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What do you do with galangal, courtesy of Flickr user thomaswanhoff

One of my favorite pastimes is wandering through the aisles of a supermarket in another country or an ethnic market closer to home, perusing the interesting packaging and unfamiliar ingredients. What to do with those ingredients is another story, and the inspiration behind our occasional series, “What the Heck Do I Do With That?”

So far we’ve looked at annatto, a Latin American flavoring, and nigella seeds, popular on the Indian subcontinent. This time, it’s off to Southeast Asia and a pungent root called galanga, or galangal.

What is it?

Galangal is a rhizome in the same family as ginger, which it resembles in appearance and, to some degree, flavor. It’s common in the cuisines of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Singapore, and is occasionally used in parts of China and India. It was popular as a culinary and medicinal spice in medieval Europe, where it was known as galingale in English (it rated a mention in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), but it fell out of fashion there. Today its only European appearances are likely to be in Asian restaurants.

There are two basic types of galangal: greater galangal and lesser galangal. Confusingly, lesser galangal has the more pungent peppery flavor of the two.

Where does it come from?

According to The Glutton’s Glossary, by John Ayto, the origin of the name galangal is the Chinese phrase gao liang jiang, meaning “good ginger from Gaozhou” (a city in Canton now called Maoming). China is also probably where lesser galangal originated; greater galangal is native to Java, in Indonesia.

What does it taste like?

I was able to get my hands only on ground dried greater galangal, which is weaker and generally considered inferior to fresh. The powder had a sweet, tangy and gingery aroma and flavor, with a mildly peppery bite. The fresh root is supposed to be much more pungent.

So, what the heck do I do with it?

Galangal is said to mask fishy flavor, so it is a popular spice to use in seafood dishes, like a Vietnamese braised carp with a sweet-salty galangal sauce. I added a couple of teaspoons of the powdered spice to a Thai-style coconut-curried shrimp dish, similar to tom kha goong (kha is Thai for galangal). Fresh galangal should be grated or very thinly sliced, as it can be a little tough (the younger the root, the more tender). It can be added to Indonesian satay (meat skewers with spicy peanut sauce), Malaysian laksa (seafood and noodles in spicy coconut milk) or samlor kor ko (a Cambodian vegetable soup).

Chocolate Stout Milk Shake. Image courtesy of Flickr user Accidental Hedonist.

In John Steinbeck‘s 1945 novel Cannery Row, the loner marine biologist Doc loves his beer—so much that one of his friends jokingly remarks that one of these days he’ll order a beer milk shake. ”It was a simple piece of foolery, but it had bothered Doc ever since,” Steinbeck writes. “He wondered what a beer milkshake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn’t let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn’t forget it…. If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn’t known—they might call the police.”

Doc eventually gets over his neuroses at an out-of-town diner and orders the shake—half a bottle of beer added to some milk, no sugar—under the pretense that it’s doctor’s orders to help treat an infection. The resulting flavor, described as nothing more than the sum of its dairy and stale ale components, hardly sounds appetizing, and Doc’s post-swig twisted facial expressions pretty much say it all. So from there on out, I’m guessing he probably went back to pairing beer with savory foods, like hamburgers, which is what most of us do. But who’s to say you can’t find beers fit for a dessert course?

Greg Engert, the beer director at Churchkey and Birch and Barley restaurants here in DC, chatted with Smithsonian online reporter Megan Gambino a while back about beers to sub in for New Year’s champagne toasts. It only seemed fitting to pick his brain over e-mail about brews to satisfy the sweet tooth and how to incorporate them into the dessert course of a meal.

When did people start brewing beers meant to appeal to the sweeter part of our palate?

Beer, as a fermented grain-based beverage, has always displayed some degree of residual sweetness. In fact, most beers would have displayed very little “sweetness” as we today comprehend that sensation. Until the technological innovations that began in the early 18th century and culminated in the 19th, beer would have for the most part been much lower in alcohol than today’s variants, had a dark hue, almost always shown some sort of roasty or even smoky quality (both on account of primitive malting techniques), and would have also almost exclusively displayed at least a mild acidity, as well as a sort of earthy, somewhat funky quality we would now mostly associate with Old World wine (due to a lack of yeast science, more rustic brewing techniques and equipment, as well as the affection for such flavors).

