Until I started spending time in Georgia, walnuts were an afterthought in my kitchen. Occasionally I’d toss them into brownie batter and sprinkle them over salads, but truth be told, they usually wound up in the trash, rancid and mealy from months of neglect. What a waste: As I’d learn in the Caucasus, walnuts are far more than a snack or a garnish. They can be the backbone of a dish, blitzed with vegetables into savory spreads, pounded with garlic into heady sauces for meat, or whisked into stews for richness and heft. In other words, your favorite new magic-bullet ingredient might already be in your cupboard.  

Many cultures cook with walnuts—see walnut-thickened fesenjan from Iran, or pickled walnuts from Britain—but in Georgia the ingredient is elemental. From the Azerbaijan border in the east to the Black Sea in the west, walnuts are in everything from soup to—well, you get it, imbuing stews, salads, sauces, and desserts with a woodsy richness that’s a hallmark of Georgian cooking. The more walnutty foods I tried in the region, the more I wondered what these walnut whisperers knew that the rest of us didn’t, and how Georgia became such a walnut-loving nation in the first place.

My fieldwork began in the one-church village of Akura at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. I was at a backyard feast at the home of Tekuna Gachechiladze, whose Tbilisi restaurant Café Littera breezes through 15 pounds of walnuts in a slow week. “So, you want to know about walnuts?” Gachechiladze asked, chuckling. “Go grab a bottle of wine. We’re going to be here for a while.”

Walnuts have been growing alongside humans since neanderthals were our neighbors. Fossil records show that they’ve existed in the Caucasus for millennia, ample time for Georgians to develop their own mythology, traditions, and—of course—foods based on the nut. According to culinary historian Dali Tsatava, walnuts are the oldest-known cultivated food in the Caucasus region. “Walnut trees were always sacred, considered a symbol of abundance,” she explained. “The nuts were offered as a sacrifice at churches, which were often surrounded by walnut trees, and almost every Georgian family had a walnut tree at the gate.” 

The spiritual connection to walnuts has been all but forgotten, but the trees and their bounty remain. Between sips of rkatsiteli, Gachechiladze explained that walnut cookery in Georgia comes down to three components: the walnuts themselves, garlic, and khmeli suneli—a spice blend that usually contains coriander, chile, dried marigold petals, and an extra-floral strain of local fenugreek (Trigonella caerulea)—all forced through a meat grinder or pounded in a mortar to obtain a thick paste. “Dilute this mixture with water, and you have bazhe sauce. Stir it into meat stew, and you’ve got kharcho. Work it into cooked vegetables or greens, and you have pkhali. And on and on,” she said. 

Gachechiladze is persnickety about her pkhali, which at Littera comes in four colorful varieties: beet, eggplant, spinach, and—my favorite—leek. “You should add enough spices and garlic to flavor the dish, but not so much that they overpower the delicate vegetables and walnuts,” she said. Acid is also crucial as it balances the walnuts’ oily richness—not only in pkhali but in all of Georgia’s savory walnut dishes. Lemon juice, vinegar, and fresh pomegranate juice are all fair game. 

But the question remained: What was with the outsize presence of walnuts in Georgian food? Gachechiladze posits that the calorie-rich nuts, high in protein and fat, were historically the most nutritious stand-in for meat, which the peasantry could seldom afford. Further, the whole nation, rich and poor, avoided meat during Lent, which gave rise to an entire canon of vegetarian “fasting” dishes including pkhali and lobio (stewed kidney beans with walnuts and fresh herbs). “I only remember my mother making pkhali when we were fasting,” said Gachechiladze.          

Like Gachechiladze, chef Meriko Gubeladze of Tbilisi’s Shavi Lomi and Ninia’s Garden grew up in a walnut-loving family. “As children, we’d pick them when they were still green and rub their white flesh on our lips. It looked like we were wearing lipstick!” she told me over the phone. Walnuts contain a chemical called juglone that, when exposed to air, becomes a brownish black pigment. 

While the kids dabbled in makeup routines, the grown-ups would be in the kitchen turning the season’s first walnuts into a chthonic spoon-sweet called muraba. This jet-black conserve is so tedious to make that you’re likely to—as the Georgian saying goes—“break a walnut shell between your butt cheeks”: First you have to remove the nuts’ ornery skin (turning your fingers brown in the process), then soak the peeled nuts in multiple changes of water mixed with alum (for color) and lime (for crispness), and finally candy them in sugar syrup and can them for long-term preservation. Georgians serve the resulting orbs with breakfast and tea; me, I like them paired with stinky cheeses and spooned over chocolate ice cream.    

In autumn, when walnuts’ tender green skins ossify into brown, brainy exoskeletons, they’re harvested and sent to market. Even at corner groceries, Georgians have the luxury of choosing from several bins of walnuts segregated by size and color. Broken brownish nubs, the most affordable option, are snapped up for soups and pkhali for which color is unimportant, while the prized whiter intact walnut halves lend gozinaki (walnut brittle) its attractive cragginess and sauces like bazhe their requisite ivory hue. 

“Anyone can whip up bazhe in five minutes,” said Gubeladze, and she’s right, provided you have walnuts and a few key spices (coriander, fenugreek, and marigold) on hand. Roast chicken with tomato-cucumber salad and a passed bowl of bazhe is Georgian weeknight fare at its finest: gutsy, simple, fresh. Gubeladze’s recipe, my go-to, is lighter and tangier than most, thanks to the double whammy of acid in the form of white wine vinegar and pomegranate juice. It plays as well with sheet-pan veggies as it does with grilled meats and even fish. 

But for newcomers to Georgian cuisine, the biggest revelation may be what walnuts do for stews. Georgians employ garlicky walnut paste like the French use cream, adding it in the final minutes of cooking for richness, texture, and depth. Walnut-thickened stews are so prized by Georgians that the country rings in each New Year with satsivi, a slow-simmered cauldron of turkey braised with garlic, cinnamon, and allspice and anointed with drops of orange-hued walnut oil. (Food scholar Darra Goldstein, author of The Georgian Feast, makes the case that satsivi descends from north Indian curries, but that’s a tale for another time.)  

Bolder and spicier than satsivi is kharcho, a west Georgian meat stew brimming with ajika and walnuts. It’s such a crowd-pleaser that it was adopted by cooks across the former Soviet Union, where it remains a staple from St. Petersburg to Samarkand. Indeed, one of my favorite bites on earth is the beef kharcho at Tbilisi restaurant Salobie Bia, where chef Giorgi Iosava ladles it over creamed foxtail millet akin to polenta. The spoon-tender brisket and silky porridge are so delightfully soft that the combo ought to be prescribed after wisdom teeth surgery.

