Every time Steve Sando, the founder of California-based heirloom bean company Rancho Gordo, heads down to Mexico, he encounters a new kind of pozole. “I remember one I tasted in Oaxaca where the cooks used some puréed hominy to thicken the broth and cooked it with goat meat,” Sando says in a rapturous daze. “I still think about it to this day.”

After more than 40 trips across the country over 35 years, the bowls have added up: In Michoacán, a broth was stained green with fresh chiles, tomatillos, and ground pumpkin seeds. In Guerrero, a pale white variation was garnished with pork cracklings. In Acapulco, an unusual rojo sassed with tomatoes was fortified with shellfish instead of the typical pork. “Whichever one I ate last is my favorite,” he says with a chuckle.

An ancient stew of corn, fish or long-simmered meat, and a garden’s worth of vegetable toppings, pozole is Mexican party food. It’s the kind of labor-intensive but universally beloved dish to break out for holidays and special occasions. There is no known original pozole or single birthplace; it dates back to indigenous religious festivals well before the Hispanic conquest, and early Spanish texts shed little light on its history. As Mayan and other civilizations traded goods across ancient Mexico, pozole migrated along with them, even up north to native tribes in the American Southwest, where the cooks incorporated the local practice of roasting green chiles and it is now spelled “posole.” Today, Mexican pozole comes in red, green, and white varieties, and every region has its preferred proteins and garnishes. But the corn is nonnegotiable.

The corn in question is nixtamal, aka hominy, the result of boiling dried corn kernels with alkaline wood ash or slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, or simply “cal”) to render the grains more nutritious and digestible. The Nahautl people termed it pozolli, and the name stuck, both for the corn and the soup made with it. Run that hominy through a grinder and you have masa, the dough used for tortillas and tamales. Leave it whole and, well, pozole (the dish) is so good that it’s pretty much become the only way Mexican cooks use pozole (the ingredient) in recipes.

Sando has made pozole perfection his kitchen mission. It includes tinkering with various recipes, as he’s been doing since his first bowl in Guadalajara in 1984, and even improving the nixtamal at the center of the dish. Sando is one of the few evangelists for dried hominy, a shelf-stable nixtamal that can be soaked overnight and simmered for pozole in a fraction of the time it takes to start from scratch with dried corn. The ingredient is a rarity in Mexico, where most cooks either patiently simmer their own nixtamal or, increasingly, buy it prepared in cans.

In his new cookbook, The Rancho Gordo Pozole Book, Sando shares a recipe for a classic rojo with smoky ancho and fruity guajillo chiles. Even with dried nixtamal, the dish is a bit of a production. The key, Sando says, is to break down pozole to its core elements.

Get the recipe for Pozole Rojo »

Top Quality Corn

In pozolerias and traditional Mexican kitchens, nixtamalizing corn is a time-consuming daily chore. In the U.S. and more time-pressed Mexican homes, canned prepared hominy is the norm. But what the cook gains in convenience, they lose in rich corny flavor and dense, creamy texture. Canned hominy also doesn’t give the broth the same heft as homemade. A third option, and Sando’s favorite, is dried hominy: nixtamalized corn kernels that have been hulled and redehydrated.

Sando first learned about prepared dried hominy through Osage Nation member Raymond Red Corn, who made and sold it in Oklahoma through his company, Red Corn Native Foods. “I immediately wondered why everyone didn’t make it this way,” Sando says. “The dried nixtamal had so much more flavor than the canned.” Sando started selling Red Corn’s dried nixtamal in 2004, and in 2014, Rancho Gordo started producing its own. (Red Corn Native Foods has since stopped making and selling the ingredient for unrelated reasons.)

You can find dried hominy in some well-stocked Mexican markets, where it’s often sold as mote blanco or white-corn posole, or order it online at Rancho Gordo or Los Chileros de Nuevo Mexico.

A Mix of Meats

Pork is by far the most common meat used for pozole, and the way Sando sees it, the more parts, the better. Historically, pozole was a cele­bratory dish made for fat times, often to coincide with an animal’s slaughter. In place of using a whole pig’s head—which Sando says will make the most gelatinous stock you’ve ever eaten—a trotter, ear, snout, or a combination of a few parts gives the broth impressive body and flavor. Ask your butcher to split a trotter lengthwise to better diffuse its collagen into your stew. You can add pork shoulder for heft and spoonable meat chunks, or use the pork shoulder and ribs alone for a leaner broth.

A Dense Broth

“Once you add all the condiments, it’s so complex, it doesn’t really need many aromatics,” Sando says about pozole’s base, which he actually makes in two installments. He cooks the hominy in a separate pot from the meat so he can control the doneness of both elements more precisely. The corn simmers with just an onion for flavoring, while the pork broth works with a mix of onion, garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorns.

The pozole rojo below relies on ancho chiles for depth and heat, and guajillos for color and brightness. Despite pozole’s many regional variations, most red versions that Sando has tasted use that same combination. Adding the chiles at the end helps preserve their flavor.

Toppings Galore

Classic pozole toppings include radishes, diced onion, limes, and Mexican oregano, but as with everything else about this dish, variations abound. Sando is partial to adding green cabbage sliced razor-thin, but his friends in Mexico City find the idea ludicrous; they use iceberg lettuce prepared similarly. In parts of Guerrero, you can get your pozole blanco topped with crispy pork rinds. Whatever your choice of toppings, endeavor to have a lot of them, and a mix of textures and flavors. This is party food, after all. It’s supposed to take over the table.

The post How to Make Pozole, Mexico’s Greatest Party Food appeared first on Saveur.

Sunday afternoon on the internet, League of Kitchens instructor extraordinaire Mab Abbasgholizadeh was teaching us how to make baghali ghatogh—a Persian dish of beans, eggs, and dill—over Zoom. Problem is, we all had different kinds of beans. Instead of the dried favas listed in the recipe shared by the multicultural cooking school, my six classmates and I were making do with an array of great northerns and cannelinis, each cooking at their own rate. (What is cooking this year if not a minefield of substitutions?) Mab, undeterred, asked us to present our beans to our laptop cameras and give them a squeeze. “Yours are almost there,” she said to one student while squinting at her screen. “These will need some more time.” It was surprisingly intimate, us squeezing our beans for Mab’s approval, separated by hundreds of miles yet simultaneously inhabiting the same virtual kitchen. I could only grin.

Like every other cooking school in 2020, the League of Kitchens had to reinvent its business model to survive. Unlike every other cooking school, the League’s online classes are so cleverly designed that they’re actually worthy substitutes for the real thing, and in some cases, improvements on the old form. You couldn’t ask for a better gift to give a food lover, especially one you want to connect with over great distances. In the Before Times, classes were only available in New York City; now, founder Lisa Gross notes, friends and family in disparate cities are coming together in a virtual kitchen.

This is a tall order, considering the League’s original mandate: You show up at the home of an immigrant auntie and cook with her—in her kitchen, with her pots and macramé trivets, listening to her stories—for five or six hours. You and a small group of classmates get to truly know her, and each other, as you make and break bread. For those who never got to study at their own grandparents’ apron strings, it is a benediction, and with astonishing breadth: The League includes culinary ambassadors from India, Uzbekistan, Greece, Japan, and Nepal, to name a few.

At the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, Gross, herself an immigrant’s daughter, took virtual classes from seven different online cooking schools to get a sense of the competition and how she could improve the old formula. League of Kitchens’ online classes ($60 for a two-and-a-half-hour class) are small, and students are asked to keep their cameras on and to share questions verbally, rather than through a chat window. A staff member sits in, directing the video feed with wide shots of the instructor and close-ups of cooking prep. The last 15 minutes of class are devoted to a virtual dinner party, where students eat together on camera, kibitzing about their meals, and chatting with the instructor.

“There really is a sense of interaction,” Gross says. “You’re live-coached from start to finish through new dishes that may be too complicated to do on your own.” It’s one thing to peel potatoes and press ma’amoul into molds under the steady, in-person guidance of an experienced cook. It’s another to be responsible for the entire meal yourself, with WiFi as your only link to that wellspring of knowledge. But what the latter lacks in physical connection, it makes up for in personal empowerment. Mab gives us the strength to go it alone.

