Joyce Kutty likes wicked sharp knives and catch-of-the-day dinners. 

As a child, the 33-year-old metalsmith learned to fish the waters off Point Judith, Rhode Island, and helped her mother prepare Tamil- and Malayali-style curries in their kitchen in East Providence. Now, after a stint crafting Harmony engagement rings for Tiffany & Co., Kutty has moved on to more utilitarian objects inspired by the ancestral housewares her father carried home after visits to family in Kerala, India: Hand-forged spice spoons, hammered thali bowls, nadan kathi knives, and koduval coconut cleavers.

Her own boning and filleting knives reference the same graceful curves of these more traditional South Asian blades. “Both my parents are from coastal states,” she says. “So we eat a mostly fish diet. Making knives that can carve into fish and the things we grow stems from the root of my culture and upbringing.” Providence chefs Scott LaChapelle of Pickerel and Robert Andreozzi of Pizza Marvin are fans of her designs (Andreozzi is her occasional fishing buddy). “Part of my practice is to get out on the ocean and harvest seaweed from secret fishing spots [to create] a saltwater patina on bowls.”

On days away from her studio, she rises before dawn to cast for bluefish, stripers, and bonito. Oily mackerel is a particular favorite for those family curry recipes, which mingle deeply oceanic flavors with the sting of chiles. With every fish she brings home, Kutty also slices off a little piece for crudo to taste its essence. And the ones that get away? “Some for us, some for others, some for next season.”

Recipes

Keralan Fish Curry

Get the recipe >

Sri Lankan Fish Curry

Get the recipe >

The post Meet the Knifemaker Inspired by South Asian and New England Fishing Traditions appeared first on Saveur.

LGBTQ bars have had a tough run lately. Shuttering in concerning numbers, many have been struggling with soaring rents and an increasingly challenging business model (not to mention dating apps, which make it easy to flirt from the couch). But happily, and against all odds, many of our go-to LGBTQ spaces are still standing—thriving, even. What’s more, they need your business more than ever in light of discriminatory anti-transgender legislation and distressing Don’t Say Gay laws. To that end, here’s a pared-down list of our favorite queer bars, restaurants, and clubs in major cities across America. Drop in for a drag show, catch a late-night DJ set, or simply pull up a stool at the bar. No matter your gender or orientation, you’re in for a good time.  

The Stonewall Inn, New York City

“We really are like the gay Church,” said co-owner Kurt Kelly. Mecca for America’s gay liberation movement, Stonewall is the site where a dayslong protest for LGBTQ rights ensued in 1969 after police violently raided the establishment. In 2019, an estimated 5 million people made the pilgrimage to Greenwich Village to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the pivotal event. Today, Stonewall is more than its brick-and-mortar location; behind the scenes, the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative is taking the “Stonewall Inn legacy to the most marginalized in our community and in the toughest places to still be LGBTQ+,” said Stacy Lentz, Stonewall’s co-owner and CEO of the nonprofit.    

Round-Up Saloon, Dallas

Next time you’re in Dallas, lasso up your friends and take them to this kitsch Oak Lawn dance hall where queer culture meets line dancing and twangy country music. Thursdays are the best nights to go for the uninitiated; that’s when instructors give free lessons on, say, how to do-si-do your partner and dance the “Hoedown Throwdown.” Nobody goes for the gastronomy (the menu is basically burgers, fries, and wings)—though it helps to have something to nibble on to mitigate the dangerously generous pours.

Cheer Up Charlies, Austin

Austin’s LGBTQ residents are up in arms: It may be too late to protect three emblematic Fourth Street queer bars from the wrecking ball as they’re slated to be replaced with luxury highrises. That makes Cheer Up Charlies—which is safe, for now—all the more important to support. With a well-furnished outdoor patio, bubbly staff, and a vegan food truck always parked outside (sweet potato fries! blood orange hard cider!), this bar is our favorite spot for partying in Texas’ blissfully “weird” capital. 

Atlantic House, Provincetown, Massachusetts

The “A-House,” as locals call it, is so old that its original owner was a mounted postman who died of cholera. Opened in 1798 as a stagecoach inn, it became a hub of Bohemian life at the turn of the 20th century as artists and writers fled gritty, industrial Boston for a freer and more solitary life. As early as the 1950s, the A-House was an openly gay establishment, a badge it wears proudly to the present day.   

Big Chicks, Chicago

The first thing you notice when you walk into Big Chicks in Chicago’s Far North Side is the diverse clientele: a wonderfully motley mix representing virtually all ages, races, physiques, and gender identities. Translation? Everybody feels seen at Big Chicks. Consider starting your evening with updated diner fare at Tweet (the sister restaurant) next door, before unbuttoning your shirt and heading over to the dancefloor. 

Akbar, Los Angeles

Akbar is all “good vibes and pretty guys,” according to Los Angeles-based music and travel writer Taylor Henderson. But it nearly shuttered due to the pandemic, when it was running up debt to the tune of $10,000 per month. In a do-or-die plea for aid, the owners created a GoFundMe page that, to their surprise, met its goal within 24 hours. Such is the commitment of this cozy watering hole’s clientele, which doubles as a community space and open mic venue.

Slammers, Columbus, Ohio

Here’s a not-so-fun fact: There are only 33 lesbian bars left in the entire country. And Slammers, fortunately, is one of them. A downtown Columbus standby since 1993, this indoor-outdoor establishment serves pizza and jalapeño poppers and strong drinks against the backdrop of live performances. There’s also karaoke, darts, and pool for those who like some friendly competition. 

Jolene’s, San Francisco

A relative newcomer on the Mission District scene (est. 2018), Jolene’s is a casual queer bar whose Insta-famous neon sign says it all: “You are safe here.” At a time when lesbian bars are closing at an alarming pace, Jolene’s is bucking the trend as a non-male-centric space that doesn’t feel exclusive. The bar food punches well above its weight with dishes like craggy fried chicken served with mashed potatoes and succotash, and cheese-cloaked sliders served alongside thick-cut fries. 

Pony, Seattle

Whenever Mark Stoner wears his Pony hat in another city, he can’t believe how many people stop him to say, “I love that bar!” The owner of this Seattle institution housed in a defunct 1930s gas station loves the compliments, but to Stoner, what “feels even better” is “when marginalized people in our own LGBTQIA+ community tell me that it’s one of the only spaces where they truly feel safe and relaxed,” he said.

The post 9 Amazing American LGBTQ Bars, Clubs, and Restaurants appeared first on Saveur.

Rich, comforting stews laced with tomato and pepper. African music. Adinkra symbols illustrating Ghanaian proverbs and adages. Growing up in Yonkers, north of New York City, Eric Adjepong hadn’t yet realized the impact of these key memories. Today it’s clear to him that the tastes, smells, sights, and sounds of his childhood kitchen—the beating heart of his family home—pointed to Ghana. Eric was born and raised in the United States, but both of his parents grew up in the West African nation. His mother, Abena, passed down the wisdom of her culture to her children. When Eric started cooking, that understanding became the foundation of his culinary path.

I first met the now 36-year-old chef in 2019 at a pop-up at Craft in Manhattan. He had recently finished strong as a finalist on season 16 of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” where he explored the story of the transatlantic slave trade and the many ways that history still connects the flavors of West Africa to the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. As he and his team cooked in Craft’s private event space, I noticed West African ingredients like palm wine and shrimp powder alongside Asian, French, Italian, and North American products. He used these global components in tandem; each bolstered the next, lending their own individual flavors and textures. In dishes like jerk-rubbed steak tartare and corn and goat’s milk pudding with hibiscus-tinted tapioca, I could see that, in Eric’s kitchen, West African cuisine blended seamlessly with dishes from all over the world while retaining its identity and depth—echoing the wisdom of enslaved Africans forcibly moved to new lands centuries prior.