I think the larger desire for sweetness is a 20th-century invention, and one only made possible by technological advancements, then instilled in a larger culture with the advent of processed food, as well as with Prohibitionist movements that swept the West with a flurry. I like to remind people that with the United States’ nearly 15 years of the Great Experiment, a generation of young men and women grew up without tasting alcohol, and soft drinks swooped in to ensure that soda-pop, and simplified, concocted—i.e., unnatural—sweetness would remain an indelible part of our world.

What qualities make a beer suitable to serve as (or with) a dessert?

Sweeter, grain-based flavors offer beer as a companion to so much of our foods, as they allow for ales and lagers to complement the sweeter notes that abound in all aspects of cuisine. I am not just talking about sugary sweetness, but starchy sweetness, as well as the sweeter notes inherent in the fatty, protein-laden, buttery tastes we discover in so much of the dishes we enjoy. Beer’s matching with food is extremely complex and many interactions are contained within the felicity of food and beer.

So, when most people think dessert, they think of sweetness, and beer certainly has that covered. Malty beers arrive on the palate showing fantastic notes of toasted bread, biscuits, nuttiness, caramel, butterscotch, toffee. These are all flavors we find in desserts. And beers can very emphatically showcase chocolaty and coffee notes in those darker brews with roasty notes. Fruitier flavors abound in some of the maltier styles already mentioned, but are also seen in the yeast-driven brews, which—through fermentation—produce boldly fruity and spicy notes. These are typically stronger Belgian ales, with those that are lighter in color tasting of apple, pear, peach, orange, lemon, banana, apricot and figs, as well as clove, pepper, cinnamon, vanilla and coriander. The darker varieties offer banana, fig, prune, raisin, cherry, plum and vinous flavors. Spices arrive in the guise of clove, pepper, rose, nutmeg and cinnamon. Some of the funky and sour brews, the Flanders red and brown ales, the fruit lambics, are also excellent for not just showing off fruitier flavors, but reminding us that their acidity is often present in fruit itself. So fresh fruit desserts can work nicely with these drinks that are actually more naturally similar to the fruits themselves. And this is to say nothing of the beers that are brewed with many adjuncts to either establish or heighten the flavors of the beer. We have malty beers brewed with hazelnut nectar, roasty stouts with cacao nibs and sweeter Belgian lambics crafted with fruit, or at least fruit juices.

Can you pair beers with more traditional dessert offerings?

Beers can pair well with so many desserts it is mind-boggling. The ability to identify very emphasized flavors in our beers, like chocolate, fruit or nuttiness, makes it so pairing beer and dessert is quite an approachable endeavor, and one that is instantly rewarding. The easiest approach is to look to mirror the flavors of the dessert with flavors found in certain beers; however, one needs to make sure that the impact of flavors from both are even, otherwise a light and airy dessert will be overwhelmed by a rich and boozy brew, even if they share certain major flavor effects. The same is true for a bold and rich dessert when paired with a lighter and more restrained ale or lager.

Think like a pastry chef and approach your pairings as if you are continuing to craft the dessert. To that end, in addition to looking for complementary flavors, matching fruit with fruit and chocolate with chocolate, one can seek to forge new complimentary relationships on the palate. So perhaps bringing a stronger Belgian dark ale to that chocolate cake, rather than the imperial stout; the Belgian will show some caramel and hints of cocoa to mirror those flavors in the cake, while adding some delicious dark fruit and spice flavors to add a complimentary nuance to the dessert. The same would work for bringing a nutty, toffee sweet barleywine the cake: this dusts the slice with shaved hazelnuts and drizzles of caramel.

What would your top recommendations be for dessert beers and what draws you to these particular brews?

