1. There’s more than one way to make a roux

It may seem that fat, flour, and some patient stirring are all that go into this building block of Louisiana cooking. But Justin Devillier, chef-owner of Maga­zine Street’s La Petit Grocery, gives no fewer than three methods in The New Orleans Kitchen. Devillier cooks clarified butter and flour for 10 to 12 minutes to create a blond roux for soups and chowders. His brown roux—the ideal étouffée base—relies on peanut oil instead of butter, and a cooking time of 15 to 20 minutes. He leaves that mixture on the heat about 10 minutes longer to yield the dark roux gumbo requires. “No one else in the world uses dark roux,” Devillier says. “Mastering its technique is the mark of a true Louisiana cook.”

2. Playing with your food can be an art form

A few years back, Esther Choi, who holds a Ph.D. in architecture from Princeton and writes for brainy publications like Artforum, began hosting a series of dinner parties themed around revered artists and designers. She shares the punny results in Le Corbuffet, “conceptual art in the form of a cookbook,” a compendium of recipes so ­absurd, they’re profound.

3. Kung Pao chicken is not an American Chinese-takeout invention…

…though it’s more accurately Romanized as “Gong Bao.” As Fuchsia Dunlop explains in The Food of Sichuan (a refresh of 2003’s Land of Plenty), the dish was named for 19th-century Sichuan governor Ding Baozhen—an association toxic enough to require rebranding during the Cultural Revolution. Whatever you call it, Dunlop’s recipe on page 182 of the book is a killer just-add-chicken weeknight move once you have a few regional staples on hand.

4. Where hush puppies come from

Courtesy of Clarkson Potter

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Toni Tipton-Martin studied hundreds of cookbooks by African-American ­authors to write 2015’s The Jemima Code, which pushed back against the stereotype of the untrained black cook. For her follow-up, ­Jubilee, Tipton-­Martin has turned all that research into recipes, and her knowledge leaps off the page (read our recent interview with Tipton-Martin here.) Before telling readers how to make Nigerian fritters called akara, for example, she cites a group of 1970s-era authors who ­explored the connections between West African and African-­American cuisine—and their suggestion that the deep-fried black-eyed-pea balls gave rise to cornmeal-based hush puppies.

5. These are the elements of a superlative Japanese pantry

Among the foremost English-language experts on Japanese cuisine—and a Saveur contributor—­Nancy Singleton Hachisu has established deep, long-standing relationships with chefs, growers, and craftspeople throughout her adopted country. In Food Artisans of Japan, she profiles her culinary heroes and shares their exactingly authentic recipes. It won’t take much reading for you to realize your mass-market soy sauce will no longer cut it. Good thing, then, that Hachisu’s picks for miso, mirin, and more are now available stateside.

Read More: How To Stock a Japanese Pantry

6. Four ingredients add up to a fancy cocktail snack

Brian Klutch

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The San Francisco bakery Tartine notoriously published a 38-page sourdough recipe in one cookbook. But while Tartine, a much-expanded reissue of the 2006 classic, has some tricky bits, there are also easier moves, like these maple-glazed pecans. Simply mix the top three ingredients above, coat the pecans, add a pinch of salt, and bake at 400° for 4 to 6 minutes.

7. How to butterfly a fish

Bob Palmer

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In his authoritative Whole Fish Cookbook, Sydney chef Josh Niland, who opened Australia’s first sustainable fish market in 2018, lets these pictures do the talking.

8. It’s time to get to know Lebanese vino

Courtesy OctopusBooks

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Each edition of The World Atlas of Wine, by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson, includes new maps—they’re a leading indicator of which areas might become the next big thing. Added to the 8th edition are maps of the trendy, high-elevation Italian region of Alto Piemonte; Colorado’s frigid riesling country; and the entire country of Lebanon. The Middle Eastern nation is best known for the culty, long-aged, Bordeaux-inspired reds from Chateau Musar, but there’s more to explore, like white wines made using the obscure grapes obiedeh and merweh, and Ixsir, an impressive, eco-friendly winery in the Batroun district.

9. Rich people can afford to eat less

Courtesy Black Balloon Publishing

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For Eat Joy, Natalie Eve Garrett assembled a murderer’s row of 31 writers—including Claire Messud, Anthony Doerr, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche—who contributed short memoirs that explore the meaning of comfort food. Alexander Chee, author of 2018’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, ruminated on a competitive cleanse with his brother—five days of eating only what most folks would consider “discomfort” food:

You should do that cleanse, my brother says. We’re sitting in a raw foods store, in the alcove they provide for people to eat their extraordinarily priced delicious raw vegan snacks. It’s hard for me not to see it all as vegetarianism for rich people, because, well, I am not a rich person, but my brother is now. I feel something like a class obligation lingering for me to pick up on, as I turn the mysterious packages over and read the ingredients: Irish sea moss, Himalayan sea salt, organic figs.

The world, shaken out or down, for a smoothie.

10. For this cake, tahini puts Pam to shame

Jenny Huang

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To get a clean release for tricky toppings like sesame seeds, Great British Baking Show alumna Benjamina Ebuehi suggests greasing the pan with tahini when making her almost-savory golden turmeric cake. You’ll find the recipe on page 58 of Ebuehi’s The New Way to Cake or here on Saveur.

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Among the foremost English-language experts on Japanese cuisine—and a Saveur contributor—­Nancy Singleton Hachisu has established deep, long-standing relationships with chefs, growers, and craftspeople throughout her adopted country. In Food Artisans of Japan, she profiles her culinary heroes and shares their exactingly authentic recipes. It won’t take much reading for you to realize your mass-market soy sauce will no longer cut it. Good thing, then, that Hachisu’s picks for miso, mirin, and more are now available stateside.

