Part Seven: Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Day Twenty-seven

Yesterday we actually just ordered the produce. It will be delivered this afternoon with some leftover market things that we need to buy. We ran around for hard-to-find spices and other odds and ends. Some things are just impossible to purchase here, like cardamom for instance. Since my philosophy is to always find the best produce, I thought these bananas were well named. It is amazing that you can buy bananas practically anywhere in the world these days.

A lot of good quality produce comes from the south of Argentina, the fertile Patagonia region. After the last market items were secured and sent on it's way to our kitchen, we went hunting for the last missing items. We found some tahini for our Moroccan salad in a Chinese store, along with some Lebanese rosewater, and finally some animal-rennet-free grana padano cheese. All authentic Italian grana padano cheese is made without animal rennet. For your information, grana padano is a hard aged cheese related to parmigiana. What's rennet? click here

After lunch I assembled a pre-arranged crew of very enthusiastic ladies for a gulab jamun roll-a-thon. These succulent confections are always very impressive, and not too difficult to make, but we plan to cook 1000, so it requires some very big equipment, patience, good organisational skills, and some serious helpers! The secret in making such a large batch is to do some accurate mathematical calculations first. The syrup goes on early, and for that I calculated that since 20 gulab jamuns require 4 cups of sugar and 1 litre of water, all we need to do is multiply everything by 50! Even for a math-impaired person like myself, that's not too difficult.

So we combined 200 cups of sugar with 50 litres water in a very very large pot, and brought it to a simmer along with some star anise and cinnamon sticks for some extra aromatic flavour. After the syrup boiled we poured in 2 litres of rosewater, then covered the pot to allow the fragrant spices and essences to fully permeate the syrup. We rolled the saffron scented balls of milk powder and milk dough in batches of 250 with the aid of 4 ladies in each team. Finally, we slowly fried the sweets at 102 degrees Celcius in four woks of ghee, 250 sweets in each enormous wok. The result? 1000 perfect gulab jamuns! Click here for more gulab jamun cooking hints. Click here for a photo of perfect gulab jamuns.

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