mix equal amounts of flour and water and let sit in a warmish place. Indoors on top of the electric fridge is ideal. I mention electric fridge because some people I know are considering making one of those non-electric Nigerian pot-in-pot fridges. Those things are only for cooling, they’re incapable of warming up the environment and therfore unsuitable for growing yeast colonies.
In about a day you should start noticing signs of life (bubbles, maybe a slightly funky smell) give it a stir and add some more flour. Keep doing this for about a week, each day stirring and adding flour (and possibly some water, if it feels too dry to stir).
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The bubbles come from little yeasts breathing
At a certain point, you’ll have grown too much yeast colony because we’re not big on the carbs anymore and we don’t eat sourdough pancakes everyday. Common practice is to throw a bit of the beige gold away. Wasteful! Once you have baked with your own yeast and have some notion of its potency, there’s nothing stopping you from placing large blobs of it in decorative recycled jars and giving them to your friends as presents.
You know that I’m kidding, right?
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Feed them
Alternatively you can slow down the process by putting the colony in the fridge. Feed it once a week. When you want to use some, take out a blob plus some (because this stuff isn’t as strong as the industrial stuff) and re-animate it again by putting it in a warm spot (above the fridge) and feeding it for a day or two.
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If you can’t stop kneading beige things, yeast is so needy that it’s more like keeping a pet than leavening.
Making yeast starter links: They’re all from one website, because I really like the simplicity of these recipes the best. Plus, I’m suffering from CO2 information overload and don’t particularly want to hear about it in my yeast recipes as well. ‘Nuff said!
- yeast Basics
- Wild Grape starter for hippies
- Basic Sourdough Starter Recipe
- Sourdough II
- Amish Bread Starter for nerds
debra at 21:21 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
Glutinous Maximus,
Grow yer own dang protein!
June 2, 2007
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It may be beige, but it sure is some good eatin’…
There are days when in one go, we can be inspired enough to shrug off one hella lotta ballast of preconceived notion. Last night was one of those days, when in an ad hoc workshop at the cooking studio of Marlein and Inez, Tomoko taught us to extract wheat gluten from flour and how to make seitan.
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Seitan’s realm, clockwise from 9 o’clock: gluten loogie, steamed & marinated seitan in a bun, knife, steamed & fried but not marinated, simply steamed, steamed & fried, steamed & marinated & fried (my favourite).
Preconceived notion #1: Without even investigating, I had always assumed seitan to be a highly processed food, akin to textured soy or textured vegetable protein, a prominent member of the subset, ‘food designed by mono-maniacal dictators trying to score a big one in the name of food sovereignty’.
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Flour power. As if wasting some precious wheat germ increases a carbon footprint, we used white flour for this daring experiment. Next time we’re goin’ brown.
Notion #1 debunked: Wheat gluten is a whole food, it already exists inside the wheat. You could argue that flour is processed wheat, but I would just argue back that you should just relax. The name seitan is a macrobiotic neologism invented by its founder in the 1960’s. Seitan refers to wheat gluten that has, by hook or by crook, been turned into something more satisfying than just another texture to put in your mouth and chew. To my knowledge (which is to say, to Google and Wikipedia’s knowledge) unlike many other proteinous foodstuffs, seitan has never been appropriated by a dictator to tow the party line. Soy, a well-known collaborator, cannot say the same.
To extract the gluten from flour, mix some flour and water into a sloppy, wet dough. Let it sit an hour or two in a slightly warm place.
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I knead you to knead me, I’m begging you to beg me.
After an hour or two, knead the wet dough for about 4 minutes and let it sit again for an hour. No need to be precise. Don’t be a follower, be a leader. I may be lying to you and I can’t follow an instruction to save my own life. It’s all about activating the gluten. (You know when you wash a bowl that has been filled with dough and all that clumpy doughy yucky stuff gets stuck in the metal wooly sponge-thingy and stays there for days making you not want to touch it? That’s gluten. You weren’t precise about it then, don’t be precise about it now.)
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It’s sexy, it’s gross, massaging out all that starch
Preconceived notion #2: I thought that seitan was developed purely as a tummy-filling device by famine giddy monks suffering from high-altitude crop failure. And I thought seitan was a ‘faked you out’ sort of meat-substitute, and except for the starch, void of any nutritional value.
Notion #2 debunked: That’s just crazy talk. Turns out the technique for making wheat meat is indeed thousands of years old and was indeed invented by monks that may or may not smell of rancid yak butter, but seitan is in no way devoid of nutritional value. In fact, gram for gram, wheat gluten contains more protein than red meat and is only 1 percentage point shy of cheese! Pass the cheese please, and by cheese, you know I’m talkin’ ’bout Seitan.
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After the starch has been massaged out and rinsed away, 25% of the mass is revealed to be gluten
Preconceived notion #3: Without even bothering to try it, I thought that seitan was disgusting, void of flavour, rubbery in texture, akin to spent chewing gum.
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Notion #3 debunked: This notion isn’t entirely untrue. In its lonesome, cooked wheat gluten is about as appealing as a plain boiled potato or boiled white rice. But like these foods, its popularity isn’t based upon how it behaves in its plain form. Nothing wrong with a bit of enhancement. Hell, I don’t unleash my ‘whole, natural self’ upon the world. I wouldn’t think of leaving the house without a big splash of perfume, some heels, a bra, and some profile flattering clothing. (And by profile, I mean tochas.) Same goes for wheat gluten, it wants to be infused with aroma and gussied up, marinated in a bath of kombu (seaweed), ginger, nama shoyu with a mushroom or two thrown in for good measure.
Zillions of pasta shapes have been designed into popularity according to how they absorb and ‘carry’ sauces. Like pasta, wheat gluten is a facilitator, ever willing to absorb accompanying flavours. If you prepare the wheat gluten by yourself, you can exert a lot of control over its texture. More on this in a subsequent entry, I’m still learning.
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It looks like a matza ball, but it isn’t. It’s better. Let me be the first to assert that wheat gluten is better than a matza ball.
Store the extracted wheat gluten for up to 3 days in the fridge in some water while you learn how to transform it into the opposite of what it is right now. Buddhist much?
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Closeup of steamed and fried seitan
That’s 3 myths debunked. Here are some links, now go make yer own dang protein…
- Bunshiro Fu – famous makers of pretty fu. Fu’s another word for wheat gluten.
- Futomi Yokoyama – manufacturers of fu, the other wheat gluten
- Hippy children in California exploring gluten
- Can you trust it? Wheat Gluten and Seitan on Wikipedia
- More iffy sources… Wheat gluten as food?
- Which leads us to Buddhist Cuisine… don’t go overboard
- A vegan body-builder and his vegan body-building diet explained at Vegetarian Teen (Seitanic praises for this magnificent website!)
- In Dutch unfortch:
Comparison of protein (1st %) and fat (2nd %) per 100 gram in common proteinous foods:cheese 25,5% 29%
seitan 24% 0%
lean beef 22% 20%
fish 17,7% 12%
flour 11,7% 02%
tempeh 17% 07%
tofu 11,2% 06,6%
debra at 13:12 | Comments (6) | post to del.icio.us