Featured in: 10 Things We Learned from the Season’s Best Books

A. Aguni-jima Salt

Since the Japanese government deregulated salt production in the late 1990s, a number of artisanal options have come on the market. This one, from the tiny island of Aguni, is created by dripping seawater down bamboo branches before it evaporates in enormous metal pans.

$13 for 8.8 oz.; ­amazon.com

B. Mitoku Mikawa Mirin

To judge the quality of mirin, a naturally sweet cooking wine not unlike sake, simply take a sip. The finest examples—Hachisu calls this one “indisputably the best in Japan”—go down like a liqueur.

$8 for 10 oz.; naturalimport.com

C. Iio Jozo Rice Vinegar

The current president of Iio Jozo represents the fifth generation of his family to operate this 126-year-old institution—and the third to insist on organic rice production. The brewery processes the grain in-house, then ferments the resulting sake into a vinegar that retains a pronounced rice aroma.

$16 for 16.9 oz.; ­thejapanesepantry.com

D. Yamaki Jozo Organic Soy Sauce

Most soy sauce is made from ­defatted soybean grits—a by­product of soybean oil ­production—which are heated in order to complete fermentation within six months. Yamaki Jozo, on the other hand, ferments whole, grown-in-Japan soybeans for almost two years, yielding a mellow and complex final product.

$22 for 16.9 oz.; ­thejapanesepantry.com

E. Ohsawa Yamaki Organic Brown Rice Miso

Yamaki Jozo also creates miso worth seeking out, sourcing ingredients locally instead of relying on Chinese soybeans, as even many high-end organic producers do.

$10 for 9 oz.; ­goldminenaturalfoods.com

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Like a lot of people I know, I’m a disciple of Rancho Gordo, the Napa, California-based purveyor of heirloom varieties of dried beans. I’m sure my younger self would be horrified that the delivery of a 10-pound box of dried beans is regularly the best thing to happen to me all day, but life is long and the beans really are that good.

The last time I was on their site I noticed “caviar” lentils for sale. I like lentils, sure, but they’ve never been something to get my blood pumping like the rest of the Rancho Gordo line. But I took a flier and tossed a pound into my order. When they arrived, they were unlike any lentils I’ve ever eaten, combining an intensely grassy and earthy flavor with a pleasantly firm texture—each individual grain stays intact and sort of pops on its own when you chew. They were actually a little bit like caviar.

Before these lentils arrived, I had two basic modes of cooking lentils at home: Indian dishes, (usually a simple lentil curry) or ’70s-style vegetarian cooking like out of the Moosewood Cookbook. Both relied on plain, mushy brown lentils over rice, and were good but nothing life-changing.

Now, lentils that don’t get mushy maybe doesn’t sound like a life-changing thing either, but I am suddenly adding them to everything. They bulk up salads; they’re a perfect neutral base for salmon, chicken, or steak; and they’re an ideal start to a grain bowl to use up all the random vegetables from my CSA. They’re as easy as pasta to cook, too: less than 20 minutes simmered, no soaking required. (They have all the filling goodness of my beloved dried heirloom beans in a tenth of the time.) I’ve since found similar black lentils at Indian markets and better grocery stores, but nothing quite compares to the Rancho Gordo product.

They’re good for you and the planet, too. They’re packed with protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates, and they have among the lowest carbon footprint per gram of protein of any food. This is not news, but it was always easy for me to ignore: lentils were virtuous, but they tasted like it. These days lentils feel like a luxurious indulgence. Every day it seems like there’s a new startup claiming that high-protein cricket flour will heal the world, that we’re supposedly on the verge of a golden age of lab-grown meat. When I hear about stuff like that lately, I can’t help but think: when we’ve got lentils this good, why go through the trouble?

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I recently spent a couple of days in Paris, where I got to have a stupefyingly-good daily pastry from Du Pain et des Ideés every morning and practically put my nose on a Vermeer at the Louvre. The thing that has really stuck with me, though, is how small the wine glasses were. I’m exaggerating, but only a little. At one point, after I ordered a 15-year-old red, a rustic Loire cabernet franc still kicking with chewy tannin, there was a big showy display of bringing out appropriate glasses—which were barely bigger than the minuscule ones they were replacing.

It seemed like the majority of caves and restaurants I went to used a tasting glass called the INAO. It was created by (and named for) the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine, the body that regulates French agricultural products—what makes a Bordeaux a Bordeaux, that sort of thing. They created a standard for a tasting glass in the ‘70s in order to have an objective baseline when evaluating wines. And so it was never really meant to be used with dinner, but it seems to have become a totem of unpretentiousness at a certain kind of wine bar or restaurant—natural wine on the menu, T-shirts on the staff.

Big glasses have plenty of real advantages: they allow you to swirl wine around and kick up extra aromas, to have your nose in the glass while you sip, and they actually hold an entire 5-ounce pour (the INAO is best used to sip 2 or 3 ounces at a time). I have a pair of big Zalto Universal glasses that I love. They’re $60 each, incredibly fragile, and, I’m sorry to say, wine actually tastes better out of them, at least to me. But after getting back from France, I picked up a case of relatively inexpensive INAO glasses, and I am also loving them.

The ideal use case is slightly different than the Zaltos or other big glasses, which are great for splitting a special bottle with one other person or other focused sipping. The INAOs, on the other hand, really shine when you’re not having more than three or four ounces of any one thing. A lightly-drunken dinner party with lots of friends and even more bottles, the kind of night when you end up saying “I’d like just a splash more of that one” more times than may be wise. My favorite kind of drinking, in other words.

