Leave Prague for Authentic Czech Pubs

by Neil Woodburn on

To get the typical Czech pub experience these days, one must now leave Prague far behind.

When I first began visiting this fine city more than a decade ago, traditional Czech pubs were on every corner. They were smoky, served cheap beer, and full of all walks of Czech life, from students to pensioners, artists to soldiers, and everything in between.

Today, however, most pubs in the center of Prague are now overpriced tourist dives that lack the charm and character of their communist era predecessors.

So, what to do?

Traveler extraordinaire Rick Steves has a solution: leave town.

The Czech Republic is blessed with numerous small towns simply oozing with character. Although many have moved with the times, a leisurely drive through the countryside will reveal those that haven’t. You probably won’t be able to pronounce their names, but you will be able to locate the local bar and pop in for a pint. If you’re lucky, you just might get a surly, communist era waitress who ticks off your 50 cent beers on a small slip of paper left at the table. Take a deep drink and you may just travel back in time.

Big in Japan: An Ode to Ramen (Part III)

by Matthew Firestone on

This week, Big in Japan will be bringing you a four-part series on the most perfect of foods. Part I of the series aimed to debunk the myth of ramen as being mere instant noodles. Part II of the series traced the hundreds of years of history behind this savory snack. Today’s column will break down the different varieties of ramen noodles and stock.

I really, really love ramen.

If you think about it, variety is indeed the spice of the life, especially in the kitchen. In the modern era of Pan-Asian, Latin Fusion and Nuevo American, we are all secretly becoming closet gourmands. Of course, all of these self-aggrandizing culinary styles can’t match the sheer variety of flavors and styles of ramen, Nature’s most perfect food.

Still think a bowl of ramen is just soup and noodles? Don’t believe me that no two bowls of ramen are created equally? Allow me to educate you on the high culinary art that is ramen.

Truth be told, ramen does consist of soup and noodles, though this is a gross simplification to say the least.

In regards to the noodles, ramen is made from four key ingredients: wheat flour, salt, water, and a type of mineral water known as kansui (かんすい). Just like New York City bagels get their taste from the local tap water, ramen noodles get their yellowish color and firm texture from kansui. Without kansui, which is bottled according to rigorous government standards, ramen noodles would be mere noodles.

As with fine Italian pasta, the best ramen is always homemade. At real ramen shops, fresh noodles will be made on the premises, and cut according to the chef’s preferred style. Thick or thin and flat or wavy, the shape of the noodle is pivotal. Needless to say, everyone has their own favorite type, though I swear by thick, wavy noodles, which manage to soak up the soup like no other.

The basis of ramen soup is chicken or pork stock, though chefs add everything and anything from tuna flakes, apples, kelp, seaweed, miso paste, dried sardines, wild mushrooms, onions, soy sauce, sake, etc. As you can imagine, the exact recipe of a given ramen stock is closely guarded, and the best ramen chefs inherit the trade secret from their parents and grandparents.

Generally speaking, ramen soup can be divided into four categories:

Shio (salt, 塩) The most basic and traditional of ramen stocks is light in color, and is the Japanese equivalent of your grandma’s chicken soup.

Shōyu (soy sauce, 醤油) The next step up in complexity, this extremely popular ramen stock is made by adding soy sauce to shio broth, and is medium to dark in color.

Tonkotsu (pork bone, 豚骨) Cloudy white and unmistakable in appearance, this comfort food is made with pork bones that have been crushed and boiled down.

Miso (fermented soybean paste, みそ) A unique Japanese creation, this dark and creamy stock is a rich blend of shio broth and miso paste.

In Part IV, I’ll highlight a few regional specialties, and share some of my own recipes.

Getting Hungry? Check out our delicious photo gallery of Japanese food. %Gallery-6477%

** Special thanks to Flickr users ngader (damn good ramen), malias (a steaming cauldron) and akakumo (kimchi beef ramen) **

Band on the Run: Shelter Valley Folk Festival in Grafton, Ontario

by Ember Swift on

Ember Swift, Canadian musician and touring performer, will be keeping us up-to-date on what it’s like to tour a band throughout North America. Having just arrived back from Beijing where she spent three months (check out her “Canadian in Beijing” series), she offers a musician’s perspective on road life. Enjoy!

