Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks. Today we have a special guest, Molly Gore.
She used to be a food journalist, now she's kind of like a satirist and activist.
Hi Molly, how are you?
I'm good, I'm good. Happy to be here, thanks for having me.
The topic we wanted to talk today is about dairy. You have like a special thing towards
dairy. Is that the reason why you moved to the Basque Country?
About 95% of the reason, yeah.
Could you explain us why that is? What is it so special about Basque dairy?
Oh my gosh, well okay, so I think for me, it's funny, I said yes to this idea of talking
about dairy because I had, you know of course it's not the full reason I moved here, but
I did have this moment when I was visiting, you know, a year ago before I came and I walked
past the milk vending machine in Plaza Ayazo in Donosti. Do you know the one I'm talking
about?
Yeah, actually I didn't know what it was. You explained this to me and I've been living
here for five years and you were like, you don't know what this is?
It's the best thing in Donosti.
I've never used them actually.
Oh my god, you just go and you just press the button and you put your mouth under it
and you just kind of let it, you know, just drink from it.
You get a milk bath in the middle of the street, nice.
It's incredible. It's this small little kind of like kiosk vending machine in Plaza Ayazo
that's fresh milk. And so you can bring a bottle or you just pay 50 cents for, you know,
a liter bottle. And I think it's just a euro 60 for a liter and like half of that for a
half liter and it's fresh milk and the farmers come down, they fill it every morning and
then they take the excess away at night. So they milk the cows at like 430 in the morning,
bring the milk down at 7am, there's fresh milk in the vending machine and you go down
and get your milk.
Yeah.
I didn't know anything about this.
Yeah, amazing. You know, and it's just like there's like a sharpie sign on it that's
like, you know, if anything's wrong here, just call in Yaki.
Yeah. And I was looking it up and I was like, I was like, oh, Yaki is like the maintenance
guy. It's the farmer. And so I think it sounds like the city sort of like half subsidized
this, but it's mostly direct sales, right? To the farmers. And so it's their way of trying
to like kind of keep up the small, you know, small farming standard by eliminating, you
know, a lot of the kind of middle brokerage and just supporting farmers more directly,
which sounds like it's working because it's been around for a while. But yeah, to me,
that's dreamy.
Are there like any other dairy products you're a fan of here in the Basque Country? Because
I mean, if you ask me about it, I would say first of all, Ilyasawal cheese.
Yeah, I know.
Which is an amazing sheep milk cheese. And the cheesecake, of course, which I'm addicted
to.
Of course. So here's the thing. You're going to be so disappointed. So I'm I like cheese,
but I'm not fanatical about cheese, I think, in the way some people are. And of course,
you know, you talk about dairy in the Basque Country and you have to talk about cheese,
right? It's so it's so woven into the dairy culture here. And I think what, you know,
especially romance to me is like coming from the US, you know, and I was I was born in
the 80s. And so I grew up in the era of like drinking, you know, our parents gave us skim
milk, you like nonfat milk, because everyone was afraid of fat, because the sugar lobby
basically convinced everyone that fat was the bad thing, not the sugar. So they could
sell more Coca Cola and you know, the whole capitalist disaster. And so, you know, I grew
up in like with all these kind of anemic, like super industrial dairy products and then
moved to California and our side sort of equivalent, I think, in California to like what's happening
here is the Nicosia Valley. And it's mostly, you know, farms. People came over 100 years
ago from France, from Italy, from Europe, and basically started up a cheese making tradition
there. And it's, you know, it's a beautiful place to do it because a the climate is temperate
year round. So there's milk production year round and there's like an extraordinary amount
of microclimates. And so you have this local variation in the cheeses, which is really
interesting. But there, you know, like America is in this great and horrible moment of trying
to reclaim its food soul after the industrial revolution destroyed it. So when we have those
moments like in the US, there's a lot of small producers who are kind of trying to reclaim
old traditions like that. Right. And then coming here and having this sense of especially
in the Basque country, there's been such a sense of preservation, right? It's like the
traditions have been held on to so tightly and have been preserved so strongly, even
in the face of so much attempted, you know, assimilation and like all of these different
forces coming in and trying to overtake Basque country and the language and the, you know,
everything. Actually, the cheesecake is like an invading species. Can you say that? An
invasive species? Yeah, it's not something from here. And it's like a new tradition.
It's about 20 years old. So like the really conservative people say like, that's not really
Basque. Where did that come from? Is that a, was it an American thing? No, no, no, no,
because it's completely different than American cheesecake. It is. Yeah. I don't know where
the origins are. I know that Sugueroa made a first cheesecake in the late eighties or
nineties. Yeah. And La Viña in the mid nineties. So it's something relatively new. Ah, yeah.
Another dessert that I thought of that is probably more your style is the Mamilla. Have
you tried that? I have tried Mamilla. Yeah. Because it's just curd milk, right? With honey.
That's it. Yeah, that's it. Right. And then there's like, they'll do walnuts or a little
bit of honey on top. Yeah. But those are the toppings. The dessert as such is just the
curd. And this says a lot about like Basque food culture. They're really trying towards
flavors that could appear plain to foreigners, but they're actually, they have their own
complexity. Right. And many times it's a lot about the texture and not just the aroma.