The post The League of Kitchens’ Online Classes are the Multicultural Cooking School You’ve Been Waiting For appeared first on Saveur.

Frozen dessert technology has come a long way since the days when Emperor Nero would send Roman slaves into the mountains to harvest blocks of ice, shave it down, and sweeten it with honey. In 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia patented the first ice cream freezer, but it required relentless hand-cranking and relied on rock salt to lower the temperature of the ice. Today, affordable entry-level ice cream makers can churn out a noticeably superior product compared with mass industrial brands, and are as simple to operate as a blender.

Yes, an ice cream maker is an investment in money and counter space, but if you’re a true ice cream lover, it’s a small price to pay for the good homemade stuff. Here are my recommendations—honed from years of home ice cream churning—for the best machines and other tools for your personal sundae bar.

The Entry Level Machine

Heami Lee

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Almost all ice cream machines function the same: They rapidly chill a base while agitating it to incorporate air. This keeps the ice crystals that are forming inside as small as possible. Which machine you need largely depends on how much ice cream you plan to make.

Cuisinart’s entry-level is compact, foolproof, and makes an excellently textured product. The downside is prep time. Its freezing power comes from a gel-filled bowl that must be frozen 8 hours in advance of churning and refrozen after each 1- or 2-quart churn.

The Upgrade

Heami Lee

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Breville’s Smart Scoop has a built-in cooling element so you can spin batches back to back (though, for best results, pre-cool base in the churning chamber for five minutes between projects). It also churns at a slower speed and whips less air into the base for a subtly denser and creamier result.

The Scoop

Heami Lee

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Disher-style scoops are popular for their quick-release sweeper arms, but the old-school aluminum kind, like Zeroll makes, is still the best for the job. Its edge is perfectly angled to cut through ice cream (twist, don’t dig), and with no moving parts it can never break. And did you know the handle is full of a conductive fluid that transfers heat from your hand for easier scooping?

The Container

Heami Lee

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Yes, containers matter! For storage, you want a long and shallow plastic container, which freezes ice cream fast, essential for preventing iciness. Rubbermaid’s 5-cup Dry Food containers are stackable, completely odorless, and conveniently fit a quart of ice cream.

The Thermometer

Heami Lee

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If you’re making a thicker, custard-style batch of ice cream, you run the risk of overcooking your eggs, curdling the base while adding unwelcome eggy flavors. A quality thermometer (the Thermapen is best-in-class for accuracy, speed, and readability) will help you locate the ice-cream-custard sweet spot: 170 degrees. It’ll also tell you when your chilled ice cream is ready to churn, no guesswork required.

The Manual

Clarkson Potter

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Chicago pastry chef Dana Cree is a bonafide ice cream obsessive. Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream is her comprehensive guide to understanding just how the stuff works and includes recipes like toasted hay and pineapple-jasmine that will get you itching to churn, too.

The post The Best Ice Cream Maker, Scoop, and Other Tools for Your Home Sundae Bar appeared first on Saveur.

Ice cream is a miracle. You start with milk, one of the most chemically complex foods we eat. Add sugars to reduce its freezing point, and egg proteins and emulsifiers to obstruct ice crystals. Then you stick this gloppy stuff in a portable freezer and pump it full of air until spinning butterfat globules coalesce to give it form. That’s bananas, but somehow it works. Weirdest of all: Making it yourself is actually very easy.

Frozen dessert technology has come a long way since the days when Emperor Nero would send Roman slaves into the mountains to harvest blocks of ice, shave it down, and sweeten it with honey. In 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia patented the first ice cream freezer, but it required relentless hand-cranking and relied on rock salt to lower the temperature of the ice. Today, affordable entry-level ice cream makers can churn out a noticeably superior product compared with mass industrial brands, and are as simple to operate as a blender.

You don’t need professional equipment to make great ice cream

As Dana Cree, author of the ice cream bible Hello, My Name is Ice Cream attests, professional-quality ice cream doesn’t require thousands of dollars in hardware. But it does demand understanding how ice cream actually works, and using that knowledge in the war against bland flavors and icy textures.

After making ice cream for years and developing a hundred-plus flavors, here are 10 sweet tricks I’ve picked up that can help your homemade ice cream, no matter the flavor.

1) Chill Your Base Thoroughly

Whether you’re making a light and fresh eggless recipe or a dense and creamy egg-enriched custard, the first step to properly creamy ice cream starts before you churn it. Before you stick it in the machine, make sure it’s thoroughly chilled, under 50°F, which you can measure with a thermometer (see below) or guesstimate with an overnight chill in the fridge.

In many cases, “aging” your base like this improves its flavor and texture, as ingredients combine and fat globules partially coalesce to form more stable air bubbles as the ice cream churns. At the very least, chilling your base ensures it’ll churn into ice cream as fast as possible, which translates into small ice crystals for creamier ice cream. Chilling your base also gives you the added advantage of tasting it in close-to-final form, so you can make final flavor adjustments.

2) Boost Butterfat for Volume

Structurally speaking, ice cream is basically bread. They’re both foams—networks of compounds connecting millions of tiny air bubbles—and as you’d do with a bread dough, you can tweak an ice cream’s formula to adjust its texture. Enriching a bread dough with butter will make the loaf more tender. The same is true for ice cream; the more butterfat you add (i.e., the more cream as opposed to milk), the richer the ice cream will be. Butterfat also adds texture insurance against iciness, especially handy if your base has watery elements like fruit purée.

Paradoxically, more butterfat also translates to a lighter, fluffier ice cream, which is why super dense gelato relies more heavily on milk than cream.

3) Take Command of Alt-Sweeteners

To continue our bread analogy: As bakers add sugar to bread to keep it soft and moist, ice cream makers alter consistency with sugar. By binding with liquids, sugar molecules prevent an ice cream base from fully freezing into crunchy ice. That is, the more sugar you add, the softer and less icy your batch will be.

The kind of sugar you add also matters. High-viscosity liquid sweeteners like honey, glucose syrup, and yes, good ‘ol corn syrup make for a more viscous base, which translates into chewy richness in churned ice cream. Substituting a small portion of the plain table sugar in your recipe with one of these high-viscosity sweeteners can have a big impact on the final texture.

When it comes to sugar, viscosity isn’t the only thing that matters; sweetness does too. Honey, for instance, is sweeter than table sugar, and it’s easy for an ice cream with too much honey to a) overwhelm the flavor of everything else and b) turn the ice cream cloying. That’s why I’m a big fan of corn syrup, which is only a third as sweet as table sugar, adds chewy viscosity, and allows me to boost the sugar level of a recipe for better texture without overwhelming the ice cream with sweetness.

Remember: Corn syrup you buy in supermarkets is a far cry from the high-fructose stuff that goes into processed food. It’s literally just refined sugar from corn as opposed to sugarcane or beets. No need to fear it. But if you’d prefer to avoid corn syrup, glucose (powdered or in syrup form) works great too.

No-Cook Saffron-Orange Ice Cream

Many manuals call for adding a shot or two of liquor to your ice cream base as added antifreeze insurance. This works, but you should know what it actually means, and how under certain circumstances it can hurt your ice cream more than help.

Alcohol does reduce the freezing point of ice cream, which translates into a softer scoop. But it’s not a creamer scoop, or a more stable scoop, or necessarily a better scoop: just softer, without any increased body. Ice creams with alcohol melt faster than those without, and those with too much booze never fully freeze. Which is why I’d much rather adjust the butterfat or sugar content of my recipe before I start messing around with booze to make it creamier.

Steep it for Killer Custard and Ice Cream

That said, liquor does have an important place in the ice cream maker’s toolkit. Think of whiskey, rum, or cocktail bitters as another kind of vanilla extract. Both involve potent aromatics dissolved in alcohol and can lend complex background flavor to a simple base. So in any ice cream recipe that calls for flavored extracts like vanilla or mint, try substituting an equal amount of your favorite cocktail bitters. (I’m a big fan of orange, Peychaud’s, Angostura, and saffron for this.)