Top styles for dessert beers fall into these categories. They should typically be bolder brews, as dessert comes at the end of the meal and the palate may struggle to fully engage milder flavors. Also, desserts tend to be richer, or at least intensely flavored.

Malty, bready, nutty, caramelized brews: English strong ale, barleywine, Scotch ale (aka Wee Heavy), doppelbock, eisbock

Roasty and chocolaty brews: sweet stout, oatmeal stout, porter, Baltic porter, Belgian stout, brown ale, imperial stout

Fruity, spicy, sweeter brews with brighter notes: sweet fruit beer/sweet fruit lambic (brewed with strawberry, raspberry, cherry, peach, apple, etc.), Belgian strong blond ale, tripel, Belgian strong pale ale, Weizenbock (pale), wheatwine

Fruity, spicy, sweeter brews with darker notes: dubbel, Belgian strong dark ale, Weizenbock (dark), quadrupel

Tart, funky, fruity brews: Flanders red/brown ale, traditional fruit lambic; blond, pale and dark wild ales

So perhaps if Doc were a little more beer-savvy before going into the diner, he could have had a better milk shake. He’s not the only one who has been intrigued by the pairing—and some even find it preferable to enjoying beer on its own.

What foods can't you get on a stick these days? Image courtesy of Flickr user Aaron T. Goodman.

Earlier this month, an ice cream shop in Columbia, Missouri decided to take advantage of the summertime resurgence of cicadas. Employees caught the critters in their backyards, boiled them, coated them in brown sugar and milk chocolate and then added them to a batch of ice cream. The insects are perfectly safe to eat and enough ice cream connoisseurs were unfazed by the “ick” factor of eating bugs that the batch quickly sold out. (One patron compared the cicada’s flavor to peanuts.) However, because there are no regulations regarding the preparation of cicadas for mass consumption, the health department stepped in and asked that the store discontinue that particular flavor. Creepy crawly cuisine may be way off the average person’s radar, but entomophagy—the fancy Latin term for eating insects—is beginning to gain attention in the Western Hemisphere.

The practice of eating bugs dates back millennia. In scripture, the book of Leviticus lays out laws and codes for day-to-day living in the ancient world, including diet. While Chapter 11, verses 6 to 8 puts the kibosh on eating rabbit and pork, verse 22 gives the green light to eating certain insects: ”Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.” (Other translations also include katydids.) In present-day cultures, bugs have gone so far as to attain delicacy status—be it the fried caterpillars served in Africa, grasshoppers with soy sauce in Japan or water boatman eggs in Mexico city, which are supposed to have a caviar-like flavor and can cost more than beef. Even some of Washington, D.C.’s upscale dining spots offer exotic spins on familiar foods, such as tacos stuffed with grasshoppers.

But why even look to bugs as a food source? First off, certain bugs, such as caterpillars, have a protein content that is comparable to beef. Second, farm-raising bugs is a big energy saver. Raising livestock is problematic because of the amount of energy required to create those neatly packaged cutlets at your local grocery store. Large chunks of land are set aside to produce feed and for the animals to live and breed, not to mention the fossil fuels needed to transport animals from farm to slaughterhouse and then to market. And, at least with the beef industry, cattle produce more greenhouse gases than cars, contributing to global warming.

Then there’s the matter of the resources it takes to fatten up an animal until it’s ready for the table. When the Wall Street Journal broke down the numbers, the same 10 pounds of feed used to produce 1 pound of beef or five pounds of chicken could also yield up to six pounds of insect meat. Furthermore, while we may think insects are dirty and unhealthy, recall mad cow disease and salmonella and the risk that those meat-borne pathogens pose to us humans. And certain bugs are fortified with fats and vitamins that could help fend of malnutrition and starvation. With the United Nations predicting we will have one-third more mouths to feed by 2050, while still trying to deal with existing issues of hunger and starvation, finding alternate, sustainable protein sources will become even more urgent.

In the meantime, summer is here and I’m sure you’ve noticed that bugs are in abundance. But if you’re feeling adventurous, there are a few things to keep in mind if you’re thinking about indulging in a six-legged snack:

1. Not all insects are edible. However, of the approximately 6 million species of insects crawling around, about 1,400 of them have been documented to be safe for human consumption. Do your homework beforehand.

