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21 Articles

Objects of Our Obsession

IT STOPPED ME FOR A SECOND. On page 70 in this issue, Zurab Chkadua from the country of Georgia refers to cheese as a “God-given treasure.” You may very well agree, no explanation needed. But even if you don’t (yet), it’s hard not to admire that kind of passion for, well, anything—but definitely for food. The writers and cooks in this issue each have a culinary curiousity that borders on obsession—be it a cuisine, an ingredient, or a cultural tradition—and our stories and recipes celebrate their admirable dedication. For them and many of us, food is not just a thing eaten around a table. Sometimes, like in the case of the Georgian cheese, it’s a culture’s history rolled up into a food, each component revealing something about the people behind…

Objects of Our Obsession

Bells of the Ball In western Switzerland, traditionally crafted bells help dairy farmers distinguish prized cows IN THE PASTURES OUTSIDE OF Fribourg, Switzerland, gently undulating fields of green rise up to meet pure blue sky at the horizon. Rugged mountains reach upward, craggy peaks white with snow. As far as the eye can see, huge dairy cows with their black-and-chestnut-colored markings dot the fields. Standing nearly 5 feet tall and weighing up to 2,000 pounds, these gentle giants lazily graze on lush grass and wildflowers. Their resulting milk—harvested twice a day—is transformed into some of the world’s greatest dairy: Dense and nutty Gruyère AOP cheese comes from the canton of Fribourg, as does thick double cream and exquisite milky-sweet butter. Hanging from each cow’s massive neck is one of the…

A Plant in Every Pot

WHEN ZIMBABWE-BASED COOK NICOLA Kagoro announced that she wanted to ignite a vegan movement among black Africans, her friends mostly laughed. Vegan food, many said, was an expensive trend, filling niche sections of the supermarket with gimmicky artificial meats. But Kagoro wasn’t following a fad; she was looking backward. “Our ancestors were vegan,” she says, referring to the centuries before Western colonization on the continent, when the majority of people subsisted largely on plants. “We have always been vegan, and that tradition and culture should not be forgotten.” Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, Kagoro spent most of her youth in New York City. She attended culinary school in Cape Town, South Africa, where she happened to intern at a vegan restaurant called Plant. “At the time, I didn’t even know what…

A Plant in Every Pot

Fire in the Fridge

EVERY REFRIGERATOR IN HAWAI‘I HAS AT least one batch of chile pepper water in it. When I was a kid, in the town of Hilo, on Hawai‘i’s Big Island, my dad and I would save old glass jars or cool-looking whiskey bottles for making and storing our own. Around the dinner table, my father and uncles would take little gulps of it from a shot glass, or else sip it from a ramen spoon in between bites of the meal. Somewhere between a condiment and a chaser, chile pepper water can be drizzled over food like hot sauce, but most people prefer to sip it alongside rich dishes, like local-style beef stew or lau lau—a steamed roll of pork or fish wrapped in taro leaves. Chile pepper water originates from…

Fire in the Fridge

For Love of Sesame and Spice

BORN AND RAISED IN NORTHWESTERN ALGERIA, NEAR THE border of Morocco, Warda Bouguettaya moved to the U.S. when she was 21 years old. “I followed my love to Detroit,” she says. After a few years, it happened again: He received an offer to work in China for three years, so they moved there before ultimately settling back in Michigan. “The idea of opening a pâtisserie was to have a space that celebrates all the places I have once called home: Algeria, France, and Asia,” Bouguettaya says. Using locally sourced ingredients such as flour from Michigan’s Ferris Organic Farm, and even some savory herbs and vegetables from nearby urban farms, she tries to achieve the most traditional versions of pastries from each place. “The ingredients might be a little different here…

For Love of Sesame and Spice

Starting from Scratch

ON A TUESDAY MORNING, A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN bustles into a kitchen in the town of Zarqa, Jordan, just outside Amman, holding multiple bags of meat. Around the kitchen, orders are scrawled on sticky notes and empty boxes. Today, she has to make 70 kibbeh, a type of fried Levantine meat croquette, and she appears completely at ease. “It’ll take four hours,” she estimates, and rolls up her sleeves. She puts away her things. The bottom of her headscarf is neatly tucked inside her tunic. She combines bulgur wheat with spoonfuls of crushed red pepper, flour, black pepper, and lamb, and kneads the mix into a dough, animatedly narrating the process as she reaches for ingredients. She works for a women-led cooking collective in Jordan, operated by a nonprofit organization, where…

Starting from Scratch

Spooning Up Clouds

NO SINGLE ENGLISH WORD IS sufficiently lyrical to represent what “wonton” means to the Cantonese. Loosely translated as “swallowing cloud,” wontons are a style of jiaozi, or dumpling, but with thinner dough than the dim sum served in Chinese tea parlors and a smaller amount of filling proportionate to the wrapper. These ethereal parcels first appeared in the Pearl River Delta port of Guangzhou during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), then followed the Cantonese diaspora, drifting east to Hong Kong. Here they landed next to egg-based jook sing noodles floating in a “supreme” broth known as shang tang. A street vendor from Guangzhou, Mak Woon-chi, has been credited with popularizing wonton noodle soup, or wonton tong meen, but the dish first achieved star status in the former British colony. (Woon-chi’s…