You don’t need professional equipment to make great ice cream

If you’re making a thicker, custard-style batch of ice cream, you run the risk of overcooking your eggs, curdling the base while adding unwelcome eggy flavors. Many recipes call for you check the custard’s doneness by seeing how it coats the back of a spoon and holds a line when swiped with your finger, which I find both crazy inaccurate (there’s a wide range of temperatures at which this will happen, not all good for ice cream) and unhygienic.

A quality thermometer (the Thermapen is best-in-class for accuracy, speed, and readability) will help you locate the ice-cream-custard sweet spot: 170 degrees. It’ll also tell you when your chilled ice cream is ready to churn, no guesswork required.

Sour Cream Ice Cream with Strawberries and Brown Sugar

For distinct swirls, don’t swirl at all—layer. As you transfer a batch to its container, alternate ice cream with drizzles of butterscotch, caramel, chocolate sauce, or pomegranate molasses. Doing so will keep your swirls neat and tidy; the swirls will naturally form as you scoop.

8) Sieve Your Chopped-Up Mix-ins

If you want to add nuts to your ice cream as chunks, toast them in a dry pan to boost their flavor. Then chop them to the desired size and shake them around in a sifter to dislodge any shards and skin. Sieving is a small step but an important one to keep gritty schmutz out of your ice cream. Follow the same step for chocolate chips, semi-hard candies—anything that produces small crumbs.

Bored With Ordinary Vanilla? Give Pistachio Gelato a Shot

Starchy sweets like cookies and popcorn will turn soggy in ice cream over time. To keep them crisp, enrobe them in chocolate or candy them in sugar. Or try these pre-enrobed options, guaranteed great in ice cream: Cracker Jacks and Pocky.

Raspberry Ice Cream

Adding hunks of fresh fruit to churned ice cream is a risky proposition, one that generally leads to icy crystallized fruit that tastes more like freezer than summertime. Generally I prefer to add fruit as a topping to avoid the problem, but there are times that just won’t do. So for cherries, strawberries, and other small fruits, cut them into small pieces and macerate them in sugar and your favorite liquor (Grand Marnier is nice) for a couple of hours as antifreeze insurance. Or use a reliable premade: Luxardo’s maraschino cherries.

The post 10 Sweet Tricks for Making Better Ice Cream appeared first on Saveur.

Gelato is a totem.

Yes, it’s a dessert, but at this point in the collective American unconscious, it’s also an idea. An aspiration. Gelato is the sophisticated European answer to everything crassly American. More pure. More worldly, yet too good for this world. Gelato is everywhere now, but the mystique remains. The idea of the perfect gelato experience still feels rare. And actually making it? Unattainable.

I admit to being a perpetrator of this magical thinking. Despite owning three ice cream machines and spending my Friday nights churning up new flavors on a whim. I’ve made soft serve. Sorbet. Frozen yogurt. Midwestern custard. But gelato’s always seemed out of reach.

Truth is, this has more to do with the Italian delight in yelling at other people for screwing up their food—see: Entire Town Mad at a Chef for Putting Garlic in His Pasta Sauce—than any innate difficulty making gelato. Gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream, and if you can make boxed brownie mix, you can make ice cream.

The key to making great gelato? Knowing what it is and how to overcome its limitations.

What’s the Difference Between Gelato and Ice Cream?

In broad strokes, we all know that gelato is denser and richer than American ice cream. Its flavor is intense and it forms swirly folds rather than pert round scoops. But what does that really mean, and how does it happen? There are three big factors at work:

Fat

Fat: American ice cream has way more butterfat—that is, fat from cream and milk—than gelato. Legally speaking, the FDA requires ice cream to be at least 10% by weight to be labeled as ice cream. Super premium ice cream brands climb as high as 16%, and home recipes—which rely on less efficient machines that require more texture insurance—can climb above 20%. By comparison, Italian law requires gelato contain a mere 3.5% butterfat. It can go higher than that, but doesn’t need to.

Cold fat tastes like pretty much…nothing. It coats and dulls the tongue, impeding the sensation of flavor. Since gelato’s so light in fat, it tastes more intense. The flavor hits you first, not the dairy.

Air

Air: Butterfat also affects texture; the more butterfat an ice cream mix contains, the more air it’s able to absorb during churning, which translates into a billowy scoop that holds its shape and, paradoxically, registers in the mouth as super light. (Consider the light-as-air texture of whipped cream compared to the coarser froth on a carton of shaken milk.)

Since gelato’s so light in fat, it doesn’t suck in much air during the churning process. American ice cream can double in volume during churning, ballooning up with air. Gelato’s overrun, in ice cream speak, is much lower, resulting in an ice cream that feels more dense and rich—because it is. But since that richness is less dependent on fat, gelato melts fast and clean on the tongue.

Temperature

Temperature: When you order a scoop from an ice cream shop, it’s likely sitting in a service freezer that hovers around 0 to -10 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which hard-pack American ice cream is scoopable but keeps its shape.

Gelato’s served much warmer—a good 10 to 20 degrees—which helps keep it soft and dreamy despite its lower butterfat. Cold also dulls the tongue, and gelato’s warmer serving temperature makes its flavor that much more immediate and aromatic.

The result? A scoop that’s potent and pure-tasting and dense but not heavy.

Bringing Gelato Home

Once you understand the basic principles, the rest is just plugging in numbers. Where most home ice cream recipes call for a high proportion of cream to milk, my pistachio gelato recipe uses a 2:1 ratio of whole milk to cream. And to compensate for the lower fat content, I throw in some egg yolks and a fair amount of sugar to help keep ice crystals at bay.

If you’re a particular kind of ice cream nerd, you might read that above paragraph, dart over to the recipe, plug it into this butterfat calculator, then come back here and ask, What gives? That’s a recipe with 10% butterfat! And you’re using so many egg yolks. How dare you call this gelato?

Take a minute. Breathe. Good? Good.

Remember what I said at the beginning of this long story, how gelato’s just the Italian word for ice cream? Well, just as American ice cream comes in all shapes and styles, so does gelato. The broad differences hold, but if you drive your way across Italy eating ice cream (not a bad idea), you’ll notice that the gelato changes from place to place.

In Sicily, what some consider to be the empire of ice cream, gelato tends toward milk to the extreme, often eschewing cream entirely, and it often excludes egg yolks altogether, thickening the base with cornstarch instead. But if you head up north, where dairy cows roam all over and there’s a lot of cream floating around, guess what? The gelato gets creamier. More eggs may enter the picture.

Because of course gelato is a many-splendored thing. Just as there’s no one Authentic Italian Pasta to Rule Them All, there’s no one way to make gelato. Hell, Meredith Kurtzman, one of the greatest gelato makers in the world, makes a ridiculously delicious olive oil gelato with a whopping 10 egg yolks per batch. And if eggs and cream are okay with Meredith, they’re good enough for the rest of us.

You can use this pistachio base, minus the pistachio, as a template for all your gelato flavors. Will it bring to mind that perfect spoonful you can’t forget on that sun-dappled day you strolled down the cobblestoned streets of Milan as a gorgeous Italian winked at you? That’s between you and your god. But will it be sitting in your freezer come 3 a.m. when you’re in need of a middle-of-the-night spoonful of cold, creamy comfort on a swampy summer night?

You better believe it.

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More Tips for Gelato Greatness

Don’t skimp on ingredients. A cliché, but true here. Gelato’s low butterfat leaves no place for subpar stuff. In the case of pistachio, buy the best pistachio paste you can afford. Agrimontana from Sicily is my favorite.

Let it thaw. If your freezer runs cold, your gelato will be hard to scoop after hardening. Thaw it in the fridge for 10 to 15 minutes before serving until it loosens up.

Eat it fast. Gelato isn’t meant to last, and one of the reasons Italian gelato tastes so good is because it’s fresh. Extended time in home freezers causes the ice cream to melt and refreeze, forming crunchy ice crystals. Eat yours within two days of churning, but ideally the day it’s made. If you have leftovers stored for longer, you’re better off melting the gelato down entirely and churning it again.

The post How to Make Real-Deal Italian Gelato at Home appeared first on Saveur.

Theresa takes a sip, then diplomatically nods her head this way and that and says to me, “This is all right. It has the dark roast, but not the rich base flavor I like in Tieguanyin.”

