“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 began 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, too, 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 permeates 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

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Georgian Beef Kharcho

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Leek Pkhali (Georgian Vegetable Paté)

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The post The Walnut Whisperers of Georgia 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

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The post How to Turn Soy Milk Into Sweet Tofu Fa 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. 

It all started with a small, spiral-bound notebook—crinkled, smudged, and dog-eared, its ruled pages fading to ecru at the edges. On those mothball-scented pages? Twenty years of recipes, each one dated, starting in 1960 and ending in 1980. Soy sauce duck, tofu fa, enchiladas, oxtail stew. A life’s worth of recipes, meticulously hand written in Chinese or English—or a little of both.

I found the notebook buried in my late grandmother’s desk drawer.  I had never seen it, nor had my Mom or her siblings. Grandma passed away more than 20 years ago, but because the family had kept her apartment intact (so visiting relatives had a place to stay in San Francisco), the book only turned up last year as we were finally getting ready to sell the place. Her home was a time capsule containing decades of memories. Beyond the recipe book, there were clattering sets of CorningWare, drawers of yellowed ivory chopsticks, and dried shark fins for soup that was never made. 

I inherited my joy for cooking from Grandma. Like her, I cook to celebrate, to mourn, to de-stress, and—above all—to show love. But the moment I opened that notebook, I realized there was much more to her cooking than putting dinner on the table. There was a cultural dialogue, a time-stamp. Her recipes made me wonder about the person beyond the grandmother figure. It’s odd to become closer to someone in death, but the notebook gave me that gift. Mary Lim-Tsing Woo was trying to tell me something. And I was listening. 

The journey of rediscovery began with lion’s head meatballs, dated Jan. 17, 1963. According to Auntie Gloria, my mom’s younger sister, Grandma cooked in phases, focusing on a single dish for weeks at a time until she got it right. Grandma’s pharmacist-trained precision transferred to her cooking. She wrote everything down, penciling in notes and adjustments. “Very good,” she’d scribble when she was satisfied with a dish. Her lion’s head meatballs are very good indeed.

A classic Huaiyang dish, lion’s head meatballs are so named because of their size. They evoke the heads of guardian lions (also known as foo dogs), while the traditional accompaniment of napa cabbage or bok choy is said to resemble the mane.  

Her recipe starts by vigorously mixing ground pork for a long time until it’s smooth and fluffy—that’s the key to the meatballs’ signature light, moist texture. (I’ve taken the liberty to simplify Grandma’s recipe in places, but this step cannot be skipped, even if your arm aches.) 

Following her instructions, I then formed the meat into large balls, seared them in oil, and braised them in a brothy sauce. They were exceptional: cloudlike and tender with hints of ginger and scallion. The sauce, not included in the original recipe, comes from Auntie Florence (my mom’s eldest sister), who has fond childhood memories of lion’s head meatballs and makes them often.  

The dish is best served family style. Sharing steaming bowls of soup around the dinner table is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Food is family—as Grandma continues to teach me through her little spiral notebook.

Recipe

Chinese Lion’s Head Meatballs

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The post Lion’s Head Meatballs Are Saucy, Soulful Chinese Comfort Food appeared first on Saveur.

Frankie Gaw is visiting New York City for the week. There’s a slew of Chinese and Taiwanese eateries he hopes to try during his short stay, and the historic dim sum restaurant Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown is high on the list. When our steaming bamboo baskets arrive, Gaw holds a chopstick in each hand and hovers the two of them in an X shape over a lo bak go, or turnip cake. He places the chopstick points on either side of the cake, then drags them toward each other, slicing cleanly through it. 

Gaw’s dexterity with dim sum is no surprise. Both his SAVEUR Blog Award-winning food website Little Fat Boy and his debut cookbook First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home, which just launched this week, feature a dizzyingly diverse array of dumplings and buns. Lovingly plated and stunningly photographed, they’ve become hallmarks of his recipe development, which focuses on classics from the repertoire of Taiwanese and Chinese home cooking, with unexpected twists courtesy of his American Midwest upbringing. Think sour cream and onion scallion pancakes, Coca-Cola soy-glazed drumsticks, and butternut squash and corn dumplings—Asian-meets-American mash-ups that showcase the duality of his cultural identity.