2. If you are allergic to shellfish or chocolate, avoid eating insects.

3. Insects in your backyard may have been exposed to pesticides. It is unclear if pesticide residues on garden-variety bugs are harmful to humans if consumed, but if you’re looking to get insect-savvy in the kitchen, your safest bet is to buy farm-raised bugs. You may also be able to find some canned bugs, such as silkworm pupa, at an Asian grocery store.

Still ready and willing to take the plunge? There are a few bug cookbooks on the market, as well as the website Insects are Food, which features a continuously growing list of recipes and a list of places where you can buy your creepy crawlies. And yes, there’s even a recipe category devoted entirely to cicadas. But sadly, none of them are for ice cream.

What is "Cancun Style," exactly? Image courtesy of Flickr user dental Ben

For this month’s Inviting Writing, we asked you to share your favorite stories about dining out—your funniest, strangest, most memorable experiences, from the perspective of either the server or the served. Here are three of our favorite short items.

Assault With Menu

I was driving my mother and her friend from Florida to their home in Michigan. We picked up my sister in North Carolina and stopped for lunch. The four of us were taking our time going over the menu when my mother’s friend asked those at the table about grits because she had never had them. The waitress, who was not standing there waiting for our order, somehow overheard me when I quietly replied, “I don’t care for grits, they taste like wallpaper paste!” Suddenly, in a flash, the waitress flew up from behind, gave me one good smack on the side of the head with a laminated tri-fold menu, and said, “Honey, you’re in the South, everybody here loves grits!” I was pretty much dumbfounded! (By the way, it actually hurt and left the side of my face red!) After the initial shock, everyone in our group (except myself) politely laughed, then we ordered our meal. Later, back on the road, my sister made an excuse for the waitress (adding insult to injury) saying that the waitress probably recognized her from previous visits, which must have given her the inclination and liberty to land me a good one! Really?!

—By Judith Burlage, a registered nurse who comes from a huge family of great cooks

Invasion From The Deep

Several years ago I was an executive chef for a major oil company, managing food service on one of their offshore platforms. One night, one of the roughnecks asked my night baker if he could put a loosely covered can in the walk-in refrigerator. Thinking nothing of it, he said, “Yes.”

When I walked upstairs for work the next morning, I was horrified to find the world’s creepiest menagerie of alien-looking sea creatures wandering through my walk-in. Seems the loosly-covered can contained live critters that had been belched up from a pipe that was being cleaned and the roughneck though they would make excellent fishing bait if he could just keep them alive until he left the platform in a couple of days.

—By Rebecca Barocas, through our Food & Think Facebook page.

That’s Cancun Style?

Back in the 70s my hippie art teacher from college and I went to Cancun, long before it became the bustling resort you see today. We got to Cancun on a sketchy wooden boat that had at least 30 people on board. We’d been dining on rice, beans and tortillas all week to try to manage our sparse funds, but we decided to splurge on a real meal for a change and ordered a dish called “Red Snapper Cancun Style.” This was a quaint local establishment and I was looking forward to a nice local treat. We got our meal—and what a plate it was. It was a piece of fish with a half-cooked piece of bacon wrapped around it, skewered into the fish with so many toothpicks that the flavor of wood was imparted to the fish. Topping it were cold canned peas and mushrooms. Not what I expected! (We had a much better meal later that week in Cozumel in a beachfront restaurant that served langostinos sauteed with garlic that was just lightly toasted, and then a little lime juice. Perfect!)

