14 minute read
Out of Our Comfort Zones & Into Málaga
Out of Our Comfort Zones & Into Málaga by ELYSE GLICKMAN
“Don’t expect pinxtos,” announces Chef Armando Ferman, as he leads our market tour through the streets of Málaga, Spain, during the maiden voyage of Celebrity Beyond. “Málaga gastronomy is large portions and big flavor.”
This alerts our group of 15 foodies that the tour will center on market shopping and cooking rather than tasting our way through different eateries as we did on a Bilbao tour earlier in the week. In Bilbao, I had been interested in seeing what changed since my first visit in 2004. I found the city more touristy but the pinxtos – Spain’s version of hors d’oeuvrestyle snacks – were as heavenly as I remembered. Now that I am in Málaga, I am ready to be surprised.
As Chef Ferman leads our group purposefully down Calle Larios, he talks about his journey from Veracruz, Mexico, to “terrestrial” restaurants in Italy, Cambodia, and Northern California, and now aboard Celebrity Cruises. Prior to becoming our chef and guide, he worked with Michelinstarred Chef Daniel Boulud devising a globetrotting menu for Celebrity’s Le Voyage. The hardcore home cooks among us ask what he learned. “You must be able to adapt,” he responds. “You can find a wonderful tomato in an Italian market that works perfectly with a given recipe but, in Caribbean markets, you may not be able to find the same tomato. You’ll need to make adjustments, and you can’t take anything for granted. You must develop your palate and even your eye to find the right ingredients.”
Whether he’s curating a one-off dinner, cooking for his family, or bringing Boulud’s vision to life, he says tackling the unfamiliar forces him to push some of his own boundaries as a chef and an eater. “Let’s see what we find,” he says, shifting to tour guide mode, as we walk into the market. He’s on the hunt for the best sea bass fillets and garlic for pan frying, Pata Negra Iberico ham, pork loin for roasting, eggs for the dessert, olives and almonds for the appetizers, and produce at the peak of freshness.
The stroll is a master class in provisions shopping and the chef is in his element negotiating with vendors and explaining what to look for when inspecting almonds, vegetables, olives, and dried and fresh fruit. He encourages us to taste samples to understand why one type will work better in a recipe than another. Next, we head down a narrow street to the Juan de Dios Barba grocery to purchase the bacalo (salted cod) for our Ensalada Málagueña. Although there are other seafood vendors at Atarazanas, he tells us this is the best place for bacalo, noting that “one sometimes must go out of one’s way to get a recipe right.”
After lunch at Los Patios de Beatas, Chef Ferman makes his final purchases – white and red wine to pair with our dinner courses – which are every bit the family-style experience he described. The unfamiliar but pleasing platters of pork, seabass, and eggy custard remind us that we too should go beyond our comfort zones to truly appreciate the whole of Spanish gastronomy.
Call now to book a cruise with chef-led shore excursions today.
LE VOYAGESM BY DANIEL BOULUD
World renowned chef Daniel Boulud, our Global Culinary Ambassador, has created his fi rst signature restaurant at sea, Le Voyage by Daniel Boulud. Just as the name implies, travel is the inspiration for Chef Boulud's tasty dishes. The global fl avors he has infused into his menu are designed to give you a taste of the places that inspire him. To accompany the culinary experience is the most awarded wine collection at sea.
The ambiance of the restaurant is the result of Jouin Manku's Parisian creative talents. For Le Voyage by Daniel Boulud, the aesthetic is intimate and upscale, featuring so tones, private banque e seating, and a stunning entryway.
Book a 2023 Caribbean or Europe sailing onboard Celebrity BeyondSM in an AquaClass® stateroom or higher and relax knowing your drinks, Wi-Fi, tips, exclusive dinning experience, PLUS an agency exclusive $100 Shore Excursion Credit are included.
Let’s Meet for Breakfast in the KSA
In Middle Eastern culture, food is a focal point, a way of reinforcing the bonds between people. While lunch is considered the main meal of the day, nothing says I’ve arrived in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) like a traditional Saudi breakfast.
A classic, simple spread includes fl atbread, cheese, and date jam. More adventurous types might like shakshuka, which is made with a savory and spicy tomato and onion sauce and topped with poached eggs. Shakshuka gets its name from the Arabic word shakka, which means “stick together,” referring to how well the eggs, tomatoes, and other ingredients do just that.
Up the Nile with Bread and Beer
by ULRIKE LEMMIN-WOOLFREY
Sailing on the SS Sudan, the last steamship still operational on the Nile, the one Agatha Christie herself cruised on, I not only managed to find the perfect means for connecting the ancient dots along this historic river, but also to do it in style. Along the way, there even awaited some surprises to delight a gastronome like me.
