Peruvian Food
A healthy fear and disgust of any Peruvian street-market is a natural reaction for anyone used to seeing chickens packed airtight in freezers and fish laid out on ice. Amidst the blaring 80s music and people screaming out that they are willing to sell rice for 80 centimos per kilo (11 cents per pound), you will see stacks of rotten fish, halved armadillos, and bubbling vats of insect larvae served as some sort of grub stew. However, despite the scary stuff, one can still find some good stuff – meat that is still warm from being alive, fruit so fresh it’s still growing. The fruit is not so scary provided that you wash it thoroughly so as to reduce the number of parasites you will be eating. Even so, it is worth the fear factor to start grabbing handfuls of fruit that you’ve never seen before, paying hardly anything, then taking them home and finding out which tastes awesome and which is gross. By the way, starfruit that costs $3 each in the US is sold for 1 sol (33 cents)… per KILO! The diversity of fruit is completely overwhelming also. In my garden alone people keep pointing out all sorts of weird fruits that for all I knew were poison. Another fruit, cacao, is definitely my favorite. Looks like a football, hack it open with a machete and you get a pod-full of fleshy white seeds that taste somewhere between an apple, peach, and lime. Take the seeds, ferment them for a week, dry them out, roast them, and grind them up, and you have pure, unadulterated chocolate. Since bringing back some cacao seeds to the US from which me and Eric T. made brownies, we have been self-proclaimed chocolatiers (more for posterity than for proficiency in chocolate making, although I am proficient at eating it). So I have been able to locate dried seeds in the market which are quite honestly complete crap, they are all mixed fermentation times – some have probably not been at all (makes the chocolate taste like acorns no matter how you roast it), while only a couple have been fermented for the 7-10 days needed for utter chocolatyness. So the plan is to go up to the farms and try to get on some cacao fruits directly. If this is a successful operation, there is a virtual certainty that I will die of a theobromine overdose within the next 2 weeks. Within this span I will try to generate some photos of the chocolatiering process, including all my advanced equipment (frying pan and a hand-crank grinder).
Meat – who would have thought that a gringo could eat market meat and live to tell about it? After failed attempts at buying pork at the local supermarket, it was time to look somewhere else. It was surprising that the supermarket had crap pork because it is literally the only place you can find refrigerated meat for sale anywhere around here. Problem is, it seems like they just bought meat and left it in their fridge until all of it was bought, which resulted in rancid junk that even vultures would cringe at. So it was time to get serious about pigs and start looking at the source – you guessed it – the market. By far, the scariest thing in the market is meat. With the help of a local dude (the same guy that was talking all night in Alto Progreso), I was able to locate some pork that had marginally fewer flies on it than the majority. A moment of exposition: the market primarily consists of rows and rows of outdoor tents made of tarps; however, there is a central building that is really the heart of the operation. Walking into this building is like walking directly into a butcher shop, except that it is a) a public exhibition and b) 90 degrees. After the initial desire to vomit on everything in site, the guy showed me where he usually bought his pork – basically it was a big table with assorted pig anatomy strewn about. I requested a kilo of chop (in one full slab), so the dude takes the meat, throws it down on the meat-stump (literally a stump, and an old one at that), and with 2 machete hacks hands me a big hunk of hot pork. 10 soles ($3.50) for a kilo, not bad! The crazy thing is that the pork was extremely delicious, juicy, and most importantly, not rancid like the other stuff.
Ok, I will be heading out into the field Tuesday night for several days in hopes to find a poison frog (Dendrobates dendrophilus) that I think only one person has seen alive before. No pictures exist of living ones yet. There is a good chance that we won’t find it, but I guess the chance of us finding it is a lot lower if we don’t go try.
-Evan
# posted by Evan Twomey : 8:32 AM