Back in Akura, Gachechiladze was using kharcho as a verb—“If you haven’t kharcho’ed shrimp, you haven’t lived!” My stomach audibly groaned as we stood and walked over to the overflowing supra table. There, beneath the boughs of a gnarled, old tree, we toasted to friends, to ancestors, and—naturally—to Georgia. When I looked over at Gachechiladze, she was pointing up at the foliage with one hand and down at the table with the other, her eyes glinting: “Any guesses?” she said.

Recipes

Georgian Roast Chicken With Bazhe Sauce

Get the recipe >

Georgian Beef Kharcho

Get the recipe >

Leek Pkhali (Georgian Vegetable Paté)

Get the recipe >

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Lime juice adds zing to this simple crudo from Uruguayan-born chef Ignacio Mattos. Assemble it right before serving, so the juice doesn’t cook the fish. Mattos uses sea bass, but snapper also works well. Check out our favorite raw fish recipes featuring crudo, sashimi, ceviche, and even poké.

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Sweden has a PR problem, and it has nothing to do with NATO membership or Russian disinformation. This week the internet woke up to #Swedengate, a Reddit post-turned-tweetstorm about Swedes not feeding their houseguests. 

According to the post, a Swedish child visiting a friend’s house was asked to stay upstairs while the family sat down to dinner—a situation deemed normal by many Swedish commenters. This, in turn, elicited a pile-on by “food-is-love” believers who couldn’t wrap their minds around not feeding any houseguest, let alone a child who’s over for a playdate. 

The anecdote called into question the commonly held utopian vision of Sweden as a happy, highly functional, tightly knit society backed by a potent welfare state. How could this cultural model justify denying a kid dinner, and what did that say about Swedish values? It turns out, it says a lot—just maybe not what you think.  

To an outsider, Sweden has eccentric cultural mores when it comes to mealtime, a fact that became apparent shortly after I moved here in 2001. A few Swedes had invited me over for dinner, and as everybody was spooning up the last of the bolognese, the host passed around a cup. Each guest deposited 20 kronor ($3) apiece to cover the cost of the meal—a shocker to me, an Asian American who had always footed the bill for my own dinner parties.

Swedish students, I later learned, live off a modest government stipend. University tuition is free, but food in Sweden is expensive—so expensive, in fact, that a Swedish student famously came down with scurvy after eating only pasta for months. For college kids who want to break bread together, pooling resources makes sense. 

That night, it dawned on me that Swedish food culture went much, much deeper than meatballs, lingonberries, and fika (the afternoon coffee-and-pastry tradition Americans are just starting to appreciate). I assimilated quickly—and even started to admire this unfamiliar philosophy around entertaining. It seemed fairer and more inclusive. But what does pooling money have to do with that hungry kid? 

To Swedes, feeding a visiting child without running it by the parents could be seen as inconsiderate—it throws things out of order. In the case of the Reddit poster, surely a hot dinner was waiting for them at home, a dinner that was budgeted for in both money and time. “A lot of Minnesotanss of Nordic descent are also very Swedish about this too,” my Swedish American friend Kristin told me. “We’ve even packed lunch for our kids to eat at the neighbors’ from time to time.”  

One could argue that such unwritten rules make life in Sweden (and perhaps the American Midwest) run more smoothly—and why hell breaks loose at communal laundry rooms when someone cuts the line.

But Twitter is not a place for nuance. An uninformed online army accused the hosting parents of being inhospitable, vengeful Vikings. Indeed, by the time the first thoughtful explanations made the rounds, we were firmly entrenched in Midsommar (the horror movie, not the festival) territory in the world’s woebegone child-starving imagination.

Admittedly, I also took the bait. When I tweeted tongue in cheek that, in contrast to Swedes, food is Asians’ love language (hence my family’s tradition of force-feeding guests to the point of discomfort), Swedish food writer Margit Richert countered, “Food is the universal love language, even in Sweden, although not as much as in most other countries.” 

Her comment made me ask myself whether there actually was a certain “food stinginess” in Swedish culture. If so, I hadn’t experienced it. My former in-laws invited us to frequent sit-down dinners, where I’d feast on locally hunted roast venison with wild mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes until I cried for mercy. 

Generous, over-the-top eating happens at the national level as well—again, generally potluck style. There’s Midsummer’s Eve, a whole day and night spent jumping around like a frog between platters of gravlax and new potatoes. Then come the crayfish parties every autumn, which bring people together around boiled crustaceans and shots of BYOB Swedish vodka. At a traditional glögg (mulled wine party), the host usually provides all of the mulled wine, plus saffron buns galore.

My friend Diana likes to invite me to her country house for Midsummer’s Eve. Yes, I’m tasked with bringing Västerbotten cheese pies for a crowd, but it’s a small price to pay for all the flower crowns, soaks in the sauna, vickning (late-night hotdogs and chips), cots to crash on, and enough instant coffee to cure the next day’s hangover. 

If Swedish hospitality can teach us one thing, it’s that order, food, and friendship go hand in hand. If each person does their part, those parts can combine to make something far greater—and more equitable.

The framing of Swedengate, then, is all wrong: Swedes do feed other Swedes. They just don’t like surprises. In fact, they’ll happily ply you with funky-smelling specialties like lutfisk (fish preserved in lye) and surströmming (fermented herring), which might have you running for the door, saying, “I’m sorry I can’t stay—my parents are calling me home for dinner!”

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Ground almonds and full-fat cottage cheese lend body and flavor to this delicate and creamy strawberry cheesecake from Asa Johansson, a gardener and writer who lived on the Swedish island of Oland. For the Midsummer holiday, she served the cake with clouds of whipped cream and ripe berries.

Featured in: “A Midsummer’s Dream.“

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Last summer, when Fernando Aciar arrived in the rural village of Garzón (population: roughly 200) along the Uruguayan coast, a sun-drenched studio and well-stocked kitchen were waiting for him. At the artist’s residency set up by famed Argentinian chef and restaurateur Francis Mallmann, one would expect no less. After all, the marriage of food and craft is evident across Mallmann’s many restaurants around the world—Los Fuegos in Miami and Siete Fuegos in Mendoza, Argentina, to name a couple—where he carefully designs physical spaces that balance rustic patina with easy elegance. To help him create tableware and decor for his establishments, Mallmann built a live-in studio near his remote hotel and restaurant El Garzón and invited artists to come and exercise their creativity. 

Aciar, an Argentina-born, Brooklyn-based chef and lifelong ceramicist who worked with Mallmann for several years, is the latest creative to stay at the residency. He opened the West Village hangout OCAFE in New York City in 2011 and launched his own design brand Fefostudio three years later; along the way, he found himself always gravitating toward accessible textures and shapes that marry function and aesthetic. “They’re very easy to understand,” he says of his pieces. “When you hold them, they look familiar to you.” Favoring neutral-hued clays with strokes of color derived from natural dyes, Aciar looks to everyday objects like plants, stones, and of course, food, to inform his designs.

