As my first post, let me begin at the beginning: Zanzibar. The Spice Island. Unguja, as referred to by the locals, a small tropical island floating in the Indian Ocean, just east off the coast of the beautiful Tanzania, home to the Serengeti and Kilimanjaro.
Zanzibar is a remote island where the almost 1 million residents live off fishing, seaweed farming and tourism. Education and commercial farming is a foreign thought, or still a twinkle in the eye. For the rest, the people are poor. Humble homes or makuti (plaited palm leaves) huts, sand roads and candle-light rule daily life and donkey-carts are a luxury.
In between the poverty and sadness, are the lush coconut trees, the tropical fruit plantations, the sugar cane fields and the infamous powder white sand tickled by the most beautiful turquoise and blue water. The postcard pretty beaches, the luxurious resorts, the hammocks and smell of coconut oil on bronzed bodies- it does exist. Fresh fish bought from the fisherman, crab claws the size of my head, tuna on every menu, tropical fruit and exotic spices in abundance...you can find it here...Paradise, here, mostly exists.
This has been home to me for the past year, and before I begin my journey, I must share with you the culinary secrets of Zanzibar.
To be honest, food on this island sucks! It is a complete dissapointment to most tourists, a headache for chefs and a frustration for ex-pats. Why? With all this fruit and fish and all things pretty and exotic?, you may ask...
Here's why:
1. Everything is grown organically and non-commercially. Don't get me wrong, I am ALL for organic and the slow food movement... but if you have 1 million locals to feed, plus an additional million tourists, those bloody avocados don't ripen fast enough and your pineapple will taste like water and be full of worms. Seasons are clearly defined, with everything in season and everything out of season the next. Produce quality is the worst I have seen in my life and supply is just as bad. The ground is raped from all nutrition and over used, the rain is either too much or too little and green fingers have never been taught to cultivate and farm. So leave a chef with a store full of mangoes and aubergine for a week and see what happens...
2. Education. Or shall I say the lack of...? Fish are caught in local sailing boats, or dhows, popped onto the boat, sailing around for hours in the blazing tropical sun, and then dropped onto the beach where it either gets bought or taken to the market, on a bicycle(no jokes), to lay and wait in a dirty, hot, pest ridden environment for an unsuspecting buyer. So even though your fish has been caught today, it has spent a couple of hours, un-gutted and bloating in the heat, bleeding into the meat and turning sour. No ice, no cold room, not even a hat! Do you know what I would look like after all those hours in the sun? So tuna steak anyone?
3. Supply. Now, an island that sat in darkness for 3 months because a cable under the ocean broke, is bound to have some supply chain problem right? Right! With no dairy farms, milk, cheese, cream and butter need to be imported. With no live stock farms, meat (which would not kill an European) and all other basic necessities (oil, soap, shampoo, hams, flour, canned goods etc) need to be imported. Wine gets taxed so much that it might be cheaper to do drugs, and the delays and freight costs on goods make it a never ending struggle to find a decent product at a reasonable price. Crappy Dubai "milk", reject New Zealand butter, cheap South African wine and dodgy Brazilian chickens rule the total of 4 grocery shops on the island, and things like condensed milk and cocktail umbrellas make you want to phone your friend and say "guess what I saw today...!" Again, no jokes!
So as most chefs on the island just give up and are happy to serve over cooked fish on boring rice, some chefs think adding star anise and calling it "Zanzibar spiced" would do the trick. It might, in those budget Italian resorts where all they really want is pasta. But there is a little teeny weeny handful of chefs on the island who do have passion and vision. And boy, do you need passion!
So for the next 2 weeks on this little slice of paradise, I'll be sorting the smelly from the shiny and telling you where to eat and where to stay away!
Watch this space....
