Kwame Onwuachi has been busy. In June he was on Late Night With Seth Meyers cooking an admirably legit crawfish boil—corn on the cob, newspapered tables, wriggly critters, and all. A month prior, he published his first cookbook, My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef (our current Saveur Cookbook Club pick), which came on the heels of his award-winning novel, Notes From a Young Black Chef, out just a year before that. 

Between books, Onwuachi has managed to release a nail polish line with ORLY, host the James Beard Awards in Chicago, and seal the deal on a biopic portraying his life. So when a rare window opened up in Onwuachi’s agenda, we pounced at the opportunity to take stock of his trajectory. Here’s our interview.

What inspired you to write this book?

It’s every chef’s dream to have their own cookbook. I wanted to document the dishes that make me who I am, that tell my version of America. Everyone who grew up here has their own version, and this is mine. 

What surprised you most in your research?

The pantry. I guess I hadn’t realized that to do these recipes right, you need an arsenal of sauces and spices and marinades. That’s why there’s a section on them in the front of the book. 

What sauce or spice blend do you reach for the most?

My magic bullet is ginger-garlic purée. It goes good in everything. I use it to bump up a lot of dishes. You can rub it on a steak and sear it and have yourself a good time. The other thing is house spice, my blend that’s a match made in heaven. It’s my mom’s recipe. We grew up using it in lieu of salt. 

How did you choose what recipes to include?

I just listed everything I grew up eating and then wrote the recipes the way I would make them.  My father is Nigerian and Jamaican and my mother Trinidadian and Creole, so there was a lot to work with. 

What dishes in the book do you cook over and over?

Jerk chicken. It’s in-depth but it’s the most flavorful thing ever. When you make really good jerk, you understand why it’s a worldwide phenomenon. My recipe is all about attention to detail: the brine, the homemade marinade, pimento wood—these are the things that can make jerk extremely special. 

What ingredient are you most excited about right now?

Honestly? Rice [laughing]. I want it with every meal. White or joloff or fried or Mexican—rice is just it for me.

Beyond your family, what influences your cooking? 

I’m still figuring that out. I recently got into acting. I used to act when i was a kid, but I forgot about it. I’m taking acting classes to see what’ll happen. Acting—why not? We are humans on this earth for a short time. Traveling has also been important.

Tell me more about that. 

Food can be a love language. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You can connect with someone and learn about their culture and who they are by sitting down and breaking bread. I remember this lady in Thailand. I was walking past, and she was eating these clams with some type of sauce and I wanted to ask what was in them. She didn’t speak English but just offered her food to me. Sometimes you don’t need language.

Your book illustrates the extraordinary range and richness of Black food. Do you feel that anything is missing from the current conversation?

You can’t talk about American cuisine without talking about West African food. When enslaved people came here, their food came with them. American food is West African food. Jollof rice became jambalaya. Suya became barbecue. Watermelon, rice, bene seeds, okra—all of these ingredients came straight from West Africa and are the fabric of America’s culinary DNA.

Why are so many Americans unaware of those roots?

A lot of erasure of Black identity was intentional. But this book is helping to bring these things back to life.

What’s next for you, chef?

I’ve got a movie coming out. A movie about my life that starts filming soon. And you can find me in August at The Family Reunion, a Black food festival in Middleburg, Virginia.

The post The Ingredient Kwame Onwuachi Can’t Stop Cooking With Is in Your Pantry Right Now appeared first on Saveur.

According to Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, authors of the Palestinian cookbook, Falastin, preparing fish with dairy is not common in Arabic cuisine, as it’s not considered to be healthy. Therefore, tahini often steps in to fulfill the enriching role butter or cream might have otherwise played. If you’d like to get a head start on the dish, both the tahini sauce and the cooked onions can be prepared up to three days in advance.

Featured in “Palestinian Pantry Staples We Live For” by Benjamin Kemper.

The post Palestinian Baked Fish in Tahini Sauce appeared first on Saveur.

The combination of fish and tahini is hard to resist, but if you’re looking for a shortcut or want to keep the focus on the lemon, this easy recipe works just as well without the sauce.

If you do use the tahini sauce, make the whole quantity of the master recipe and save the leftovers for drizzling over all sorts of roasted vegetables, meat, salads, and fish. Most meaty white fish, such as sea bass or halibut, works just as well here, as does salmon.