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I once heard somewhere that, among high-level chess players, a fancy wooden set is a sure sign of a poser. A cheap mat and plastic pieces are all you really need, right?

Now, I don’t know a King’s Gambit from a Perenyi Attack, but I do know that there is a similar anti-snob snobbery among wine geeks. It’s a cliché at this point that the only corkscrew anyone really needs is a cheapo Pulltaps. And it’s true that these simple pullers are preferred by hard-working waiters and sommeliers everywhere. They’re compact, they’re cheap enough to leave everywhere, and the double-hinged design allows an efficient two-step cork extraction, no excessive force necessary.

The only question you have to answer is what color you want. I personally like bright orange, because it looks like a tool you might buy at Home Depot and has a little bit of a Tom Sachs vibe (humor me?).

All this is obviously an overstatement—more complicated, easier-to-use designs are a godsend for many people. My nonagenarian grandmother makes great use of an electric model because anything else would be difficult for her to operate. But truly, most people only need a simple waiter-style corkscrew.

The major exception comes with very old bottles. Corks get dry and brittle as they get older, prone to breakage. It’s not true that all (or even most) wines get better as they age. But if you do find yourself in possession of one of the rare ones that does—a Barolo that was bottled when Watergate was in the news or something—you don’t want little flecks of cork floating in it.

Enter the Durand, a device designed to solve this specific problem. It combines a standard corkscrew with another traditional design, the Ah-So, which uses two metal prongs that slide between the cork and the neck of the bottle. (It’s also called a butler’s thief, because it allows a cork to be pulled and replaced without putting a hole in it.)

The Durand uses both methods at once: the two metal prongs support the cork as the corkscrew yanks it out, doing a much better job of keeping everything intact as it’s extracted.

Let me say right here that this thing is expensive, $125, and is not necessary to enjoy wine. But if you had a rich great-aunt kick the bucket and leave you a cellar full of Bordeaux, or otherwise find yourself mutilating corks while opening aged wines on a regular basis, think about picking up a Durand.

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Virtually all wine drinkers could benefit from decanting their wines. The classic case is an aged red, when the wine needs to be separated from the sediment that has developed in the bottom of the bottle. But that’s only one example; many wines are decanted for another reason: aeration. Any brawny, tannic young red wine—the kind that dries your mouth—could use a few hours or even a day in a decanter. Some natural wines come out of the bottle with a little funk that will eventually blow off. And even certain white wines improve with decanting. Mosel rieslings, for instance, sometimes have a sulfurous struck-match smell when they’re first opened—a couple hours can coax out some much more pleasant fruity-mineral aromas.

Truthfully, a decanter does not have to do much beyond hold a bottle of wine and not tip over. But a one-liter Erlenmeyer flask, a flat-bottomed conical vessel named after the German chemist who invented it in the middle of the 19th century, does an excellent job at that. I got the idea at Whisk, a fancy kitchenware store in Brooklyn, but this has been percolating among wine nerds for years, including in the New York Times.

I won’t blame you if you spring for a beautiful and blingy decanter like the Zalto Axium. But I enjoy using the Erlenmeyer because it’s not marketed to wine drinkers. There are so many silly gadgets out there, as if you can’t enjoy a bottle without a contraption that aerates the wine as you pour, or as if a bottle will turn into vinegar within hours unless it’s preserved in a vacuum or coated in argon gas.

Nobody needs any of this. Decanting is the best way to aerate wines, period. And decanting them and paying attention—getting to know how your favorite bottles respond to a little air—is an ideal way to solve the problem of not finishing a bottle in one night. You’ll quickly discover that while some wines go off overnight, others can sit in a cool place for days while still tasting great. Those are the ones to open when you’re not sure you’ll be able to polish off a whole bottle.

All you need is a $16 piece of lab equipment.

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If you care about wine, an unhappy fact of life is that the prices of your favorites are probably going up every year. What was yesterday’s under-hyped gem gets big on Instagram, and all of a sudden the new vintage is double what you used to pay, if you can find it at all. I am usually happy for the winemakers, especially if they’re a small-scale independent operation—they work unbelievably hard, and more or less nobody is in this to get rich. But it is still a bummer!

So I was surprised by my reaction when I was browsing my local wine shop recently and saw a half-bottle of one of my favorite wines, Valdespino Inocente, going for $11. I was vaguely offended? It seemed somehow unjust for one of the world’s great wines to be going for that little. At the same time, though, it objectively rules that you can grab a bottle for the price of a Chipotle burrito.

And Inocente is one of the world’s great wines. It’s generally understood that these wines express the soil they were grown in, the terroir. Inocente comes exclusively from Macharnudo, a martian landscape of white chalk on a hill outside of Jerez, in southwest Spain. It’s the product of careful and traditional winemaking, too: Inocente is fermented in wooden barrels with indigenous yeasts. Then it’s aged for ten years or so under a veil of protective yeast as it moves through a ten-stage system of barrels called a solera.

But you know what? Don’t get bogged down in the details. Sherry is one of those categories that sommeliers and other wine geeks enjoy and buy much more than the general drinking public. I think this is because there’s so much minutiae, as though you can’t drink and enjoy it without a perfect understanding of the solera system, or being able to rattle off the difference between a palo cortado and an oloroso.

Instead, if you’ve got an extra $11 in your grocery budget this week, just give it a shot. Some geeky wines can sometimes be hard to find outside of major cities, but this isn’t one of them. If you live in the United States, the best wine shop near you will likely be able to special-order it at the very least. And if you don’t like Inocente on its own, it also works nicely in cocktails.

