African Locust Bean Tree

Humans have a propensity for indelible curiosity. That’s what I would like to believe. Every day I go to Chong Qing House, my favorite restaurant, which excels upon serving Hunanese/Sichuan style cooking. Pig intestines, $17 hydroponically grown bean sprout shoots sauteed in garlic, chestnuts with braised short ribs; dishes of comfort quite motherly if your mother happens to be of Hunan descent.

Around a half mile from my dorm room, it’s a cold walk of contemplation to Chong Qing. Why am I eating Chinese food alone every day? When should one stop such a habit of monetary ignorance to fulfill temptations of twice cooked pork? Will I see someone get stabbed again? Normal questions from the head of a completely normal kid. It’s a daily walk of introspection intertwined with classic Providence cityscape beauty. Wind turbines, the occasional homeless veteran, RISD girls, to ignore the terra firma and it’s botanical merits is easy to do.

I find pleasure in brutally kicking ground objects. From empty 50 ml fireball whiskey bottles, unrecognizable pieces of scrap metal, asphalt chunks, I kick desultory. A temporary stop for coffee before a Ching Qing lunch prompts the perilous mission of kicking every African locust bean pod on Thayer Street.

These pods of fece-like composition I’d been kicking for weeks were nothing more than carob pods. That was my finite cessation, needing no further room for interpretation. I’m a self-determined semi-fluent naturalist. When are self-determined semi-fluent naturalists ever wrong? But I was wrong. Upon further research, my original characterization of carob pod was fractionally accurate. In the same family as the carob tree or Ceratonia siliqua, I’d been kicking African locust bean pods for weeks unknowingly, ignoring such bean pod value.

Let me briefly talk about carob ecology. Generally speaking, all sub-members of the carob species are relatively adapt to drought-like conditions, thriving upon the soil of sandy loams. I think it’s of value to state this species of tree is not ideal for an urban environment whatsoever. Heights of up to 50 feet and an expansive root system, almost always providing supplemental sidewalk destruction, the only reasonable explanation for carob trees amongst the urbanscape is ignorance. With no foreseeable changes, self-education of anything of carob or locust bean use does no harm.

Most eastern cultures have some form of fermented bean paste used as a flavor enhancer. Koreans have doenjang. The Japanese have miso. Indonesians have tauco.

Those from West Africa have sumbala or netetou. Similar to the process of miso fermentation, time and labor intensity is unignorable. The nere seeds are boiled for 12-24 hours, enough time for the outer husk to soften, allowing them to be separated from their embryonic leaf, or cotyledon.

Further dehalling takes place in a mortar and pestle, in which the next step is nothing but remarkably ingenuitive. Sand is added, alongside granular salt, as an abrasive to remove the hulls further. The end products quality is determined with the competency of eliminating all form of sand granules with a sufficient water run-through. Unlike miso, which is placed into clay pots, only to be left alone for years, netetou is different. Stuffed into nylon potato sacks, it’s a relatively short fermentation process of 48 to 72 hours. Traditional netetou paste is on the decline due to the inevitable wraths of Western culture with the convenience of the bouillon cube. Similar in flavor, purists dismiss such a factory replacement of the French.

Turned on by anything of said gastronomic merit, I took to the African Locust trees on Thayer Street. Ignoring the frequent onlookers pondering my decision to remove nere seeds on the sidewalk publicly, any woman from Fogny would proudly disapprove of my seed pod processing speed. After an hour of pod processing, and enduring harassment from the nearby mini-mart owner, who left the comforts of his store only to approach me with, “What the hell are you doing!”, I quit. With enough beans to hopefully make a few tablespoons of netetou paste, my current environment isn’t applicable for such cookery. I go home in a few weeks. A follow-up article detailing how to make netetou paste from home, with pictures, will hopefully follow this one.