Featured in: Palestinian Pantry Staples We Can’t Live Without

Equipment

• Medium Bowl
• Large Roasting Pan
• Parchment Paper
• Small Bowl
• Small Pot
• Fork

The post Roasted Cod with a Cilantro Crust appeared first on Saveur.

My copy of Jerusalem, by Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi, is a mess. Flip through it and you’ll find oil blotches, desiccated plant matter, and pages stuck together with pomegranate molasses and other miscellaneous schmutz. Like many cooks, I consistently reach for this bible of modern Israeli and Palestinian cuisine.

So when I heard that Palestinian-born Tamimi and British food writer Tara Wigley were teaming up on a Palestinian cookbook called Falastin (Ten Speed Press, June 2020), I saw my next victim, tahini stains be damned.

Falastin, the October-November pick for the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, brings together Palestinian recipes both traditional and novel, from the za’atar-topped jammy eggs of Tamimi’s youth to a blissfully unorthodox labneh cheesecake heady with cardamom and orange blossom water. Containing well over 100 recipes, the book is a workhorse, more at home on the kitchen shelf than on the coffee table. Most of the recipes come together in under an hour.

Yet as with any book from the Ottolenghi restaurant empire (Tamimi co-owns and is executive chef of six London establishments alongside Yotam Ottolenghi), Falastin is also a looker. The photography is vivid and evocative, whether you’re staring at plump, ultra-flaky sambousek (Arabic samosas) or a serene portrait of a woman Tamimi and Wigley met in the Aida refugee camp, Islam Abu Aouda, whose recipe for ravioli-like shush barak graces the meat chapter.

Between whipping up recipes like squash-saffron soup or baked fish in tahini sauce, make time to ponder the essays interspersed throughout the book, which range in subject matter from Palestinian olive oil production to the fraught politics of the Gazan fishing industry. Combined with the recipes, they portray the Palestinian nation as relatable, human, and kind, a welcome departure from the gloom-and-doom narrative dominating the news cycle.

Last week, I caught up with Tamimi and Wigley on a video call to learn more about their new release.

BK: What are the defining flavors of Palestinian food, and how do they differ by region?

ST: Because Palestine is shrinking, everyone is cooking everyone else’s food, but there are still some regional differences. In Gaza, seafood and fish are everywhere. Bethlehem is known for its cheese and bread. Green chile, dill seeds, garlic, za’atar, sour pomegranate juice, burnt aubergine, cardamom, mint, lemon: These are the flavors I grew up with.

BK: What inspired you to write this book?

TW: Jerusalem was so well-received that it was time to zoom in on Palestine. A cookbook is such a good entry point into an area’s geography, history, and politics. We wanted to write recipes for cooks not living in Palestine, to make the cuisine more practical and approachable, and to bring people closer to Palestinian culture through its food.

ST: Falastin is a “thank you” to the country that I come from. I left Palestine 23 years ago, but it is the backbone of my cooking career. I wanted to share my heritage and its food and people with the world.

BK: What sets Falastin apart from other Palestinian cookbooks?

ST: Many Palestinian cookbooks focus on the same traditional dishes. We wanted to show modern Palestine without any nostalgia. People are living there, making incredible food right now, and it all ties back to their connection to the land.

TW: There’s also the fact that men don’t cook in Palestine, and this book was written by one!

BK: Tell me more about gender roles and cooking in Palestine.

ST: When I was little, I was always kicked out of the kitchen because I was told boys didn’t belong there. When I was 18 and decided to become a chef, my dad disapproved and said that it was a woman’s job. So to learn to cook Palestinian food, of course I have to rely on a lot of women. They are the keepers of the knowledge, passed down from mother to daughter.

BK: What surprised you most in researching this book?

TW: Coming from a rushed London world, I’m always surprised by anyone willing to give their time to a stranger. That happens often in Palestine. When you sit down to a four-hour lunch that your hosts started cooking the day before, it’s extremely humbling. It sounds silly, but I was unprepared for the amount of fun I had in Palestine, hanging out with locals, considering the grim backdrop one comes to expect.