The best wines are more than a beverage—they’re a portal into another culture that happen to get you buzzed. So pick up some almonds and olives, maybe some jamón if you’re feeling fancy, and pour yourself a well-chilled glass. You are not going to find a greater monument to Spanish culture between here and the Prado Museum.

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Rum production on Martinique traditionally wraps up by the first week of June, just before the arrival of the rainy season, but Habitation La Favorite was still running at full steam when I arrived on the 12th of the month this past year. The distillery, a ramshackle cinder block and corrugated metal structure, is tucked into a ravine at the end of a dirt drive in the lush hills above the island’s capital, Fort-de-France. When it is running, you smell it before you see it: acrid smoke and the sickly sweet vapors of fermenting sugarcane juice.

The cane-growing season had been troubled and late-ripening, partially on account of the previous year’s record-breaking hurricane activity, and owner Paul Dormoy was scrambling to make up for lost time before the Caribbean’s summer rains returned and destroyed his crop. Most rum distillers don’t have these kinds of problems, but the dominant style on Martinique is rhum agricole, “agricultural” rum, which is distilled from highly perishable, fresh-crushed sugarcane juice rather than the far more common (and shelf-stable) molasses. Time was of the essence.

I was visiting the island with Ed Hamilton, La Favorite’s American importer and one of the world’s foremost experts on the spirit. Hamilton had come to hash out some points of contention with management. An order had arrived in unlabeled boxes and caused chaos in his warehouse in New York, and another had arrived in the wrong proof. He also wanted to check on how things were progressing after a difficult period for the distillery, which had suffered a series of mechanical issues.

An old-fashioned agricole distillery is animated by sugarcane alone. Steam-powered conveyor belts feed cane into a crusher, a tangle of gears that pulverize the grass to extract the cane’s juice. The juice is then diverted into enormous steel tanks to ferment into a lightly alcoholic sort of wine. The post-crush cane continues on to another series of conveyor belts to be burned in a furnace, which provides the steam that powers the machinery and heats the still.

At La Favorite, workers without so much as a pair of safety glasses supervised, periodically intervening when a clump of crushed cane threatened to gum things up. The machinery whirred and clanked deafeningly; steam hissed out from weak spots in the plumbing. “It’s music!” Dormoy shouted above the din.

The heart of the operation, a pair of 20-foot-tall column stills, roared away against the west wall, concentrating the post-fermentation sugarcane wine into rum. Boiling liquid sloshed around in portholes as banks of analog gauges twitched under fogged glass. At the base of each still, a fountain of white rum spilled out at the pace of a kinked garden hose. The left still was more modern, constructed partially of stainless steel. The right still—made out of dull copper and held together by primitive clamps—seemed ancient by comparison, as if Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had turned to alchemy rather than naval architecture.

Hamilton has earned a reputation as a defender of the old-fashioned and authentic in the world of rum, and it went without saying that he preferred the older still. It produces the rum for the main La Favorite product—the one he imports—while the liquor from the left still is sold in bulk and used in lower-cost bottles. He encouraged me to compare the just-born liquors by sticking my finger into each stream. The rum streaming out had been distilled to about 75 percent alcohol—150 proof—and the sample from the left still tasted every bit of it—fiery and harsh. But from the right, the rum had the burning sweetness of raw ethanol but immediately receded into a sort of chalky mellowness. I looked back at Hamilton, then stuck my hand back into the right stream for another taste. He grinned. “It’s not bullshit, right?”

The question of whether something is bullshit is a persistent one among rum lovers. Today, the spirit has a reputation—one that’s mostly been earned—as a low-quality party fuel, suitable for sweet boat drinks and underage guzzling. “Rum is a junk category,” says San Francisco bartender Thad Vogler. “Virtually all of it is garbage.” This is not to say Vogler is a rum hater: He opened Bar Agricole, named in tribute to the Martinique style, in 2010. (It has been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s bar program award every year since 2012.) The problem, to Vogler and other frustrated rum enthusiasts, is twofold. On the low end, the rum trade is dominated by a handful of enormous distilleries that flood the market with flavorless industrial liquor, essentially vodka that happens to be made from sugarcane, much of it subsidized by one government or another.

Then, on the high end, many aged rums are dosed with sugar and other added flavorings, making them more of a liqueur than a proper spirit to enthusiasts. These additions are typically a trade secret, but a subculture of amateur sleuths has developed on the internet: They test for sugar with their own hydrometers and trade screenshots from the websites of state-owned liquor stores of Nordic countries, which make sugar content public. They have discovered, to take one example, that Ron Zacapa 23, a popular top-shelf Guatemalan rum, contains about 20 grams of sugar per liter, about as much as a semisweet German riesling.

These two poles represent the vast majority of rum on the market. But for those who know where to look, there are pockets of transcendence, like the unadulterated treasures made at Foursquare on Barbados or overproof Jamaicans like Rum Fire that project intoxicating ripe-banana funk all the way into the next room. “I taste some of these rums with whiskey people, and they’re converted for life,” says Fred Minnick, a bourbon expert who branched out to publish a book titled Rum Curious last year. “The great rums are pound for pound as good as the great whiskeys and brandies.”

Hamilton has made the search for the good stuff his life’s work, first as an author and educator, then as an importer. He has done it all with a cranky and outspoken obsession with transparency. “He was out there preaching about high-quality rum before rum was cool,” Minnick tells me. “Now there are people interested in it and money flowing into it, but we still have this shit rum. He was talking about the shit rum before anybody. He had the guts—and I mean this—to stand up to the big brands to say, ‘You suck.’”