“All right” for Theresa Wong is still top of the line for most tea drinkers, but there are dozens of teahouses in Maokong like this one, and we didn’t fly 18 hours to Taiwan, then ride the Taipei subway to the end of the line and take a gondola up a mountain, for “all right.”

Theresa is the owner of T Shop, a devout but welcoming tea room in New York. She’s here to meet farmers, visit teahouses, and sample as many teas as she can in search of a few exceptional batches worth adding to her collection of Taiwan’s prized oolongs.

Black tea leaves are fully oxidized before they’re dried. Green tea leaves are completely unoxidized. Oolong teas lie somewhere in between, and they’re the most labor-intensive teas to make. Every step of processing—withering, bruising, resting, rolling, drying, and roasting—has to be done just so to coax the right balance of sweetness, body, flavor, and fragrance out of the leaves. In Taiwan, this isn’t just an industry; it’s an art form.

We’re not alone on the road: Tea tourism here is a national pastime, the Asian equivalent of wine tasting trips in the West, and one that draws thousands of local—as well as Chinese and Japanese—tea drunks to hike the lush countryside, then sip some of the world’s most distinctive tea in farmers’ quaint tasting rooms. That may mean nutty, sesame-tinged Dong Ding; or a verdant green Shan Lin Xi loaded with woodsy, tropical aromas; or prized vintages of aged tea that some obsessive has hoarded for decades.

Though Taiwanese tea began with mainland Chinese cultivars and traditions, over the past 150 years it’s developed into a culture and style all its own. Pristine high-elevation farmland, ample government support, and innovative processing methods all make Taiwan a standard-bearer in the global tea market. And a high-speed rail system helps visitors get around easily—it takes all of two hours with a bus transfer to reach the famed tea mountains of Nantou County from Taipei, their misty peaks a world away from the city’s swampy haze.

The most difficult part of a tea trip is fitting in enough food between all the shops; a mere five meals a day don’t suffice to properly binge on the local fare. Oily pancakes draw crowds in Taipei, but out in tea country, herb-stuffed chickens roast streetside in clay ovens, then get doused in their drippings to moisten the bronzed skins. Young bamboo, served a dozen ways, is invariably juicy, woodsy, and unfairly good. For dessert there are pineapples tender to the core, so imbued with coconut sweetness they’re practically pina coladas already.

The day after our visit to Maokong, we catch a mid-morning train south to Taichung City, then ride a bus into one of Nantou’s many mountain tea villages. On some winding roads, every other storefront is a tea shop run by a farmer or their family, ready to offer you a free cup of tea. At the tea table, there’s no ceremony or pretense. Maybe you talk about the year’s harsh drought, which cost some tea farmers 50% of their harvest. You might make friends with strangers also on the hunt for good tea. And you drink, and keep drinking, because a proud seller always plays fast and loose with the samples.

A farmer friend of Theresa’s joins for an afternoon and introduces us to a buddy on Dong Ding mountain. The farmer brews a few Dong Ding-style oolongs, classically nutty and creamy, but not Theresa’s speed. Seeing her disappointment, he digs around for one last tea. It’s another Dong Ding, but harvested from a plot not sprayed with pesticides, so little leaf-hopping bugs can chew on the leaves, driving the wounded tea bush into nutrient-producing overdrive. The resulting brew might as well be peach juice, with toasted undertones brought into clear, crisp focus, and a tarte tatin sweetness on every outward breath. Theresa sips more and smiles. This one is coming back to New York.

Adventurous travelers or Mandarin-speakers should have an easy time trekking the oolong trail on their own. Taichung City, near Dong Ding and Shan Lin Xi mountains, has no shortage of cheap but high quality hotels, and tea villages like Lugu and Xitou are full of family run B&Bs with full amenities for all of 50 USD a night. But there’s also been a boom of Western-facing Taiwanese tea companies in the past couple years.

To brew your own Taiwanese tea without making the trip, try these sellers that buy directly from Taiwanese farmers:

T Shop: A small but sterling catalogue ranging from crisp and vegetal Green Jade and Shan Lin Xi to dark, honey-sweet Red Water Oolong.
Eco-Cha: This Taiwan-based company values tradition-heavy, sustainable agriculture, and stocks affordable, excellent tea, mostly from Nantou County.
Té: A supplier to the tea menu at New York’s Eleven Madison Park. Their Oriental Beauty oolong is remarkably bold and lemony with a surprising kick of cinnamon.
Song Tea: A San Francisco tea room with pricey but rare teas from Taiwan and China, like the Winter Sprout, a Lishan mountain tea as sweet as cotton candy.
Everlasting Tea: The fanatic’s draw here is a pair of ~30-year-aged Baozhongs, full of deep plummy notes with a long, soothing finish.

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Before we can see the cardamom plants, Amilcar Pereira and his men have to castrate the bulls. That morning, in a pickup truck on the bumpy mountain climb to the cloud forests of Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz, I was privy to Pereira the theologian. Our discussion about his new export company, 786 Gexsa, prompted a half-hour sermon on the roles of god and personal responsibility in family and commerce. He named his first business FedeAgro, a portmanteau of the Spanish words for faith and agriculture. “They’re both tiny things that get bigger.”But now it’s time for Pereira the cowboy—lasso, hat, pistol. He directs his crew to corner a bull and tosses a rope over its horns. A few more lassos and the bull is down, legs outstretched, suddenly silent and docile. As one man douses its genitals with grain alcohol, another unfolds a Swiss Army knife, yanks the scrotum taut, and excises the testes in two quick cuts. More grain alcohol to wash the wound. A splash of iodine and a squeeze of sour orange to cleanse it. Pereira loosens the ropes and the bull is off. The scents of citrus and cow dung mingle in the vaporous haze.

We break from the heat for an early lunch, but Pereira is constitutionally incapable of sitting still. He gobbles his beans and tortillas, then asks if we’re ready to hike up to the part of the farm where the cardamom grows. An hour later, after climbing narrow trails cleared by machetes, we’re nearly there. I’m panting as loud as the bull had that morning and can barely keep up. Pereira, 54 going on 25, circles back to tell us there’s just one more ridge. He slaps his arm on my doubled-over back and says with a laugh, “Race you to the top.”

Green cardamom is the third-most-expensive spice in the world, behind saffron and vanilla. Across the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Nordic Europe, cooks and bakers relish its floral fragrance and menthol bite, and use it in everything from rice pilaf and curry gravies to baklava and butter cookies. But the world’s leading producer of cardamom since 1980 is a country with zero cultural connection to the spice: Guatemala.

In 1914, a German plantation owner named Oscar Kloeffer brought green cardamom to his Guatemalan coffee estate to see if he could undercut growers along the plant’s native Malabar coast in the kingdom of Travancore, in what is now the southern Indian state of Kerala. Cardamom thrives in relatively cool, humid air at high altitude, and it turns out Guatemala’s cloud forests are the perfect environment for it. These days, the country produces around 30,000 metric tons of cardamom per year—well over half the global supply—and 70 percent of it comes from the northern department of Alta Verapaz.

Virtually all of that cardamom is for export; like many spices, it is far more valuable as a cash crop than an ingredient for local use, and despite its presence in the nation’s agriculture for more than 100 years, most Guatemalans never developed a taste for it.

Instead, all that cardamom gets shipped to the Middle East, the world’s leading consumer region of the spice, or to India, parts of Europe, or the U.S. The international spice trade is far from transparent, and though Guatemala is a powerful name in the wholesale market, commodities like cardamom rarely receive origin designations the way balsamic vinegar or prosciutto do. Once in India, Guatemalan pods might get mixed with Indian stock, then perhaps packaged and resold as Indian cardamom. Most of the time there’s simply no country of origin listed at all.

Which is why I’ve followed my friend Ethan Frisch to Guatemala to meet Pereira. Frisch is a chef and aid worker I met back when he was pushing a cart around New York, selling scoops of homemade ice cream and donating his profits to a street-vendor-advocacy organization. After working on development projects in Afghanistan and Jordan, he started an import business called Burlap & Barrel, selling high-end spices to restaurants and cooks in the model used by specialty chocolate and coffee companies. Instead of ordering through the largely anonymous network of commodity wholesalers that have controlled the global spice trade since its inception, Frisch buys directly from small, independent farms and pays them above-market rates to secure their best products. (Disclosure: I hold an unpaid position on Burlap & Barrel’s advisory board but have zero equity or stake in the company.)

