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Ingredients for a five-star meal

Following a Yellowfin from Haramel to The Chedi
How to Feed a Mushroom
The Lifespan of Vegetables

How much Marbling do you want in your Wagyu?

You’re sitting at The Chedi digging into 29 rials of seared tenderloin of Australian Wagyu beef (marbling 9+), or dipping your fork into tuna in turkey ham, or picking through the mushrooms in a Pad Khee Mow. The hotel is five-star, the setting minimalist and the food is fantastic – but exceptional experiences are what you pay for in a hotel like this, and deserve to be taken for granted. The real story isn’t the one of the kitchen, told ad nauseum: it is the hidden lives behind, of the fish that was caught by a resident of Haramel the evening before, of the Wagyu grain-fed in Australia, of the mammoth earthmover mixing mushroom food in Barka. This is their story.

Following a yellowfin from Haramel to The Chedi
Some of the best tuna in the world are being brought in at five in the evening to a little cove in Muscat that much of the city has never known existed. Haramel is mostly a place unheard of, a sliver of beach unseen.

A little self-contained village within Muscat, its low concrete houses arc around the waterfront, themselves framed by rough, jagged oceanic rock that cups the village within a city, holding it close to the water. “We are born in the sea,” says Mahfood, as he stands inch deep in the dark sand, waiting for a yellowfin to be unloaded. Almost everyone here is a fisherman, and their 30 boats start trickling back in at 5pm, the last one close to midnight.

Mahfood will wait for them all, buying the fish he will sell to an exporter, and to hotels like The Chedi, The Sheraton and the Shangri-La. He might send up to 400 tuna to the hotels in a day, and a staggering four tonnes to Oman Fisheries, which will fly the catch on one plane a day to Europe.

Mahfood has raised himself out of the confines of a fishing village that no one has heard about, and at age 38 has a thriving business with an enviable client list, with two trucks packed with ice, waiting by the water’s edge in the twilight. As a handful of fishermen get off the boats, mixing with onlookers, Mahfood is at the centre of attention, the sole buyer on this beach. But Haramel is a small place, and the market knows no boundaries. Mahfood will buy his tuna at a rate anywhere between 400-700bz per kilo, and sell it at around 800bz. When the day has soured and the boats return empty, the rate goes up, paying for time at sea, fuel for a day and the hungry at home. The Muttrah fish souq is minutes away by road and even shorter by boat, and if Mahfood doesn’t pay them enough others will. The market, like the sea, doesn’t play fair.

Things could be better. A 30-foot boat, which he’s now trying to organise for with a license from the ministry, will pack ice and set off to the fishermen’s boats while they’re still out at sea. This way the tuna will go into the ice practically straight from the water, instead of roasting in an open boat until it reaches the shore, and changing colour.

Tuna has always been dear to the Omanis, says Mahfood, for it could even be preserved with salt and eaten months later in the interior. The hotels prefer yellowfin tuna, while local tastes run more with the longtail – apart from the fact that it is cheaper, of course. Other catch includes kingfish and hammour, which helps because tuna is seasonal. After some months offshore here they will move south around Masirah, then further down the coast towards Yemen, and then arcing themselves towards the Maldives and Sri Lanka, before coming full circle past Pakistan and Iran.

By nine the next morning, the yellowfin will be brought to the back door of The Chedi, its tail sticking triumphantly out of a bucket of ice, a glassy eye staring back at Chef Ashish, as he inspects what guests might eat just hours later. It would probably be a Grade A piece, with the darkest red meat. Grade B, of course, will be lighter, and C would have the least amount of colour. Grade A, Mahfood explains, acquires greater importance in a lighter style of cooking, or when there is none at all, like sushi. It is also what gets packed to Europe, and what you will eat on your everyday five-star plate.

How to feed a Mushroom
They don’t use ladles to mix stuff at Gulf Mushrooms – they use an earthmover. It rumbled through the morning around the compound, scooping up piles of what will eventually make mushroom food: straw, the best kind imported from Pakistan, chicken guano and re-circulated water.

These basic ingredients will be effectively cooked over the next couple of weeks till they make a mass that no mushroom could resist. First, all this is fermented over 4-8 days in bunkers, where they are subjected to what the experts call a forced aeration system. After this, it is all conditioned for five days in closed tunnels till it reaches its optimum nutritional balance. At the end of this process, when it is just ripe for growth, the mushroom spawn, or seed, is introduced.

Everything is controlled: mushrooms aren’t picked off trees, or grown in fields with birds twittering above. In the largest mushroom factory in the Gulf region, room after cavernous room houses the produce in various stages of development. The first few rooms have trays of compost covered with moist cloth, the room climatically controlled. You have to step into a foot disinfectant before going in, and wear a head cloth. Inside, it is cool and dark, with a surprisingly sweet, fruity scent.