Now a fixture on food TV, Eric is also a children’s book author and an avid traveler. And he’s hard at work on his first cookbook, Ghana to the World: Cooking the Lessons of Sankofa, a project on which I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with him since 2020. Recently, I caught up with him in his Maryland home kitchen to learn about how his travels have shaped not just that room, but also the ways he cooks for his family today.

Let’s start at the beginning: We’ve talked a lot about your childhood kitchen while working on your cookbook. If you had to describe it in one word, what would that be?

I would say it was active. Growing up in a two-family household with my three other siblings in the house, and my cousins, there was always a lot going on. The energy in the kitchen as people were coming in and out, and my mom or my aunt were cooking or catching up over tea—there were always baskets of yams or plantains on the floor and big bags of rice—that active kitchen is the genesis of a lot of my family memories.

How would you describe your home kitchen? 

It isn’t as busy as that one was. [Laughs] I’m barely home now between travel and filming. When I do get back I still like to cook. This week is a perfect example because it was my daughter, Lennox’s, birthday. I had family come down from New York and I made a bunch of food. When there’s a family event, I feel a similar energy to the kitchen that I remember growing up in, especially when everybody comes in and unpacks, and just naturally congregates in the kitchen. It made me feel a little nostalgic to be there, with the same cousins and siblings, but now it’s our children running through and playing. 

What was the menu for the day?


Well it was a sleepover, so I made some eggs, bacon, and cinnamon rolls in the morning for the kids. For lunch, I made a super simple shrimp fried rice, roasted cabbage, and fried chicken because my daughter is a big fan of fried chicken. 

What tools do you always have on hand?

I have a little bain-marie that I keep all of my go-to essentials in, like spatulas, wire whisks, a cake tester, tasting spoons, a mini strainer, tongs, and a Microplane. I travel with that everywhere I go and if I’m at home, it’s right next to my stovetop. 

What ingredients do you keep at home?


I always have roasted garlic and ginger paste somewhere in the freezer, like my mom did growing up. You can take a couple of tablespoons and add it to rice, pasta, marinara sauce, stew, whatever. It’s a great foundational building piece. Lemons and limes. And I also always have spices like berbere or all-purpose seasonings like seasoned salts, a bunch of ’em. 

Something that came up while we were working on your cookbook is the idea of how home kitchens can transport you via cooking. Your mom cooking West African dishes in Yonkers, for example, was trying to make sure you and your family had that connection to your culture. When you’re home from traveling, what do you like to make? Do you have a go-to meal or are you experimenting, playing around? 

I experiment the most with South [Asian] and Southeast Asian flavors at home. I love Thai, Vietnamese, and Indian food. There are a lot of similarities between West African cuisine and food from those areas, in the variety of textures, and in their earthy spices. I always try to take inspiration from recent travels—I may see a cool combination of ingredients or a dish and I keep that in my memory bank for when I’m back in my kitchen, or I just hop into the pantry or the freezer, see what I have in there and just start riffing. I may be looking through a cookbook and want to try something different. It really all depends on what the mood is. 

What inspires that kind of experimentation?

I think my impulse to combine food cultures happens organically through travel. I’m able to try foods from different mom-and-pop restaurants, Michelin-rated restaurants, and even food stalls, and I’m inspired by all kinds of cooks, really. You know, I don’t meet a lot of people who genuinely like to cook. I meet a lot of people who like to eat and like to go to restaurants. But cooking is such a craft and I always appreciate when somebody else, no matter where they’re from, loves that craft too.

That’s a great point. I worked with a bartender once who said people like to drink because they like the way alcohol makes them feel, and that rarely do they like the taste. It’s a means to an end. For a lot of people, cooking’s kind of the same: It’s a means to an end rather than a joyful process. 

I think a lot of people experience that. But for me, I really like the process. But there are also happy mistakes that can happen in a kitchen, you know what I mean? It’s all about not being afraid to try new things. 

That’s good advice. I think people assume when you cook professionally or write about food for a living that you don’t make mistakes, but we’re human! Have there been any recent happy accidents in your home kitchen? 

Yes. It wasn’t anything major, but I was embarrassed the other day ’cause I was making a grilled cheese sandwich for Lennox and I completely forgot that it was on the stove. The whole thing was burnt. [Laughs] So to your point, even chefs can mess up something as simple as a grilled cheese sandwich. Anything can go awry when you’re not paying attention.

The post At Home with Chef Eric Adjepong appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

The happiest marriage on earth is between food and drink, and a crafted selection of bar bites can foster many friendships, love affairs, and community gatherings around the world. Yet the Japanese izakaya transforms drinking and dining into a form of high art. Izakayas first emerged during Japan’s Edo period, as small shops to purchase sake and beer. Eventually, the proprietors began to offer drinks by the glass, and later still, to offer small bites such as otsumami, or finger food, to be paired with the drinks. Offered as a spread of many small plates of various colors, textures, and temperatures, these dishes both absorbed and also amplified the pleasures of the drinks, and showcased the exceptional culinary craft of the chefs who prepared them. Thus the izakaya, the sake shop turned showcase for culinary artistry, was born.

At his San Francisco restaurant, Rintaro, chef Sylvan Mishima Brackett brings the izakaya tradition home, adapting the dishes that he encountered during his travels in Japan to fit the rhythms of an American dining establishment. Born to an American father and a Japanese mother, Brackett had just completed six years as a chef at Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse when he bought a one-way ticket to Japan to “eat and cook as much as possible,” without much else in mind. He tasted his way through the country, visiting the kaiseki restaurants of Aoyama, the fish markets of Saitama, the oden (dashi-based soups with fish cakes, tofu, and vegetables) spots of Yokohama, and of course the many izakayas in Tokyo and beyond. When he returned to the Bay Area, he knew that he wanted to open a restaurant that would translate—rather than replicate—the izakaya experience, to offer “exciting but simple food that tasted both like Japan and California—not fusion food, but the kind of food you’d expect if the Bay Area were a region of Japan.” By not trying to replicate his experience in Japan, Brackett gave himself permission to innovate, and wrote his own tribute to the craft of Japanese cooking in his new cookbook, Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California. 

During our conversation, it was clear to me that Brackett’s restaurant, and the book that captures its beauty, was the result of many years of careful research, tasting, and cooking. It also was an opportunity for Brackett to celebrate the intentionality of Japanese cooking, the precision in ingredients and techniques that made each dish so uniquely delicious, and why home cooks give as much love and attention to their meals as the most seasoned restaurant chefs. Whether I was recreating his mother’s famous gyoza recipe or preparing homemade katsuobushi dashi for the first time, I knew that I would savor my at-home izakaya experience as much as I would if I’d managed to score a table (or better yet, a counter seat) in Rintaro’s gorgeous dining room.

Tell us a bit about your first encounter with the izakaya tradition.

I didn’t grow up knowing about the history of the izakaya at all. My mother is Japanese, and I was born in Kyoto, but I grew up in California. But we’d go back to Japan every 2 or 3 years, sometimes for as long as 2 months at a time. Now when I was a kid traveling with family, we never went to the izakayas, because they were drinking spots. But I started going to Japan during college by myself, and I realized while visiting friends and people’s houses in Japan that they tended to be quite small, and so there was less entertaining at home than there was in the U.S. So where people typically hang out, especially younger people or co-workers at the end of the day, would be at an izakaya. During those years, I was routinely blown away by the experience of going to some super-duper simple places, tiny little izakayas underneath the train tracks—just one guy and a grubby little grill, with a very small selection of canned beers in a cooler—to much fancier places across the city. But the idea that you could sit and be there for two or three or four hours, and just order little by little, was so appealing to me, and I loved meeting people who were right next to me at the bar and having that shared experience. I didn’t see anything like that anywhere in the Bay Area (and only very rarely in Los Angeles). So when I came back as an adult and a chef, I had it in my mind that I wanted to someday open a Japanese restaurant, and create a niche experience.