Frisch was drawn to Pereira, he tells me, because in all his travels around Guatemala in search of suppliers, Pereira and his partner, Francisco Lavignino, are the only exporters who also grow and process their own pods from start to finish. Frisch is now their sole American importer. Other industry insiders confirm that they run the country’s only vertically integrated cardamom business. It doesn’t hurt that Pereira grows exceptional cardamom: piney, resinous, refreshing as a blast of Arctic air—and that he’ll talk your ear off about it.

Pereira’s farm spans from pasture to jungle. Cattle and turkeys graze in the valleys, and fruit trees climb the hillsides. His cardamom fields are secreted deep in the forest, though “fields” implies level land and tilled earth and neatly placed rows of plants, none of which apply here. Instead, call it a cardamom sanctuary, nature gently nudged into a haven for this interloper species from half a world away.

The stalks loom over us like Jurassic ferns. Each plant shoots dozens of them from the soil, and their diaphanous leaves form a canopy above our heads. Cardamom is a relative of ginger, and its seed pods, the only edible parts of the plant, grow on vines that hug the ground, hidden from sunlight. Native trees tower over the stalks, their fallen leaves forming a bed of nutrients to feed the cardamom. Pereira doesn’t bother with the expensive process of organic certification, but by cultivating the plants biodynamically and cloning high-yield varieties, which doesn’t require clearing more land, his methods are as close to natural growth as you can get.

Pereira calls Frisch over to inspect a vine nearly ready for harvest. He’s taken off his cowboy hat, literally and figuratively. Out in the forest, it’s time for Pereira the naturalist. You know the cardamom is ready to pick, he says, by the softness of the pod. It should give a little, like a green olive, though selecting the right ones is entirely a matter of feel and experience—part of the laborious manual process that makes it so expensive.

Almost all of the cardamom farms in Alta Verapaz are minuscule operations run by Guatemalans of Mayan heritage, some as small as individual plots worked by families one poor harvest from destitution. Once these smallholder farmers pick the fresh pods, they have fewer than 12 hours to offload the harvest before it begins to rot. Drying machines are far too expensive for most, so instead farmers sell their haul to buyers at local markets who set prices indiscriminately, and rarely in the farmers’ favor. These intermediaries then sell to drying facilities, which in turn sell to packers and exporters, which set their own prices by the global commodities market. A supply chain that begins with tens of thousands of poor indigenous farmers ends with a mere handful of wealthy exporters, in many cases descendants of the original German plantation owners.

Pereira began his career a rung below these poor farmers, as a Q’eqchi’-speaking laborer who’d work on others’ farms during harvest. He had dreams of becoming an engineer but soon learned his talents were better suited to wheeling and dealing than studying. “It was easy,” he boasts. “Work more, save more, buy more. It was always about finding better quality, producing with better methods, doing better business.” He eventually earned a degree in theology and did a tour in a military intelligence unit during the civil war that ravaged Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. When he returned to civilian life, he bought a small farm in Alta Verapaz, only to come into conflict with drug traffickers who frequented his land on their way to Mexico. He soon sold that property to buy his current farm, and put his picaresque life experience to work growing high-quality cardamom. “I’ve been the beneficiary of enormous miracles,” he says.

Traffickers don’t bother him now, but Pereira keeps a pistol in his pickup truck all the same. It’s a smart precaution in a business where some buyers negotiate behind the barrel of a gun. This is one of the reasons he and Lavignino have spent the past 15 years building an alternative supply chain all their own. What Pereira doesn’t grow himself, he buys from a growing cadre of nearby farmers, to whom he pays a premium for superior-quality cardamom. He owns a drying facility that processes the fresh pods up in the mountains, and in the city of Cobán, his warehouse handles the intensive steps of cleaning, sorting, grading, and packaging. Pereira is responsible for the supply side of the business; Lavignino is the head of sales. In 2017, the partners sold 36 shipping containers’ worth of cardamom to wholesale clients in Pakistan, Dubai, Israel, Spain, and Romania. This year, they hope to hit 60.

Three hours’ drive from the misty cloud forest, the city of Cobán is awash in color. Tourists usually bounce between Guatemala City and Antigua, but little Cobán is on the way to hot springs and scenic vistas that draw visitors in search of natural beauty and indigenous Mayan cuisine. The city is also the local capital of the cardamom business, where packers sort and grade raw product for the major export companies.

Pereira’s cardamom dryers on the mountain, repurposed coffee dryers, are hulking wood-fired machines. His warehouse in Cobán, on the other hand, is a portrait of modern industry. New batches are inspected by hand, then sent through high-tech equipment that cleans, sorts, and grades the pods by color and size. Machinery like this costs a small fortune in Guatemala, well out of reach of most producers, but Pereira considers the investment an essential part of the export company’s growth. While he and Lavignino can’t compete on volume, they’re able to sell a particularly high-quality product to smaller buyers in search of a genuine specialty ingredient, not just a commodity. Frisch’s haul on this trip amounts to a couple hundred pounds packed in our luggage. An order that small wouldn’t even get you in the door at a major wholesaler.

“If Pereira is to succeed, he can’t rely on the typical markets for cardamom,” says Juan Manuel Girón, an agronomist at the nonprofit Heifer International. “He will have to build new markets of his own.” Girón lives in Cobán and works with cardamom farmers to improve the efficiency and quality of their harvests. He’s watched Pereira’s blossoming enterprise with interest for years, and considers it a potential model for other growers. Adding value at the source is critical, he says, for small farmers looking to improve their bargaining position and escape the hand-to-mouth poverty cycle that so often accompanies cash-crop agriculture. But to really succeed, farmers also need buyers to believe in what they’re doing, and the infrastructure to support their growth.

Between the fields and the warehouse, 786 Gexsa employs 35 people. That doesn’t include the 200 partner farmers Pereira buys from, smallholders used to living at the whims of the harvest that he’s guiding toward greater self-sufficiency. “Growing up,” he says, “everyone around me was struggling. They didn’t believe in themselves or that anything could change. I feel a responsibility to show them they can succeed. God put us here to pursue our dreams and provide for our families. Anyone who disagrees is dead wrong.”

Baking with Cardamom

This fragrant spice is used all over the world in an array of sweets

Recipes by Kat Craddock and Stacy Adimando

Sugar Cookies Sandwiches with Cardamom Milk Chocolate Ganache

Cardamom-Rose Cake Donuts

Cardamom Rice Pudding

Swedish-Style Cardamom Buns

The post Meet the Farmer Shaking Up the Guatemalan Cardamom Trade appeared first on Saveur.

I have lost track of how many boring meals that Lao Gan Ma brand Spicy Chile Crisp has rescued from the blandness abyss. No idea what to put on noodles? Get the Lao Gan Ma. Need a quick topping to give your salad some crunch? Scoop up a spoonful of the crispy stuff. Eggs in need of something extra? The oily heat, the crunch of chile flakes and fried peanut, and the blast of umami from granules of MSG are all here for you. Often dubbed “the angry lady chile oil” in honor of brand founder Tao Huabi’s stern portrait on the label, Lao Gan Ma has become a cult condiment for heat freaks in America. It occupies a similar position to Huy Fong’s sriracha a decade ago, back in the halcyon days before that sauce gained mainstream acceptance and, in short order, was declared so over.

Of course, in its home of China, Ms. Tao’s 20-year-old company is a condiment empire, raking in nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars a year. The angry lady drives a Bentley worth five hundred grand. Her chile oil commands the cultural cachet of Heinz.

But like Heinz ketchup, the angry lady chile oil can be a bit much. The salt and MSG that makes it finger-licking good? They also mean that overindulgence can make you feel like you mainlined a jumbo bag of potato chips. The crispy-hot chile flakes that add welcome crunch to everything they touch? Lovely, but a little lacking in character. In China, crispy-chile-laden hot oil is an entire genre of condiments, often custom made in restaurants and home kitchens. For instance, my friend Helen You, the chef of Dumpling Galaxy in New York, flavors hers with star anise and ginger. It’s a gentler, subtler chile oil, lower volume but brighter timbre, reflecting the simple yet soulful flavors of her hometown of Tianjin.