There may be no denser concentration of pure, honest rum than on Martinique, where Hamilton got his start importing. The island is some 200 miles from South America in the Lesser Antilles, the volcanic arc of islands that defines the border between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It is also a department of France, an integral component of the Republic, with representation in Parliament just like Paris or Marseilles.

The rum industry has benefited from this arrangement. Shiny distillery equipment with a sign indicating it was purchased with the support of European Union agricultural programs is a common sight on the island, and French labor regulations have outlawed the exploitation of sugarcane field workers that is too common throughout the rest of the Caribbean. But the greatest benefit to the island’s rum has come from the French national genius for food bureaucracy. Rhum agricole from Martinique is regulated by an appellation d’origine contrôlée, an AOC, France’s designation for products that may be produced only in a given region. This means the rum is subject to the same sort of rules that govern the production of Bordeaux wine or Bresse chickens. In Martinique, the rules dictate everything from the maximum distillation proof to the time of year it’s legal to distill, and they proscribe many of the bad practices that make rum such a troubled category—­flavorless ultra-high-proof distillation, misleading aging claims, added sugar and flavorings. Rums made from fresh sugarcane juice are found elsewhere, and even some Brazilian cachaça is similar, but the AOC enforces a baseline level of quality on the island, which helps the style reach its highest highs here.

The island, population 375,000, is about a third the size of Rhode Island but feels much larger because of its ruggedness: Dense ripples of cane field and rainforest mean the roads are never straight. On the north side of the island, a volcano called Mount Pelée rises to more than 4,500 feet above sea level just a few miles from the sea.

Martinique was a center of France’s ­brutal colonial slavery regime for nearly 200 years, responsible for producing sugar and oceans of molasses-based rum. The two typically go hand in hand: Molasses is essentially a waste product of sugar production. (Disposing of it was enormously annoying to the first colonial sugar barons before rum distillation was developed early in the 17th century.) Two disasters struck around the turn of the 20th century. Mount Pelée erupted in 1902, killing 30,000 people, destroying the city of Saint-Pierre (then the capital and one of the most developed cities in the Caribbean), and leading to the closure of many small distilleries. The other disaster was slower moving. Over the course of the 19th century, European agronomists bred ever-more-potent sugar beets, encouraged by Napoleon and other leaders eager to find a way to produce sugar in cold climates. Their efforts led to a glut on the world market, plummeting prices, and the collapse of the Martinique sugar industry.

In 1887, at the height of the sugar crisis, a politician named Homère Clément purchased a bankrupt plantation. Clément was a popular figure on Martinique. The son of a slave, he was the first person of color to become a licensed medical doctor in France, and he represented the island in the National Assembly in Paris as a radical-­socialist. Rather than let his new estate’s crop rot in the field, he began making rum directly from cane juice. Other people had made rum this way, but Clément did it on a larger scale, and used his clout to champion the style. Today, the vast majority of the rum produced on Martinique is made from fresh cane juice.

Hamilton is 64 years old, 6 feet 5 inches tall, and perpetually clad in a Hawaiian shirt and Panama hat. He keeps his white hair shaggy and maintains an enormous white walrus mustache. The overall effect is of a rum importer as imagined by a Times Square caricaturist.

Hamilton came by the look honestly. The story he likes to tell is that in 1978, when he was 24, he was working as an engineer for a company that made tiny, powerful actuators for airplanes and bombs. His boss asked him to write down his five-year plan, and how he planned to get there. He wrote: “Go sailing. I quit.”

He moved to Taiwan to build sailboats, then found one-way work in Singapore as the engineer on a commercial ship bound for Manila. (“Hired off a bar stool—I was not qualified.”) He ended up based in Perth, Australia, working as an engineer on oil rigs across Southeast Asia, and resolved to stay until he could afford a boat of his own. The job meant white-knuckle plane flights and nights spent sleeping in shipping containers in the Papua New Guinea jungle.

Five years after quitting his desk job, Hamilton bought a 38-foot sloop. He sailed for years until, during a rum-fueled full-moon reverie, he came up with the idea of visiting every distillery in the Caribbean. It still seemed like a good idea in the morning, and he turned his years of wanderings into the still-active Ministry of Rum, the first large website devoted to the subject, and several books, including 1997’s The Complete Guide to Rum, which described close to 200 distilleries at a time when the largest liquor store in the country had seven rums on the shelf.

Hamilton supported himself with odd cash jobs, most colorfully smuggling rum and cigarettes and tourist knickknacks (“everything but drugs­”) between Caribbean islands. But this was just one job among many. An engineer’s skills were always in high demand in ports packed with sailboats in various states of disrepair. And an all-time jackpot gig came when he and a group of friends made $50 a day as extras on the set of Speed 2: Cruise Control, which was filmed in St. Martin. He still talks ruefully about not having time to work on Pirates of the Caribbean like the rest of his crew.

By then he had gained a business partner and an importing license. His first containers of Martinique rum left the island in 2004. “I just wanted to bring back rum for my friends,” he says. “I thought, if this doesn’t work, great. I’ll end up back on a 45-foot cutter in the Caribbean.” There were complicated years during the Great Recession, when Hamilton had to buy out sole control of the business. But the operation has seen steady growth, and his portfolio of a few dozen rums is now available in 42 states.

More than other liquor brands, Hamilton’s business model recalls figures in the wine industry, like Kermit Lynch, who challenged American consumers to seek out smaller producers making a purer, unadulterated product­—preferably one he imported. Hamilton’s portfolio has expanded to include a line of Hamilton-brand rums he buys in bulk from distilleries in St. Lucia, Jamaica, and Guyana, offering everything from vintage rarities to cocktail workhorses with the same focus on transparency. The idea was never to sell only to collectors and connoisseurs—in almost every state, you should be able to find or order his rums at a decent liquor store.