When we were building the beautiful cedar counter in the restaurant, I was thinking about people who might come in on a rainy Tuesday night and sit together at the counter, ordering a few skewers and having some beers and lingering for four hours. But that is not a very effective way to run a business, so unfortunately we cannot exactly match my dream. But when we have Japanese customers visit, they want to order a beer and maybe sashimi and a few other things and then mull it over and add to the order as they go. That runs pretty counter to the American dining scene, where we have to ask people to order their entire meal in the beginning, to ensure we can move things along and pace it nicely. But it is interesting that we’ve had to kind of transition some of the key elements of the izakaya in order to make it work in a restaurant for a Californian audience. 

How would you compare the Japanese drinking-dining culture to those of other cultures around the world?

I’ve only been to Spain once, and went to maybe four tapas places total while I was there. When I first started, that was the only real reference we had, to describe the izakaya as “Japanese tapas.” And yes, it’s similar in some ways in that every dish is pretty simple, made from usually five to six ingredients at most. But there’s something else strategic going on, in that the contrast of flavor and texture and color, fat and lean, cold and hot, happens not all on the plate, but between multiple dishes. And that’s very Japanese.

There’s a general flow to the meal—usually sashimi and cold dishes in the beginning, fried and grilled things towards the middle, and then a rice or udon at the end, a bit of starch to fill you up and soak up the alcohol. There’s also a rule about not wanting to drink sake and eat rice together, because they’re made out of the same thing; the same is true for beer and udon because of their shared wheat base. A table where there’s some sashimi, some dashimaki tamago (a folded omelet), a little yakitori, a panko dish, maybe a really spicy pickled dish, where you’re nibbling between all of those as you’re drinking and talking is really exciting. Some of our regulars eat that way, while others like one thing after another, like a coursed meal. But for me that’s the charm of this kind of cooking, to have all the dishes on the table at the same time.

Several dishes, including the rice (don) dishes, often build on a homemade dashi. For home cooks who may have never made dashi from scratch, what would you recommend vis-a-vis ingredients?

Not all the recipes in this book need to be made completely from scratch; certainly, I’ve used store-bought wrappers to make the gyoza before. But dashi is different, because the pre-made stuff is just not that good, and it’s so easy to make once you get your hands on the ingredients, which are really just katsuobushi and konbu. The fragrance in our food is really due to dashi, and the katsuobushi is key. There is a freeze-dried powdered dashi, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it, because it’s the death of Japanese cuisine, like using a bouillon cube instead of using chicken stock. If you’re buying a bag of shaved katsuobushi or bonito flakes, look for ones that are as bright as possible, because otherwise it’s already started to oxidize. The brighter the packaged katsuobushi, the better the quality. Or you can buy it as a whole log and shave it to order, which is what we do in the restaurant. When you’re buying konbu, ideally you’re buying Hokkaido konbu, where most of the konbu in the world is produced, and you don’t need very much. If you live where there’s good water, don’t worry about tap water, but you can also filter it before you make your dashi. Other than that, it’s pretty simple. There are several online resources, including TheJapanesePantry.com, which carries all of these ingredients that we use throughout the book, and they support so many small, great producers in Japan.

How important is it to have contrast from dish to dish in an izakaya menu?

I think that’s pretty important. I really love fried foods, like croquettes and karaage chicken, but whenever I have something heavy and fried, I serve a big floof of shaved cabbage to go with it. Incidentally, I’ve been telling customers as I drop off the panko dishes that they should alternate between bites of the fried food and the cabbage, to help cut the oil. We love it and we spend all this time making it, but most people don’t eat it because they think it’s a garnish, so it ends up in the compost. In Japanese food, and especially at the izakaya, the contrast between dishes—their colors and textures and temperatures—is very important in a satisfying meal.

How did you decide what aspects of the Japanese izakaya experience would be replicated in your restaurant, and what did you decide to change?

Izakaya cooking can be very casual, even though at Rintaro we’re more at the formal end of things. But that’s also because our staff is stronger, and we have more people coming from and going to Japan to learn, so we’re a lot more technically adept and sophisticated than when we opened 10 years ago. But not everything that I loved in Japan can be replicated here, and I made a firm decision that I wouldn’t aim for a facsimile of my experiences in Japan—because we’re in San Francisco, and we should take advantage of the great vegetables and interesting fish and really well-produced meats in the area. When I first moved to San Francisco, there was an old-school kaiseki-style restaurant in Japantown, and technically it was flawless, but every single thing had been shipped frozen from Japan, from the pickled vegetables to the fish to the meat. I felt like it was a pale copy of Japan, because they weren’t taking advantage of the good things here. And I vowed never to do that. When we would have a dish like simmered sardines with ginger and umeboshi, I knew that we could source from the Japanese plum farm nearby. I knew that the sardines from Monterey would be really good. Of course we have ginger grown nearby, so we could make a really good local version of it. I didn’t want to be importing mountain vegetables to pretend like we were in Japan; what I was most excited about was the chance to make it here. 

I love the way that you talk about the Bay Area as a “region of Japan.” What have you learned about the diaspora of Japanese culture and cuisine in your area, and across the globe?
Many people forget that Japan has been historically extremely poor, and at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of Japanese “second sons” were emigrating all over the world. So there’s a diasporic Japanese community in Peru and Brazil, California and Mexico, and other places, and I’m fascinated to see how each cuisine has evolved in its own way. Though I’m half-Japanese, for a long time I had almost no connection to the Japanese American community. But now I have several cooks and servers who are like third-, fourth-, fifth-generation Californian, but full-blood Japanese, because their families have always been here. The family of one of my sous-chefs is very involved in the creation of Japantown in San Francisco, and that’s just amazing to me. I was talking to my friend Nancy Hachisu, the author of Japanese Farm Food, and she said that when she went on her book tour, a lot of the Japanese American grandmothers told her that the food that she made tasted a lot like the food that they grew up eating in California, because Nancy’s recipes spoke to the same tastes as the 70-year-old’s memories from childhood. So the Japanese roots here run very deep.

You’re very attentive to technique in this book—for example, you have multiple spreads on the preparation of yakitori, from the butchering to the skewering to the roasting. Why do you lay out the cooking process for so many dishes in such detail?

What makes it special is doing it right—and in Japan, doing it right is never easy. The culture is so old and the craft is so deep, that seven pages on yakitori is just barely scratching the surface. But it’s that depth which makes something really exciting, delicious, and special. Look at something as basic as slicing scallions: you want to slice them really fine, and to do that, you have to have very sharp knives, and then you want to rinse the scallions after slicing. If you do each of those things, you give the scallions a very particular texture and look, and when you’re piling them onto other dishes, they’ll hold together in a very particular way. There’s a reason for everything.

There’s also a level of specialization in Japan, which is quite different from how people train here. For instance, I went to a katsudon restaurant, and they served it in two sizes: with extra rice and pickles and soup, or without. That’s the whole menu. At each Japanese restaurant, somebody’s spent their life making one dish really, really, really well. I just met a chef from Japan who has an unagi restaurant out in the countryside, and I had him do a series of dinners at Rintaro with farmed eels from Maine. Each step of him cutting, skewering, and grilling the eels was so specific, and he had a reason why each thing he did added up to make a perfect grilled unagi don.