Just as we are all better for Heinz coexisting with artisan upstarts like Sir Kensington, the crispy chile oil category deserves some diversity on grocery shelves. Unfortunately, no Western-facing brand has risen to the occasion.

Enter Jenny Gao.

Gao, a Chengdu-based chef and culinary educator, has built a career out of exploring the heritage of Sichuan Province’s famously fiery cuisine while advancing it on the modern global stage. She’s also been selling spice mixes and condiments in China under the brand name Fly By Jing. Her product line includes a crispy chile oil. It is very good. And now she’s bringing it to the rest of the world.

Today marks the launch of Gao’s Kickstarter, a pre-order system for her Sichuan Chile Crisp, which Gao expects should arrive in mailboxes by the end of the year. If the Kickstarter goes well, more products will follow, such as a mapo tofu sauce, fermented bean paste, and an heirloom variety of Sichuan Province’s famous peppercorns—all staples of Sichuan cuisine that often get shortchanged by substandard products available on the American market.

But we’re here for the chile crisp, the first and only packaged condiment of its kind—available in the U.S., that is—that deserves a spot on the shelf next to Lao Gan Ma. For the sauce, Gao combines three varieties of Sichuan chiles with Sichuan peppercorns, kombu, and dried mushrooms, all submerged in neutral oil. Those chiles are impressively fragrant, ripe and sweet with bright, acidic heat. The tongue-tingling peppercorns add warm touches of camphor and citrus. And where Lao Gan Ma relies on synthetic MSG for its umami, Gao’s one-two punch of mushrooms and kombu delivers a gentler but richer savory undercurrent. The sauce tastes remarkably homemade for something that isn’t, a testament to the subtle nuances of Sichuan cuisine, which all too frequently gets reduced to a caricature of bludgeoning heat.

The two chile crisps are qualitatively different condiments. Gao’s Sichuan chiles don’t have the same shatter-crisp flakiness of Lao Gan Ma, which was born in Guizhou Province 500 miles away. But both are limitless in their uses. Since receiving my sample jar of Fly By Jing, I’ve dabbed it on pizza, stirred it into for fried rice, and used it as the sole seasoning for a simple but eminently satisfying side of blanched greens. It is perversely delicious on vanilla ice cream.

These are fat times for artisanal upgrades of everyday ingredients. Red Boat fish sauce is practically mandatory in ambitious Vietnamese restaurants. American-made Thai hot sauce, Moroccan harissa, and Indian achaar are increasingly common in grocery stores coast to coast. We can now buy single-origin turmeric that “moves forth in the spirit of radical community, matriarchy, and social justice.”

Against this backdrop, high-end Chinese ingredients remain conspicuously absent on the Western market. There are a few reasons as to why, but ingrained prejudice toward Chinese cooking, fueled by centuries of unjust associations with cheap and junky food, likely have something to do with it.

A quality chile oil isn’t going to change that, but it’s a fitting statement in a jar, a Sichuan analogue to, say, Sicilian olive oil, that merits just as much respect.

Gao’s Kickstarter will run for 30 days from June 4th and pre-orders ship worldwide. Orders start at $25 for two 200-gram jars.

The post You Need This New High-End Chinese Chile Crisp appeared first on Saveur.

My dessert-making life exists in two eras, Before Smoked Cinnamon and After. I hate to be hyperbolic about something as straightforward as baking spices, but since it came into my life a few years ago, my spice cakes, brownies, ice cream, hot cocoa, and snickerdoodles have never been better.

Smoked cinnamon is exactly what it sounds like. A unique creation from spice mastermind Lior Lev Sercarz of La Boîte, who develops custom spice blends for restaurants and food and drink brands, it’s made of cinnamon sticks gently smoked over a mix of grape vines, apple wood, and hickory, then ground into a fine powder. That touch of smoke tames some of the cinnamon’s spicy-sweet bite, while adding a subtle savory element that stands out even in complex spice blends.

Next to the ginger and allspice in honey cake, you might not even realize the smoke is there, but an extra umph makes you pay attention. It turns humdrum sweets like coffee cake and cider doughnuts into desserts that make you take notice. And it really shines in cinnamon-centric recipes like crisp fried churros or straightforward snickerdoodles, where that savory smoke comes to the forefront like a wisp of burnt chile from Spanish pimenton.

The idea came to Sercarz while he was working on a line of smoked sea salts. As long as he had the setup, he wondered, what else could he infuse with smoke? Cinnamon is a must-have product for any spice business, but its popularity is somewhat seasonal; it shines in fall and winter around the holidays, then drops out of the spotlight. “I thought if we added smoke to the cinnamon, we could get more people excited about it,” Sercarz explains. “A lot of people think of it as limited to a certain time of the year with just a few uses, but there are no limits to it.”

Since releasing the spice for retail in 2011 at the opening of his New York spice boutique, he’s seen customers use it in all kinds of desserts as well as vegetable dishes and spiced, meaty stews. “It’s very good with beef, or even just a really special cinnamon toast.” I’ve had great success with white bean soup full of bay leaves, where the cinnamon stands in for smoked ham hock without all the fuss of an actual trotter. Barbecue sauce is a no-brainer.

Technically, the smoked cinnamon isn’t actually cinnamon. It’s Cinnamomum cassia, a cousin species of ‘true’ or ‘Ceylon’ Cinnamomum verum, which is native to Sri Lanka but also grows in Mexico and East Africa. Most of the world’s cassia comes from China, and it’s actually a far more popular spice for its bolder flavor and punchy heat, the kind you taste in a pack of Hot Tamales candy. Sercarz says he needs that strength to stand up to the smoke. “I got interested in the idea of smoked spices that don’t affect the nature of the spice too much. There’s a limit to how much I want to change things.”

Which is why I’m over the moon about this stuff, despite the preponderance of trend-catching smoked products out on the market. We have space-age smoke guns, an infinitude of smoked salts, bottle after bottle of smoked bourbons and bitters. There’s even something called smoked water now, which is basically plain old liquid smoke rebranded with a shockingly high price tag.

Most of those products taste like charred wood instead of anything palatable. By contrast, La Boite’s cinnamon is all about subtlety. You don’t use it to make your desserts taste like smoke. You use it to make them taste extraordinary.

The post Smoked Cinnamon Could Change The Way You Bake appeared first on Saveur.

If you’ve ever dreamed about quitting your job to travel the world, meet new people, cook their food, and write about it, know that Robyn Eckhardt has done it first. For over 20 years, the journalist and culinary polyglot has documented the local foods and cultures of the Eastern hemisphere, in publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but even more excitingly, also on Eckhardt’s excellent blog, Eating Asia.

There, she and her husband, the photographer David Hagerman, spin captivating yarns—punctuated with jaw-dropping photos—about Chengdu tofu diehards and Malaysian raw-sugar masters, with occasional recipes, thorough and compassionate reporting, and a complete disregard for all the usual tropes of travel writing. Eckhardt is a journalist’s journalist, exacting and endlessly curious, which is why I love working with her on stories whenever I can.

Last month, she and Hagerman published Istanbul and Beyond: Exploring the Diverse Cuisines of Turkey, a culmination of decades of criss-crossing the country in search of family recipes and hyperlocal traditions. The book sheds particular light—for Western audiences at least, but probably some Istanbul residents, too—on Turkey’s less-reported-on culinary regions, such as eastern cities like Van and Hakkari, and on the food of ethnic minorities like the Kurds living along the Syrian border. The result is a picaresque portrait of a country that doesn’t really have a national cuisine at all; it has dozens.

I caught up with Eckhardt over Skype while she and Hagerman were moving “a lot of boxes and cats” to their new home in Italy’s Piemonte region—a move in part to be closer to Turkey. Below, Eckhardt on the essential qualities of Turkish cooking, and how the country’s tumultuous political situation of the past few years is impacting the hearts and minds of locals.