While helping himself to spare ribs and vegetable buns, Gaw admits that, as a child, he would not have publicly acknowledged liking these dishes. Growing up in Cincinnati with Taiwanese immigrant parents, he straddled two cultures. At home, Gaw loved Skyline Chili and dumplings equally and openly. But at school, he was one of only two East Asian students and didn’t want to stand out more than he felt he already did. Not only did self-deprecation become his armor—“I always would joke about my race, just to be in front of the joke, before someone else can say it,” he recalls—but he also strove to dress and eat the way his peers did. When friends came over, the pantry was stocked with classic American snacks, “to make sure that I could blend in.”

Gaw is American, but he never felt “white enough,” as he puts it, to truly fit in—yet he didn’t consider himself knowledgeable enough about Taiwan to wear his heritage proudly, either. Though his parents and grandparents had immigrated from Taiwan, Gaw had never been there. “It’s this weird, in-between space that you exist in,” he says of first-generation immigrants. “You put away a lot of these things that make you, you.” His desire to assimilate spurred him to stifle not only his cultural background but also his sexuality. “I knew I might be gay,” he says, but “I remember very much suppressing that and being like, ‘This is just a phase.’” 

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Gaw moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began working as a product designer at Facebook. But shortly after, he found himself back in Ohio; his father, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, was losing his battle with the disease, and Gaw returned home to help care for his ailing parent. “Frankie had a very hard time,” Peggy Yang, Gaw’s mother, recalls. “His dad was his confidante. There was nothing he didn’t consult his father about.” When he wasn’t at his father’s bedside, Gaw would assist his grandmother in the kitchen; on hard days, preparing meals for Gaw’s father was all she could do, sometimes dyeing her homemade noodles green or orange using spinach or carrots to infuse a bit of joy into the food. 

Gaw’s father died in 2015, outliving his initial prognosis by two years. “That totally threw me for a loop,” says Gaw, who was 24 at the time. “Who am I as a person? What matters anymore? I was just totally lost.”

Amidst the pain and haze of bereavement, buried doubts and unspoken feelings bubbled to the surface. Faced with the ephemerality of life, “a lot of these things I cared about, like my status, how my job makes me look, and how much money I’m making,” he says, suddenly felt like little more than catering to the expectations of others. Who was it that he wanted to be?

When Gaw finally told his mother that he is gay, she responded that she had always known. “I just was waiting for you to figure it out for yourself,” he recalls her saying. Yang’s unconditional acceptance helped Gaw shed a massive burden he felt he had been shouldering all his life. “When I came out, that took down a ton of different walls,” he says. Like a cascade of falling dominos, other aspects of his identity that he’d buried began yearning for release and exploration.

Throughout Gaw’s upbringing, his family’s primary link to their Taiwanese roots had always been their home-cooked meals, which included dishes like beef noodle soup and stir-fried tomato and egg. In hopes of holding onto his father’s memory, Gaw decided he needed to learn more about the food of his heritage. “I really craved this idea of me being able to make [those dishes] for myself,” he says. He began asking his grandmother to cook the meals he recalled from his childhood, while he jotted down the steps to practice recreating them later. Gaw’s aunt Jay Luor, Yang’s younger sister, not only helped translate his grandmother’s decades-old handwritten recipes but also sent him her collection of old Taiwanese and Chinese cookbooks. During a visit to Taiwan, Gaw’s first time on the island, he expanded his awareness of, and curiosity about, Taiwanese food even further.