“I was surrounded by so many foods in the studio,” he says of the space in Garzón, which is divided in two by a large work table, with ceramic tools on one side and a kitchen on the other. “They served as a model for me to start playing.” In the pantry, Aciar found glass containers holding all varieties of grains, beans, and pastas. When he opened a canister of orecchiette, he immediately recalled learning how to make it from scratch in 1997 while working at Mallmann’s 1884 Restaurante in Mendoza, Argentina. Inspired by the pasta and his memory, Aciar decided to make an orecchiette-shaped sconce that Mallmann could potentially place in one of his restaurants. 

Aciar’s approachable forms and understated style align with Mallmann’s aesthetic vision. The chef likes to create layered, unfussy environments peppered with antique textiles, vintage kitchen tools, and storied furniture. “[My restaurants] have an ongoing language of romance—with flowers, with beautiful woods,” says Mallmann. 

The unpretentious nature of Mallman’s spaces may stem from his favored culinary approach, which derives from the indigenous fire-cooking techniques of Patagonia and often requires little more than an open flame. The immediacy of that primordial mode of cooking captivates the senses and keeps people in the here and now, Mallmann explains. Diners feeling comfortable and present facilitates what he believes to be the most important aspect of a meal: “The only reason why we eat and drink with friends, lovers, family, is because we want to talk. We want to exchange.”

Marie Ducaté, a ceramicist and designer from France, first visited Garzón in 2007 to develop commissioned pieces for Mallmann, and has worked from the studio multiple times since. She points out that flames are essential for both fire-cooking and ceramics-making, so chefs and potters share similar movements and mindsets. “You don’t know what color it will be after a night of cooking, so it’s very mysterious,” she explains, drawing the parallel that open-fire cooking, too, can be mercurial.

Like Aciar, Ducaté found plenty of inspiration while staying at the remote studio, which is situated in a lush countryside teeming with flora. “As humans, we experience nature through all of our senses, and nature enhances our days, our hours,” says Mallmann, who is releasing a new cookbook later this year dedicated to cooking plants over live fire. After noticing that Mallman had a fondness for lemons, Ducaté created ceramics in the shape of the citrus; when assembled into a metal structure, the pieces turn into a decorative chandelier.

Aciar, a chef himself, especially embraces the philosophy of coupling food with craft, and continues to do so back home in New York City. For his Brazilian-inspired OCAFE, which serves coffee and pastries like pão de queijo, he designed the furnishings and tableware himself. In 2019, he launched OSTUDIO, a community space made up of art studios and working booths for creatives that will open its own in-house OCAFE location in April, as well as a wine bar that will offer residencies for chefs to experiment with different styles and techniques.

“We need to be more creative in the way that we present food. We have to get fully involved in the storytelling,” says Aciar. By combining the creation of art and food under one roof, he hopes to bring together the best of both worlds—a mission Mallmann has been instilling in him since the two first started working together.

“We will keep inviting artists-in-residence to produce things inspired by the beauty of this little phantom town,” says Mallmann, referring to the Garzón studio. “It’s a big joy for me.”

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It took Virgilio Martínez and an army of researchers six years to write The Latin American Cookbook, a 400-page hardcover released in November with 600 recipes hailing from 22 countries. It is the newest, and perhaps most hotly anticipated, culinary bible by Phaidon, the publisher behind such emblematic releases as Japan: The Cookbook, India, and The Silver Spoon. 

Last year, when we heard Martínez was crisscrossing the Western Hemisphere gathering recipes and local lore for an epic Latin American cookbook, we were delighted—and admittedly skeptical: How could a single book do justice to the foodways of an area stretching from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn? 

It sounded like mission impossible, even for a go-getter like Martínez. If Martínez’s name sounds familiar, that’s probably because you met him on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. The soft-spoken phenom from Peru starred in a 2017 episode that charted his trajectory from troubled teen to toqued stagiaire to, today, culinary eminence and lay anthropologist. On the show, Martínez gives viewers an intimate look at Peruvian cuisine—the glimmering Pacific seafood, the sticky Amazonian tree saps, the knobby Andean tubers, and everything in between. 

Now, he brings the rigor and curiosity that won us over on Chef’s Table to The Latin American Cookbook, which is our December/January pick for SAVEUR Cookbook Club. The goal of the compendium, as Martínez states in the introduction, was never to be an exhaustive encyclopedia of Latin cooking but rather a “culinary snapshot” with dishes that can be adapted freely to suit personal preferences and available ingredients.  

The recipes run the gamut from international hits like black bean soup and Colombian arepas to lesser-known gems like Chilean disco fries and Bolivian schnitzel dolloped with rocotó-tomato salsa. “Christ’s knees,” we learn, are hot, yeasty buns from the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca bursting with queso fresco and streaked with blood-red achiote oil. There’s even a section on cooking ants, grasshoppers, and palm weevil larvae—ample proof that Martínez is determined to give it to us straight. As he explained to us via video chat, this is, happily, not another Latin-“light” cookbook for the mainstream American market. Here is our interview with Martínez.

You grew up in Lima, Peru’s capital. What foods did you love as a kid? 

Some of my earliest food memories are of ceviche. It was street food, not trendy or elaborate like it can be today. We also ate a lot of stews like carapulcra, which is made with pork and potatoes, and ají de gallina, made with chicken and yellow chiles. To me, Peruvian comfort food smells like onions and chicken stock and melted cheese. These platos de olla (dishes from the pot) were always incredibly flavorful, which I’d later learn was because they incorporated ingredients and techniques from different cultures: African, Portuguese, Spanish, Creole… 

So, some dishes people would call Peruvian are in fact a product of many cultures. 

Yes, and that’s true of Latin American cuisine as a whole. Latin America is a gigantic pantry, filled with different types of corn and potatoes, cacao and coffee. We also have the oceans to play with, with all their bounty. The influence of various cultures over the last 500 years created a fusion cuisine, and to me, the epicenter of that melting pot is Lima. In Lima, food is filling and exploding with flavor. Nothing is watered down. There are no kids’ menus, no plain pasta or potatoes. Fast food arrived late in Peru. For us, fast food was the street vendor ladling out ceviche or soup.

The Latin American Cookbook—that’s an ambitious title! Were you overwhelmed by the task of compiling a book so broad in scope? 

I took the responsibility of writing such a book seriously, but I didn’t overthink it and got right to work. Because of Mater Iniciativa, our research arm, I was already in contact with cooks, farmhands, grandmothers, food writers—people who, in sum, could contribute to making something truly great. I knew what I didn’t want to do was write another book of Latin American comfort food with a few pretty photos and call it a day. We made a point to go deeper. We’d ask people across the region what they ate when they were little, what crops they grew, and what was important to them about each particular dish. And I have to admit, I couldn’t have done this alone. It helped that I had a whole team behind me along the way.  