I’m not trying to be fussy, but I’m interested in specialization. There are so many great 30-minute Japanese meal cookbooks, and I didn’t feel like I had a lot to contribute to that. But I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to do things and refining processes, and I’ve seen how intentional the process is. And I want to challenge readers to make something that’s worth the effort of making it.

How does one set about making yakitori at home—from the butchering to the skewering to the cooking—to get the end result just right?

Yakitori is not easy—it takes time and focus, and perhaps no beginner reader will make excellent yakitori right from the start, but it’ll be really tasty, and super fun. It also really makes the most of your ingredients: some people think of chicken as just light meat or dark meat, but within a single chicken there are so many different textures and flavors, leanness and fattiness, that yakitori is an amazing way to use almost every little bit. It’s really worthwhile if you’re buying very expensive, high-quality pasture-raised chicken. 

Getting the yakitori grilling process right is hard at home; you really need a heavier, denser charcoal, and you have to expend a little effort. Traditionally, yakitori is made with binchotan, which is charcoal fired at a really, really high heat, made out of oak branches and cut into various links that are two to 10 inches long. When you clink the charcoal together, it sounds like glass—it’s just extremely hard. Ogatan is a bit less expensive, as it’s the bits and pieces that have been compressed into charcoal tubes. You set them about six inches apart in the grill set-up that I describe in the book, and it really concentrates the heat before you start grilling. It’s a very different kind of heat, because as the fats and juices come out and fall onto the charcoal, they vaporize and come back to coat the chicken, and give it a really special taste.

The gyoza in this book started as the recipe your mother Toshiko made throughout your childhood, which you later adapted for the restaurant. How did the gyoza recipe evolve from her hands to yours?

As a kid I helped my mother to make her gyoza; my job was to wet the wrappers after filling them. Then I graduated to folding them, and then after that to making the wrapper dough from scratch. My mother never wanted to bother, but we had a little pasta machine, so I used those to roll out the wrappers. Most Japanese gyoza tend to be quite small and with a more cabbage-to-meat ratio, and hers were bigger and meatier, more like a Chinese-style potsticker, but the seasoning was very Japanese. When I was a caterer, we would make gyoza for events, and one of my first big events was the Chez Panisse staff party, which was completely terrifying. We made them in the Chez Panisse kitchen, all of our ingredients and wrappers right there in the restaurant. Afterwards Alice Waters loved them so much, she told me “You just need to open a gyoza restaurant.” Eventually we started making and freezing gyoza for Samin Nosrat’s pop-up general store in Oakland, where various food people from around the Bay Area could sell their stuff.

As we kept making the gyoza, we also kept refining the recipe, thinking about how to make the skins a little thinner, the filling a little juicier. During this time I worked with one of my cooks, Tomoko Tokumaru, who became my gyoza “section chief” outside the restaurant. Now she works with a small team of Japanese women who are all friends and make the gyoza for us. She’s worked out very small refinements in the recipe, and the recipe in the book is the version that she honed to perfection.

Several years ago you showed SAVEUR a smattering of pieces of cookware and plates that you were collecting, perhaps just when you were opening the restaurant. How did you go about deciding what the visual aesthetic of the restaurant would be in relation to, especially the cookware and the serving wear that you chose?

I’m really drawn to antique or vintage Japanese tools, in part because a lot of the pots and baskets from 75 years ago were made so well that they still function perfectly today. I think it started with a wood-burning rice cooker stove, which I received from one of my early chefs in her old house in Japan. After she moved to the States, it was sitting in her brother’s backyard, so I paid to have it shipped over, and we used that rice cooker for catering gigs—we put it in the back of my Volvo, and drove it up to the venue, and built a fire, and it was very dramatic and cool. I like old things that function really well, and made by people who really know what they’re doing.

You talk about rice as the “real food” of the izakaya, why do you see rice as having this important role?

Japan has been a rice-growing country since the beginning of time, and for the most part Japanese people haven’t had enough to eat. So you have rice, and then you have the things that go with the rice. So that might be a little bit of fish if you’re lucky, a little meat, probably lots of vegetables, but rice is the thing that really fills you up.

But the process for cooking rice is also just as intentional as anything else we make. During one of the dinners we hosted for this book, which took place at Zuni Café, we had problems preparing our rice for the meal. So I sent my sous chef back to the restaurant to get our donabe clay pot, a clay pot made for cooking rice that has a super-thick bottom and a double lid, and really makes flawless rice. Basically you bring the rice and water up to a boil, you turn it off, and then the thick bottom continues cooking via the heat held within it. So we had that going alongside a cheap run-of-the-mill rice maker and a fancy Zojirushi rice maker—and for better or worse, it was the first time I could actually have a taste test between all 3 methods. I was very gratified to find that the donabe rice was by far superior, glossier, with the grains a bit more distinct, and no mushiness whatsoever. Second was the Zojirushi—still good, but not as shiny and the grains not as flavorful—and third was the conventional rice maker, which was just fine. Side by side, I had to report to everybody that we weren’t doing it the hard way for no reason—the difference really paid off.

Lastly, I want your take on the ideal izakaya-style meal to make at home. First off, are we having beer or sake?

Definitely both! You start with beer, and then you have some sake, and then when you feel like you’re drinking too much, you can go back to beer. Any good izakaya style would have a bit of a mix.

For food, I’d start with a single variety of sashimi—maybe a bit of tuna sashimi—and then a dressed dish, which should be anchored in whatever is seasonal. Since it’s still wintertime, I’d suggest the crab sunomono or the ika no nuta, squid with a mustardy miso dressing that can be made a little bit in advance. And then you might do either the dashimaki tamago omelet or chawanmushi. Once you get into the heavier foods, you might have a gyoza and one panko dish, maybe the kabocha croquettes—both can be made and frozen and cooked whenever, so it doesn’t have to be assembled at the last minute.

Then, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you could do yakitori, but given that you’re doing everything else, I’d focus on a chicken thigh yakitori, which can get you five to six different skewers from that. And again, it could be prepared the day of, or the day before and skewered. And then as a final dish, I’d likely recommend either some curry rice, mabodofu don (spicy tofu and pork over rice), or just simple bowls of rice or udon. This is a huge amount of work, though many of these items can be made ahead, even the udon. It all comes down to whether you want to join your dinner or cook for your guests. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post This Cookbook Will Help You Create Your Own Japanese Izakaya Experience appeared first on Saveur.

Madeline Kuhn yanks open a metal door six times her size. A pungent, acidic, yeasty scent comes trailing outward, but her nose is used to it. “I spend a lot of time down here,” she says, as she takes stock of the shelves weighed down with hunks of cheese. Pale yellow wheels on spruce boards line the walls from floor to ceiling—Roth’s Grand Cru Surchoix, the 2016 World Cheese Champion.

“When I was new, I asked if my desk could be in the cellars. I insisted I was totally fine just hanging out here.” She chuckles, then gives a half sigh. “Yeah, that didn’t materialize.”

Still, Kuhn spends much of her day in these rooms. A 29-year-old research and development technician for Emmi Roth, one of Wisconsin’s most decorated cheesemakers for brands like Roth Cheese and others, Kuhn is a licensed cheesemaker herself. America’s Dairyland, fittingly, is the only state in the U.S. that requires a license to make and sell cheese. Though she grew up on a farm with dairy cows, she never tried cheesemaking prior to stepping through Roth’s doors: “I learned—and fast.” 