The kind they produce here is one of the most widely cultivated in the world, the white button, or Agaricus bisporus. It can be picked at various stages of its development, and you can have a look at the entire range at your local supermarket: the cute little ones, the medium-sized mushrooms that are the most commonly available and the largest kind, which are the most expensive. Most people prefer the medium or smaller sized ones because of their visual appeal: smooth, white, tightly packed into shape. They look delicious, but, in fact, the larger, browner ones might have a deeper taste.

Slice open a mushroom and you’ll see why. Just above the stem, slightly lower down the bulb will be a thin ring of gills, separated from the rest of the flesh by their texture and slightly darker colour. At this stage, they are still in their formative stage. Later, if you allow a mushroom to grown on, the gills develop fully, producing spores for the next generation, until they fan out to make up the base of the bulb, and turn the mushroom a muddy brown. Young mushrooms might look more appealing, but do not have their taste. The other reason some cooks might prefer the whiter mushrooms is that the developed gills might be strong enough to alter the colour of the surrounding food and gravy.

The lifespan of vegetables
Falcon Trading picks up where Gulf Mushrooms finishes. When the produce is ready, Falcon distributes it, and you will find their vegetables everywhere, from the Wadi Kabir Vegetable Market to the Royal Air Force, from Oman Aviation Catering to the top hotels: the Shangri-La’s Barr al Jissa Resort and Spa, the Al Bustan Palace InterContinental Hotel, the InterContinental Muscat, Crowne Plaza Muscat, Muscat Holiday Inn, Majan Hotel, Al Madina Hotel, Radisson SAS and The Chedi Muscat.

Their huge supply of vegetables comes from all over the world, imported via Dubai by refrigerated truck, up to two tonnes of farm produce every day, ferrying anywhere between RO3-4,000 worth of greens. This is a difficult, cut-throat business: the vegetables have a lifespan of a day or two, and the supplier has to sell them in that time or lose them, and money. That means that they have to be cleared by customs – and finally face their ultimate test: meeting the chefs at the receiving end. One such encounter happens every morning at 9:15, when Chef Ashish steps out at the back of The Chedi after his morning meeting. There were two trucks waiting for him: fresh yellowfin tuna from fish supplier Mahfood and a huge assortment of vegetables and fruit from Falcon. Everything came under the microscope: the length of the leek, the colour of the onion and the answers of the supplier. Hours later, they would end up as part of the menu in The Restaurant.
 
Falcon might buy produce from Gulf Mushrooms at RO1.525 per kilo, and get a discount of five per cent with their trading of more than 2,000kg a month. They sell the produce to the hotels at around RO1.600 per kilogram. There might be up to ten other suppliers around, so there’s always someone else who will supply your client if your price is too high.

How much marbling would you want in your Wagyu?
1.3 tonnes of prime meat flies into Oman each week from Australia through Falcon al Wadi Trading, most of it for the Grand Hyatt Muscat, The Chedi, the Radisson SAS, Shangri-La’s Barr al Jissa Resort and Spa and the Hotel InterContinental Muscat. You will have dug into it, from their A-grade tenderloin that costs RO9 per kilo to the famed Wagyu beef that tips the scales at a more generous RO37.

And one of the first things that managing director Ali al Balushi stresses is that this is not frozen meat, but chilled. This means that although the market had accepted frozen meat as the norm, Falcon is educating people about the benefits of chilled meat, apart from the actual quality of that meat. Frozen meat might have a huge lifespan, but you always lose quality when you defrost it. Chilled meat, on the other hand, expires 90 days after the slaughter, but remains much truer to its character.

Falcon al Wadi’s star product is Mulwarra, a premium Australian meat exporter that offers poultry, game, seafood, Wagyu and other beef, veal and lamb. Within this, the hero of the show is Wagyu beef, which you can easily identify by its marbling, or the pattern of fat present in a cut. While other quality beef cuts have their meat and fat visually starkly separated, the Wagyu looks beautiful even if you don’t know what it is: a softer, lighter look, with an even spread of fat through the meat. Such products come from a breeding program that combines full blood Japanese bloodline Wagyu bulls over Holstein cows and it is a far cry away from your neighbourhood butcher. Everything is recorded and controlled: the Wagyu progeny are slaughtered at a live weight of 800-900kg, after being fed on grain for over 500 days. During the production, the primary cuts are labelled and are traceable with the whole life history of each animal maintained. None are treated with hormonal growth promotants or antibiotics, and they don’t have access to genetically modified food. Calves are weaned off milk and then fed a diet of natural pastures and cereal supplements.