How would you describe the recipes in the book? 

We started with over 1,000 recipes and winnowed the list down by about half. It’s a book for home cooks. There are simple recipes you can make in 20 minutes. We included many emblematic and traditional dishes and also some newer ones, since the dishes that the current generation loves will likely become classics in the near future. 

What do people most often get wrong about Latin American cuisine?

That it’s all meat and potatoes. The potato part really gets me—you have no idea how many varieties of potatoes there are, and how nutritious they can be. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t just make you fat. They are filled with vitamins and can taste like one corner of the Andes or another depending on their origin. 

What changes are afoot in Latin American cuisine? What does the future hold?  

At fine-dining restaurants in Japan, in the middle of an elaborate tasting menu, they’ll give you, like, a slice of perfectly ripe mango. And that’s the course. In Latin America I think we can learn to give our native ingredients this same reverence and respect. Imagine the same treatment, except instead of a mango it’s a pitaya cactus.

While stitching these diverse food cultures into the patchwork quilt that is this book, did anything strike you as a common thread?

The ingredients may change from region to region, but the sense of community is palpable wherever you go in Latin America. In Guatemala, when families gather for a funeral, they make a point to cook and get tipsy together. One person chops the carrots while the other plucks the chicken for soup… This idea of a family unified around food, paying tribute to their lost brother or sister—it’s priceless and beautiful. I’d even call it innovative: How many families do you know that cook together? What would society look like if we were more collaborative in this way? 

What surprised you the most over the course of your research? 

The willingness of people to help. Every time we reached out to someone for a recipe, some information, or whatever we needed, the answer was always a resounding “¡claro que sí!”  That says a lot about the pride Latinos have in their food. 

Where do you think that pride comes from? 

When something is yours—meaning, you grew up with it, and you know it inside and out—you want to share it with the world. I think it’s a natural human impulse. People everywhere are passionate about their food, but in Latin America it takes on a different dimension because food is so present. And perhaps there’s something to be said for the lack of recognition for producing and exporting some of the world’s favorite foods and recipes. We want to say, look where your chocolate and tacos and coffee are coming from.  

Will there be a sequel to The Latin American Cookbook? 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s how little we know about our own history in Latin America—how certain ingredients arrived here, and how others were sent abroad. It’s nice to realize that there’s still lots to uncover. You know you’ve done a project justice when you can step back at the end and say, “¡Caramba! I’m ready for more!”

The post Why Virgilio Martínez Wants You to Rethink Latin American Food appeared first on Saveur.

Early mornings are Mauro Nesi’s best time. As he walks down the gentle hill to his workplace—an ancient oak forest—his tawny Lagotto Romagnolo dogs, Spritz and Brisa, scamper ahead of him. In the quiet, Nesi’s senses are alive, attuned to the sounds of the birds and the leaves underfoot. He scans the trees and keeps his eyes trained to the ground, looking at the way the earth rises here and dips there. If it swells just a little he pauses. When Brisa darts towards a tree, tail wagging and nose to the ground, Mauro follows. He has to catch her quickly, before her claws can damage the truffle she’s after. He speaks to the dog and gently nudges her out of the way so he can dig.

Mauro, who learned from his uncle to look for the clues of the forest, is now an experienced guide at Castello di Casole, a luxurious hotel in Siena, Tuscany. Guests can spend a morning hunting for truffles with him, and while the yield isn’t guaranteed, there is almost always something to be found in these woods. Truffles—the aromatic, subterranean tubers—are the prize. 

Beginning in June, Nesi and his guests might find scorzone (Tuber aestivum); known as summer truffles, these are the least fragrant—and least expensive—of the species. Around September though, the scorzone begin to mature and become more intensely flavored. At this point, they become known as Tuber uncinatum, or Burgundy truffles (a bit of a marketing misnomer, as both grow widely throughout Europe). There is some debate about whether these two truffles are entirely different species or morphotypes of the same, says David Yourd, a partner in Regalis Foods, an importer and purveyor based in New York City. “However, in the business, we distinguish between summer truffles and Burgundy truffles once the truffle hits a very mature state,” he explains. “The interior becomes more marbled, and changes from cream or light beige in color to a darker tan, with increased nutty and earthy aromas.” In Italy, Burgundy truffles can typically be found from mid-September through December or January. From mid-January to the end of April, mild white truffles known as marzuolo or bianchetto (Tuber albidum or Tuber borchii) begin to appear, as does the Tuber melanosporum, another prized black variety.

Back at the hotel’s Ristorante Tosca, chef Daniele Sera works these local truffles into many elaborate dishes, performing a kind of wizardry to achieve layers of texture and flavor. This luxe experience is a world apart from the traditional truffled egg and pasta dishes served on trattoria tables throughout Tuscany, but for the guests who’ve traveled from far and wide to stay in the hotel’s elegant rooms, Sera does riff on traditional regional preparations. A sous vide egg is crowned with an ethereal cloud of Parmigiano-Reggiano spuma (foam). A stack of julienned black truffles, like a pile of straw, rests on top. The chef’s risotto, on the other hand, is more classic, and made from just five ingredients: the only distraction from the truffle is the wide, golden rim of the bowl.

Two hours away, in neighboring Umbria, truffles are celebrated in much the same way they are in Tuscany, sprinkled over softly cooked eggs or hand-rolled pasta. At a small trattoria called Semiramide in the picturesque stone village of Melezzole, run by brother and sister Pierluigi and Chiara Pantaleoni, you’ll find these familiar dishes cooked with great care. It’s food for the locals—and any lucky travelers who happen to find their way. The restaurant is tucked amongst trees and hung with potted plants. In the dining room, a central fireplace glows. Pierluigi makes fresh pasta daily; for fine ribbons of tagliolini, he warms truffle slices in olive oil to release the tuber’s flavor before tossing the pasta in the pan. The creamy tangle is then finished with more freshly shaved truffle. The dish is a loving homage to the seasonal ingredient. Simpler yet, the chef spoons a heap of softly scrambled eggs onto a plate before showering it with finely grated truffle. Priced at seven to 12 euros, these are a luxury most in the area can afford. 

Beloved for its heady aroma, the truffle inspires equal passion in the field, where competition among the hunters who dedicate their lives in pursuit is fierce. For those in tune with the ways of the woods it’s a beautiful calling, as depicted in the 2020 documentary, The Truffle Hunters. For the dealers who trade in this particular treasure and handle exorbitant amounts of money, the business can also be cutthroat, as dramatized in the moody 2021 Nicholas Cage thriller Pig, and exposed in Ryan Jacobs’ true crime book The Truffle Underground. 

