Tomato Salad with Smoked Perch Roe

The project Salt Dykes is a serious invitation to let the imagination (the capability to generate images as a tool for learning and forming) be dragged on the other side of the membrane, to make culture permeable and adapt it to changing, non-linear, non-dichotomous conditions.

The menu is an exercise to the taste as a means to defy the general understanding or practicing of spaces and edibility, hence the paradox. Recipes records no weight or measures, no procedural or serving hints but a way to think about ingredients and reframe their value as such.

tomato(es)- they come in a huge variety of colours, shapes, tastes, densities, cultural complexes and environmental issues. In this dish there are at least six varieties of tomatoes (of which I can’t name one) all coming from a mesmerising, local farmer’s market in Hamburg and grown in greenhouses (in October, in Germany) in the Alteland. For some reason though nearly every single person who ate this dish (mainly Germans) assumed they must be coming from Italy, possibly because it was an Italian serving them. A cultural stigma, or rather two in one, Italians have good tomatoes to the point that Italy equals tomatoes while Germans have very poor options in terms of vegetables. Tomatoes are originally from South America but they travelled the world becoming staple food in many cultures that selected and developed iconic varieties. It is a slightly salt-tolerant plant that can grow with moderate soil salinity. For this reason it became diffused in the Northern Venetian Lagoon after the flood of 1966 that ended the bespoken fruit production of the area.

We served them seasoned with bread vinegar, sea fennel (or rock samphire, halophyte, a salt tolerant plant of the same family of the fennel. It has a very complex profile mixing fresh and balsamic sapidity with a neat taste of burned orange) and bohnen kraut (basically a bruschetta). I also added freeze dried sour cherries for a hint of tartness.

smoked perch roe- tender and creamy, slightly smoked, it is made by the same Sebastian Baier that provided all the fish from a perch he caught himself. It actually doesn’t really have a better story besides it was too good not to use it and it was perfect with tomatoes.

rosehip ketchup- rosehip of the so-called rose dog ( or Hagebutte in German) is legitimately a neglected wild fruit. It is painful to harvest and quite tedious to clean. The thin layer of pulp hides a number of annoying hairy seeds. But if you’re able to collect a considerable amount of hips and have nothing better to do, cooking them with just one part of sugar and one of vinegar will get you a delicious ketchup. Basically what would be easier doing, and is usually done with tomatoes but wilder. Rosehips were highly valued for their ascorbic acid content (vitamin-C) in cold regions before citruses were available at all latitudes all year round. They can grow almost anywhere, even on poor soil and bare loads of fruits. These were collected in Copenhagen along the inner canals and on the ponds’ shores.