“When I get a Demerara rum from Ed Hamilton, it’s going to have the right charred-wood taste, the right kind of smoke. It’s going to have every characteristic that is going to make a tropical drink taste the way it’s supposed to,” says Jeff Berry, a writer and bar owner responsible for reconstituting much of the once-lost tiki cocktail canon. “I know it’s going to be a pure rum. It’s not going to have any additives or flavorings. He’s jousting with these corporate behemoths that are flooding the category with ­anonymously sourced, adulterated product. Rum needs people as dogmatic and single-minded as Ed is.”

Out of a solo sailor’s combination of thrift and misanthropy, Hamilton runs the business completely by himself, doing everything from distribution contracts to sales calls to logging inventory on his own homebrew software. He now splits time between Florida and Southern California, and spends much of the year flying around the country with his girlfriend, Caroline, an old friend from his boatbuilding days, on the move from bars to conferences to distributor offices. In 2009, Hamilton’s 45-foot cutter was destroyed by termites while in dry dock on Saint Lucia.

Hamilton’s easygoing island-time appearance is just a thin veneer over a detail-oriented and competitive personality, and the supposed inauthenticity of his rivals is one of his favorite topics. Rhum J.M. was already the best-looking distillery on Martinique before it was purchased by Bernard Hayot, an industrialist who controls a huge portion of the commerce on Martinique. Since then, the facility has been expensively renovated, with a fresh coat of bright-red paint, every surface buffed to an antiseptic shine. It now runs on electric power. While there is no reason to suspect that this results in an inferior rum, when I visited with Hamilton, he grinned as he pointed out that the pristine steam engine was now mostly decoration.

J.M.’s new management also sped up their fermentation process, the step when rum develops much of its flavor. The faster fermentation is not a secret—the tour guides brag about it to visitors. But to hear Hamilton tell it, the change ruined what had once been pretty good rum.

“I am not the rum police,” Hamilton likes to say, before launching into a diatribe about one of his competitors. The spirits industry does run on secrecy, back-slapping insiders, and enormous marketing budgets, and Hamilton is a voice in the wilderness standing up for better rum. But he sometimes makes little distinction between bad rum and artisanal products that he happens to be competing with.

After visiting J.M., we drove to the estate where Homère Clément first distilled rhum agricole. Rhum Clément is also owned by Hayot, and while production has been moved to a large distillery on the island where several other brands are made, the grounds are still home to aging facilities and a tasting room—plus a contemporary art exhibition—which are open for tours. There was plenty for Hamilton to raise his eyebrows at: the quintessential Martinique distillery reduced to a museum. But he went further—insisting, mistakenly, that the bulk of their lineup hadn’t been made according to the AOC rules. This was based on a simple misreading of the label, but it was easy to see how stuff like that could irritate his competitors.

Both J.M. and Clément are imported to the United States by Ben Jones, a great-grandnephew of Homère Clément. He got his start importing the very same month as Hamilton. It’s remarkable how much they sound like each other when decrying the flaws of the category as a whole. But the two are bitter rivals, and Hamilton’s combativeness frustrates Jones, who says it doesn’t make sense for Martinique producers to fight for the same tiny slice of a much larger pie. “Agricole is one-tenth of 1 percent of all the rum in the United States,” he says. “A rising tide lifts all ships. When Ed gets into all of that, he doesn’t do the category any favors.”

Hamilton is at least an equal-opportunity griper. The primary reason for this particular visit to Martinique was a stop at Distillerie Neisson, the crown jewel of his portfolio, a family-owned operation that’s considered by many to be the best on the island. It’s tiny, even by the standards of Martinique distilleries, painted in saturated shades of purple and lime green. We weren’t there for 10 minutes before Hamilton scampered into a pile of sugarcane, dodging a swinging set of mechanical jaws that were actively loading the cane into the ­distillery. He was dismayed by what he found. Cut sugarcane begins to spoil almost immediately after it is harvested, and the cane he pulled off the pile had gone soft on the ends. Owner Grégory ­Vernant emerged from his office and confirmed ­Hamilton’s hunch, aghast: There had been a mechanical problem on Saturday afternoon, and it was now Monday morning.

Vernant is in the last phases of ­taking over the distillery from his mother, Claudine Neisson-Vernant, 76. Vernant has chosen to take over the business even though he could sell out to a big multinational luxury-goods company and retire whenever he wanted. He says Hermès was the most recent suitor, and that they were offended when he demurred before they could even name a price.

Vernant talks like a winemaker, about terroir and the flavor of particular yeasts. He’s experimenting with aging rum in expensive, brand-new American oak barrels. (Most Martinique rum is aged in used bourbon barrels.) When things are really ­humming at the distillery, he shows off by bottling 70 percent alcohol rum straight off the still, essentially raw distillate. This is ­practically unheard of in the world of distilling—raw liquor is generally ­disgusting. But these bottlings are sought after by collectors.

Vernant is most passionate about his organic rum ­project. Neisson is the first distillery on Martinique to work with organic cane, though the venture has not been without its problems. Yields have been lower than conventionally farmed cane, and issues in the fields were why Neisson was still producing so late in the season. Vernant says it’s worth it, that eventually the entire estate will be organic, that he’s seen the changes in the fields himself. “People think I’m crazy when I start talking about the butterflies,” he says, “but I’m never going back.”

