Balti Triangle Trail 2

Exloring the Balti Triangle. Arriving there, Dim started to say he was hungry, although we did not go there for eating. In fact there were big chunks of steak waiting to be cooked at home. So we decided to buy something from a fastfood shop. He got inspiration from this place called Kafe Karachi. Pakistani, evidently.



Now, he always has problem in deciding what to order, and this occasion was not exception. Boredom for me.

Finally he decided on Chapal Kabab on naan, as we have never seen elsewhere.




It took quite a while to cook the meat on the grill. This is the chapal kabab on naan. Chapal kabab was a big meat patty made with a lot of chili, whole coriander seeds and whole cumin seeds. It was quite spicy. Dim started to complain about the whole seeds in the patty. I found the meat a bit stale. Otherwise ok for this type of food. £3 it was.

This shop was advatising a dish called Nihari offered Saturdays. Being curious, I checked what was Nihari on internet. Basically it is a curry stew made with beef on bones. I eat steak on bone, but beef marrow soup is still scary. I would give it a miss.



This is a large supermarket on Ladypool road. Something about the exterior decoration makes me think of street of Karachi or Islamabad. Inside there are all sorts of "Asian" and "Arabian" foodstuff. Good place to look for exotic ingredients.

Balti Triangle Trail 1

In Birmingham, there is a quarter commonly known as "Balti Triangle". As you can imagine, it is a triangle shaped area in south east of Birmingah, where there is a high concentration of Indian, Bangladishi, and Pakistani restaurants. If you live in Britain, you might remember the tornado that hit the area on 28 July 2005.



This is the view of Ladypool road, one of the main streets of the area. Bit gloomy, partly because of the weather.

Balti means a curry dish supposed to be born in Birmingham in the immigrants' community here. The idiosyncracy of balti is its container: it is served in a small metal bowl shaped pan with two handles, which is called "kalahi". My impression is that the recipe changes from restaurant to restaurant and does not have real "sine qua non" element. Balti became also local synonym for curry.

If I understood well, tens of years ago, the Balti triangle was the only place you could get decent "Indian" (British term for the people of India, Bangladeshi, and Pakistan is "Asian", but I guess "Indian" is commoner elsewhere) food in Birmingham. However, with the increase of "Indian" immigrants settled in other areas and the "Indian" food got more and more familiar to the British people, it is now easier to find good "Indian" restaurants elsewhere than in Balti triangle, so the restaurants in the area are in decline.

We come to the area from time to time, because it is still exotic somehow and we can find many unfamiliar things. I write about our recent visit in coming entries.

Yellow Fin Tuna Sashimi

One Saturday I found very good looking tuna in the Indoor Market of Birmingham. This is how it looked like.



This piece costed about £7.5, for a bit less than 500g (was about £15/kilo). I asked the fishmonger if we could eat it raw. She said it must be all right as it was brought in that morning. I don't suppose this meant that it was fished on the same day, but bought in from the wholesale market.

Although I was told that it was safe to eat raw, to be extra-cautious, I decided to marinate one half in shoyu (soy sauce) and the other half in lemon juice and olive oil.



This is Zuke-don. "Zuke" means soy sauce marinated tuna sashimi in Japanese. This came really beautiful. I am not necessarily able to buy such a good tuna everyday even in Japan. I ate it with "Yuzu-kosho", which is Japanese condiment, mixture of a citrus fruit called yuzu and chili.



This is lemon marinated tuna. It was nice, but as nice was the zuke-don.

I would surely buy again, if I find such a good tuna again.

BBQ 2 (Razor Clams)

Another thing I pretty much looking forward to bbq was these.




RAZOR CLAMS!!!

I have seen these clams often at the Birmingham central market, but I never had courage to buy, as 1) they are sold only in 10s, 2) relatively expensive, maybe £8 (ca. US$16) for 10. But this time, we were in 8, so we could share the burden.

What part of this shell is razor escapes me.




BBQ in operation. As you see in the photo, the meat shrinks quite a lot and there is not much to eat.

The taste, however, was superb!!! Very dense and deep flavour of sea clams, so intense that we could get quite a big satisfaction with only 1 or 2 clams.

We baked also some oysters, but everyone there agreed that razor clams were much superior bbq shellfish.

According to a friend from Kyushu area of Japan, these clams can be found also in Ariake sea and she used to go and collect them. It is called Mate-Gai in Japanese.

Afterwards we had lamb kebabs, pork and beef, until the early evening. We departed saying that we will bake something even more adventurous next time!

Deep-fried Mars @ Birmingham

This is window of one of our local chippies (note for non English people: chippy means Fish & Chips shop). On the red paper, it is written "Battered Cream Egg/ Mars or Snickers". Cream Egg, Mars, and Snickers are all chocolate ball or bar. They batter them, fry and sell for 70p!

I knew that this delicacy existed in Scotland, but I now we have it also in Birmingham. I don't think I will ever try it, so I will never discover how it taste like. It is kind of a pity, but I don't have courage...