The Netherlands - Brain Tonic Mushroom Soup

I forgot to include this interesting story about finding a brain tonic herbal soup mix in Den Haag's China Town. 

I can't read Chinese characters, especially when they are too fancy. I can only read a word that means "monkey head mushroom" and "brain". The rest looked like some encrypted ancient language to me. Lucky enough, I was there with a friend from China. She translated almost everything on the package, and it says that it can improve your brain and also make you smarter. Ha!

The only ingredient I recognize was monkey head mushroom and golden mushroom. And it's actually pretty weird they didn't include goji berry in the ingredients list even though I clearly saw goji berries (on the first picture, the red seed-like dried fruits at the bottom of the package). The rest of ingredients can actually be found in Google and Wikipedia (and I'm actually quite surprised I was able to find good information about those ingredients).

All of the ingredients for Chinese herbal soups are normally preserved by drying. In this case, I have to rehydrate the monkey head mushroom (above) separately in a bowl of water for 10 minutes, then squeeze out the water from the mushroom. They call it monkey head mushroom because when it is at its original or rehydrated state, if you rub the caps, you feel like rubbing a monkey's hairy head :)

The ingredients were nicely and individually packaged. It made me think that this herbal soup premix is actually of high quality. The goji berries also look fresh (they are bright red; some poor quality goji berries look pale orange and are shrunk too much).

In the English instruction, they only said "add lean pork meat" into the soup but when my Chinese friend read the instruction written in Chinese, it actually said "add lean pork or chicken meat" into the soup. Why would they change the instructions? Is pork meat better for English speaking communities? LOL. Lost in translation.

I simmered the soup in low heat for 3 hours. It's very delicious (to me, who is used to drinking herbal soup since young). It's slightly earthy but also sweet because of the goji berries.

Do I feel smarter? Well, you tell me. I left my favorite gloves in an iceskating rink 1.5 hours away by car from Wageningen during an iceskating rink event organized by Thymos, a sports association in my university, a week after I drank this soup. It definitely doesn't improve my short term memory. But hey, it tastes great. I don't mind eating this soup again :D

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The Netherlands - Shiitake Beer

Stir-fried mushrooms are my favorite. I was really excited to find a mushroom specialty shop at Wageningen's open market. They had a stall that specializes in mushrooms.

They have almost all types of edible mushrooms I've encountered in my life. Before this, I enjoyed a large variety of mushrooms cooked in many different ways in a restaurant called Mushroom Pot in Singapore. This stall sells monkey head mushroom (because the texture of the cap feels like a monkey's hairy head - when I rub it with my hands I felt like petting a monkey's head), one of my favorite mushroom. It has a texture like a meat when deep fried: slightly chewy, slightly fibrous.

I bought a small jar of black truffle sauce as well. It costs 7.95 euros, but I think it's worth the price because you only need a little bit of black truffle sauce in a dish. It has a really strong fragrance and taste.

And then, next to the jars of truffle sauce lies beer bottles. Shiitake beer, yup.

I was super curious about this. Technically, mushrooms don't contain a lot of sugar. I'm not even sure if the beer is completely fermented from shiitake mushrooms, or they just added shiitake flavor to it. There was no other information on the label, and the only information available was on paddestoelenrijk.nl.

Google Chrome automatically translates foreign languages into English, but it has some limitations. The translation I got from the website about the shiitake beer was:

"On craft brewed beer with Shii-Take your own nursery.
Made by Special Brewery Oijen."

The original text was:

Op ambachtelijke wijze gebrouwen bier met Shii-Take van eigen kwekerij.

Gemaakt door Speciaalbierbrouwerij Oijen.

It would be great if someone could help me translate this properly, but my guess is that this beer is uniquely crafted by brewing the beer using self-grown shiitake. To simply put it, there is no further information about this beer. Not even the alcohol percentage.

The taste? I'm sorry, I had to stop drinking it after the first sip. It doesn't really have a strong taste, but it's weird. As a mushroom lover I might be a little bit more sensitive towards the aftertaste from mushrooms, especially shiitake because it's the most commonly used mushroom in Asian soups, and I've been eating it for years. I would expect this kind of flavor to go well with savory applications. Not beer.

I couldn't finish drinking it, but I saved it. Have you ever heard of chicken cooked in beer? Yes, it was quite popular, at least I know it was popular among college students when I was in the US. Cooking chicken in shiitake flavored beer? I think it would taste awesome: extra umami factor added. I'll post the results when I'm done cooking it tomorrow for dinner :)

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