Home Grown and Bizarre

I get a lot of odd looks these days whenever I’m asked about my day job. I can spin a good yarn about the hakarl merchants of Bjarnhofn—the guys who “make” the putrified twenty-foot-long Greenlandic shark (the national dish of Iceland). I have sped alongside killer whales in the glacial North Atlantic in search of puffin, divined my way through gritty night markets from Taipei to Thailand, attended ritualized tuna auctions in Japan’s Tsukiji Market, eaten the freshest caviar by the fistful with the Iranian merchants at Rungis outside Paris and with Russian mobsters at the Caviar Bar at St. Petersburg’s Grand Hotel Europe (they take theirs on blini). Sheep’s heads? Which continent? And I can tell you that the Napo River Pilchi Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon know how to cook coconut grubs with more flair than their Filipino counterparts.

When it comes to dining on unusual foods, however, there’s no place like home.

Sharing food and experiencing culture is what I do on the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, and the longer I spend working on the show the more I believe that all provincialism is universal. Care to charcoal grill some camel parts next weekend? Not in my backyard? Well, try explaining lutefisk to a melon hawker in the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakesh. Or American cheese singles to a herdsman in the Sahara. He’d laugh at you. What is cuisine on one side of the world sounds vulgar on the other. Frankly, what is a weirder food practice than taking boneless, skinless chicken breasts from a factory farm and shrink-wrapping them in plastic?

So it was with great pleasure that we pitched the Travel Channel on doing a local episode of our show—in fact, “Bizarre Minnesota” was part of the first set of proposals we ever submitted to the network suits way back when.

We got the green light for a homegrown episode in season two, so beginning with the wild rice harvest last August and through late September’s ruffed grouse hunt, we shot a Minnesota episode. We could have shot an entire show in one day in the Twin Cities if we cared to. Tongue tacos on Lake Street, fish maw and spicy pig intestines at my favorite Chinese restaurant, head cheese on East Hennepin . . . but what would be the challenge? Here’s my diary of weeks of Minnesota eating, which, no doubt, would make a Kalahari bushman blanch.

Wild Rice Harvest—Mahnomen
8/23/07: Shoot 1
My father-in-law has insisted for years that I check out the White Earth ReDiscovery Center and do some wild rice harvesting, so it seemed a good place to start my journey. The center is where tribal elders pass on important ways of life to a generation removed from traditional pathways.

It took me all night to drive to Mahnomen, and after a short sleep, I drove to the center. The White Earth people believe that the Great Spirit brought them from the Northeastern United States to the place where the elders told them the “food grows on the waters.” Wild rice is a plant native to the Upper Midwest lakes region. Zizania Palustris is actually not rice, but a water-grass seed prized around the world for its singular nutty flavor.

I spent the morning on the water, gliding in a canoe (many a Minnesota lake has been stripped of its value by ignorant motorboaters) through the delicate shoots, knocking the seeds onto the floor of the canoe while my partner poled us along. The shoots may be accidentaly ripped out if they are tugged on, so the practice of knocking the seeds with long wooden sticks is purposely sloppy, allowing some of the harvest to fall back into the lake to reseed the rice bed. After an hour, we had a large pile of rice in the middle of the canoe, and we headed for shore.

We cured the rice by letting it air-dry, then we parched it by stirring it with a wooden paddle in a cast-iron kettle over an open fire, letting the stray grasses and the seed’s outermost skin harmlessly burn away. What remains is jigged, or threshed, by dancing on the seeds until the skin separates completely. Tossing the rice in the air allows the chaff to simply blow away.

We ate a wonderful meal, cooked at the water’s edge, among the birds and stunning scenery of the northern lake country. Griddled yearling deer, baked bannock bread, and the rice were a real treat, and, yes, we ate all of the deer—heart, liver, all of it. The strangest thing we ate was sucker-head soup—a bland potage made with a repulsive lake fish renowned for its fatty and cartilaginous body. The heads are the prize of each diner’s bowl—you chew, you suck, you spit out bones. No one said this job was easy.

Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul
8/30–31/07: Shoot 2
The fair offers up an environment rich with some of the world’s strangest foods, and some delicious irony. The foods I long for the most on trips overseas are judged in the 4-H animal buildings or born in the Miracle of Birth Center.

Madrid’s Casa Botin has built a 300-year-old reputation on baby pigs. If I were running the fair, there would be baby pigs, lambs, and chicks coming out of wood-burning ovens instead of sitting under heat lamps waiting for the unwashed hordes to snap a picture. Sounds tastier than a candy bar on a stick, don’t you think?

I settled for sharing corn dogs with my pal Marjorie Johnson and sampling the good (wild game brats at Giggles, deep-fried smelt), the bad (cola cheesecake, ostrich on a stick, spaghetti and meatballs on a stick), and the ugly (deep-fried Spam). There’s been a sad trend over the last decade of incorporating new fair foods simply because someone can put them on a stick. Sloppy Joe on a stick was one of the worst things I have ever eaten. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.