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A few select high end restaurants use ants for their sour taste. Why specifically ants? No clue. I do know that such restaurants like to switch it up and be a b

• giraffe_lady 3y ago
  There is a set of techniques refined and published by noma that have been really influential in high end cooking the last decade. They use koji (the catalyst for miso and soy sauce, among other things) to break down protein and/or starch into sources of deep umami or complex sweetness. The liquid forms of this are being called garum, though it's not a continuity of the ancient food by that name. The original book published a grasshopper garum, but recently I have seen much better ones based on bee brood, and a chicatana ant garum is one of the best things I've ever tasted. They are very complex and unique flavors, nothing is quite like them.
  • seer 3y ago
    Isn’t garum a “fish dissolved in its own gut enzymes” kinda thing? By the at measure - dissolving other organic stuff sort of makes sense as names go.
    • giraffe_lady 3y ago
      Yeah I think it's a good name for it. In the past when this has come up I've seen people be disappointed or hostile to it simply because there isn't an unbroken continuous european food tradition between roman garum and this. Which it may sort of imply, I guess. But I think it's a fun repurposing of a good word that was going unused.