Hamilton had come to Neisson to taste barrel samples to sell as limited-edition single-barrel ­and vintage bottlings. Rum aged in the harsh, hot climate of the tropics matures much faster than it does in cooler parts of the world, and these old agricoles had become formidably concentrated in flavor. Hamilton clearly still loves rum, and drinks it most days, but he tastes it like a merchant rather than an enthusiast. “This is so smooth,” he said at a couple of points. “But can I afford it?”

Vernant returned to the aging warehouse for another sample. Hamilton turned. “I knew this son of a bitch was going to do this to me. I came to buy five barrels of this rum, which I can afford,” he said, pointing to a sample of a younger blend. “He shows me three other vintages that are much better,” he said. “When you get a chance to buy something like this, you buy it, but this trip is going to cost three times as much as I thought it was going to.”

The aged Neisson rums were markedly more intense than anything else I’d tasted on Martinique, and Hamilton’s bottles are sure to be quickly snapped up by American connoisseurs. But on Martinique, most people drink the fresh, unaged white rum. If you remember your first sip of good mezcal after a lifetime of big-brand tequila, the first taste of unaged agricole is a similar kick in the teeth. It is a bracing expression of the essence of sugarcane, a grass. Attempts at describing its flavor invariably skew green: lime peel, olives, basil, freshly mowed golf course.

It’s typically consumed as a ti’ punch. Short for petit punch, it’s as simple as cocktails get: a tiny bit of lime, a little of the flavorful local sugar, and a glug of rhum agricole. They don’t actually drink mai tais in the South Pacific, and good luck ­finding a decent daiquiri in Havana these days, but the ti’ punch is what people on Martinique actually drink.

I thought of this on the way to lunch late one morning. ­Hamilton was holding forth about his favorite topic, in this case about a particularly “heavy” Jamaican rum, one that includes liquor from late in the distillation process that is usually thrown out. “It’s unfit for human consumption. The Jamaicans don’t drink it,” he said. “It is not part of the ­culture there. Actually go to Jamaica, or Trinidad, or wherever else, and find out what they’re actually doing there.” It was an inadvertent summary of the entire Hamilton worldview.

We arrived at the restaurant, in Sainte-Anne, on the south side of the island, little more than an open-air wooden platform perched spectacularly above the harbor. It was four minutes before noon, but Hamilton’s broken French got us a round of Neisson ti’ punches. Down below, crews were racing yole boats, colorful traditional canoelike crafts with rectangular sails. It was the low season, and the bar was sparsely populated by local guys chatting in Creole and half-watching the boat race. They were drinking ti’ punches too.

Correction: Mar. 28, 2019
An earlier version of this article misstated where Hamilton moved to build sailboats. It was Taiwan, not Singapore.

The post This Importer Is Bringing Back Some of the Caribbean’s Best Rum appeared first on Saveur.

When he was opening Maialino, a Roman-inspired restaurant in Manhattan, Nick Anderer was determined to cook with the world’s greatest dry pasta. He just wasn’t sure exactly which one that was. The solution was to test every bag he could get his hands on. “We knew the sauces and shapes we wanted to serve,” he says. “It was just a matter of pairing as many different producers with them as possible.” You are probably not looking to open a trattoria in your home, but the process works just as well if you’re deciding which brand to stock in your pantry.

Anderer says to start by watching how a pasta cooks, particularly when it approaches an ideal al dente texture. “Bad pastas never have a great texture. Others are a perfect al dente and then immediately fall apart,” he says. “The best pastas hold their texture for a little longer so they’re easier to work with.” Then, consider how the sauce behaves when you transfer the pasta to the pan to finish the dish. A good noodle will have a sticky, starchy outer layer that encourages the sauce to emulsify and cling to the pasta. Finally, taste: “Some industrial pasta just tastes like nothing—it should taste like wheat.”

Matt Taylor-Gross

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Vertically integrated
Most Italian dry pasta is made from imported wheat, but better brands use homegrown. Massimo Mancini takes that a step further: His factory in Le Marche is in the middle of his wheat fields, and he directs the process from start to finish. According to Nick Anderer, the control-freak approach gets results.

Matt Taylor-Gross

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Brown Bag It
“It’s a glory time for dried pasta,” says Andrew Carmellini, chef-owner of Locanda Verde, Bar Primi, and Leuca in New York. “We’re huge fans of Rustichella d’Abruzzo, particularly the spaghetti. The texture on the outside from their bronze dies really grabs the sauce.” Melissa Rodriguez of schmancy Manhattan Italian spot Del Posto relies on Rustichella d’Abruzzo’s corn pasta for gluten-free versions of her sea urchin spaghetti, among others. “A lot of gluten-free pasta gets slimy or mealy,” she says. “This one holds a really nice texture.”

Matt Taylor-Gross

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I had just parked at the Hörte Brygga with Simon Bajada, a SAVEUR contributing photographer from Sweden, when he noticed the bushes in the garden. “Sea buckthorn!” he said. “Let’s try some.” I would never have recognized the bright orange berries—or even known they were edible if I had—but Bajada lives in the country and worked as a chef in a past life, so he’s a guy who knows about Nordic delicacies. We dug in like a pair of hungry bears in a nature documentary. The flavor of the seedy berries was fascinating: bright and citrusy but with an herbal edge.

Just then a man walked out of the restaurant. Busted, I thought. But he introduced himself as Robert Hägg, the chef, and joined our little foraging party. “These three bushes are all slightly different varieties,” he explained as he sampled them. I wouldn’t know, of course—but I began to compare the berries and it was true: one was quite sweet, the middle was very tart, and the third had a richer, meatier flavor.

We were on the edge of the Baltic sea in rural Skåne, the southernmost region of Sweden, on the grounds of a serious yet casual restaurant called Hörte Brygga. In the cooler months it morphs into the Köksbordet—or Kitchen Table—where a two-person team of just a chef and a sommelier prepare a strikingly ambitious tasting menu for a single party.