Spooning Up Clouds

The trademarks of a good wonton broth are its clarity, pale color, complex flavor, and freshness—chef Yan Tak starts his over if it’s more than five hours old. Strive for balance with the highest-quality ingredients: Pork shoulder adds fatty richness; Jinhua ham strengthens the broth and gives it a salty character (the closest comparisons are jamón ibérico and Appalachian country ham). Yan Tak also prefers stewing hens with their head and feet intact. Chinese Superior Stock MAKES 12 CUPS Active: 1 hr. ● Total: 5 hr. Superior (also called supreme) stock is the complex mixture that slowly simmers in the finest Hong Kong restaurants. It is enriched with multiple kinds of meat as well as dried plaice or flounder. This version was adapted with help from Tony Tan, author of…

Wrappers should be thin and tender, never doughy, and just large enough to contain a single bite of filling. Choose fresh wonton wrappers from a reputable Asian market if possible, and buy extras to make up for any cracked ones in the package. (You can wrap leftover wrappers tightly in plastic and store them in the freezer for up to a month before they become dry and brittle.) Keep the unused wrappers under a damp towel to prevent them from drying out as you wrap the parcels. There are many traditional techniques for folding wontons, and—much like Italian pastas—different shapes are better suited to specific preparations. When selecting a shape, consider the surrounding ingredients, says chef Man-Sing Lee of Hong Kong’s Mott 32. “The Szechuan wonton fold, which has the…

“Wonton noodle soup is the ultimate comfort food. This is a dish that will elicit sighs of nostalgia, hunger, warmth, and home.” Some recipes call for a final topping of minced scallions or leeks, but chef Chan Yan Tak floats seasonal brassicas such as choy sum or gai lan in the broth for his personal flourish. Gai lan, also known as Chinese broccoli, has a fresher green flavor than the Western cultivar too often used as its substitute. Simmer the leaves and trimmed stems until just cooked through before adding one or two to each serving bowl.…

Go for the Gold

WHEN I FIRST MOVED OUT of my childhood home, only a week went by before I found myself craving my mother’s cooking. Specifically, I missed Persian rice with tahdig—the prized golden, crispy crust at the bottom of the rice pot. Rice is the crown jewel of Persian cuisine, and Iranians have elevated its preparation to an art form. Whether we’re serving a simple saffron rice or one of the many variations in which it is mixed with other ingredients like meat or lentils, a cook’s reputation practically rests on their ability to turn out perfect, fluffy grains and an evenly crisped and bronzed layer. For all its seeming simplicity, rice with tahdig takes a surprising amount of knowhow. Ideally, each grain should remain separate and long when cooked, not sticky…

Go for the Gold

Music to Your Ears

WHENEVER I’M HOSTING friends or just know I will need sustenance for a busy week, I can rest easy if I have a batch of carta di musica made and stored away. Sometimes called pane carasau (carasare essentially means “to toast”), these semolina flatbreads were said to be a staple of Sardinian shepherds who would travel with sheets of them while tending their herds (carta di musica almost never go bad). Basically rustic, free-form golden crackers, they resemble the parchment onto which music was written—which is how they got their name. Though carta di musica originated many centuries ago in Sardinia’s Barbagia region, many variations can still be found across the island. Generally, the simple dough is rolled out into large disks, each often measuring more than a foot across.…

Music to Your Ears

The Banh Mi Formula

PEOPLE OFTEN ACT AS IF there is a holy grail of banh mi authenticity. But like a lot of Vietnamese dishes, these sandwiches are very casual and flexible, hard to mess up or interpret too loosely. You can stuff practically anything in one, which is more or less how they were invented: Good bread, butter, pâté, and Maggi Seasoning (a European umami-laden condiment) came to Vietnam with French colonists; porky fillings like char siu crossed the border from China; and local cooks ran with these new ingredients, adding their own vegetables and herbs to create something uniquely Vietnamese. You might already know the classic dac biet (or “special”) banh mi, a sandwich that originated in Saigon and is sold by many street vendors today. It features pâté, cold cuts like…

The Banh Mi Formula

RUM PRODUCTION ON MARTINIQUE TRADITIONALLY wraps up by the first week of June, just before the arrival of the rainy season, but Habitation La Favorite was still running at full steam when I arrived on the 12th of the month this past year. The distillery, a ramshackle cinder block and corrugated metal structure, is tucked into a ravine at the end of a dirt drive in the lush hills above the island’s capital, Fort-de-France. When it is running, you smell it before you see it: acrid smoke and the sickly sweet vapors of fermenting sugarcane juice. The cane-growing season had been troubled and lateripening, partially on account of the previous year’s record-breaking hurricane activity, and owner Paul Dormoy was scrambling to make up for lost time before the Caribbean’s summer…