Adding to the high stakes of the truffle business is the unpredictability of Mother Nature, and (perhaps more predictable) human nature.”Ecological factors affect the truffle seasons tremendously,” Yourd explains. “Truffle harvests have been very small and prices very high this year. This is due to climate change and loss of wild forest habitat to vineyards and construction in truffle growing regions of Italy.”

It can take years to develop a keen hunter’s eye, so for those who want to try their own luck, it’s best to seek out an expert guide like Nesi. A tartufaio, like any other professional wildcrafter (the title preferred by many mushroom hunters and foragers), can show beginners what to look for. Just know that few will be willing to share their secret spots—those, of course, are closely guarded. 

If you’re lucky enough to get there, you could also walk into a hilltop Umbrian trattoria just as darkness descends, and let the local chefs do what they do best. Or, if instead you prefer to leave the foraging to the professionals and roll up your sleeves in your own kitchen, there are plenty of good retail and mail-order sources for fresh truffles. No passport or great culinary skill is required to enjoy the season’s subterranean treasures. 

Sourcing: Where to Buy Fresh Truffles

Always purchase truffles from a reputable source. Look for them in specialty stores or online and expect to pay for overnight shipping. Regalis Foods, a highly regarded supplier of wild edibles like truffles and other “exceptional, elusive food products,” was founded in 2012 and has rapidly become an essential fixture of New York City’s culinary landscape. The company’s website features collaborations with many of America’s most exciting chefs. Regalis’ truffles are directly imported, and handled expertly.

Urbani, originally founded in Italy in the 1850s by Constantine Urbani, has grown from a small husband-and-wife business into one of the most prominent truffle purveyors in the world. Look for Urbani products at Eataly’s markets, or order directly online.

How To Store Fresh Truffles

The key to storing truffles is moisture control. After being removed from the ground, a truffle loses three to five percent of its moisture each day. By contrast, there is also a risk of mold whenever excess moisture is involved. So unless you’re using your haul immediately, you’ll want to moderate hydration without trapping too much liquid. To do this, wrap the truffle in something absorbent, then place it in an airtight container—Nesi opts for a cloth handkerchief and a glass jar, but a couple of layers of paper towel inside a zip-topped freezer bag gets the job done too. (We recommend changing the paper every 12 to 24 hours.) Each truffle has a slightly different moisture content, but if stored properly, most black truffles will keep for up to 14 days; the more delicate white truffle will keep for less than a week. Ideally, all truffles should be enjoyed as quickly as possible.

How To Serve Truffles

Burgundy truffles are one of the most versatile truffle varieties, as they are comparatively moderate in price and well suited for both cooked and raw preparations (unlike the more umami-packed and volatile white truffles, which should never be heated). Burgundy truffles have deep, earthy notes, with a hint of roasted garlic and caramel. When warmed in hot butter or oil, the tubers’ aroma diffuses beautifully. 

Truffles’ flavors shine when incorporated into simple dishes, such as eggs, risotto, fresh pasta, and creamy root vegetable soups. A classic French preparation calls for placing thinly sliced truffles under the skin of poultry before roasting.

Truffles are usually sold clean, but if handling freshly dug specimens, Nesi suggests brushing away any dirt with a small, dry brush (a clean toothbrush works well). When ready to serve, shave them using a special truffle slicer or a vegetable peeler, or finely grate them directly over your dish using a sharp rasp.

How To Preserve Truffles

If you should have any extra truffle shaving or scraps leftover, there are a few things you can do to preserve them for future use in your own cooking, or for gifts:

• Truffle Butter: Bring a stick of unsalted butter to room temperature. In a medium bowl, beat the butter with grated or very finely chopped truffle pieces, then season to taste with salt. Spread the mixture onto a piece of parchment paper, then roll tightly into a log, twisting the ends to seal. Alternatively, spoon the compound butter into ice cube trays or another small container and refrigerate or freeze until ready to use.
• Truffle Oil: For short-term preservation, grate a piece of truffle into a small jar of olive oil, cover the jar, and refrigerate. This simple infusion can be drizzled over pasta or spooned over roasted meat, as you like. This oil must be kept refrigerated, to avoid the risk of botulism. 
• Truffle Salt: Grind truffle scraps with coarse sea salt in a small food processor or spice grinder. The salt dehydrates and preserves the truffle, creating a fragrant and shelf-stable seasoning that will keep its potency for up to 2 months. Store in an airtight container away from direct heat and sunlight.

Recipes

Soft-Scrambled Eggs With Black Truffle

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Tagliolini with Shaved Black Truffle

Get the recipe>

Black Truffle Risotto

Get the recipe >

The post Searching High and Low for Truffles in Tuscany and Umbria appeared first on Saveur.

“When people come here, they often ask us, ‘What’s CHamoru?,’” Chef Shawn Naputi tells me from Prubechu, the celebrated CHamoru restaurant he co-owns with longtime business partner Shawn Camacho.

Technically, CHamoru (also stylized Chamorro, a Spanish exonym) refers to the Indigenous people, language, and culture of Guam—the U.S. territory and western Pacific island where Naputi and Camacho were born and raised—and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariåna Islands in Micronesia, which includes Rota, Tinian, and Saipan.

Conceptually, however, it’s difficult to distill the character of CHamoru cuisine. Food from Guam is at once exotic and familiar: you’ll swear you’ve tried some dishes before—and you probably have, as there are many CHamoru interpretations of dishes that are popular in other cultures, such as lumpia, empanådas, and potato salad—while others are wholly distinctive.

To get a firmer grasp on CHamoru cooking, it’s important to consider the Mariåna Islands’ geographic location and history. The first islands to be settled by humans in Remote Oceania, the Mariånas were long a coveted outpost on the Pacific trade route, strategically located in relation to the Philippines, Hawaii, Japan, and Oceania. The Indigenous people of the islands are primarily of Austronesian descent, with the majority residing on Guam, the largest of the island chain. But beginning with the Portuguese explorer Magellan’s arrival in the 1500s, CHamoru natives have had to incorporate and adapt to a constant influx of outside influences, including 300 years of Spanish colonial rule, as well as occupations by Germany, Japan, and the United States. Today, you’ll see an amalgamation of these influences—in addition to those of Latin American and other Asian and Micronesian cultures, brought by people who have immigrated to the islands—reflected in CHamoru cuisine.

Naputi and Camacho say that, over time, CHamorus have adopted the dishes they liked most from these other cultures, adding them to their native repertoire and iterating them in their own distinct way. (One could also argue that CHamoru culture has influenced other cultures in return: the Indigenous CHamorus first settled the Mariåna Islands more than 3,000 years ago and developed their own culinary practices, from which foreigners likely drew inspiration during their visits to the islands or occupation of them.) In Guam, the result is a continually evolving culinary landscape.