The Shelter Valley Folk Festival is only in its fourth year and you’d never know it. It’s one of the smoothest run festivals I have performed at in years. This was our first time there, but I walked onto the site on Friday evening and felt immediately at home.

I’m not sure if it’s the shape of the land, how it lolls uphill in Northumberland County (just south of Grafton, Ontario) and overlooks the huge sparkling body of water to the south: Lake Ontario. Maybe it’s the energy of the festival, which is geared towards community, local suppliers and artists, collective decisions, family. Or, maybe it’s all of the above combined together that draws around the event like an embrace and made my shoulders loosen up and take it in.

Whatever the reasons, it was a breath of fresh country air this Labour Day weekend.

I arrived to my band mates and friends lying in a pile in front of the stage Friday night, their faces lit up by spill of the stage lights, listening to Bill Bourne‘s set (accompanied by Michelle Josef on drums and percussion.) The pile gaped open to allow me to drop myself into it and we all huddled together staring up at the stars to the melodic lilt of Bill’s dancing guitar lines. Everyone was mesmerized and the whole audience seemed to be breathing in time to his tunes.

The next day, I kept running into my fellow artists who I knew weren’t programmed to play that weekend. I had read the schedule but their names weren’t on the performer’s lists. I found out shortly that many artists combine forces and volunteer at this event. It might have something to do with the founder, Aengus Finnan, an artist himself who was the visionary for this festival. And, while it may have been his vision to start with, many artists now share that same vision and lend their energy to prove it; they were doing things like MC’ing the stages, taking tickets, clearing plates in the dining tent, stage managing. That’s testimony right there to the magic in this event. It’s very rare to see musicians volunteering to work events that don’t include their music.

That’s belief in an event’s power.

That’s powerful.

We performed a total of seven times this weekend. Usually, I’d grumble a bit at being programmed so much at a festival. There was only one full concert on Saturday night, but we were playing in several workshops that included two or three songs round-robin style. (If you’re reading this from Australia, this is the “song swap” style of performance.)

What I found instead of pure exhaustion from these additional performances (which has been the case at other festivals at different times in my festival touring career) was an injection of energy from each workshop. We were collaborating with several other artists whose work all aligned beautifully with ours, like complimentary colours of a continuous musical spectrum. We did workshops whose themes were road stories, songwriting, community and collaborations, to name a few. I looked forward to each one and they all delivered that same post-performance grin.

A distinguishing feature of this festival compared to many others is the arts and wellness areas. In the artists’ booths, there were local artists from all different media whose only stipulation for being part of the festival was to provide demonstrations of their work to festival goers. There were people glass-making, painting, carving and paper-making for all to witness and learn from. Those booths were humming all day with onlookers and questions flying. I found it fascinating.

I was peering at the paper-making demonstration when there were suddenly horns blowing, shakers shaking and drums drumming coming down the path. Everyone’s head lifted and turned to see the kids’ parade walking towards us having already walked the circumference of the site and through the backstage as well. Kids were dressed and painted and smiling. Parents were filming. The young ones held onto a rope like the kind they have for preschoolers on walking trips through the city. It created this colourful spine around which the older kids and adult supervisors danced and jumped like the legs of an enormous caterpillar as it snaked its way around the remainder of the festival site.

This plastered a smile on my face as I took in the wellness area just beyond the artists’ booths. The area included talks and demonstrations of various body work. You could attend a shiatsu seminar and follow that up with a talk about sustainable organic gardening, for example, before catching a late afternoon musical workshop and then heading to the food stalls for organic and locally grown food.

All in all, this festival is educational, entertaining and healthy. The backstage area had full recycling drop points including composting and the use of re-usable plates, cutlery and glassware. It was healthy towards all things living, most importantly the Earth which we all can’t live without.

My friend Darlene (performer and volunteer at this festival) makes hula hoops as a side project to her amazing music and she graciously gave me one as a present this weekend. I think the gift may have been inspired by my long hula hoop session with a few eight-year-old girls in the open space to the east of the main stage on Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t stop playing with those hoops and I had to be tugged away when it came time for all of the performers to take to the stage for the finale songs.