Nearly seven years later, Kuhn’s touch can be found all across the cellars, conveyor belts, copper vats, and steel shelves of Roth’s Monroe, Wisconsin facility. The company, with roots dating back to the 1860s, processes 400,000 pounds of milk every day—that’s 40,000 pounds of cheese, divvied up across a dozen-plus varieties. Though no two days in Kuhn’s life are quite the same, here’s how Wisconsin’s young cheesemaking superstar spends an average day—honing her craft, dreaming up new cheeses, and continuing Roth’s legacy.

She pipes at dawn.

It’s 3:30 a.m., and Kuhn’s already hard at work. That’s when the pipes are running the type of milk she needs for her latest experiment. All of Roth’s milk comes from nearby, mostly from small, family-owned farms, and all of it gets turned into cheese within 72 hours. If there’s a specific milk Kuhn wants, she’s got to act fast.

Kuhn spends the wee hours of the morning circling a small metal vat roughly the size of a baby’s crib. Whenever she’s cooking up a new recipe, she works in miniature. Miniature to her, that is—enormous to the rest of us. The trial pilot equipment she’s setting up holds 500 pounds of milk, and the vat will eventually birth two 19-pound wheels. (In contrast, the standard-sized vats around her hold 30,000 pounds, pre-cheese.) 

It’s a laborious process that takes hours just to prep: She cleans, sanitizes, hooks up pipes, prepares ingredients, gathers and weighs cultures and enzymes, monitors the milk’s temperature and pH, and keeps an eye on the cheese as it forms. It’s equal parts nurturing and scientific, both deeply mathematical and deeply creative. 

Once the cheese takes shape, things get a little bit easier to manage, she says, and that’s when she can step away to attend to things like meetings, paperwork, and checking on her other trials and experiments. The fruits of her labor are littered across the facility—cheeses in wheels and blocks with hot-magenta trial tags. To the untrained eye, the tags are enigmatic: ECW v 5. pH target 5.25. Brine in trial. “It’s…rather secretive. Most people don’t know what we’re working on,” she says. 

This cheese she’s dreaming up now will need to age for up to a year. She won’t go into too much detail, partly because she can’t. The cheese doesn’t have a name or story yet. 

“It’s what you might call a hybrid cheese,” she discloses. “We’re pulling out flavors and aromas across well-known cheeses and combining them into a different format. It’s one of my favorite realms to play in.” 

A world of pure imagination (and delayed gratification). 

Clad in a white jacket, goggles, hairnet, hardhat, and boots, Kuhn also runs facility-wide technical support, monitoring production at every stage. Beyond the cellars, there are pasteurization tanks and copper vats (which Roth pioneered in the U.S.), the brine room (“it’s sort of like a cheese spa!”), and aging and storage rooms, where tag after tag hang in the final lurches of judgment. Most of the cheeses never get tasted outside the facility.

“The nature of R&D is that less than 10 percent of what you work on goes anywhere,” she explains, rattling off a plethora of reasons—flavor, color, cost, timing, and stakeholder interest. To succeed in the job, she continues, a cheesemaker has to understand that everything is a learning experience, and that nothing is a failure. 

“R&D can get a little weird,” she adds with a laugh. She recalls a cheese so soft it crawled off the boards; the black-garlic experiment that turned out delicious, but gray. “It feels a bit like Willy Wonka sometimes.”

Like the candymaker, Kuhn works in intricate halls, where cave- and river-like systems flow, often quite literally, with cheese. She, too, is a scientist and a chemist—just one who works not in marshmallow rooms but in cellars of fontina. And instead of “invention being 2% butterscotch ripple,” it’s 2% buttermilk gorgonzola. 

Unlike Willy Wonka, though, Kuhn has no magic buttons and levers she can press or pull, and no instant gratification for her meticulous work. Roth Aged Gouda, which is Kuhn’s recipe, is just one example: That project took her three years. 

It’s a bit of a rollercoaster, she admits, and it’s easy to get attached to long-term projects. “But I don’t look at that as a bad thing,” she notes. “I prefer to have that kind of stake in my work—I should be the biggest advocate for everything I create.”

The biggest, perhaps, but certainly not the only. Roth’s cheeses have millions of fans, and if Kuhn keeps at it, she may find her creations cheered on by millions more.

The post A Day in the Life: Meet Wisconsin’s Newest Superstar Cheesemaker appeared first on Saveur.

“Until the 1650s there wasn’t anything remotely like distinct, codified ‘national’ cooking, anywhere,” writes Anya von Bremzen in her new book, National Dish. Those are fighting words if, say, you’re a chef specializing in “authentic” Japanese curry, an Italian American exalting the primordial Italian-ness of pizza, or a food writer (cough) publishing recipes for Thai this or French that. 

On a whirlwind tour of six cities—there’s Parisian pot-au-feu in one chapter, pizza in Naples the next—Von Bremzen celebrates the colorful histories of canonical dishes like ramen, mole, and borshch. But she also picks at their accepted narratives like a scab: Was pizza Margherita truly invented in 1889 to honor the queen of Italy, as Wikipedia and umpteen scholars would have you believe? (Spoiler: It wasn’t.) Are mezzes really Turkish, considering there was no cookbook with the term “Turkish” in its title until the 1970s? (Probably, but it’s complicated.) 

Answering these fraught questions, Von Bremzen’s prose is anything but academic—it’s as bold and richly textured as a steaming bowl of shoyu ramen. In Oaxaca, kernels of maize “glimmer like multihued amber.” In Seville, tapas are “little road signs or historical plaques, couched in the language of the plate, marking the long epic national narratives of power and politics.” 

Von Bremzen is no newcomer to the intersection of food and national identity. Born in the Soviet Union (more on that in her memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking), she has written a potpourri of books, including Paladares: Recipes Inspired by the Private Restaurants of Cuba, Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook, and The New Spanish Table.

National Dish reads like a lively, personal spin-off of those titles. It’s as if, after spending decades fact-checking culinary history for myriad articles and cookbooks, she finally reached her foodie “fakelore” quota and said, “That’s it, I’m calling BS.”

That frustration can be felt in the occasional rhetorical bomb—for instance, when Von Bremzen writes that many national dishes are “products of a late-capitalist cultural logic that treats identities, belonging, heritage, and origin myths as commodities subject to the rule of the marketplace.” But she’s equally quick to point out that although identities are social constructs, that fact doesn’t make them any less real or important.

Last month, I gave Von Bremzen a ring at her apartment in Queens to get a window into how she grappled with some of these sticky subjects. Here are the highlights from our conversation.

BK: How did this book idea come about?

AVB: I guess it all started with the collapse of the Soviet Union. My first book, Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook, was about all the different cuisines that belonged to an empire. And it came out right when [the USSR] was breaking up into many countries. I hate to say it now, but the book had a sort of imperial perspective, with “Russian” in the title. Later I did this book called Greatest Dishes: Around the World in 80 Recipes, which had me researching iconic foods like pizza, risotto, and mole—and that got me thinking, gee, there’s so much material here, but in a cookbook you can only do so much. 

What is the best thing you ate while researching?

Pizza. Because who doesn’t love pizza, especially when Enzo Coccia is making it. Then there was pringá in Sevilla. It’s basically a full Andalusian cocido [meat stew], just distilled into a slider. You get four perfect bites that are the essence of Spanishness—the pimentón, the chorizo … all in a tapas-scale version. And in Mexico I loved all the different moles. Especially with the warm handmade tortillas made from heirloom maize. The way they puff on the comal. The toasty scent and earthy corn. Those tortillas—it’s like comparing mac and cheese from a box to something your Southern grandmother made. 

Tell me more about those moles. What role does mole play in Mexican culture today?