And in this case, you just want to explore the milk aromas. Like also in the Basque
country, it's the only place I've seen like in fine dining restaurants where they serve
milk ice cream, just milk ice cream. I haven't had that yet. Yeah. You can find it in Bodegon
Alejandro, for instance. They have a really good one. Yeah. It's interesting. The thing
that struck me about the Mamilla was the texture. I tasted it. I was like, Oh, it's just curd.
Like nothing going on here except the milk. But yeah, there is a real sort of like delightful
simplicity and freshness to it, which does feel very, very Basque. And I like finishing
a meal with a Mamilla because it's super light. You know, it's like you're just having a curd
and then to clean your mouth. Yeah. I like cheesecake more. Do you have any interesting
like anecdote that you have experienced around the world of dairy, curds and milk and cheese?
Yeah, I think I have one. I think it was probably my second week here. I, you know, and I moved
here with very basic Spanish and zero Basque and constantly working on it. But I went to
the grocery. It's like tiny little very Basque grocer near me. And I was just going to pick
up a bottle of milk. And so I go to the dairy section, you know, looking around and there's,
you know, something that looks like milk in a milk bottle in the bottom shelf. And it
has a picture of a sheep on it. I was like, Oh, okay. You know, sheep's milk. I like sheep's
milk. I'll get the sheep's milk. So I got the sheep's milk and I take it home. And the
first thing I do is I make tea with it. Right. And that's, that's like mostly for most of
my milk. I was like on my oatmeal or in my tea and I drank my tea that day and it tasted
really burnt. And this was confusing, but it was also really concerning because this
was like in the thick of a wave of COVID. And I was like, Oh, whatever this talk about
how it messes up your taste. And I was like, Oh my God, I hope that my tea tastes burnt.
And so the next day, the same thing happened. And by that point, I, you know, it occurred
to me, I should probably look at the milk. And so I looked at it and it was all in Basque
and I translated the Basque and it was milk for cojada, but it was extra burnt flavor.
You know, cause I guess there's, you know. Yeah. They, they do this like with a red gluing
hot iron. They put it inside the milk and it generates this burn like in the, in the
best case caramelized flavors, like kind of like an atofi direction. Yeah. In this case,
it tasted maybe like a little bit even more synthetic. I don't know how they did it, but
it was just very burnt tasting milk. Burn aroma, basically in drops. That was my hazing
moment as a foreigner in the store. And it's good news that I didn't have COVID, but I
learned about what cojada was at that moment. When done properly, burning milk is something
really delicious and it's something really traditional also here in Spain. Yeah. Yeah.
And I didn't try to make cojada actually, which I don't, I haven't tried it yet, but
I was like, cool. Me neither. To be honest, I I've known that in I think in a Calaver
or in some Michelin star place, it was probably a Calaver many years ago. They would curd
it in front of you. They would bring the liquid milk into the curd and then perhaps you eat
two more courses. And at the end of the dinner, it was yeah, cojada, gelatinized. Oh, we should
go eat some of that. Well, that's a super expensive place. I haven't been there actually
to Aguilar. It's one of the big classics of the city. Yeah. I haven't been either. What
about non-food application? Have you discovered any other things done with milk besides taking
a milk bath in the streets of San Sebastian? Rubbing cheese on my face. Yeah. It's probably
some good oils in there actually. But no, I mean, yeah, you know, I do like yogurt masks
on my face sometimes. Things like that. But I know there's some interesting stuff you
can do with whey though. A lot of people doing like vodka and this kind of things using whey
instead of water. Really? And it generates a completely different flavor profile. Yeah.
It's pretty cool. Oh, that's super interesting. Yeah. And I even saw once this wasn't like
in a kitchen lab, they would put like just a tiny bouquet of sheep's hair inside the
bottle. So you know that sometimes you have like a flower or a herb. Yeah, it was sheep
hair. What's the purpose with that? I guess showing where it comes from, probably communicating.
So this is whey based booze. I do that with my own hair in my cooking sometimes actually.
Some people never made it, you know. To put your identity in your stews. What about in
your daily work as a satirist and activist? Have you found like any inspiration like in
the Basque dairy system? Inspiration. Well, okay, here's an interesting connection. You
know, oh gosh, I'm going to forget their name. But when Napoleon's armies were coming through,
there was the way that the sheep herders hid themselves by like hiding under the pelts.
And then I think that's how they could like organize and coordinate ambushes and stuff
like that. But to me, it's really interesting because our work a lot of the time is about
shape shifting and satire and pretending to be the enemy. And like we, in short, we a
lot of the times will like prank giant oil companies or governments to hold them accountable
for doing bad things, which is like an old kind of even mythological sort of way of interacting
with power. And so I, whenever I see this out in the world, like the ways that the underdogs
have shape shifted or disguise themselves or sort of like played with the rules of the
game in order to shift the power dynamics, I find it super, super interesting. And so
when I saw that, that story about the sheep herders, I was like, Oh, here's another, what's
happening again?