BK: But that grim backdrop exists, right? One million people are facing hunger in Gaza currently, and the U.S. has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in aid in recent years.

ST: It’s not all gloomy. With Palestine, you get a lot of black and white messages, but there’s a lot of gray. You can’t rely on politicians to change minds—you have to go there, see the place, meet the people, eat the food. Palestinians aren’t sitting around crying about their situation. They’re switched on, helping one another, and trying to make things better for themselves. Everyone should learn about what’s going on there with an open mind. It’s not about taking sides.

TW: Despite the grim circumstances, Palestinians are hopeful and doing exciting, enterprising things with food. We give that contradiction space in the book. Words and recipes and stories are important, and we did not take that responsibility lightly. Some stories in Falastin are meant to be celebrated, while others are meant to sober people up. People always talk about the links between food and identity, but I didn’t fully get it until I spent time in Palestine. Chicken mussakhan is traditionally made with olive oil when it’s freshly pressed and abundant. So the fact that the olive trees are being threatened [by the construction of Israeli settlements] is also a threat to the culture. It’s all connected.

BK: When we’re able to travel normally again, do you recommend people visit Palestine?

TW: Yes! It’s not a massive region; you can see Bethlehem, Nazareth, and other key sights in a short amount of time.

ST: There’s lots to see if you know where to look. The problem is, most tourists are whisked out of Palestinian areas and not given a chance to engage with locals, which doesn’t help the country’s image. Amos Trust gives good culinary tours.

BK: What are your favorite dishes to cook from this book?

TW: I keep going back to the little gem salad [on the cover]. People start eating it politely, and then before you know it, everyone’s digging out the aubergine cream with abandon. Oh, and I always have a jar of shatta chile paste in the fridge.

ST: Chicken mussakhan is one of those magical, show-stopper things that doesn’t take long to make. It’s a spiced chicken, roasted till crispy with lots of caramelized red onion, sumac, olive oil, and pine nuts. Naan can even stand in for the traditional flatbread. Mussakhan embodies the Palestinian way of eating—everyone around the same plate, grabbing a bit of bread and chicken with your hands.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post ‘Falastin’: Equal Parts Cookbook and Conversation Starter appeared first on Saveur.

“So many people in this area grow rhubarb in their yards that the local grocery stores don’t even bother to sell it in the spring,” writes Amy Thielen in The New Midwestern Table, our current Saveur Cookbook Club pick.

The casually written line has this quarantined Manhattanite daydreaming of a backyard flooded with pink stalks, like plastic flamingos in Florida. Not least because I had to go to four different grocery stores in New York City to finally find rhubarb, and in asking various employees if they had it, learned that many people up here don’t even know what it is.

“Rhu-barb?” I was met with blank faces.

It doesn’t help that the seasonal window for these magenta-red petioles lasts just a few months, usually from April to June (unless, of course, you’re harvesting 25 pounds of them from your yard). But perhaps that’s exactly what makes Thielen’s pink rhubarb-lime icebox pie so appealing: It’s a celebration of the end of winter, and of the bounty of the warmer months.

“This recipe came to me one spring,” she tells me in an email. Inspired by key lime pie, she wondered what would happen if she used tart-pink rhubarb in addition to citrus. I’m grateful she did, because what you end up with is a custard that tastes more complex—fruitier, almost floral and apple-like—than if it were made with just lime juice, sweetened condensed milk, and egg yolks (the usual). The filling, bolstered by a 10-minute rhubarb compote, is still pleasurably sour—especially as a contrast against the sweet, cooling pompadour of whipped cream on top and the buttery shortbread crust beneath. But stacked against a regular key lime pie? This spring version is, for me, the clear winner.

It’s prettier, too. Store-bought is more than fine, in this case: Hothouse rhubarb from the market tends to be vibrantly red, which dyes the custard base a glorious fuschia. Not that you should worry if you can only pluck the stalks from your luscious, Edenic garden in the Midwest; the locally grown stuff, usually more green with just a blush of pink (or none at all), will still taste wonderful. But if you’re greedy for pink, Thielen suggests in her headnote a way to give your filling a louder hue: “add a drop of red food coloring…although I happen to love the natural blushing mauve color.” (Alternatively, as Test Kitchen director Kat Craddock suggests, you could even add a small chunk of fresh beetroot during the stewing process, then take it out before processing.) I was tempted to do so—as pink is my favorite color—but decided to leave my filling, as well. Nature, in this case, needs no embellishments; it’s so beautiful already.