On day two of my six-day journey to Aswan from Luxor, I toured the temples of Abydos and Dendera, which are dedicated to Hathor, the Goddess of Celebration and Drunkenness. There, my guide, Saber Hamad, an Egyptologist accompanying the cruise, enthused about a carved image. “This is a picture of a vessel used for brewing beer,” he said, explaining that, just recently, the world’s oldest beer factory had been discovered in Abydos, dating back 5,000 years.
It seems that beer was once a staple food, payment for workers, and vital for sacrificial rites. The ancient brew was made by crumbling emmer wheat bread and yeast into earthenware vessels filled with water, then allowing the mixture to ferment. Saber assured me that the result would have been very palatable, and a sustainable way of getting both food and drink out of the locally grown wheat. Instead of beer, Saber then presented me with bread purchased from a roadside baker who used a stone oven that would not have looked out of place in Pharaonic times. Baked with a recipe barely changed in thousands of years, the bread was simple and so good.
As the tour continued, references to beer and bread kept cropping up. In Valley of the Kings, there were symbols indicating grain harvesting on Tutankhamun’s tomb. Similar scenes were etched into the crypts of the artisans who had painted the royal tombs. All highlighted the importance of wheat, which sustained the Egyptian people then as it does tourists today.
Back aboard the steamship, my fellow passengers and I toasted the sunset with glasses of modern, local beer and set our sights on our final destination: the temple of Philae in Aswan, appropriately dedicated to Hathor who, as a fellow lover of food and drink, was much cherished aboard the SS Sudan.
Make plans for a Nile River food cruise with your travel advisor today.
A Tale of Two Egyptian Food Tours
by LAUREN KEITH
Under the glow of colorful, bulbous, glass lamps, I joined my group at a quiet, back corner table in Felfela, a storied restaurant located in downtown Cairo. While we got settled, the chaos of Egypt’s capital city carried on outside. Every time the restaurant door opened, a cacophony of car horns and fragments of conversations poured in like a wave washing over the shore. Within seconds, a swarm of servers covered the entire table in dishes and bowls of every size, curls of steam rising like exclamation points. My dining companions and I stared at each other in disbelief, hoping that our stomachs were bigger than our eyes, instead of the other way around.
I had joined an evening outing with Bellies En-Route, a female-founded food tour company that’s the first of its kind in Cairo. The largest city in both the Middle East and the whole of Africa, greater Cairo has a population of more than 20 million. While that means restaurants are plentiful, the ones most loved by Cairenes aren’t found in touristy areas and rarely have menus or signage in English, so a knowledgeable Arabic-speaking guide is essential.
Felfela was only the first of several food stops on our route and this feast could have fed a family. As we ate, dishes continued to arrive, the servers clearly masters of rearranging plates to make them all fit like a jigsaw puzzle on a table that now felt woefully undersized. Middle Eastern hospitality truly knows no bounds, and it seemed to be a cardinal sin to let us leave the restaurant with even one ounce of stomach space.
I recognized a few familiar dishes as they appeared – a huge bowl of creamy hummus cradling a generous pour of olive oil in its folds; hamburger-sized patties of falafel, perfectly crisped and dotted with sesame seeds; a nearlyready-to-topple Jenga tower of pita bread – but others were strangers to me. Amir, our gracious tour leader, made the introductions. Hamam mahshi is pigeon stuffed with spiced freekeh (cracked
green wheat that has an almost nutty flavor). Molokhia, is a love-it-or-hate-it green and garlicky stew made from jute’s mallow, which has a slimy, gelatinous texture similar to okra.
Across the Nile River just a few miles from the iconic pyramids, we were dining like pharaohs, not only lavishly, but also on the same ingredients they had once consumed. Amir told us the ancient Egyptians painted molokhia leaves onto their tomb walls. One of the planet’s cradles of civilization, Egypt has a foodie history that expands back not just mere centuries, but millennia.
The love of food in Egypt still runs so deep that, in the local dialect of Arabic, the word for bread (aish) is the same as the word for life. Even some dishes commonly found elsewhere in the Middle East get a uniquely Egyptian twist. Falafel here, properly called ta'ameya, is made with fava beans instead of chickpeas, which the Egyptians say makes them fry up even crispier, and is cooked in large flat discs instead of balls. Tahini, a sesame seed paste that’s a constituent component of hummus, appears on the table more often than hummus does for dipping pita bread.
Like many visitors to Egypt, I first arrived in Cairo and then made my way to Luxor, some 400 miles south, which has so many ancient temples, tombs, and monuments that it’s called the world’s largest open-air museum. Luxor’s uber-touristy status means that the food scene at first taste can seem lackluster but, as in the capital, a foodie guide can open doors and transform the experience.