To document his cooking journey, Gaw began sharing photos on social media of the dishes he was making and publishing the recipes on a blog. As a designer, he knew that presentation and artistry could significantly influence how someone reacted to a dish. He decided to only shoot flat-lays, focusing the viewer’s eye on the food, and to use monochromatic backgrounds and colorful styling that would make the dishes pop. “We see European-centric food photographed like this all the time,” says Gaw, but he points out he hardly ever saw Asian food presented with similar care in American media. “Why don’t we get this kind of treatment and representation in our stories?”

Building off the foundation of his grandmother’s recipes, he began to incorporate fresh, seasonal ingredients from the grocery stores he frequented around the Bay Area. He also added American flourishes to traditional Taiwanese and Asian foods, producing recipes like what he calls Cinnamon Toast Crunch butter mochi. The base recipe is nian gao, or glutinous rice cake, which he reimagines by soaking his favorite breakfast cereal in milk and incorporating the liquid into the dessert (inspired by chef Christina Tosi, the founder of bakery chain Milk Bar).

In 2019, less than a year after launching his website, Gaw won the Blog of the Year Award at the SAVEUR Blog Awards. Little Fat Boy had become more than a hub for recipes, but an avenue for exploring the complexity of the first-generation experience. Today, his new cookbook is an encapsulation of that journey of self-discovery. Not only does he confidently and proudly eat dim sum now, he reinvents the dishes so that they tell a story—his story.

“As I’ve grown up navigating my identity,” he writes in his book’s introduction, “food has been at the heart of my discovering both deep shame and overflowing pride.” Gaw’s food is a reminder that cuisine is never static, instead ever-evolving across time and space. From fried chicken gua bao to turkey fried rice, his recipes are an honest representation of one immigrant family’s bicultural tastes, forever oscillating between two paradigms, seemingly opposing forces that meld together seamlessly on the plate.

Recipe

Rice Cake Bolognese

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The post Rice Cake Bolognese and Fried Chicken Gua Bao Star in Frankie Gaw’s Standout Debut Cookbook appeared first on Saveur.

When chocolatier Wendy Lieu decided she wanted to pay homage to the Mid-Autumn Festival, she knew she had to infuse the taste of mooncakes, that holiday mainstay, into a delicate chocolate shell.

Across many Asian countries, the Mid-Autumn Festival is among the most important holidays of the year, with families gathering together to celebrate the harvest moon. The festival’s emblematic treat is a sweet round pastry, commonly filled with the iconic combination of lotus seed paste and salted duck-egg yolks. The cakes are exchanged, admired for their designs, then enjoyed with loved ones, and Lieu’s Vietnamese family was no exception. “As a child, my favorite part of mooncakes were the egg yolks—some had double yolks,” she recalls. “I remember cutting them open, eating the yolk, and giving the remaining portion to my parents.”

But how to deliver the flavors, texture, and signature salted-egg-yolk center in an elegant, bite-sized gourmet truffle? Not surprisingly, the co-owner of San Francisco’s Socola Chocolates couldn’t locate anyone else who had achieved, or even tried, this transformation.

This wasn’t Lieu’s first time attempting a new twist on a nostalgic food—she had previously incorporated the essences of durian, Vietnamese coffee, and even Phở, all beloved flavors in her culture, into her chocolates. (Socola, after all, is the Vietnamese word for chocolate.) Still, mooncakes posed unique challenges. The hearty treats are baked, while chocolates are not, so one hurdle was achieving the proper consistency in a lotus seed paste, one of the most popular fillings among mooncake lovers. After some experimentation, the chocolatier discovered the ideal approach: soaking the lotus seeds, removing the tiny sprouts by hand, pressure-cooking them, mashing them into a paste, and—here’s the key—adding white chocolate into the filling.

Because Lieu envisioned customers delicately slicing her mooncake chocolates in half to reveal the tiny golden orbs within, the salted egg yolks had to hold their shape. She found that she needed to bury the yolks in salt and let them set for a month in the refrigerator before gently washing and baking them, then slicing them into diminutive balls. This lengthy process made sure they didn’t ooze into the filling.

In addition to the traditional filling, Lieu also created mooncake chocolates starring ube, black sesame, and jasmine tea, topped with colored splatters to match their defining ingredient. 