It’s everywhere. In Mexico City, you have chefs like Enrique Olvera making borderline metaphysical moles that are aged for over a year and served at different stages of maturation. What’s interesting is that mole is colonial—it represents a mix, or mestizaje, of ingredients both Spanish and native Mexican. Now, down in Oaxaca, there’s a lot of attention being paid to “indigenous” moles that have almost no Spanish elements. So you have a multiplicity of moles, not one colonial hybrid dish. 

The subtitle of National Dish is, “Around the world in search of food, history, and the meaning of home.” Did you find the meaning of home?

The book wasn’t about me, but it did make me reflect on my childhood in the USSR. Borshch, for example, represented home for me and for Russians in general, but when war broke out in Ukraine, borshch suddenly became political, with Ukraine rightly calling it theirs. I’m a ruthless cosmopolitan of sorts, so for me, “losing” borshch seemed justified. It was a way of decolonizing it from, and for, myself. Many other Russians wouldn’t agree with me, though. Home is an idea we carry inside us, but it can divide us, too. 

What was the most surprising discovery you made?

For me it was this whole story about pizza Margherita—how the dish got its name from a queen who allowed a pizza to be named after her … The claim is repeated in every academic source, yet it turns out, it’s fakelore. So many of the “traditional” dishes I looked at are actually recent inventions. For instance, people think Japanese curries from Sapporo and Hokkaido and whatnot are old, but they didn’t exist before the 1980s. 

Did researching this book change your view on cultural appropriation as it relates to food?

When we talk about cultural appropriation, we’re really talking about racial injustice and other power imbalances. I think it would be much more useful to talk about those issues directly. So, instead of “he appropriated my mofongo,” maybe it’s, “there is racial injustice in the food sector.” National identities change all the time. When most dishes were invented, current borders didn’t exist—so how can you really claim something is from Syria or Lebanon or Turkey when it was eaten under the Ottoman Empire? The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah says that when you treat culture like corporate property that belongs to someone, you’re not acknowledging the fluidity and complexity of cultural exchange. Nations do that with food. I wish every time we talked vaguely about cultural appropriation, there was a “donate” button, because ultimately only political action can effect change.  

In the book, there’s constant tension between universality and propriety. That a dish like pizza can be eaten everywhere, with new iterations being created all the time, and yet many claim it’s from a specific place. How do you walk that tightrope?

After writing this book, I’m much more in the universalist camp. When you start reading about this stuff, you see how recent borders are, and how histories are appropriated and mythologized for the purpose of commercial and political interests. But regardless of the actual history of a dish, what’s more important is how people feel about it. 

On that note, UNESCO recently said dolma, stuffed vegetables, were part of Azerbaijan’s cultural heritage. That didn’t sit well with Turkey and Armenia, countries that also lay claim to the dish. Are these international organizations perhaps hurting more than they’re helping?

When UNESCO gives dolma to Azerbaijan, they’re not saying the dish belongs to that culture; they’re saying they want to honor the dolma-making tradition of Azerbaijan. Of course, that’s not how it’s read. And because everything is about marketing and nation-building and place-branding, countries use these designations in promotional campaigns—not just abroad but at home as well. I think these organizations mean well, and their phrasing is ok, but it’s all very complicated. 

One of the most fascinating passages was about cucina povera, and how we get it all wrong. 

Yes. There’s this whole myth that peasant cuisine was wholesome and wonderful, but when we look at what people actually ate in Italy or France, for example, we find horror stories of scarcity, hunger, and bleak gruels. Sure, our ancestors ate more healthy whole grains, but they definitely wanted the white rice. We poo-poo white bread and industrial food now, but when they became accessible to the masses, imagine what a revolution that was. 

I was struck by the fact that American perceptions of certain food cultures often don’t jibe with reality. You mention that sake accounts for six percent of booze consumed in Japan. Beer is Spain’s alcohol of choice by a landslide, not wine. Where does this disconnect come from?

It’s natural to orientalize cultures, to imbue them with the essentialist qualities we want to see in them. When you go to Turkey, you want to see Turks eating Turkish food. So when you realize Japan has some of the best French, Italian, and hybrid food you can imagine, it’s hard to check the “authenticity” box. That’s where the cultural appropriation question comes in: What do you do when a country like Japan wants people around the world to appropriate its food? At the same time the world was falling in love with sushi, Japanese people were turning away from their traditional diet. Ironically, the success of Japanese food abroad encouraged Japanese diners and chefs to rediscover authentic local cuisines. 

What do you hope readers come away with?

I want people to understand that identity is transactional, complicated, and really important, and that food is a part of that. I hope readers will be skeptical of essentialist stories and canned bits. To recognize that food histories are dynamic and open-ended.

The post The Problem with National Dishes appeared first on Saveur.

On an early evening in Charleston, South Carolina, a group of dynamic women gathered at the home of Molly Fienning, CEO of Red Clay Hot Sauce, for a celebration of women in food and beverage. The idea was to create a comfortable space where we could share learnings from successful entrepreneurs who share the same challenges, and lend some inspiration to those starting out on their own. And, of course, a space where we could share some very special drinks, bites, and fun. 

And, it was definitely casual and comfortable as we all grabbed a chair, a spot on the couch, or on even plopped onto the floor for the main event: a panel discussion between Molly Fienning, CEO of Fly by Jing, Jing Gao, and Petra Higby, CEO of The Caviar Company, focused on the idea of entrepreneurship and how to navigate it as women. From raising capital to staying true to your own mission, we chatted about it all. Read on for all the details of the night, from what we ate and drank to the biggest takeaways of our discussion.

The Menu

Molly tapped up-and-coming Charleston chef Vilda Gonzalez, to create a menu highlighting the products of our panelists. 

Pecan dukkah honey, paneer rose jelly, goat cheese, stone-milled sourdough crackers, Diaspora Co. chilis

La Salumina Prosciutello, toasted hazelnuts, Red Clay Hot Honey 

Spiced candy roaster squash dip, Fly by Jing Chili Crisp, vegetable crudite 

Flakey sourdough flatbread with stracciatella, charred spring onions and Caviar Company Caviar  

The Drinks

Charleston bartender Fabiana Pinillos came up with two different cocktails highlighting female-led spirit companies. First, a Passion Fruit Mezcalita got some heat from Red Clay’s Spicy Peach Hot Honey and highlighted the smoky notes of Doce Mezcal, founded by NYC-based Gabriela Lawrence and Amelia Tonelli.

Guests also sipped Post Flirtation Rosé, a juicy natural wine from Northern California’s Martha Stoumen. Bubbles from B. Stuyvesant Champagne were flowing, thanks to Marvina Robinson, founder of the first Brooklyn-based, Black-owned Champagne company—that’s a lot of firsts. 

The Salon

 I had the honor of moderating a panel consisting of our CEOs and founders. We got down to brass tacks on the nitty-gritty of building a business from the ground up, and what it takes to be an entrepreneur these days. The panelists gave great insights from a variety of perspectives and answered questions from attendees whose backgrounds range from wine sales to chefs to current small business owners. Here are a few standout learnings from the evening. 

Jing Gao, Fly by Jing

“The path to entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart and it comes with severe lows and severe highs, sometimes in the same day. Most people are not going to believe in you until you have proven success on your own,” says Gao.”It’s really like are you the only one that can do what you want to do. You have to answer the question ‘Does this need to exist?’ and ‘Are you the one that needs to do it and why.’ To know that why is what will keep you going.” 

Molly Fienning, Red Clay Hot Sauce

“Start small, start direct, and build an engaged customer base through your direct consumer channel. The second you take capital you start the engine of pressure. I think I would have taken a little more time to build the brand directly on my website before taking on investors. I would have scaled my direct-to-consumer more before I went to grocery and gotten that business really humming.”