Egyptologist Haytham Ramadan launched the first, and currently only, food tour around Luxor. Clearly suffering from temporary amnesia after my tour in Cairo, I decided to give Luxor’s food a try. Following Haytham’s lead, I devoured a bowl of kushari, Egypt’s quirky national dish that’s an everything-but-the-kitchensink mix of rice, macaroni, lentils, fried onions, chickpeas, and spicy tomato sauce. Next, we sampled offal-filled pita sandwiches from a street vendor. The sweet finish was a selection of irresistible honey-drizzled desserts and bags of freshly made sugarcane juice.
After tours in two of the nation’s most touristed cities, I would describe Egypt’s restaurant dining scene as more exciting than glamorous but, with a local guide, it’s always authentic and deeply human. Taking a food tour in Egypt not only supports local entrepreneurs but it’s also a fulfilling – and just plain filling – way to get a different perspective on the country.
Contact your travel advisor to learn more about Egypt's food tour options.
Tasting El Dorado
by NANCY HELLMRICH
Juan Felipe Lozano Sanz is an internationally certified barista. That means he pays himself to drink coffee. “It’s a tough life, do not cry for me,” he says with a smirk. The owner of Caffa Colombia, a coffee café located just seven miles north of Bogotá’s Museo de Oro, Juan Felipe grew up with privilege but opted out of safer career paths in favor of military service, daring travel to remote regions, and a business he believes will help bring justice to underserved Colombians.
When I meet him in his brightly lit café, he is brimming with exuberance. Or caffeine. Or perhaps both. “You’re in luck,” he says, resting his hands on the marble counter top, “because today we’re going to try what is called an author’s beverage. That is a creation based on coffee, but with other ingredients. We got second place nationwide with this recipe.” An ardent follower of coffee culture, I had seen the El Dorado drink and the Coffee Master 2022 competition on social media. With a business conference scheduled in Bogotá the following week, flying in early for a tasting seemed almost preordained, so I caught an evening flight. The next morning, the hotel concierge had been puzzled when I asked for a taxi. “We have coffee right here,” he had protested, an open palm showing the way to what seemed like a lovely restaurant. I fibbed and said I had a business meeting and a ride was quickly procured.
After taking me through preliminaries in which I smelled the burnt fragrance of dry,
commercial grounds, learned about the thermodynamics of coffee, and slurped a cup of gently roasted Pueblo Nuevo (grown by a man named Gabriel Gallardo), Juan Felipe asks if I am ready. Si, I respond, seizing the opportunity to practice Spanish.
Cocktail-style glasses are brought out as Juan Felipe recounts the legend of El Dorado, in which Colombia’s indigenous Muisca people hide the nation’s gold from invading Spaniards by throwing it to the bottom of a deep lake. At the bottom of the glasses, Juan Felipe places a tablespoon of cocoa powder. Next, he rolls balls of vanilla ice cream in panela, which looks like brown sugar but is produced more naturally and therefore retains more nutrients.
As he adds the ice cream to the glasses, he sidebars. “A lot of baristas will say you have to drink coffee this way or that way.” Juan Felipe believes in trying things, like brewing coffee with hot cranberry juice. “It tastes really cool. But don’t ever try it with pineapple juice. Actually do. It’s awful.”
Having introduced the idea of experimentation, he explains how he and his brother, a craft brewer, created Jack’s Coffee by resting the beans in Jack Daniels® barrels, allowing them to absorb the whiskey’s smoked caramel essence. Shots of hot, Jack’s Coffee espresso are then poured over the cocoa, panela, and ice cream. To this, he adds cold brew and a swirl of foamy almond milk. “Now are you ready to find El Dorado? Are you ready to see magical realism?” Juan Felipe emotes, referring to the writing style of Colombia’s literary hero Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
It’s important to know at this point that, in the El Dorado legend, the Muisca king covers himself in gold dust and dives into the deep lake. I say that because Juan Felipe, now in the throes of barista bliss, holds a shaker high and generously sprinkles each beverage with actual gold dust, then places a golden garnish at the center of each glass. “Colombian gold. This is not fake.”
When it comes to drinking the beverage, I’m told there are no rules. “You are the explorer here. You are the one finding the gold. Just go for it. As in the lakes of the Muisca, in the bottom of this lake, you will find a treasure.” And sure enough, in the bottom of the glass, the gooey cocoa makes for a sweet finale.
“Have you ever had a coffee bathed in gold like this?” he beams, his hands positively glimmering beneath the café lights. At this, we laugh. “At the beginning, when I was experimenting with all this,” he says, “I arrived home and my fiancée was like, ‘Why do you have shiny stuff on your body?’ And I’m like, ‘Babe, trust me, it’s gold.’”
Call today to book a tour of Colombia’s six different growing regions and an ever-growing list of specialty cafés.
