Mark Siddall: Culinary Adventurer

(upbeat sound) (slow tempo music) - I believe my science is about discovery and is directed by the kinds of questions that we need to ask.

And what I do in terms of cooking is also about discovery.

Going to a lot of different places around the world collecting leeches, you get to see what people eat.

So for me it's really getting to know the ingredients that go into something that I just ate.

When we're in the field I do tend to take on the cooking responsibility and that's great, that's something that I love to do at the end of a long day in the field to do something creative, something different than what we were doing.

When we were in the field in New Brunswick, we had caught a cod, big cod and we went through it for the worm parasites in the flesh and we pulled all of the worm stages out of the fish because we were doing some parasitology and we we're left with all this fish meat.

Not wanting to throw it out, I made a Caribbean Jerk Cod, then for dessert I got some Irish Moss which is a red seaweed that grows in the area and steeped that in milk for about 20 minutes, added some vanilla and some sugar, strained it, it makes this nice little jellified custard, tastes a little bit like the sea and a little bit like vanilla.

I think what's happened with me is that cooking and preparing food is coming from very deep inside and is this creative outlet for me that really works.

Need something you can whisk with, you need something you can make a double boil out of and of course, a stove.

Also I've eaten a lot of strange things and you might imagine that I've eaten a leech and indeed I have, leeches are edible.

It was on a dare and I decided that if I was gonna do this I was going to make it taste as little like a leech as possible.

And so I stuck it on a stick and roasted over a fire and sure enough, I can attest to the fact that leeches taste a lot like charcoal.

My guess is though that the other sort of very muscular leeches like the giant Amazonian leech, little garlic butter, some herbs I think it'll be a little bit like escargot.

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