“I feel like this pie has a lot of synesthesia for me,” Thielen adds. “It reminds me of high school in the late ‘80s, the Pretty in Pink era. Denim miniskirts, white keds, mauve plastic bead necklaces. My hair—everyone’s hair—was a little too big, like the whipped cream, bangs crested into a frozen wave.”

Who wouldn’t want to eat that?

The post Pretty in Pink: An Icebox Pie to Celebrate the Midwest’s Local Rhubarb appeared first on Saveur.

As a Saveur reader, you’ve probably patted spiced lamb into Turkish-style kofte and tempted fate unmolding a saffrony Persian tahdig. Maybe you’ve dabbled in Georgian khachapuri or developed a predilection for real-deal Russian blini. In other words, you dig the food of Armenia’s neighbors. But how many Armenian recipes are in your repertoire? If you can’t tell your khash from your khorovats, we have good news: Lavash (Chronicle Books, 2019), this month’s pick for Saveur Cookbook Club, is the Armenian cuisine primer you’ve been waiting for.

Lavash, published in October, is a joint effort by writers and recipe developers Kate Leahy and Ara Zada, and photographer John Lee. (If Leahy’s name sounds familiar, that’s because she authored Burma Superstar, Cookie Love, and other popular titles.) All three food-industry pros had been blown away by Armenian cuisine at some point or another—Leahy via a college thesis on Armenian diaspora foodways, Zada through his Egyptian-Armenian roots, and Lee by way of a food photography workshop he taught in Armenia at the TUMO Center—and wondered why so many of the cuisine’s thrilling dishes weren’t better known. Realizing there was no Armenian cookbook on the market by a major company, they found each other and got to work on this gorgeously shot and meticulously researched cookbook.

So just what exactly is Armenian cuisine?

In contrast to, say, Georgian or Russian cuisine, Armenian food is impossible to sum up in a few key flavors or signature dishes. Complicated geopolitcs, countless migrations, and, most recently, the Armenian Genocide (1914 to 1923)—in which the Ottomans killed some 1.5 million Armenians—have all contributed to the splintering of Armenian culinary traditions. Dishes that grace, say, Armenian-American tables in Los Angeles, such as manti (tiny lamb-stuffed dumplings) and choreg (a sweet bread flavored with aromatic cherry kernels called mahleb), are virtually unrecognizable in Armenia today, where Soviet influences (e.g., mayonnaise-y salads, sour cream, pickles) are acutely present.

Faced with the impossible task of defining what Armenian food is (and is not), Leahy, Zada, and Lee took a step back and moved the goalposts. Instead of penning the be-all-end-all bible of Armenian cuisine, they would fly to Armenia to learn how people cook in the mother country. The book would be a snapshot of the culinary zeitgeist of a nation reinventing itself after the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 2018, which upended a Russian-backed oligarchy and installed the Western-leaning journalist-cum-politician Nikol Pashinyan as prime minister.

With Armenia looming large on “Places to Travel in 2020” roundups, there’s no better time than now to get the skinny on the nation’s food and its untapped potential. To that end, we sat down with Leahy and Zada to ask about their favorite dishes and to hear more about what they learned while collecting recipes.

BK: Let’s address the elephant in the room. Does real-deal lavash have anything to do with the seeded crackers of my suburban American youth?

Ara Zada: It actually might, but let’s backtrack. Lavash in Armenia is a flatbread cooked on the wall of a tonir, or clay oven. It is at every table at every meal. It’s soft and slightly sour from a bit of so-called “old dough” (ttkhmor). In the winter, when it’s too cold to go outside to light up the tonir, families rely on dried lavash, which they’ll spritz with water and wrap in a towel to rehydrate—and, bam, you have your soft lavash back. So maybe this crunchy lavash has its roots in that tradition.

BK: Tell me more about this “old dough” method and about how lavash is made.

