The Bizarre Truth (26 page)

If I could pick any place to return to for lunch these days, it would be Lamb Alley. The spirit of the place, the hustle and bustle, the energy and the enthusiasm of the Souk, excites me like nothing else. You need to be aggressive and decisive or else be prepared to get lost in the shuffle—it’s kill or be killed in more ways than one. In a way it reminded me of Papaya King or Carnegie Deli in New York—just one of those places where, if you make it to the front of the line and don’t know what you want, they’ll skip your chance
to order and send your sorry ass to the end of the line. I guess it’s the New Yorker in me that loves the get-down-to-business-or-get-the-hell-out vibe.

I wandered back into the Souk after that lamb lunch, where I found one of the most horrific foods I have ever encountered. The foundation of k’lia is mystery meat; sometimes it’s beef, sometimes horse, and sometimes it’s probably so wacky that it’s better left a secret. The mystery meat rots, then is sliced thin and slow-cooked in its own fat, much like the making of pork or duck confit. The meat is stored in the fat itself at room temperature, and because the stuff is already spoiled, it lasts for days without any kind of special care or refrigeration. It took two days of traveling around with k’lia in my backpack before I found someone who would cook it for me in its most desired form: sautéed with some fried eggs. I’m usually in the “fried eggs make anything delicious” camp, but no amount of yummy, runny yolk could mask the putrid meat flavor of the k’lia. I think the frying actually heightened the rotten flavor, and not in a good way. That food is not for the faint of heart, but if you want to check it out, the Souk behind the Djemaa El Fna has plenty of vendors eager to help you.

The Djemaa has been a gathering place for all of Morocco for centuries. It’s got a sordid past—even as late as the nineteenth century the square was primarily used for beheadings—but every single evening, 365 days a year at five on the dot, the space is transformed from an orange juice vendors paradise to a phenomenal food festival. This is the place to catch a real slice of traditional Moroccan life. It’s the best way to see this country and its people. You’ll learn more about Morocco spending one night in the Djemaa and the Souk than you will strolling the museums or touring the antiquities by carriage. Trust me, it’s a lot more fun than hanging out at the hotel pool.

Andrew hunts down some fresh tuna
off the shores of Samoa’s Nu’utele Island
before gearing up for the giant fruit bat hunt
.

hen it comes to global cuisine, I’ve tasted it all. Whole roasted sparrows in Vietnam, stinky tofu in Taiwan, a glass of warm steer’s blood in Uganda, deer penis soup in Singapore. As the Cantonese say, “Anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible.” I can tell you firsthand, the Cantonese are onto something. Considering the range of crazy foods I’ve eaten in my lifetime, it might shock you to know that my most memorable food experiences involve fruits. This certainly shocked the hell out of me. I never would have guessed that my most thrilling food moments would come in the form of a juicy bite of fruit. Whether it’s rare and exotic or ridiculously plentiful, you can’t beat fruit grown in the ideal environment, picked at the right time. It’s nature’s candy.

Mangosteens were the first exotic fruit that opened up a world of new ideas for me. Often referred to as the queen of all fruits, mangosteens are universally well regarded for their sweet, succulent flavor. It’s like eating a sorcerer’s blend of honey blossoms and wildflowers ingeniously mated with the sweetest melon. These small, round fruits have a sturdy green stem and a firm, purple, husky exterior. Place the fruit between your hands, making sure to not crush the delicious center to smithereens, press your palms together, and crack the spongy, fibrous shell. Inside, you’ll uncover eight or nine misshapen segments around a central core or pit. It’s not entirely unlike a snow-white mandarin orange. Sweet and juicy, and once you take a bite, you can’t stop. What makes
them extra special is their relative scarcity around the world outside of their growing zones. The small mites that live inside their thick skins make these fruits next to impossible to transport, and attempts to cultivate the fruit in similar climates, like Hawaii, California, and Florida, have failed miserably. While I wish we all had better access to this incredible fruit, there is something to be said for only being able to eat it while in a specific area of the world. Why? Because when it comes to food, I believe in eating with the seasons. Can’t enjoy a summer tomato unless you eat beans and stew all winter long. And in the age of the jet plane and in a time when all our lives are built around instant gratification, it’s nice to have something to look forward to when you travel.

When you think about perfect fruit-growing climates, an arid, African desert does not come to mind. However, one of the most interesting fruits I’ve ever tasted hails from Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. The marula trees drop yellow, golf ball—size fruit, which sun-ripen (rot, actually) on the ground. Marula, with an extremely tart frontal assault and a sweet finish, is not only a Bushman favorite but popular with the kudu and baboons as well. Unearthing the small bit of fruit is an involved process. First, you bite through the rind, remove the cap, then squeeze the fruit from the end. The marula pops into your mouth like an oversized lychee. Suck out the sweet-sour flesh and spit out the big seed—but don’t throw it away. When roasted and dried, this seed can be cracked open and eaten. For thousands of years, marula nuts have been one of the five primary staples of the Bushman’s diet. I savor the simple pleasure of walking through the desert, ten marula fruits in hand, snacking on them as juice streams down my face and hands. SweetTarts never tasted so good.