I saw a super nice video from Basque shepherds, like explaining their, their day to day life.
And they have like this ancient walls that are probably thousands of years old and they
still use them today. And they were the shepherds talking about like, yeah, this is our heritage.
We don't even know who built this walls and how old are they? And we've been using them
for centuries, you know? Yeah, it's crazy.
What has been your experience with the food system, sustainability practices in the Basque
country in general, like in comparison with food systems in America and the United States?
What's been interesting to me is that there's not as much like obvious transparency, like
in the U S we're sort of because, because we went through this horrid kind of industrial
period and then had this reckoning starting, I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago when everyone
realized how all of the goodness had been bred out of our food and you know, how much
it's so, so preserved and toxically overloaded and you know, all the life has been like bread
and boiled out of it, you know? And, and so now there's sort of this movement to assure
the public of the provenance of where their food is coming from. So there's like huge strides
towards letting people know what, you know, towards transparency, at least, you know, for the folks who are really interested in that.
And here I don't think because there hasn't been the same legacy, there hasn't been a
need right to do all of this kind of storytelling around where the food comes from. Because
there's this, just this assumption that like it's from right here. It's good. It's fresh.
And there's none of the same kinds of horrible industrial practices that I'm familiar with
in the U.S., although I know there has been conglomeration and there is like, you know,
large scale kind of stuff going on. So that's been one of the interesting things is me going
to the farmers market and asking some questions and feel very surprised at the questions because
I think other folks just have a general sense of like where the food's coming from and how
it's grown. And for me, I'm in the habit of wanting to know and finding out when they're,
when it's not obvious to me because of where I come from. And so that's, that's just been
very interesting.
Yeah. Like I would add to that, for instance, tomato salad. That's something that you see
in most restaurants here, but in Bar Nestor, there is like a newspaper article wall with
an interview to Nestor himself. And he says like eating raw tomato, that's something that
comes from the Spaniards. They serve like one of the best tomato salads in town. But
he admits that this is not something that you would find here, let's say a hundred years
ago, that it's something that somehow it evolved at some point in the 20th century. And now
it's part of the culture, just as cheesecake and as many other elements, so to say, modern
elements. But when you say that tomato salad and cheesecake are the modern elements, you
can tell that it's a really, when it comes to food, a really conservative culture, I
would say.
What I think about when I think about like the difference between the sort of like sustainability
aspect here and in the States is just that I think, okay, so for example, I was in, well,
this was actually Galicia and I was in like a little Galician seafood pub. They just did
smoked fish. That was it. Like little kind of tostadas, they have smoked fish. And I
was there with a couple of people and one of them was another American from Oregon,
like along the West coast. You know, I think we've, we've all developed like a really deep
sensitivity to wanting to know where things are from, right? Because that's, that's the
place in the U S that really started reclaiming good local food first, I think. And it spread
from like Northern California because for many years we didn't know where anything came
from because again, industrialization. So anyway, he, you know, we're in this little
pub and he asked us the waiter, he was like, Oh, you know, I think I want, you know, how
the sardines are not sardines. It was like a monkfish or something. He's like, but where,
where is it from? You know, is it from here? Which is classic habit question from where
we're from. And the waiter kind of looks at him. He's like, I'll go ask. And he goes back,
ask the chef. And then we hear some like bickering, like we hear them kind of arguing in the kitchen
and the waiter comes back and he's like, it's like the chef wants me to tell you that he's
not going to tell you where it's from, but it's good. He's like offended because the
assumption it's like, well, of course, you know, we talked to him more and it was like,
no, no, no, it's from right off the coast, 15 miles that way, but he's not going to tell
you where it's from because he has his spot. He has his fishermen. He's been sourcing this
fish. Okay. Okay. That's the reason. Okay. Good. Yeah. The reason was like, of course,
it's from right here, but I'm not going to tell you where. And so it was just this really
kind of funny moment of these two cultural expectations clashing up against each other
because we're used to such very different standards of, you know, food production. And
so, yeah, that was funny. Well, this reminds me of cider houses. I've asked and I know
for fact that most of the boned ribeye states, the chuletones. Yeah. They're mostly, they
come from East Europe, from Poland. Oh really? Yeah. And the reason is the production here
is not on, it can supply the demand of so many chuletones that are eaten. And same,
when you see the cider barrels, there are some that have like a red apple sticker. And
that means that that is made out of Basque apples because there are also many apples
imported to produce enough cider. Like the Orchards are not as productive enough as they
were, let's say 500 years ago in the golden age of cider. And is that because just the
way land is being used has changed around here or is that because the population has
grown? It was probably an economical shift after the golden age of nautical enterprises.
Yeah, because they would drink cider. Right. And the ships to avoid getting scurry. Right.
Yeah. Like this archetype of the drunken sailor is because they were drinking whatever they
were drinking all the time, but it wasn't water. That's it for this week's episode of
potluck food talks. If you like what we're doing, make sure to subscribe to the podcast
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