Petra Higby, The Caviar Company

“My sister and I really started our business with the idea of, we want to have mutually beneficial and long-lasting relationships; that’s kind of why we are in hospitality, because of the people. And obviously, the product is a lot of fun. It’s a really marketable product, we get to do some really fun things. But it really is the people that brought us into this world. And so we want to honor the people, respect the people and work with the people. And with that kind of mantra, we’ve really gotten to make some amazing friends. And we’ve gotten to do some really fun partnerships, even with things that are like with jewelers, or with you know, alcohol brands, or wines and things like that. And what we found is that whenever we really care about that it’s a two-way street to where it’s not just like okay, so what do we get out of this? We are really taking into consideration the question of ‘what does our partner get out of this,’ where everyone can benefit, and then we have fun too. And then it leads to other relationships and the other fun collaborations.”

A special thanks to Lizzy Rollins Photography for capturing the best moments of the night, Jenni Lata for expertly styling our dishes, Asha Loupy for representing Diaspora Co., and Imane Hanine for representing Martha Stoumen.

The post Toasting Women Founders at the Inaugural SAVEUR Salon appeared first on Saveur.

If you’ve been keeping up with food trends on social media, chances are you’ve noticed some weird-ass cakes creeping into your feed lately. You know the look—lopsided, whimsical, and baroque, with bushy foliage and flowers poking through the frosting and thick chunks of fruit smushed straight into the sides. 

This striking new aesthetic—pioneered by a cohort of young bakers like Amy Yip, Jamie Rothenberg, and Aimee France—is everything conventional pastry isn’t: freeform, imprecise, and refreshingly unserious. 

But the genre is so new that scant resources are available for home cooks eager to dabble in the “anti-cake” chaos. After all, most baking books don’t teach you how to make slumped, wobbly cakes—they aim to do just the opposite.

So when Aimee France—the 23-year-old baker who goes by YungKombucha420 on Instagram—invited us into her tiny Bushwick kitchen for a lesson in unconventional cake decorating, we jumped at the opportunity to watch the artist at work. Here are her top tips for bakers looking to branch out.

Create distinctive patterns and designs.

Run-of-the-mill garlands, buttercream roses, and fondant accents won’t do—let your imagination run wild and get inspired by nature, fashion, and geometry. Aimee uses lots of lines and dots. “I never go into decorating a cake with a specific plan or idea of what it’s going to look like in the end. I just kind of freestyle,” she says.

Use architecture as inspo.

Crown molding, capitals, domes, motifs—architectural elements like these find their way into Aimee’s cake designs. 

Toss the tip.

To create the Van Gogh-like ruffles and swirls that make Aimee’s cakes so trippy and hypnotic, she frequently forgoes metal tips and pipes on the icing straight through the hole in the pastry bag.  

Go crazy with color.

No color is out of bounds when it comes to frosting, as evidenced by Aimee’s jaw-dropping charcoal-gray and black cakes. Visit your local kitchen store (or shop online) to stock up on unconventional food colorings, then play painter and blend them to create even more distinctive hues. Aimee skips artificial dyes and instead uses spices and natural colorings (such as activated charcoal and butterfly pea tea) to create her signature earth-tone palette. 

Fresh produce is your friend.

“I love using seasonal ingredients because there’s always something new to look forward to,” Aimee says. This time of year, she’s reaching for cranberries and citrus, which “add a little zing” to chocolate cakes in the form of fillings, frostings, and garnishes. When the ideas aren’t free-flowing, she reaches for The Flavor Bible, which helps her figure out what ingredients might play well with one another. 

Lean into the lean.

Aimee’s cakes are so gorgeous in their topsy-turviness that you might assume she relies on protractors and complicated support systems. But that couldn’t be further from the truth: “You can make a cake, but gravity is the force of life,” she said, adding that she lets the layers settle organically, which sometimes results in a tilt. To prevent the cake from collapsing, she often inserts a single dowel through the center of the cake.

Forage!

The concrete jungle of Bushwick is no forager’s paradise, but when Aimee goes on vacation or visits her hometown in New Hampshire, she returns with wildflowers and bushels of wild herbs, which she presses and dries for year-round garnishing. Chamomile and hemlock are two of her mainstays. But just because an ingredient is pretty doesn’t mean it is edible—be sure to do your research!  

Spice up your frosting.

Literally. Beyond adding color and texture, spices like cinnamon, cardamom, and dried herbs lend complexity and depth to an otherwise one-note frosting.

Aimee’s cakes are available for purchase in the New York City area and must be ordered at least two weeks in advance via email: yungkombucha@gmail.com.

The post How to Make Those Fabulously Unhinged Cakes You Saw on Instagram appeared first on Saveur.

Open the door to the cheerful little wine shop Beaupierre, and the bustle and busyness of Midtown Manhattan recede into the background, replaced by shimmering shelves of reds and whites. Bottles hailing from as far away as Morocco and Croatia, and as close to home as Upstate New York, are exhibited at eye level for anyone who might be in a wheelchair, and the shop’s business cards feature Braille. Here, in a quiet corner of one of the metropolitan’s most trafficked neighborhoods, this new family-owned store is carving out a safe, welcoming space for the wine-loving and the wine-curious—where accessibility, in every sense of the word, defines the culture.

Yannick Benjamin, a born-and-bred Manhattanite, co-founded Beaupierre with his wife and fellow sommelier Heidi Turzyn. Benjamin grew up surrounded by wine enthusiasts: With a father from the north of France and a mother from Bordeaux, he recalls many childhood visits to French wineries. “I remember going into the cellar and smelling the fermentation, the wines aging. I just loved, loved, loved it,” he says. Benjamin was also raised in a family of restaurateurs and knew early on that hospitality would be his life’s passion. As a teenager, he began working his way up the front-of-house ranks at famed New York City establishments, including stints at Le Cirque and Oceana. Before turning 21, he started taking courses at the International Wine Center; soon, he was a sommelier on the rise, serving wine at fine-dining spots like Atelier at the Ritz, Jean-Georges, and Felidia.

Then, in 2003, when Benjamin was 25, he was in a car accident that paralyzed him from the waist down. The event changed his life dramatically, but it didn’t dull his lifelong love for hospitality. Rather, Benjamin’s new reality opened his eyes to the fact that people living with disabilities are too often marginalized and overlooked by the industry—inspiring him to work toward making wine education and appreciation more accessible to all. “We have to really work on that—getting rid of the stigmatization that comes with disability,” says Benjamin, pointing out that 61 million Americans live with some kind of disability that may or may not be outwardly apparent. “A lot of these individuals don’t vote or don’t go out to restaurants because they feel like they’re not welcomed,” he says. “They feel like they’re not being catered to, or that they’re being ignored.”

To address this problem directly, Benjamin co-founded the non-profit Wheeling Forward in 2011. Through initiatives like college scholarships, fitness programs, and adaptive sporting events, the organization aims to help the disability community access the resources and services they need to live fuller lives. To help support Wheeling Forward’s advocacy work, Benjamin also founded Wine on Wheels, which regularly brings together a network of New York City sommeliers for fundraising tasting events. Then, in 2021, Benjamin launched Contento, an East Harlem restaurant acclaimed not only for its innovative Peruvian-inspired menu, but also for its rare culture that accommodates and prioritizes patrons with disabilities in every aspect of the dining experience. Now, he and his wife have teamed up to launch Beaupierre, the next act in their mission to make inclusive hospitality the norm.