—By Sue Kucklick, a mental health counselor who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Whether they’re chef’s memoirs or profiles of the workers who toil at every stage of the food system—from pollinating crops to ringing up your convenience store coffee—the common thread among these recent releases is that the best food stories are really about people. Here’s what I’ve been reading this summer:

The Beekeeper's Lament by Hannah Nordhaus

The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus
I’ve read articles about colony collapse disorder, so I thought I knew as much as I wanted or needed to know. But Nordhaus’s book is about a lot more than the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that began five years ago. It’s also a profile of John Miller—a large-scale beekeeper and colorful character who trucks his hives around the country—and a fascinating peek into the precarious business of keeping the nation’s crops pollinated. Long before CCD, America’s beekeepers had to contend with devastating hive-killing diseases and pests like the varroa mite. “Today, thanks to the varroa mite, the European honey bee is, in most of the world, a domesticated creature, and one on life support, at that,” Nordhaus writes. “Without beekeepers, Western honey bees would not survive.”

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
Culinary school isn’t the only—or even the best—route to becoming an acclaimed chef. In this well-written memoir, Hamilton, who won this year’s James Beard Foundation award for best chef in New York City, traces the unconventional education that eventually led to her popular East Village restaurant, Prune: The grand parties her French mother and bon vivant father threw on their rural Pennsylvania land, with whole lambs roasting over an open fire. Dishwashing, waitressing and eventually working in a kitchen as a young teenager left to her own devices after her parents split. The deep hunger—and even deeper satiation—she experienced while traveling and working in Europe, often on zero dollars a day. The years of churning out food in mediocre catering and restaurant jobs. Somehow it all added up to success—and a very good read.

Life, On the Line by Grant Achatz
Aside from divorced parents, the resume of the man behind Chicago’s Alinea—frequently cited as one of the best and most creative restaurants in the country—is different in nearly every way from Hamilton’s. Achatz was born into a restaurant family and had an unrelenting drive to be a great chef from an early age. He attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and worked under Thomas Keller at the beloved California restaurant the French Laundry before striking out on his own to explore the burgeoning molecular gastronomy style—now more commonly called modernist cuisine—pioneered by Spain’s Ferran Adrià. At the top of his game, he was diagnosed with cancer, which destroyed his ability to taste his own food but not his ambition.

Love in a Dish … and Other Culinary Delights by M.F K. Fisher
An Extravagant Appetite: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher by Anne Zimmerman
Two new releases relating to Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher shed light on an influential 20th-century food writer whose succulent prose is revered in both culinary and literary circles. If you are unfamiliar with her work or want to refresh your memory, start with Love in a Dish, a short selection of her writings from throughout her career. These include a hilariously uncomfortable account of being the only customer in a Burgundy restaurant, where the accomplished chef and overzealous waitress won’t take no for an answer, and a lyrical musing on the pleasures of shellfish.

Zimmerman, who selected and introduces the collection, also wrote a biography of Fisher. She describes a childhood of alternating deprivation, when her domineering grandmother, who disapproved of sumptuous food, was at the table, and secret pleasures, like cocoa toast for dinner, when Grandma was gone. Later there was a disappointing and ultimately doomed marriage that brought her to France, where her gastronomic education truly began, two more marriages—one ending in her husband’s suicide—and, of course, a writing career that gave expression to her hungers, both literal and metaphorical.

Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
In a follow-up to the 2001 behind-the-sauté-pan tell-all Kitchen Confidential, which turned him into a TV celebrity with the world’s most enviable job, the cantankerous Bourdain rails against his usual foes—well-meaning but ignorant idealists, scummy restaurant reviewers, vegetarians—updates the status of characters from his first memoir, and talks about how fame, getting older, and becoming a father have changed him.

My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe
It takes chutzpah to buy a Brooklyn deli, as Howe and his wife did as a gift to her Korean immigrant parents. It takes a fine writer like Howe to find the humor in the absurd situation that follows, when the business is struggling and he must follow his day job as an editor of one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the country, The Paris Review, with night shifts behind the cash register. Negotiating the price of a cup of coffee, Willy Lomanesque suppliers and police stings targeting underage-tobacco sales proves more challenging than he could have imagined. The description of Howe’s famous and endearingly quirky boss at the magazine, George Plimpton—whose reaction to the news that Howe will be moonlighting at a convenience store is, “Wonderful. Enchanting. … Let me be your stocker. Just for a day”—is worth the price of the book alone.