Now I have a bright red hula hoop as a memory of this event.

And hopes to return some future year.

Shelter Valley Folk Festival is worth your attendance.

Go!

Low-Brow Wine-Cellar Hopping in Moravia

by Iva Skoch on

Getting away from cities. Folks in costumes. Plenty of cheap wine to go around. If this concept frightens you already, you might as well stop reading now.

Most people visiting the Czech Republic–some 8 million annually–come only to Prague. For those trying to get away from all those tourists, I suggest heading to the south eastern part of the country: the wine growing region of Moravia. September is a great month to go because the wine harvest is in full-swing and wine-tastings readily available.

I am not going to lie to you. Don’t expect Napa Valley or Bordeaux. Don’t even bother with the red wines. Too cold for them. The whites, however, range from Pinot Blancs to Rieslings, and are generally very good. Above all, the wine cellars are all different and their owners tend to be generous, eclectic types.

You can also do a bicycle tour of Czech/Moravian wineries. Just remember as of last year, you can actually get a ticket when riding your bicycle drunk in the Czech Republic. Thankfully, no “open container” laws, yet.

Big in Japan: An Ode to Ramen (Part II)

by Matthew Firestone on

This week, Big in Japan will be bringing you a four-part series on the most perfect of foods. Part I of the series aimed to debunk the myth of ramen as being mere instant noodles. Today’s column will trace the hundreds of years of history behind this savory snack.

I really love ramen.

I mean, how many other foods out there are the products of centuries of culinary revision? How many other foods out there crossed oceans of antiquity on multiple occasions? How many other foods out there have been adapted and re-adapted to local tastes time and again?

Bananas may have colonized the New World, coffee may have catapulted itself out of Arabia and salt may have built empires. But, none of these foods hits the spot quite like a steaming bowl of miso ramen topped with minced garlic and fresh bean sprouts.

The history and lore behind Nature’s most perfect food is worthy of textbooks.

Originating in China, scholars debate exactly when this hardiest of noodles was first introduced to Japan. Although it may have crossed over at several times during the history of Japan, the first recorded record of ramen-eating was in the late 17th century by the shogunate of the Tokugawa.

Needless to say, the Tokugawa dynasty was the first to unify Japan, so I think the connection between ramen noodles and empire-building is obvious.

Of course, ramen was not introduced to the Japanese masses until the Meiji era when the country first opened its doors to foreign interests. For most of Japan’s history, the diet consisted simply of steamed rice, vegetables and seafood, which is partly to explain why the country suddenly became incessant gourmands in the late 19th century.

During the Meiji era, American and European cuisine became the height of fashion, which sparked a large cattle- and pork-rearing industry in Japan. However, the real culinary revolution of the late 19th century was taking place in the Chinatowns of Kobe and Yokohama, where Chinese immigrants opened up food stalls in the busy ports. Here, along with gyōza (dumplings, ギョーザ), another one of my favourite dishes, Japanese commoners tasted their first bowls of sweet, delicious ramen.

As history will have it, World War II put something of a damper on the Japanese obsession with eating gourmet, though the food industry was quick to bounce back. In the 1950s, cheap US flour imports flooded the Japanese market, while ex-soldiers who had previously been in China proceeded to set up ramen shops across the country. In a few short years, ramen shops took Japan by storm, becoming something of a neighborhood landmark.

Much like McDonald’s in 1950s America, a family trip to the ramen shop was good eating.

The 1950s also brought about the invention of the instant noodle at the hands of the late Momofuku Ando, founder and chairman of Nissin Foods. Now, I don’t want to diminish the accomplishments of what has been regarded as one of the greatest Japanese inventions of the 20th century. After all, it’s Ando’s noodles that swept the world and the made ramen a household name. But, as I’ve no doubt tried my hardest to explain to you the reader, instant noodles are not ramen.

Still don’t believe me? In Part III, I discuss the varieties and flavors of ramen that you can find in Japan. In Part IV, I’ll highlight a few regional specialties, and share some of my own ramen recipes.

Getting Hungry? Check out our delicious photo gallery of Japanese food. %Gallery-6477%

** Special thanks to Flickr users kk+ (Noodle Chef) and Joey-Tigger (Cup o’Noodles) **