“I think all the technical questions regarding ‘Where does this dish come from?’ only happens outside of Guam,” Naputi says, citing the oft-futile scenario of trying to pin down the provenance of any culture’s cuisine. Growing up, he and Camacho didn’t even realize that some common CHamoru dishes had originated outside the island because they were so inextricably woven into local Guamanian culture. A dish, therefore, becomes distinctly CHamoru “when CHamorus decide to put it on their table,” Camacho says.

Camacho and Naputi, longtime friends who originally moved to California for college and culinary school, respectively, opened Prubechu in 2014 after years of cooking their native cuisine for friends and colleagues. Though California has a large CHamoru population compared to most other states in the mainland U.S., CHamoru food is still highly underrepresented in the country’s culinary landscape. Naputi and Camacho are trying to change that.

“Food is a focal point of every gathering, and plays a central role in family and our culture,” Camacho explains. Dishes are often prepared in large batches—sometimes with the help of the whole family and neighbors—and enjoyed communally. Camacho and Naputi strive to capture that energy at Prubechu, where they serve shareable plates and regularly host fiesta-style events, often partnering with local and Guamanian-owned breweries.

Engaging the community through food is important to Camacho and Naputi, both in Guam and at Prubechu. Naputi and Camacho credit their own community for not only helping them launch their restaurant, but also supporting them during a brief hiatus in 2018—when they were between physical restaurant spaces—and through 2020’s pandemic-related closures. Their community also connected them with their third business partner—D-Scheme Studio president and architect Marc Dimalanta, another Guam native—who helped bring to life Naputi and Camacho’s vision for their newest space in 2019.

“We started our original restaurant with less than $10,000 and staffed it with family and friends,” Camacho remembers. “Truthfully, we wouldn’t be here without the community that built us up —the guests, the encouragement and support from industry pros, the farmers who were super enthusiastic about how we were using their ingredients in very unfamiliar ways.”

Despite the multifaceted influences that express themselves in the cuisine, CHamoru cooking relies heavily on two main pillars, Naputi says: “High-acid, high-char.” Grilling (also colloquially referred to as barbequing in Guam) and the use of vinegars and citrus are prominent in many dishes. Spice from fresh chile peppers and coconut, which Naputi and Camacho call “the tree of life on Guam,” also make frequent appearances, balancing and heightening the other flavors.

Naputi and Camacho, committed to offering patrons a genuine CHamoru dining experience,  suggest certain dishes like chicken kelaguen should always be prepared as traditionally as possible. However, applying some creative spin when cooking CHamoru food is generally acceptable. At Prubechu, Naputi draws upon his experience working at an Italian restaurant early in his career, as well as his access to fresh produce in the San Francisco Bay Area, to create original takes on prominent CHamoru dishes. He might swap pasta for rice in a dish, or add ingredients that aren’t available in Guam—if and only if the flavor profiles work, he emphasizes. For example, Prubechu serves a rendition of tinaktak, a coconut-braised beef that features flavors reminiscent of beef stroganoff and is traditionally served over white rice. To help diners make the connection, Naputi layers tinaktak over noodles, which he believes makes the dish more accessible to a wider American audience without disrupting the soul of the original dish.

“Our cuisine is very classic—we just add another ingredient, but we do it with the utmost care,” Camacho says of Prubechu’s way of inviting both Guamanians and non-Guamanians to the table through creativity. But no matter the dish, the goal is the same: “If someone from Guam flies in and eats our food, we want it to taste like it would taste in Guam.”

Cooking CHamoru Food At Home:

Before embarking on your own exploration into CHamoru cooking at home, Naputi and Camacho recommend stocking your pantry with the following staples, most of which can easily be sourced at your local grocery store, or at Asian or Latino markets. In addition to the ever-important barbeque grill, some tools that come in handy in CHamoru cooking are a citrus squeezer, coconut grating tool, and tortilla press—the latter of which is used to make CHamoru titiyas (coconut-infused flatbread) and empanådas.

Tropics Grated Coconut

Grated coconut is a key ingredient in many iconic CHamoru dishes, including kelaguen, and sweets like coconut candy. At Prubechu, the team uses Tropics-brand frozen grated coconut, which doesn’t include added sugars or preservatives, when they are unable to grate fresh coconut on the kåmyu, a traditional Guamanian tool with a seat and star-shaped blade.

Kikkoman Soy Sauce 

Soy sauce is the backbone of many CHamoru marinades and sauces, including piquant fina’denne’, which Naputi describes as the “mother sauce” that is a permanent fixture on CHamorro tables. Prubechu’s aromatic barbeque marinade also relies heavily on soy sauce as its base, conjuring Asian-inspired flavor profiles with its mild sweetness and addition of ginger. Naputi and Camacho grew up using Kikkoman-brand soy sauce in Guam, so it’s become a reliable go-to at Prubechu.

Heinz Distilled Vinegar

In addition to citrus, vinegar also helps achieve acidic flavor profiles in CHamoru cooking. Heinz distilled white vinegar or apple cider vinegar are versatile liquids to have on hand. Naputi also incorporates white rice vinegar into dishes like escabeche, and whips coconut vinegar into Prubechu’s creamy tuba butter.

Chaokoh Coconut Milk

Coconut milk features in many traditional CHamoru dishes at Prubechu, including lechen biringuenas (smoky eggplant in a creamy coconut-soy marinade) and appan mendioka (coconut milk-braised cassava). Fresh coconut milk is always the best and most traditional option, but it’s labor-intensive and not always possible to execute at home. The Prubechu team tested several different brands of canned coconut milk and found Chaokoh to be the next best thing.

Mamacita’s Achiote Powder

Made from ground annatto seeds, achiote powder derives from the prickly red Bixa orellana shrub and was likely first brought to Guam by the Spanish, who had also colonized Mexico. In CHamoru cooking, its subtly sweet, earthy flavor enhances CHamoru empanådas and red rice (hineksa’ aga’ga’), a mealtime staple that is typically the first dish placed at the head of the fiesta table. The Prubechu team often uses a pre-made powder from Mamacita’s, a Filipino brand, when fresh achiote from Guam is not available. “In California, there are a lot of cultures that use achiote, so if you get a Latino or Mexican variety, it’s usually mixed with some kind of liquid, which turns it into a paste,” Camacho explains. 

