East Austin’s Caribbean restaurant Canje prioritizes sustainability in its kitchen. The restaurant opened in 2021 and has partnered with Farm to Table to source local ingredients for its menu items. One of its protein-forward dishes helps reduce the invasive species of wild boars in Texas.
Canje’s executive sous chef Erik Trotman also looks for multiple ways to use special ingredients like cassareep, which can serve as a glaze for meat or to flavor ice cream. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Executive sous chef Erik Trotman poses at Canje. Trotman is of Caribbean descent on both sides of his family and embraces the challenge of using one ingredient multiple ways in the kitchen. Mars Tello
Tell us a little bit about what people find on the menu there for folks who might not have eaten there before.
Canje is a Caribbean restaurant. This restaurant is based on just shedding the light on Caribbean cuisine as a whole. And what we do there is have fun.
What sort of dishes? Hit me with a few.
Jerk chicken – very bold, spicy. It’s marinated for 48 hours and fermented for 48 hours with chilies that we use from each batch. So it just develops more flavor.
Oh man, this is the real deal. You’re going through the whole process here, the fermentation and everything.
How do you come up with these dishes? Have you lived in the Caribbean yourself or you have a mean cookbook you’re working from or what exactly?
All of the above. My mother’s Haitian and my father’s side of the family is from the Virgin Islands. Island hopping.
How does the farm-to-table model work out for folks who may never have heard of this? And I’m thinking in particular, how do you use it for this restaurant, Canje?
It’s kind of like the middleman to like bridging the gap between local farmers who can’t like necessarily go to the city.
So Farm to Table reaches out to all those farmers, over a hundred farmers in Texas, and then connects it to the restaurant.
So I’ll go online, hit up Farm to Table through an email like, “Hey I need so-and-so and so-and-so” and like look through their list of like farmers that they have. They just show us what they have, what they don’t have, what’s in season, what’s not in season, and then kind of buy from there.
Well, that’s obviously going to help you big time with the freshness factor there. But what about prices? Because I would imagine that it might be hard to beat some of the big wholesalers, that kind of thing.
Yeah, but like our ethos is like we’d rather support someone local in Texas, rather than like going to the bigger chains that like they already have it. We like to keep it in-house, you know.
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
You’re going have to tell me more about these wild boars that you mentioned earlier. You guys are playing a role in managing a population that a lot of Texas ranchers will tell you has gotten out of hand.
Yeah, it’s like over 1.6 million hogs just in Texas alone that are just like invading and terrorizing. But we try to do our part by at least getting one to two boars a week whole. We’ll break it down, braise it, and it goes in our Guyanese pepper pot. And that’s like our dent.
Tell us about cassareep. How do you use that in the kitchen?
So cassareep is basically like a dark molasses-like substance that is made from boiling down the cassava root. We get cassareep from the owner’s family in Guyana because they produce it. We cover the boar in it and braise it.
What do you do if you realize you’ve purchased more of say one ingredient than you can actually use?
If we purchase more of one ingredient than we can use or it’s like almost on its way out of almost hitting its shelf life, we try to figure out different preservation tactics that we can use.
Like one time for R&D [research and development] for a New Year’s dish, we forgot about our guava. So it was sitting on a tray almost about to get to the point where you can’t use it. I was like, let’s figure out a use.
So we took it, put it on the grill rack and just like smoked it and grilled it and then mixed it with like a vinegar mother that we had and then let it sit and ferment for about forty days. Then we took it out, tasted it and it’s like a perfect smoked guava vinegar.
It’s mind-blowing to see what you can do with one thing.
A West African street food dish called suya is served at Canje in East Austin. It includes a skewer of Wagyu beef, seasoned with cayenne and dressed with peanuts. Mars Tello
Well, of all the dishes on the menu, what’s your favorite?
Right now, I’m really loving the suya that’s on the menu.
Suya. And what is that?
It’s a traditional African street food where it’s just like grilled, skewered meats. But our play on it, basically our identity on the dish, is it’s Wagyu beef. We cure it with salt and sugar, then we hit it with our yaji spice, which is peanut powder, ginger powder, cayenne. We slice it nice and thin, put it on a skewer.
Then we use our cassareep and brush it so it can caramelize and grill it and then put it on a plate with our African bird’s eye pepper to kind of tie in West Africa and the hot spicy chilies that come with the dish.