Late one sultry morning in late spring, we wandered over to Diyarbakir’ Mardin Gate for a savoury breakfast. We’d passed the big bear of a man presiding over a busy cig kofte stall on previous stays in the old walled city. The time had never been right; either we’d just eaten, or were on our way to eat somewhere else. But this morning we’d set our sights on his specialty: uncooked kofte made of bulgur kneaded with pepper and tomato pasted, onions, pomegranate molasses, chile and other spices. (Cig kofte traditionally include raw lamb or beef but that’s been outlawed, if sold from a street stall, for years). Most of the folks crowded around his stall were taking their cig kofte to go, as pictured here: smeared across soft lavash, drizzled with pomegranate molasses and lavished with rocket, mint and parsley leaves, grown in his garden just outside the city walls, he told us. We took a seat at his only table, set in@the shade of Diyarbakir’s ancient black volcanic stone wall. He set before us tin plates, each with 5 kofte, oval with indentations from his fingers. Another plate held lettuces and herbs, a shallow bowl alongside sweet and sour and spicy tomato and pomegranate – based ezme. I placed a kofte in a piece of romaine, added rocket and herbs and a drizzle of ezme. I tasted all the dried spices, all the fresh herbs, the vibrancy of the pomegranate molasses and the nuttiness of bulgur all at once. The crispness of the lettuce, the sandy texture of the bulgur. Coolness and heat. ? Wow. He offered lavash but I didn’t want to dull the intensity of those kofte and their accompaniments with bread. This is one of my most vivid memories from researching ‘Istanbul and Beyond’ — the flavours, the setting, the friendliness of all the Diyarbakirli gathered around this stall, the vendor’s gigantic moustache and his playfulness and obvious pride as he dodged my questions about what made his kofte so darned delicious. Missing eastern Turkey a lot right now. Make this dish! It’s in the book. ?????

A post shared by Robyn Eckhardt (@istanbulandbeyond) on Oct 31, 2017 at 8:32am PDT

There’s so much food in here that most people don’t think of as Turkish: paper-thin noodles with blue cheese, cookies fragrant with oranges. Was that an intentional decision to challenge our preconceived ideas about Turkish cooking?
The impetus for the book was traveling across the country for years and eating things I never would have thought of as Turkish food, like collards and cornbread in the Black Sea. Just as people are learning about Italy and China, there’s no one single Turkish cuisine. It’s a place of regions, each with their own cooking, like most other places in the world.

We traveled by car in Turkey, and I was struck by the major differences in topography and climate between relatively short distances. You can be on the Black Sea and it’s very lush, then drive six or eight hours inland and it’s a totally different landscape—and a totally different diet. There are dishes you’ll never find outside their home regions. Sometimes you won’t even find them in one village, when they make it in another village 30 minutes away.

Even now, Turkey is a country where people eat extremely locally. It’s not a trend, it’s just how it’s always been. In Istanbul you’re starting to see more variation in the food, but in places like Van, the Black Sea, or Hakkari, people focus on the food growing around them. I wanted to bring that understanding home.

Is industrial agriculture starting to change that, though?
Sure, around the lower Agean and south coast there are farms growing produce like tomatoes year-round, and at every local market, there are five to ten sellers of conventional vegetables who’ve bought them from a wholesaler.

But it’s different out of the big cities. There people live off what they can grow in their backyard gardens, or what they preserve. For instance, in Hakkari, in the far southeast, the landscape is really inhospitable to farming. It’s mostly animal husbandry. But in the spring, there’s six weeks where everything is in bloom. The hills are covered with all kinds of wild herbs and vegetables. People go out and they collect tons of them, literally. Plants like fennel, wild garlic, sorrel, purslane, thyme. They’ll salt them and put them in the local cheese, or sun-dry them, and that’s what they live on from then until the winter comes.

Turkish people are keen preservationists, even in urban areas where you have access to fresh produce year-round. If you go into a city and you look up at apartment balconies, people are always making pickles. They’ll hang peppers to dry on the clothesline so they can stuff them later, in winter. They like to do it themselves.

When we were researching the cookbook I did not spend much time thinking about how I work, so it's been interesting to be forced to do so during interviews that will be timed to its launch. Here we are in a small village in Karacadag, an incredibly beautiful part of Diyarbakir province. Dave and I were in Diyarbakir city, at the cheese market. Diyarbakir is known for a particular salty braided cheese, and we wanted to see it made. But the cheese sellers weren't super friendly. So we wandered into the back of the market, where a bunch of older guys were sitting around in an office. They called out to us; they wanted to talk. I asked where the cheese was made, the guy behind the desk pointed to an old man: His son is a cheesemaker. The man explained where his village was, I *kind of* understood, and we drove out the next morning. This amazing landscape, not quite visible here: vivid green ground (it was spring) pocked with black black volcanic rocks and boulders, ever so gently rolling, you could see for miles and miles. Like a jungle green moonscape, lush and desolate at the same time. And then suddenly, the tent-workshop of the cheesemaker. Youngish, late 20s, married with two kids. He'd travelled a bit, spoke a wee bit of English. His family moved from this village to Diyarbakir city during the worst of the fighting (late 90s/early naughts) when their village was burnt down by soldiers. During a break in the cheesemaking action we walked out towards the remains of stone houses, just visible here. He pointed out to the horizon and said 'That's where the PKK hid, and we couldnt come out of our houses at night'. Caught in the middle, no winners here but plenty of losers. We returned a couple times; Dave was ill with a stomach thing on one trip. It was so hot, and they rigged up a tarp for shade and laid a cloth on the grass so he could sleep it off. They fed us breakfast and lunch, so kind, and all we could offer were photos but they were much appreciated. These women are carrying goat's milk. They barter with the cheesemaker for groceries from Diyarbakir city, carried on a 'bus' by him, or by his father, when he takes the cheese into town to sell.

A post shared by Robyn Eckhardt (@istanbulandbeyond) on Jul 17, 2017 at 3:41am PDT

You’ve been working on this book for years; what did the reporting process look like? Especially when you were visiting people’s homes, I can’t imagine they had anything written down.
I’ve been thinking about that myself recently, and I think it comes down to thinking like a journalist, not an anthropologist. I wasn’t super organized and didn’t do a lot of research ahead of time.

When Dave and I are reporting somewhere, our modus operandi is to just go and meet people. Then eat a lot of stuff and talk to them about it. We go the market—always start with the market, the first we see—and ask questions. See what leads to where.

This sounds like a good foundation the for Robyn Eckhardt School on How to Travel.
One advantage we have is how we kept going back to places again and again, which you can’t do if you’re just going on vacation. Because the more you learn, the more you realize how much you have to learn. So we’d go somewhere, and then it would be like, “Okay, it was like this, but that was just the spring. Now I need to go in the fall to see how it’s different. And the winter, because I wonder what these people will do when there’s no food growing anywhere.”

Once we figured out the regions we’d focus on, we started planning visits years in advance, keeping the seasons in mind. But it still comes down to meeting people.

At markets, I’d just start asking the ladies questions. “What do you do with this?” “How do you make it?” Silly stuff like that. From there, maybe you see someone who makes bread, and hey, I’m interested in bread. “Well, if I came to your village, would you show me how to make it?” Sometimes it’s yes, sometimes it’s no. Or we’d go to a local restaurant, and listen to the cooks and ask how they made something. I would never say this is an encyclopedic book on Turkish food. This is my Turkey, as I experienced it.

Everyone says it, but it’s true: food is an entryway into culture. Everyone wants to talk about food. And it’s non-threatening. I’m not a rabble-rouser or anything. I just want to talk about your cheese. And people trust me, because I really do want to talk about their cheese.

Istanbul’s most overlooked specialty? Tost, aka grilled cheese sandwich. Tost is so ubiquitous, served from convenience kiosks called ‘bufe ‘, on ferries, at shops like Bambi, a tost chain, and now at more upscale delis and cafes, that visitors tend to overlook it. Too bad, bec when tost is good it’s very very good! There’s a recipe for the ultimate toast, my dream toast, with everything (pepper paste, roasted green chilled, pickle etc etc) in@the Istanbul chapter. Bottom line — when it comes to tost, more is more!