Yours Brand Lemon Powder

Though fresh lemon is preferable in certain recipes, some dishes require the acidic profile of citrus without the additional liquid. That’s where lemon powder comes in. In Guam, Yours Lemon Powder is such a sought-after pantry staple that it’s often stored behind the counter at stores to avoid theft, according to Naputi and Camacho. While Prubechu works directly with a distributor to obtain their stock of Yours, the rest of us can either order it online for a premium price (about $10 to $18 for 5.2 oz., plus shipping) or buy it in person in Guam.

Bird’s Eye Chiles

Fresh red chiles add heat to dishes and sauces like fina’denne’ and donne’ dinanche, a spicy paste that’s used as a condiment for grilled meats and white rice. While the Guam pepper varietals donne’ sali and donne’ ti’au aren’t always easy to find on the mainland U.S., Camacho and Naputi say red bird’s eye chiles—which are more readily available at Asian markets and some grocery chains—mimic their flavor and heat profile well, offering high-intensity heat without lingering on the palate too long. 

Diamond G Calrose Rice

Rice has been important to CHamorus for centuries, and was even used ceremonially in ancient CHamoru culture. Today, steamed rice is a staple that accompanies most CHamoru dishes, either served plain or prepared as red rice with achiote. Naputi and Camacho prefer Diamond G Calrose rice because it’s the only brand they grew up eating on Guam (likely due to the island’s limited product availability), lending a taste of home to the dishes they serve at Prubechu. 

Maseca Instant Corn Masa Flour

Mexicans once traveled through the Mariåna Islands on the Mexico-to-Manila trade route and likely introduced corn to the ancient CHamoru diet. For hundreds of years, CHamorus ground the corn by hand, but in modern culture, cooks use processed corn flour to make CHamoru corn titiyas and empanådas. Naputi prefers Maseca-brand masa harina (corn flour) but also sources fresh masa dough from Latino markets in San Francisco.

Recipes

Chicken Kelaguen

Get the recipe >

The post Prubechu’s Essential CHamoru Pantry appeared first on Saveur.

There’s nothing technically wrong with a rich, buttery chardonnay, but it’s no secret that this classically Californian style has fallen out of fashion since its heyday back in the 1990s and early 2000s (cue: Bridget Jones and her tall bedside pour). It’s safe to say that each new wine-drinking generation is generally determined to do things differently than the ones that came before, and people’s palates today skew much drier than they used to (take the history of champagne drinking, for example). And while the chardonnay grape actually spans a wide spectrum of flavors, the image of a California chardonnay served over ice on a sun-soaked porch is a hard one to erase.

“California is a diverse state,” says Susan Fredson-Cole, creator of @admirevine, an Instagram account dedicated to making wine content more accessible to all. She explains that, to understand its breadth of chardonnay offerings, one must consider that many environmental factors can affect the grape. Because of the variation in topography, altitude, and temperature across California, they will taste different depending on where they’re grown.

“Vineyards in warmer climates can produce chardonnays with tropical characteristics, while cooler-climate vineyards can produce wines with more stone-fruit characteristics,” she says. “Producers are always trying to make their wines stand out. Even if you [compare] chardonnays from Paso Robles and Mendocino, you’ll taste the difference.”

In winemaking, the grape itself primarily determines the final product’s core flavors, natural color, acidity, and tannin. The vintner’s stylistic choices throughout the winemaking process further influence each of these characteristics and infuse added complexity. Fredson-Cole refers to the winemaker’s impact as the “special sauce”—which encompasses all choices made post-harvest, from maceration and fermentation to extraction and aging, as well as any additives the winemaker might choose to introduce.

Aging, in particular, is a major contributing factor to a wine’s degree of butteriness in both flavor and texture; vessels made of oak, especially new oak, are key in rendering the proverbial butter-bomb chardonnay, imparting flavors like vanilla and sweet spices. 

On the other hand, vessels made of stainless steel or concrete help preserve the fresh, lean, and crisp flavors in some chardonnay grapes—a clear contrast to the rounder, richer styles many associate with the varietal. These produce wines that are often referred to as “unoaked.” The latter is what you’ll find most often in French Chardonnays (think Chablis, a variety of wine from northern Burgundy that uses chardonnay grapes exclusively).

According to Miami wine writer and judge Jacqueline Coleman, another factor that greatly impacts a chardonnay’s ultimate flavor and mouthfeel is malolactic fermentation. “Malo refers to the process of converting malic acid into lactic acid, which results in a softening effect and in many cases adds a creaminess or butter-biscuit texture or flavor to a wine,” she explains. This process of fermentation is often perceived to be what produces ultra-buttery styles, but it’s actually only one part of the equation. “It doesn’t always necessarily lead to the wine as a whole being buttery,” Coleman clarifies. When it comes to that particular style of chardonnay, the buttery qualities can be accentuated by the winemaker through malolactic fermentation, along with other factors such as oak and aging on lees.”

While there’s no denying that many consumers and industry professionals steer clear of chardonnays akin to those of California’s oak-and-butter era, there’s still a time and a place for them––and champions of the old-school style do exist, especially when it comes to food pairings. For example, if you’re cooking a dish such as a white fish with a savory cream sauce, a crisp, new-age California chardonnay wouldn’t shine quite as much as its bigger, more buttery counterparts. And while you might not opt to sip the latter on its own, the goal of pairing wine with food is to create an experience that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

The bottom line is that, like with any other wine varietal, chardonnay is too diverse a category to relegate all bottles into one singularly-defined box; many factors throughout the winemaking process can impact how a particular chardonnay ends up tasting. “Some producers are heavy on the oak, especially if you look at the chardonnays you’ll find at bigger retail stores,” adds Fredson-Cole. But it’s important to recognize that crisper, fresher styles do exist, and if you are someone who tends to disregard chardonnays, you might want to reconsider––and try more of what’s out there.

Whether you’re completely new to chardonnay or you’re revisiting the varietal, Fredson-Cole has a few pointers for your next trip to the wine store if you’re hoping to explore the fresher end of the chardonnay spectrum.

“Look for descriptors such as ‘crisp’ and ‘lean’—if ‘stainless steel’ is mentioned on the label, you’re good,” she explains, adding that you can also ask a store employee for something unoaked. Shopping online, or doing independent research before venturing out to a store, is also the perfect opportunity to brush up on your knowledge and to search for specific producers you’re interested in trying. When in doubt, try perusing a review site or app like Vivino to learn how fellow consumers feel about the bottles on your list. Simply use Vivino to scan the label, and if the bottle is in the database, you’ll be able to see user-generated ratings, tasting notes, and reviews that will help you make your final decision. You’ll be glad you did.

The post In Defense of California Chardonnays appeared first on Saveur.

Silvestre Valencia, former owner of Viva Taco Bus in Turlock, California, adds jalapeño pickling liquid to the pork braise, which tenderizes the meat and keeps it from drying out. Looking for more taqueria traditions? Check out 16 of our favorite taco recipes, here.