Our meal began with an aperitif of pétillant natural, a bottle-fermented sparkling wine, served by Hägg’s partner, sommelier Ester Sökjer-Petersen. We sipped the cloudy, lightly effervescent white and hung out while Hägg manned a smoker on the side of the building. It occurred to me that it was Labor Day weekend back in the United States, and that hanging out by a smoker was basically what I would have been doing back there, just now I had much better wine and handmade charcuterie.

I can say confidently that I would not have experienced the flavors that came once dinner started at any backyard barbecue stateside. Bajada and I sat in the garden for the first courses, a procession of subtle flavors: cured perch, a light-colored freshwater fish, seemed to dissolve into a lightly meaty flavor. Pollock and zucchini shrouded in a butter-garlic sauce was similarly ethereal.

Even a dish of raw lamb tasted rich and fatty but not at all gamy, a magic trick of careful sourcing and fresh preparation. A dish of unripe tomato, on the other hand, was anything but subtle. Hägg prepared it with fermented tomato juice and thinly-sliced broccoli, and the effect was as if Hägg had compressed the flavor of an entire case of tomatoes into a single bowl.

Once the sun set and the garden got cold, we retreated to sit indoors for a last savory course of duck, then a parade of desserts that prominently featured the sea buckthorn from the garden. Inside, the complex and intense flavors we had been experiencing made a little more sense. The building was a curiosity cabinet of ferments and jarred liquors labeled in wax pencil, with drying herbs and curing meats hanging from the rafters.

But there were still the sounds and smells and good vibes of that Labor Day barbecue. I ended up sitting next to the restaurant’s record player, and was put to work as the D.J., selecting from their stack of vintage records (I went with Creedence Clearwater Revival). While the success of the New Nordic movement may mean the northern latitudes are packed with places to eat a multi-hour-long tasting, I would come to appreciate that Skåne is quite a bit lower-key than Copenhagen or Stockholm—the kind of place where they care just as much about ingredients and treating you to an eye-opening food experience, but where they don’t mind if you eat their sea buckthorn. To close out the meal, Sökjer-Petersen poured us a final sweet wine made from muscat grapes. “You might smell a little hash in this one,” she said, then paused. “I wouldn’t know, of course, but sommelier friends of mine have said that.”

The post Why You Might Never Have Heard of The Köksbordet, But Should appeared first on Saveur.

Saltimporten Canteen, a waterfront restaurant in Malmö, Sweden, is defined as much by what it doesn’t do as what it does. It is open for two hours, noon until 2pm, on weekdays, and that’s it. It offers two pre-prepared options—a vegetarian plate that changes weekly, another with meat or fish that changes daily—that each cost about $10, plus one dessert, a few wines, and coffee. And it’s one of the most exciting restaurants in Malmö, and maybe the entire country.

The format is an update of the Dagens Rätt—or daily lunch special—a traditional Swedish workers’ lunch, served relatively quickly at communal dining tables with a curated choice of pre-made plates. It’s a tradition that is coming back in the area, gracing a few modern chef’s menus who are reinvigorating it with fresh local ingredients and global flavors. Visiting as a tourist, I felt like a bit of an interloper among the solo diners who seem to work in the area and co-workers grabbing a quick bite together. And yet, despite its low price, it is an ambitious statement of how simple cuisine can be elevated, and what modern Swedish cooking might look like.

When I visited at the end of last summer, I couldn’t help but compare it to the most famous Swedish restaurant of the last decade, Fäviken, a 24-seat tasting-menu temple in a remote corner of the north of the country kind of near the ski town Åre. It is apparently the kind of place you need to take some time off of work to visit properly, 14 or so courses of New Nordic wizardry, nettles and reindeer and lichen. I say “apparently” because there is just one seating of 24 people a night, and reservations disappear months in advance, so most of the dining public—and I—have only experienced the restaurant and its chef, Magnus Nilsson, through season one of “Chef’s Table.”

But a paradox of New Nordic tasting-menu food has been that, despite representing an entire region to the outside world, it has very little to do with the way most people actually eat—normal Swedes don’t generally feast on nettles and reindeer and lichen. They do eat the kind of food of which Saltimporten Canteen makes exceptional versions: stews, cured fish, and grain salads. And at the restaurant these are all rooted in classic Scandinavian flavors with a bit of East Asian and Middle Eastern influence. To me, that makes it a better ambassador for the potential of Swedish cooking to the outside world.

Like Fäviken, Saltimporten Canteen requires a pilgrimage of sorts. It’s at the end of a long industrial pier that projects into the city’s harbor, a 15 minute walk through a working industrial port. (The name means “salt import,” and refers to the previous use of the building.) It requires the trip, I should say, of people that don’t work in the area—it’s probably best visited on your lunch break.

The chefs and owners, Ola Rudin and Sebastian Persson, have a fine-dining background, and they cook seasonally, with almost exclusively local ingredients. The day I visited, the rotating menu featured Gravlax served over rice with cucumbers, sprouts, and sweet fried onions, all of it dusted with fine seaweed powder. The communal tables were bustling, but it wasn’t hard to grab a seat. I contemplated a glass of wine from excellent French natural producer La Granges aux Belles and snagged an extremely good piece of gratis bread. Relishing the last few bites of the comforting yet inspiring meal, I couldn’t help but fantasize about an alternate life as a stylish Swedish graphic designer: I’d visit three times a week; take in all the flavors, colors, and voices of the crowd; then just pop back to my office next door and get back to work.

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