As I ate my first marula fruit, it brought me right back to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where I first tasted my favorite fruit of all time. For twenty years, I measured everything against the mangosteen. Tree-ripened apricots from the mountains a day’s ride outside
Marrakesh, Morocco, placed a close second. That is, until both were trumped by the achachairu.

Compared to the stark, cold, and brown lunar landscapes that sweep most of Bolivia, Santa Cruz is a lush tropical paradise. Serving as the country’s gateway to the Amazon, this area teems with amazing produce and wildlife. We headed to Yacapani, an even smaller town in the area that boasts a restaurant whose reputation for serving some of the world’s best fish and roasted armadillo reached me all the way back in America. Some people love licorice, beef jerky, or ice cream on road trips, but to me nothing accompanies a long, dusty car ride quite like fresh fruit. I’m always on the lookout for roadside fruit stands. Taking out your penknife and cutting into a fresh papaya, melon, or bunch of bananas on a road trip is my idea of heaven.

The first fruit stand we encountered outside of Santa Cruz was filled with watermelon, avocado, and baskets of a strange citrus fruit. However, the stand looked a little down on its luck. There is nothing more disappointing than fruit that is not up to snuff—I’d rather eat my Puma sneakers than a mealy pear or a flavorless melon. My driver assured me there would be more stands along the road. Sure enough, we pulled over at a gem of a place ten minutes later. Mesh baskets hung from the wooden edge of the lean-to that protected the fruit from the hot noonday sun. At first glance, the baskets looked to be full of small lemons or limes. Upon closer inspection, I realized I’d never seen anything like it: pale orange in color, some almost flaming red, and figlike in appearance, with a harder, leathery skin, much like the marula fruit.

“It’s called an achachairu,” the vendor explained. “It’s a fruit.” Sounded more like a sneeze to me, but I purchased a small bag anyhow. I was smitten.

Attacking a foreign fruit can be complicated business. It’s very crucial for the neophyte to ask how to eat it. Imagine diving into a coconut, pineapple, or banana without any guidance. Do you bite
into it like an apple from the orchard? Peel it like an orange? Like the marula fruit, fresh lychee, and rambutans, achachairu flesh must be opened in order to access the fruit, but instead of a tidbit of white flesh surrounding a large nut, it’s the exact opposite. The skin is rather thin compared to its cousins’, so slipping the fruit out is a much easier endeavor. Inside, you will find a huge bite of the most delicious floral, sour symphony of flavors, which explodes into your mouth.

Advice to exotic-fruit lovers: Never ever, ever, ever buy a small piece of fruit for a couple of pennies and get back in the car. And don’t ever drive away in a hurry—especially when you have yet to sample your purchase. If it’s disappointing to your palate, you haven’t lost anything. No matter where you taste the purchase, at the curb or an hour’s drive away, you’re going to dispose of it if you don’t like it, or stop eating it, or give it to someone else who is going to enjoy it, probably in reverse order. But if it’s new to you and you love it, you’re going to want to eat a lot of it. I always sample on the curb.

One bite of achachairu sent me into a frenzy. They came in little one-kilo bags with roughly twenty fruits inside. I bought three bags and finished them within hours. That night, I ventured to the village market, bought three more bags, and brought them back to the room. I pounded those down in a day. On the way back to the airport, I bought five more bags. By this time, I had convinced the crew that maybe they would want to eat some, and over the course of the next couple hours we demolished three of the bags. Just before we headed to the airport, I made a pit stop for a few more bags. My passion for fruit knows no bounds. I ate two more bags in the airport. If I could have taken them back to La Paz, I would have. Sadly, I couldn’t buy enough, couldn’t hold enough, and couldn’t bring enough onto the airplane. I was eating every single piece of achachairu that I could.

Cultural elitism, price, and difficulty in procuring a certain ingredient can give food an artificially heightened sense of scar-city.
However, where there is sunshine and water, there is fruit. Fruit is a very egalitarian edible, and obtaining it doesn’t require special privilege—just a keen eye in a field if you’re foraging, or a few cents if you’re shopping in a market. Unless you’re after a $200 square watermelon in Tokyo, fruit offers the best bang for the buck when it comes to exciting ingredients. Fruit also teaches us all a lesson in immediacy politics—there’s a “carpe diem” quality to eating fruit that other foods don’t have. Eat it when it’s ripe, or miss your moment forever. And never pass up the fruit stand unless you know something that I don’t.

alling in love, landing the perfect job, starting a family—the greatest things in life seem to happen when you least expect them. Experiencing food and culture is no different. I see it on the road all the time. Sure, there’s huge hype over a lot of the strange things I eat and experience on the road. Paint a thousand pictures and no one ever calls you an artist, but eat one bug on one show and you will forever be labeled the Bug Guy. On the other hand, I will also never forget cooking with Nobu Matsuhisa on two continents or my personal, one-on-one crash course in molecular gastronomy with famed French scientist Herve This. However, I anticipated greatness in these situations. It’s the times when my expectations are low that I find the most pleasant surprises.