A post shared by Robyn Eckhardt (@istanbulandbeyond) on Oct 29, 2017 at 5:25pm PDT

We can’t talk about Turkey today without talking about the political situation there, which started getting really volatile after you finished your reporting in 2015. What was it like when you were on the ground?
Probably the minority that we spent the most time with was the Kurds. We were very fortunate, too, that our research coincided with a strengthening of the peace process that was started by Erdogan. We had actually just been assigned a story on southeast Turkey because it had become a newly safe and easy place to travel through. Then riots started in fall of 2014, and the story was cancelled.

When we returned in January of 2015, things had kind of settled down, and by the time we went for our last trip in April and May of 2015, it was just the best time to be traveling in that part of Turkey. The elections were approaching, the peace process was going really well. People were hopeful and happy. As the election approached, it looked like the Kurds would win enough votes to claim a place in the parliament.

Then the elections happened in June. A month later, there was a bombing in Suruc near the Syrian border that killed a lot of Kurds, and everything fell apart. We haven’t been back to that part of Turkey since. We have friends there that we miss, in Van and Hakkari.

Did the government’s conservative shifts come as a surprise to the people there?
I’d say so. Before the 2015 elections, people really were so hopeful. We met a lot of Kurds from all walks of life, and spent time in Kurdish homes. And I’d never bring up politics, because that’s not why I was there, but of course it always came up.

I want to make clear that not a single Kurd I ever met wanted to separate from Turkey. I heard more than one time, “We do not want to be part of Kurdistan, we want to be a part of Turkey, we just want our rights as Kurdish citizens.” I’m not advocating separation, and most people I met weren’t either.

A couple autumns ago we timed book research in Hatay province to pomegranate molasses making season. This was part of the breakfast table at a pomegranate farmer's parents' house in a village outside of Antakya (formerly Antioch). Home-brined green olives, fresh spicy 'deer antler ' peppers, crumbled whey cheese salad with lots of chopped parsley, flavourful tomato paste with olive oil to dip bread into. Also for dipping: what I call 'breakfast spice mix', a heady combination of ground leblebi, ground nuts, sumac, dried chilies, cumin and other spices served next to a bowl of local olive oil. Dip a piece of bread in the oil, then in the spice mix. Eat. Swoon.

A post shared by Robyn Eckhardt (@istanbulandbeyond) on Jun 6, 2017 at 10:38am PDT

How are your contacts dealing with the changes?
I think you either decide you’re going to leave, or you find ways to get joy out of life. For people in the tourism business, it’s certainly been hard. When we were in Istanbul last year, we saw so many vacant shops for rent. People are hurting because of the drop in tourism. And I really would tell Americans: Go to Istanbul. It’s just as safe as Paris, Nice, or Brussels.

I have some Jewish extended family in Istanbul, and they’ve been laying low because of the recent rise of anti-semitic sentiment.
I’d certainly believe it. There’s been a rise of nasty feelings. I don’t know how it happened so fast.

We’ve been wondering the same in the States. Did you notice any parallels when you came back to the U.S.?
I think it’s surreal in the same way. I had to take a lot of planes when I was in the U.S. this last time. Everyone’s all crammed in, and it’s summer travel, and every flight’s full. But people were so nice with each other, and helping each other with their bags. “Here, you go first,” “Oh, I’m sorry to take the middle seat.”

Then when I look at the political spirit, it’s confusing to me. I’m looking around wondering, “who’s the Trump supporter, who’s the liberal?” It’s strange like that in Turkey, too. Turks are so kind to each other still. And I don’t know, maybe in this environment, people just know to avoid talking about anything but trivial things to someone they don’t know, because hey, you never know where it’s going to lead.

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There’s something grotesque about the oyster. Its veins shine in crisp almost-black-and-white, and its ropy edge curls lazily over its jiggly belly in a slick coat of brine. It sits on a fraying gray fabric sample on a plate that could’ve been poured from concrete. Only a single leaf of some spinach-like thing gives any color to the image; I think Pantone calls it Haunted Forest. This is the photo that accompanies Aaron Turner’s recipe for roasted oysters with seawater emulsion in IGNI, the new cookbook documenting the life and times of Turner’s Australian restaurant of the same name. It’s typical of the book’s art style, which favors raw over cooked, black and white over color, strange geometries over recognizable (let alone appetizing) food. The frontmatter pages are printed black with white type. Maroon marginalia breaks the restaurant’s first year (the book’s subtitle) into stark timestamps to focus on lines like: “19-01-2016 (day before opening): I threw up this morning, in the shower, just as I always do before opening.” There’s a word for this type of design. IGNI may be the world’s first brutalist cookbook. IGNI is an odd choice for an American release. Though the Australian press has heaped praise over Turner’s intricate and expressive live-fire cooking at IGNI, and Loam before its sudden unexpected closure, few Americans have ever heard of him. The recipes, which call for ingredients like saltbush berries, marron birds, and fruit woods for lighting fires, are pretty much impossible to replicate. The thing costs $45. Who is this cookbook for?

Yet since the book arrived on my desk a few weeks ago, I haven’t been able to shelve it away. For all its stark, grey-toned weirdness, IGNI is a stunning work of art, and the most beautiful cookbook I’ve seen in years.

As narratives go, Turner’s Hemingwayish prose gets the job done, documenting the spiritual and physical toll of sustaining an ambitious high-end restaurant. (The first chapter ends, “Fuck cooking. Fuck everything.”) But what really sets IGNI apart is Julian Kingma’s photography set in Vaughan Mossop’s design. As Turner, who has the looks of a young Nick Offerman, tells SAVEUR’s editor-in-chief Adam Sachs, “I thought the world had enough of the beautiful side of cooking. I wanted to show what it was like to come back to restaurants after falling out of love with cooking, and trying to fall back in.”

Take a quick visual tour of the world’s great brutalist buildings. Their harsh, angular forms are stunning, but it’s hard to focus on one for too long; your eye strains to look away. Similarly, reading through IGNI isn’t hard, but it is distinctly uncomfortable, and it takes the gritty aesthetic that brought us Faviken’s curled grouse talons on a plate and Paul Liebrandt fisting a fish to higher and more interesting levels. When animals spread across the page in IGNI, they’re not ingredients; they’re corpses. By contrast, the monotone portraits and candids of the restaurant’s staff capture intimate human moments, but even these are static with an almost pained distance. Best as I can tell, all these young tatted folks are still alive, but they’re captured in a memorial to a time that’s now dead.

When Kingma opts for color, it’s eery, even extraterrestrial. The spiny underbelly of a spanner crab doesn’t look like it’s from this planet; nor does the violet, fire-wrinkled skin of a desiccated bosc pear. When these ingredients are set on the weighty angular dishes from Made OF Australia’s Anna-Marie Wallace, they hardly even seem like organic matter. For a book about the pains of trying to fall in love with food, you couldn’t ask for a better backdrop.

Even though IGNI comes from an Australian publisher, it’s not hard to see the American cookbook design trends it’s reacting to. Lush, saturated food-porn shots are so ubiquitous these days they’re basic, and all you have to do is search “celebrity chef cookbook” to fall into an ocean of smiling white teeth.

High-minded titles have been breaking that mold for a while. For years we’ve delighted in the gonzo-retro antics of Lucky Peach‘s cookbooks, and this year brought us mixed-media dessert collage in Hello, My Name is Ice Cream and a fanatical devotion to whimsical illustration in Salt Fat Acid Heat. As the newest member of the Fraternity of Tortured Genius Chef Books, IGNI and its gloomy aesthetics are hardly unique. (See: Faviken, Noma, Alinea.) But they’re better than anything else on the market.

Do you want to buy a chef memoir directed by Darren Aronofsky? That depends on what you want to get out of IGNI. For what it’s worth, if you’re the kind of person who spends $45 on a cookbook, you can probably adapt Turner’s recipes to a home kitchen pretty easily. (The roasted oysters are basically just that—roasted—and dressed with a simple vinaigrette and some greens.)

But the real reason to dig into IGNI is the reason we still love those hulking brutalist monsters of the ’60s: it grants us a new perspective to appreciate beauty.

More Snapshots From IGNI

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