What’s Behind the Frenzy Over Bamboo in Cooking?

14.10.2024 - 21:02 / nytimes.com

A single panda can eat more than 70 pounds of bamboo a day, so before Mao Sun and Xing Er, two Chinese-born bears, moved to the Copenhagen Zoo in the spring of 2019, Danish zookeepers had to find a reliable source of the treelike grass. One supplier was the farmer Søren Ladefoged, whose crop has recently benefited another local attraction: the fine-dining destination Noma. The chef Mette Søberg, 34, who heads Noma’s test kitchen, was inspired to add tender young shoots to the menu after the restaurant’s 10-week pop-up at the Ace Hotel in Kyoto last year, where thinly sliced bamboo was served in squid broth. “In Japan, and in Kyoto specifically, they’re so excited about ingredients that are in season for a short time,” she says. From late March through May, “everyone knows, ‘Ah, it’s bamboo season!’” Back in Denmark, she started grilling the shoots over pine boughs for a slightly smoky tinge and serving them with a butter and sencha tea dipping sauce. “We want to make it really simple so people can actually taste the bamboo,” says Søberg, who describes the plant’s flavor as “nutty, vegetal and a little bit sweet.” She adds that many Noma diners are surprised to encounter bamboo in Denmark, where it’s cultivated but not typically consumed. Outside of Asian restaurants, the same is true in the United States, where, at Brooklyn’s Cafe Mado, the chef Nico Russell, 36, has been pickling the shoots and serving them with razor clams in a garlicky sauce. He gets his supply of the yellow groove variety from the New Jersey-based forager Tama Matsuoka Wong, 66, who described this year’s demand as “a frenzy.” Wong, who specializes in harvesting edible invasive plants, points out that yellow groove multiplies rapidly through horizontal roots and can quickly overtake a plot of land. She works with property owners to contain the plant, while getting it into the hands of chefs like Mads Refslund, 47, of the wood fire-centered restaurant Ilis, also in Brooklyn, who has ordered over 750 pounds from Wong so far this year. This past summer, he served vertically cut salt-cured shoots with buckwheat oil-brushed uni and caviar pooled in the divots of the stems. He also preserved the majority of his supply, he says, so that — despite bamboo’s short season — he can offer it for months to come. —

It’s hard to find a culture whose adornments don’t include symbols of marine life. From the twin golden fish of Jainism and the nearly 4,000-year-old turquoise-and-gold catfish charm unearthed in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom to the lusterware guppies fashioned by the 20th-century American ceramist Beatrice Wood, the image of the fish, shimmering boldly in the light of the sun or moon, has embodied both the ephemeral and the eternal. Now