Featured in: “On the California Taco Trail.”

The post Carnitas Tacos (Michoacán-Style Braised Pork Tacos) appeared first on Saveur.

When I came back to sun-brightened Mumbai after getting a degree in London, I had never felt so far from myself. The road ahead felt bouldered, the path itself lost to me. 

Then, as always, it was to food that I turned for reorientation. My mother, in a fluster of anxiety, poured out a flurry of dishes—all the Mumbai chaat that I had missed terribly, the chile cheese toast, the potato bhajias. But most satisfying was the stream of rainbowed curries. Best of all was her red seafood curry, made Parsi style the way her mum made it, the colour of a flame-charred sunset in winter, its apricity seeping into my bones. 

More than anything, I loved to watch my mum make it. The scrunch of the knife as it pressed down on an onion, the smell of frying coconut tendrilling through the air, the slick of oil bubbling up around the red chile masala, the burble of the coconut milk as it roiled in the pan—it all brought me back to myself. I no longer felt like I was living my life behind frosted glass. And although it wasn’t quite the cresting of the hill that I had expected, it was certainly the start of it. 

What’s in a Name?

The word “curry” is sometimes used in the West as a familiar semaphore, but the term ossifies the immense sophistication and complexity of Indian food. K.T. Achaya’s explanation for the English usurpation of curry has been the one largely memorialized in public discourse: “The meat dishes cooked with pepper were called kari in Tamil, a word now used in English as curry,” he writes in his seminal The Story of Our Food. 

But it is possible the word reaches beyond the English, perhaps to the Portuguese. Gaspar Correa, travelling with Vasco da Gama, used the word “caril” in 1503, and in 1623, so did Pietro del Valle, who scurried up and down India’s western coast: “Caril is a name which in India they give to certain Broths made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian Nuts, (instead of which, in our Countries Almond Milk may be us’d, being equally good, and of the same virtue) and all sorts of Spices, particularly, Cardamoms and Ginger, (which we use but little) besides herbs, fruits, and a thousand other condiments,” he wrote in The Travels of Peter Della Valle, Sirnamed The Traveller. (Italics and capitalization his.)

Whatever its past, in India today, curry refers to a very specific type of dish, with protein or vegetables sunk in a pool of spiced gravy, halfway between a stew and a soup; fractals of rich, layered creations shored up by a constellation of thickening, spicing, coloring, and souring agents, and eaten with rice, flatbreads, or leavened breads. It isn’t a catch-all phrase for all Indian food by any means. “A curry recipe will be better understood if we work out the role that each ingredient plays in the recipe. The effect of each of the spices is a little complex,” writes Camellia Panjabi in The Great Curries of India. 

The ingredients of each hew to the geography of its home state. For instance, the Pandi (pork) curry of the Kodava community of Karnataka gains its flavor from the connivance of peppercorns and kachumpuli, a strident, ink-dark vinegar drawn from the panapuli (aka kodampuli) fruit tree that capillaries through the state. Similarly, the western coast of India is furred with palm trees; as a result, many of its gravies are anchored in ground or milked coconut. 

Even within the western coast, there are differences in ingredients. Mum’s burnished Parsi curry, unlike its coastal kin, is girded by khuskhus (poppy seeds) and besan (gram flour), its sourness coaxed from tomatoes and tamarind rather than the more popular kokum fruit. Cashews pounded into an oleaginous paste add a creaminess that slakes the scald of the chiles. And the curry is always served with a slash of lime and kachumber: stripes of onions, cucumber, and tomato jounced with vinegar and salt and scalpel-sharp green chile.

Aside from this red curry, the Parsi community makes plenty of others: a green coriander curry with green chile chiming through it like a bell; a hazel-yellow curry with an undertow of peanuts and poppy seeds; a decadent sau badam ni curry (curry of 100 almonds); and the rare and completely absurd cutlace ni curry, made with breaded meat cutlets that likely came about to bare the kitchen of leftovers. 

All of these curries, much like Parsi cuisine, are magpie dishes plundered from here and there; their ingredients reading like pages scythed from the history books of the community. Parsis were religious refugees from Iran who settled on India’s western coast a millennium ago. The use of cashews and almonds and peanuts finds its roots in Iran’s abundance of nuts and dried fruit. Our dislocated love for Iran’s freshwater fish was soon resurrected in the seafood of India’s western coast. Also from the coast came coconut, rather exuberantly fuelling most of our curries. And then there is the near omnipresence of tomatoes and chile, once-foreign ingredients transhipped to India by the Portuguese and now pinned into the pantheon of Indian cuisine. 

Although most conversations about Parsi food are marooned within euphoric descriptions of dhansak, a mutton or chicken stew eaten with caramelized brown rice and the best-known dish of the community, many Parsi restaurants also list curry on the menu. In fact, “the seafood curries have always been the best-selling items on the menu,” says Kainaz Contractor who runs Rustom’s in Delhi with her partner Rahul Dua. (They recently replaced their red seafood curry with the yellow kind). Jimmy Boy, a popular restaurant in Mumbai, makes five curries: egg, mutton, chicken, prawn, and fish versions.

“The secret of making a good curry again lies in the slicing and frying of the onions and masala,” writes Bhicoo Manekshaw in Parsi Food and Customs. “The masala should be finely ground…the curry should not be allowed to boil. It should be simmered with the lid half covering the pan and should be cooked at least two to three hours before serving, so that all the different flavours are amalgamated and brought out just right. Finally, a good curry needs a good rice which should be steamed or boiled.” 

It is always hard to coax exacting recipes from my mother; they live under her skin and she draws them out subconsciously onto the plate. Nevertheless, here are some more words of advice wheedled from her while she cooks: “Chop the onions into fine flakes and fry them in more oil than you think you need, on gentle heat. Stir, stir, stir often or else they will gum themselves to the pan; when they shift from glossy pink to amber is how you know they are ready. The tomatoes, you grate.” 

An additional tip: Buy prawns still cloaked in their carapace. Prawn heads are particularly delicious. In a large oiled pan, fry the shells until the pieces burnish to pink, then bruise the shells with the back of a heavy spoon until they fissure. Add two cupfuls of water next, slowly simmering until the stock lowers to half. Then layer malmal (or any diaphanous cloth, such as cheesecloth) over a finely-veined sieve, and mash through as much of this essence of prawn as you can. This elixir is what you pour into your curry paste for an infusion of umami. It will lift your curry beyond all others.

Further urgings from my mother: each curry is largely unmappable, she believes, so her advice is to be merely used as waymarkers on your trail to the perfect curry. Take your bearings from her, as I did, then let them guide you safely home.

The post Indian Curry is Largely “Unmappable”—But This Writer Found Her Way Home Through One Recipe appeared first on Saveur.