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF OYSTERS

IN THE ANTIQUE KITCHEN OF HIS FAMILY’S restaurant, C.J. Gerdes slips a handful of cornfloured oysters into one of the six blackened pots on the stove. The fat froths like sea foam. Two minutes later, he pulls them out, their crisp coats crinkled and golden. Sandwiched between thick, buttered slices of “pan bread”—Casamento’s version of Texas toast—the oysters crackle as you bite into them, the crust crumbling down into the creamy centers. I’ve been eating at Casamento’s, a New Orleans institution that turns 100 this year, since I was a child, but, somehow, I’ve never asked what C.J. fries his seafood in. “It used to be we couldn’t tell people, or they’d make a face,” Linda Gerdes, C.J’s wife, says with a laugh. “But then lard came back in style.”…

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF OYSTERS

The LOST CHEESES of GEORGIA

ZURAB CHKADUA WAS ACTING AS THE TAMADA, the toastmaster, for a traditional Georgian supra at his house in Lakhamula village in the Svaneti region of northwestern Georgia. The job is sort of like being both a pastor and a quarterback for a dinner party. He had just instructed us to raise our glasses and give thanks. “To our guests at the table,” he said, as we downed ample portions of amber wine in a single go. “We must also be grateful for this treasure God has given us.” He meant the cheese, which his wife, Ira Ansiani, makes in her kitchen, about 10 feet from where we were sitting. Calling cheese a God-given treasure did not feel even a little bit like hyperbole because this wasn’t any ordinary cheese.Narchvi is…

The LOST CHEESES of GEORGIA

Before I floated down Oregon’s Grande Ronde River with chef and charcutier Elias Cairo, I would have figured that an angler who brought his own trout on a fishing trip to be sure to have something for the grill was not much of a fisherman at all. This was the first lesson of many. The idea of joining a fly-fishing trip with Cairo came up as we were wrapping the cookbook we wrote together for his restaurant Olympia Provisions. “I’ve never seen anywhere quite like the Wallowas,” he had told me. “It’s a mountain range: 250,000 acres of public land, six thriving rivers, and Hells Canyon, America’s deepest gorge. Come out and fish sometime.” I went home and looked it up on Google Maps. Fishing wasn’t usually my thing, but…

SEARCHING FOR ERKUAI

“I USED TO EAT IT IN SOME FORM ALMOST EVERY DAY.” THE ERKUAI BAO YOUTIAO LADY COMES to Luofeng Street every morning. She sets up her cart across from the elementary school and begins grilling round tortilla-like pieces of erkuai, a tender rice cake that is a beloved specialty here in Yunnan, China’s southwesternmost province. First she toasts each piece over homemade charcoal, carefully flipping them until they are hot and blistered all around. Then she slathers each with sauce—either a spicy paste made from fermented beans and chiles, or one made from a mix of ground sesame seeds and peanuts. Finally, she wraps the erkuai around a youtiao, a long piece of fried dough, and pops it into a small plastic bag. (The bag is so thin, you have…

SEARCHING FOR ERKUAI

AROUND THE INJERA

The smell of the morning’s pan-roasted coffee still lingered as a late lunch was hurried up the stairs from the kitchen in hot terra-cotta pots. On the second floor, home of the elegant and matriarchal Senait Worku, in Addis Ababa’s upscale Bole neighborhood, the dining room was set for an Easter feast, Ethiopia’s most anticipated meal of the year. Downstairs, the family kitchen doubles as a production space for their restaurant, Antica. For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Easter—the most sacred of holidays—also marks the end of the year’s longest and most arduous fast. Adherents rigorously abstain from eating meat, cheese, butter, eggs, and animal fats for not only their 56 days of Lent (known as Hudadi) leading up to this holiday, but some 200 days total each year, including most Wednesdays…

AROUND THE INJERA

Spiced Clarified Butter (Niter Kibbeh) MAKES ABOUT 1 CUP Total: 25 min. When butter is clarified—cooked until the water has evaporated and the milk solids have separated—it becomes a brilliant yellow oil that can be stored for 2 months without spoiling. Ethiopian cooks simmer a range of fragrant spices, onions, or garlic into their clarified butter before filtering it and using the clear liquid in various dishes. In his recipe, chef Yohanis uses dried lemon thyme and dried basobela, an Ethiopian basil similar to Thai basil. But regular dried thyme and basil can be substituted. 1 lb. (2 cups or 4 sticks) unsalted butter4 cardamom pods, lightly smashed1 tsp. coriander seeds, coarsely crushed1 tsp. fenugreek seeds, coarsely crushed1 tsp. long pepper, coarsely crushed1 tsp. nigella seed½ tsp. grains of paradise…

1 Injera at Home Teff, an ancient grain, is the basis of Ethiopia’s daily bread THE SOURNESS OF injera, Ethiopia’s fermented flatbread, balances the spice of the stewed meats and vegetables it’s typically used to scoop up (see “Around the Injera,” p. 92). It requires only four ingredients, and teff flour is the main one. The flour comes in dark and light varieties, but either will work in this basic recipe, meant to turn out enough for two to four diners.—Kat Craddock Injera MAKES FIVE 10-INCH FLATBREADS Active: 30 min. ● Total: 1 day Most injera batters ferment for two to three days to achieve their signature bubbles and tang. This one can be made in about one day, thanks to a bit of baking powder. It’s adapted from a recipe by…

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