Chicken goes Cluck-Cluck, Camel goes Moo

Recently came back from a trip to Abu Dhabi. It was my first time in the Middle East and I was looking forward to stuffing my face with ample array of Arabic eats. For me, the reason why travelling is worth the effort of packing up a boiled-down reduction of the essentials in your life and subjecting yourself to the torturous turmoil of commercial air travel and the moody bipolar whims of airport staff and those who supposedly enforce security by not looking at their screen when a passenger puts their bag through a scanner and forgot to discard her bottle of water and subsequently has a neat souvenir from the UAE that also provided some needed hydration in the car on the way home in Thailand, is the fact that we can experience first-hand a fundamental fragment of a foreign culture by simply sampling the local food.

Extending this idea further, you can find the basic building blocks of a cuisine and culture by looking at the base products and ingredients on hand which is why I love exploring supermarkets to see what the locals favour. I must say, walking the isles of a big supermarket somewhere in Abu Dhabi, the one section that made my jaw drop was the cheese counter. Or counters I should say. Never in my life have I seen such a large and varied selection of cheese on a commercial level. I am certain their repertoire could rival many specialty cheese stores out there. Of course I am still speaking on a commercial scale, so if you want that one type of homemade cheese they make in that one place in the world, by definition, you will not be able to find it anywhere including this vast library of cultured cow juice creations. Cows –now we come to the main subject of this particular post. We are no longer talking about cheese. We are going back one more step and talking about that primal provider of life for all of us mammals: milk.

Step back for a moment and recall where we are in the world. We have landed in the United Arab Emirates. Aside from the ridiculously indulgent 7 star hotels and the most expensive, tall, large, ornate (etc. etc…) structures in the world, what do we think of? Sand dunes, endless desert, sand storms, sand surfing, sand skiing, sandy beaches, sand, sand and sand. And what do we envision ourselves riding across these surreal sand swept landscapes? Jerboas! … Ok, I didn’t have the opportunity to go camping and encounter these adorable desert mice as they bombard you during the night, but I am determined to meet them next time. But seriously, we are talking about the iconic camel. If you have cows, you have cow milk. If you have goats, you have goat milk. So if you have camels, yep, you have camel milk. I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to sample some fresh camel milk plucked off a fluorescent-lit supermarket shelf next to the comparatively boring basic bovine variety.

The inconspicuous plastic packaging in a sense diffused some of the exotic mystery but it also emphasised that wonderful feeling of being somewhere new. I could not walk into a Big C in Bangkok or a Sainsbury’s in London or a QFC in Seattle and grab a petite plastic bottle of camel milk from the refrigerated shelves. Before cracking it open, you can already see that the colour looks like most varieties of milk. A clean opaque pearly white peeks up at you when you pop off the top. It has the faintest blush of a rich cream. Putting it up to my nose, I could smell a rich dairy scent with only a very light hint of a fresh game protein. This experience was reflected in the flavour. I was anxious and excited as I brought it to my lips and took a sip. I let the liquid spread across my tongue and slowly inhaled through my nose to try and experience as much of the taste as possible. It was a rich and heavy milk, akin to the thicker cow milks you find in England, but still not crossing over in to the consistency of cream. The initial hit is a luscious creamy dairy that morphs from a familiar milky taste as it enters your mouth to a grassy game meat scent as it slides down. As you swallow, you notice a salty savouriness which is the stronger flavour in the yoghurt culture finish. The salted yoghurt taste lingers and melds with that fresh grass fragrance to create a unique aftertaste. It was quite an intense experience so I was more than satisfied with the small portion. It is highly recommended for those who are fond of goat, ewe or alternative milk sources but also for anyone curious or wanting to step out of their box, or in this case, milk carton.