Kate Leahy: In the villages, bakers will always hold back one piece of dough to mix into the next batch. The direct translation of ttkhmor is “sour dough,” so you get the idea. We approximate this method with a pre-ferment of flour, water, and a pinch of yeast. When old dough is not used, it’s the missing link—you really need it to give the lavash its flavor and texture. Those little blisters on good lavash? That’s the ttkhmor at work.

To make lavash, you mix the old dough with water, flour, salt, and a little oil. You let that rise and portion it into balls, which actually keep in the fridge for several days. After the second rise, you roll out each ball into a thin oblong shape. In Armenia this is where the tonir would come in, but we replicate that ancient baking method with an overturned wok. A cast-iron griddle also works, though not quite as well. At first it can be tricky to roll out the dough and get familiar with your heat source, but don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it. The first lavash in a fresh batch is never pretty.

AZ: In Armenia, they say that the first lavash is like your first love—it goes in too hot and burns out quickly.

BK: Say I want to impress some guests. What dishes in the book are the biggest show-stoppers?

KL: For me it’s got to be jingalov hats. These flatbreads are filled to the brim with fresh herbs and greens, and I’m convinced they’re the breakout star of the book. They’re beautiful and vegan and a great way to eat a lot of greens. And they’re forgiving: You don’t have to scour the ends of the earth for obscure Armenian plants—fresh herbs, chard, and scallions, and you’re good to go!

AZ: Hands-down, ghapama. It’s a whole pumpkin stuffed with rice, dried fruit, nuts, and honey. You slice it down the side and it sort of spiders open. It’s sweet and savory and a great cold-weather dish.

BK: What about weeknight fare?

AZ: I keep going back to trout wrapped in lavash. It’s like making fish en papillote, and you can even use store-bought lavash with success. You just stuff the fish with butter and tarragon or pretty much any herbs you have on hand, roll it up in lavash, blast it in a hot oven for 15 minutes, and it’s done. The fish is perfectly steamed when it’s finished, and you can soak up the juices with the crusty bread. I eat the whole thing with my hands.

Then there’s panrkhash. To make it you tear up some old lavash, layer it with some cheese and caramelized onions and water, and bake it. It’s basically Armenian mac ‘n cheese. I make it for friends after football games. Just throw out some forks and let everybody dig in. And yeah, we add hot sauce because it’s L.A.

BK: How did you go about collecting recipes?

KL: At first I was a little stressed, like, how are we going to get all these recipes? But Ara told me not to worry because in Armenia the hospitality is second to none. He was right. We’d walk into a bakery and they’d just hand over whatever recipe we needed. In Goris, a town in southern Armenia, for instance, we were put in touch with a grandmother who was happy to show us how to cook a bunch of dishes as long as we paid for the ingredients. Goris is famous for its beans, and she made beans some 10 different ways in her tiny apartment. It was incredible. The fried bean lavash triangles in the book [p. 117 in the book; filled with mashed beans and fresh herbs] are her recipe.

BK: What’s Armenian food like in Armenia today?

KL: It’s definitely in flux. You have lots of Western Armenian dishes making inroads in cities like Yerevan because there are Syrian Armenians relocating there for obvious reasons. Lahmajo, a meat-topped flatbread, is one such recipe. But there are plenty of historical recipes that haven’t changed in millennia—harissa, for example. In Armenia, harissa has nothing to do with the pepper paste; it’s probably the original medieval porridge and has just four ingredients: chicken, wheat berries, water, salt.

BK: Why do you think people should add a trip to Armenia to their bucket lists?

AZ: If you like wildlife, culture, scenery, and history, and someplace that’s super affordable—we’re talking $40 for the fanciest soup-to-nuts meal—then Armenia is for you. Food-wise, everything is sourced from right around you, even in cities. Bread is made in the bakery next door, trout is naturally farmed in ponds out back, and pickles and preserves are often homemade.

KL: Going to Armenia today is like stepping back in time and going to Italy 70 years ago. You can have a really authentic travel experience in which you feel like you’re getting tons of culture without dodging selfie sticks. It’s rapidly changing, so now is the time to go.

Lavash is the February 2020 pick for Saveur’s Cookbook Club. Head over to our Facebook group or follow #saveurcookbookclub on social media to join in the fun—or just follow along!

The post A New Cookbook Finally Gives Armenian Food Its Due appeared first on Saveur.