Beaupierre’s emphasis on accessibility is evident right at the shop’s entrance, which offers power-assist wheelchair access. “We’re trying to make [shopping in our store] seamless for people with disabilities,” says Turzyn. The lighting is intentionally bright, to support those with low vision. Upon entering, patrons meet the owners or the couple’s longtime friend and fellow sommelier Nestor Escalante, who extend appropriate assistance based on the guest’s requests and needs—whether that means wine pairing suggestions, help with reading a label, or support with carrying bottles to the register. It all comes down to “just simple communication, and not being presumptuous,” explains Benjamin, noting that it’s important to ascertain what customers might require, before jumping to assumptions. 

The store’s ethos of inclusivity goes beyond ensuring that the space is physically accessible. In the hospitality industry, fine wine is often positioned as an exclusive luxury reserved for the knowledgeable and well-heeled, but the couple believes there should be a place for everyone at the table. To make their collection as economically accessible as possible, the two work hard to ensure there are plentiful options under $20—an effort that goes hand-in-hand with their mission to meet customers where they are. “Heidi does such a tremendous job of catering to our customers’ needs and making sure they feel comfortable—that they should never feel ashamed to ask the simplest question,” says Benjamin. “I know what it feels like to feel intimidated by [wine],” adds Turzyn. “Everybody starts from somewhere.” The pair have also begun organizing wine seminars for people with disabilities who want to learn more about spirits in a relaxed, unpretentious atmosphere. The purpose of wine, after all, is “to get people together,” Benjamin says.

Beaupierre not only welcomes diversity in its customers, but also advocates for it in its inventory. An undercurrent of social and environmental sustainability is evident in the thoughtfully curated collection, which highlights small producers from communities the industry has historically marginalized, and features bottles from lesser-known wine regions around the world. The shop’s wide-ranging line-up includes brands like Kumusha Wines, helmed by Zimbabwean sommelier Tinashe Nyamudoka; Aslina Wines, owned by Ntsiki Biyela, a winemaker in South Africa; and Dila-O, which practices Georgia’s ancient Qvevri winemaking methods.

Beaupierre’s mission is in large part an extension of the impact Benjamin is already making with his restaurant Contento. Just a few years ago, the idea of owning and operating his own barrier-free fine dining establishment felt like a far-off prospect—until his friend and fellow para-athlete George Gallego told him about a retail space that had become available down the street from Gallego’s East Harlem apartment. Along with Gallego’s friend Lorenz Skeeter, who was leasing the space, the friends decided to venture into business together. They brought on Lima-born-and-raised chef Oscar Lorenzzi to helm the kitchen and craft a menu inspired by his native Peruvian cuisine; sommelier Mara Rudzinski to serve as managing partner; and Turzyn to develop craft cocktails. After its spring 2020 launch was delayed due to the pandemic, Contento finally opened its doors in the summer of 2021.

At the restaurant, respect and consideration for people with varying disabilities permeate the ambiance—from adaptive flatware on the tables, to grab bars in the bathroom, to a wheelchair-friendly bar design. Menus are available in both Braille and an audio format. “When you really want to create a space that is inviting, you have to figure out ways to remove barriers,” says Gallego, explaining that it’s important to “create options so that people can have a choice, and they don’t feel like they’re being forced to take a specific approach.” With that goal in mind, the staff is carefully trained in the appropriate protocols and etiquette for ensuring patrons with different disabilities feel safe and secure. And at Contento, Lorenzzi ensures there’s plenty for everybody to enjoy: the level of customer care in the dining room also imbues the kitchen, which dishes up standouts like short-rib udon noodles, spicy mussels in tomato broth, and arroz con pato. “We call it Peruvian American comfort food,” says the chef. 

Since the acclaim for Contento’s culinary offerings and impactful hospitality has spread, the team has received outreach from many restaurateurs hoping to follow their example and create more accessible spaces. “Yannick started a movement years before Contento,” Gallego says. “Now that we have our own platform, I think that even more people are hearing what we have to say.”

Today, over in Midtown, Benjamin is bringing these values to a new, wine-focused audience. For the sommelier, getting to open up shop at this particular address—664 10th Avenue—feels tinged with serendipity. Not only did he grow up in this exact walk-up apartment building (which he had to leave after his accident), but his parents still live there, his sister resides two buildings down, and his uncle is just a block away. “It’s something that Yannick holds very close to his heart,” says Turzyn. The name of the shop couldn’t be more fitting: Beaupierre translates to “beautiful stone” in French, and Benjamin’s father’s name is also Pierre. “I am nothing without my family,” says Benjamin.

Every day, being surrounded by their support fuels his tireless drive to make the wine world more inclusive. “Having our own little place here is quite special,” he says. “It’s a real blessing.”

The post We Hope Wine Shops of the Future Look Like This Newcomer appeared first on Saveur.

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 >

The post The World’s Walnut Whisperers appeared first on Saveur.

Welcome to Grandma’s Notebook, a series unearthing the hand-written recipes of  Mary Woo, the late grandmother of fashion designer Peter Som. Follow along as we dive into 20 years of recipes that trace her Chinese American immigrant experience. Along the way, we’ll discover hidden family secrets, new and enticing flavors, and priceless hand-me-down dishes that deserve a second life in your kitchen. 

Tofu Fa is a Chinese classic whose sublime simplicity is hard to describe: The sweet version, my favorite, is a delicate, custardy tofu drizzled with ginger-sugar syrup. If that sounds bland or boring, stay with me—you haven’t tried my grandmother’s.

A few pages in from lion’s head meatballs (which you can read about here), tofu fa is dated 1973. That was a terrible year for Grandma. My grandfather, 67 at the time, was diagnosed with leukemia. Four and a half months later, he died. I was two years old and recall very little, but the death was hard on my mom. She remembers the day my grandma moved out of the family home and said goodbye to her flower-filled backyard. The new abode was a small San Francisco apartment with a deck that could barely fit her beloved orchids. 

This tofu fa recipe hails from Hong Kong. My Uncle James, who’s always been quite the gourmand, relocated there shortly after Grandpa’s funeral. I like to think that he mailed the recipe across the Pacific to Grandma to bring her a moment of joy amid her horrible grief. (Grandma blamed herself for Grandpa’s ill fate and sobbed and sobbed for months.) 

Now, I don’t know if tofu fa can cure a mourning grandmother’s heartache, but it has certainly soothed me in times of duress. As I gently break the delicate, trembling tofu with a spoon, it floats in the syrup, resembling flower petals. (“Fa” is Cantonese for flower.) But it doesn’t stay beautiful for long—I’m hungry, and I can’t resist the perfumed fragrance of ginger and sugar. It’s akin to soft panna cotta, the syrup coating each petal of supple tofu. 

Sometimes I cut corners: Store-bought silken tofu is fine in a pinch. But every once in a while, when I have time, I make my own. It’s easier than you think—instead of using the more traditional gypsum powder as a coagulant, I simply dissolve gelatin in warm soy milk and then refrigerate it overnight to set. 

The syrup is just as effortless; in fact, the trickiest part is tracking down Chinese rock sugar, which most Asian markets carry. (Absent English labeling, look for clear bags filled with large, irregular chunks.) Rock sugar is less sweet than granulated and doesn’t overwhelm the key flavors in the dish: the caramel notes from the brown sugar and the subtly pepperiness from the ginger.

Tofu fa is my antidote to the world’s spiraling chaos. Corny as it sounds, I like to think of it as a proverbial flower sent from Grandma, a reminder to savor life’s beauty, spoonful by spoonful.

Recipe

Custardy Tofu Fa with Sweet Ginger Syrup

Get the recipe >

The post How to Turn Soy Milk Into Sweet Tofu Fa appeared first on Saveur.