The mooncake chocolates are the cherry on top of what has been a full-circle entrepreneurial journey for Lieu, who launched Socola Chocolates with her sister Susan back when they were teenagers growing up in Santa Rosa, California. After school, the siblings would go to the nail salon their parents owned and visit the neighboring See’s Candies shop for free samples. Those See’s chocolates, which Lieu found to be overly sweet, inspired her to experiment with creating her own. She infused them with ingredients emblematic of her Vietnamese heritage—everything from sriracha and passionfruit to guava and cognac. When her customers tasted her chocolate truffles imbued with these classic flavors, the treats spurred long-forgotten memories. “It really opened up conversations about Saigon, back in the day,” she recalls.

The mooncake chocolates, Lieu says, are another homage to her culture. “I have so many memories of cracking open a tin, carefully cutting up each mooncake into individual bite-sized pieces, and sharing with family and friends.”

The post You’ll Never Guess the Surprising Ingredients in These Chocolate Truffles appeared first on Saveur.

The relationship between “healthy” food and inclusivity tends to be inverse. Health food brands often project an aura of exclusivity around their products. Ghost Town Oats, the world’s first Black- and queer-owned oat milk company, wants to break down the barrier surrounding one of today’s trendiest health-promoting products—one delicious, creamy cappuccino at a time. 

As of late July, the LA-based brand is officially available in select coffee shops in Los Angeles, like Dayglow and Obet & Del’s Coffee, and Chicago, like Stan’s Donuts. It’s the fledgling company’s first step toward creating a deeply inclusive, widely available, and (attention, baristas) better-tasting oat milk. 

Like many newish and innovative food companies, Ghost Town Oats was a brainchild of the pandemic. Stuck at home, veteran coffee professionals Michelle Johnson, Ezra Baker, and Eric J. Grimm decided to join forces and create a product that they felt the industry needed. Their goals were threefold: taste, texture, and culture. “We really homed in on what flavors we wanted,” said Baker on a recent phone call, explaining that many of the existing oat milks tasted overwhelmingly “oaty.” Their goal was to create one with a taste and creaminess that approximated whole milk.

Because all of the founders are baristas at heart—Johnson, known for her blog The Chocolate Barista, was in fact the first Black woman to qualify for the U.S. Barista Championship—it was important that the milk alternative they created could steam exceptionally well. “That was the number one thing that we wanted to do,” said Baker. 

Finally, they wanted to reach customers they believe have too often been excluded from plant-based milk culture—specifically, communities of color. Currently, according to Baker, the target audience for alternative milks largely overlaps with wellness adherents—mostly white, mostly affluent. According to Baker, “we want to be the bridge” to a much wider, more diverse customer base. “We want to be the Sprite of oat milk,” he continued, in reference to how the lemon-lime soda was historically heavily marketed to African American communities. But unlike Sprite, oat milk carries nutritional benefits—and it’s lactose-free, a significant consideration for communities of color that Baker points out are more likely to experience lactose intolerance. 

The company’s commitment to inclusivity runs so deep that it’s even built into the financing. Through the WeFunder platform, the company invites anyone to buy a piece of the pie (for as little as $100) and potentially earn a return on their investment. As of this writing, Ghost Town Oats has raised $236,518 from 392 investors.

If investors have proven to be eager, so have customers (and wannabe customers). According to the company’s WeFunder page, the waitlist for coffee shops wanting to carry Ghost Town Oats has soared past 100. Reminiscent of the explosive growth of the bonafide unicorn startup Oatly, Ghost Town Oats stands to scale fast. “It’s almost scary for someone who’s never done this. I’m freaking out a little bit,” said Baker with a laugh. “But we’re having fun.”

When asked about his ultimate vision of success, Baker didn’t mention funding rounds or financials. He replied, “Success for us would be to go to any bodega in New York City or in Brooklyn and find our product there.”

The post Why Oat Milk Is Too White—And How One Brand Is Determined to Change That appeared first on Saveur.