Haddock is often used for these Canadian fish cakes, though any firm white fish will do. This recipe, which has been adapted from Nova Scotia Cookery, Then and Now, creates tender cakes with golden edges. If you like, the mixture may be shaped into patties a day ahead of time and refrigerated, but for the best texture don’t roll the cakes in bread crumbs until just before frying. Green tomato chow-chow is an excellent accompaniment; find the recipe here.

This recipe is featured in “The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking in Nova Scotia.”

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“Between chocolate and fruit desserts, I always choose fruit,” says Georgia Goggi, the cook at Puglia’s Masseria Moroseta. She makes this simple pear cake recipe from memory. “I brush it with honey and lemon glaze to keep the top moist and shiny.” In fall, pears or apples work well, or in summer, peaches, apricots, and berries do too. Spelt, an ancient grain, lends a hearty crumb and golden color.

Featured in “This Garden-Driven Cook is Shaking Things Up In Southern Italy”

What You Will Need

• 9-inch Cake Pan
• Parchment Paper
• Stand Mixer with Paddle Attachment
• Medium Bowl
• Whisk
• Small Pot

The post Pear Cake with Honey and Spelt appeared first on Saveur.

Using a whole chicken contributes to the intensity of this soup from the indigenous Tsotsil Maya of Puebla’s Yo’on Ixim, so if sold with the bird, definitely add the backbone, organ meats, and feet to the pot. The mainstay vegetables for this southern Chiapas caldo de pollo is chayote, an edible gourd, as well as tomatoes and onions.

Featured in: “The ‘Women of the Corn’ Share More than Maize at Yo’on Ixim.”

What You Will Need

• Very Large Pot
• 8-10 Large Soup Bowls

The post Caldo de Pollo (Mexican Chicken and Vegetable Soup) appeared first on Saveur.

“This is the quintessential Korean household dish,” says chef Esther Choi, who grew up eating kimchi-jjigae around four times a week. “It would be my last meal on Earth if I had to pick one.” The warming, spicy stew is extremely versatile: According to custom, you can use any protein you want. In this version, meaty chunks of pork belly meld with the tart, fermented flavor of kimchi.

Featured in: “How To Make Kimchi With Chef Esther Choi.”

What You Will Need

• Medium Pot
• 4 Serving Bowls

The post Kimchi-Jjigae (Korean Kimchi Stew with Pork Belly and Tofu) appeared first on Saveur.

Three decades ago, when Esther Choi’s parents and grandmother emigrated from Korea to New Jersey, they set to work building a garden to make their own kimchi, the basis of most of their weeknight meals.“At the time, there was no kimchi at restaurants nearby,” she says, “and it was hard even to find any Asian ingredients in stores.” Choi’s grandmother began gathering neighbors and friends to make communal batches of kimchi in their local church basement. The fall batch was the most important because it meant their garden vegetables would be preserved through the winter.

Making her grandmother’s recipe—an amalgam of thick cabbage spears, dried and fermented fish, sticky plum sauce, and a fire-engine-red chile paste left to ferment for a week or more—is still a steady ritual for Choi, who is now chef-owner of mŏkbar, a Korean restaurant with locations in Brooklyn and Chelsea Market.

“I’m obsessed with kimchi and always have been,” the chef says. “It’s in my blood.” Aside from being a staple side dish of Korean cuisine (which Choi eats alongside everything, even pizza), this spicy, fermented vegetable mixture is the main component in many Korean dishes. Today, Choi’s menu at mŏkbar features riffs on some, such as kimchi-jjigae, a comforting stew.

Traditional Kimchi

At her restaurant, Choi has at least 12 different types of kimchi in rotation. Beyond using the traditional Napa cabbage, she makes versions with daikon radish, perilla leaf, and ramps.

There’s no single perfect formula or recipe for how to make kimchi—every family has its own, something Choi likens to an Italian tomato sauce—nor will every batch turn out the same. The results might vary based on the water content of the vegetables or the time of year and the day’s weather, or the particular type of salt you use. But more than anything, Choi says, “It’s the person—it’s the knowledge that you bring to it and the lessons that you learn with each batch that make your kimchi your own.”

“It’s a slow, long process,” she continues, “which is why it carries a stigma of being difficult.” But if you like eating kimchi, try making your own. The flavors are more complex, and “it’s not that hard,” she says. “It just takes repetition, and then it becomes sort of like a memory.”

Making Kimchi Is Easier Than You Think

You just need a large jar, a couple of bowls, gloves (if you want them), and these four steps

Step 1: Salt The Cabbage.

“This is the number-one thing,” Choi says about salting, a part of the process called joelim in Korean. Salting the cabbage and letting it rest draws out its water and gives it a lightly “cooked” texture, preparing it to be fermented. “Not every salt is the same and not every cabbage is the same, so even if you have an exact recipe, you will still probably have to improvise based on what looks and feels right.” Eight to 10 hours of rest after salting is a good starting point, but check earlier to determine how much the cabbage leaves have wilted. “You want a little bit of crunch to remain, but when you lift up the cabbage, it should flop down,” says Choi. Be sure to rinse vegetables at least 3 times in cool water after salting.

Step 2: Make The Paste

“This is where people get creative—each region and household has their own recipe,” Choi says. Her take falls between the flavors of southern Korea, which is known for fishier versions, and Seoul style, which is spicy and sour. She swears by adding plum extract to the paste, but you can substitute puréed fruits like apple or kiwi if plum extract proves difficult to find. Other crucial elements include a sticky rice “glue” made from cooked rice flour, for thickening, and a combination of fish sauce, fermented baby shrimp, and dried pollock or cod—which gives the kimchi a refreshing brightness called shiwon. “It’s just not the same without it,” Choi says. You can make the paste a day ahead and refrigerate in an airtight container.

Step 3: Mix Thins Up

The best way to mix the paste into the salted cabbage is with your hands. Because—particularly in traditional recipes—the cabbage is kept in large wedges before it’s seasoned, nothing else can do a better job of working the paste into the nooks and crannies. So wear gloves if you want, and focus on coating each piece. “Don’t overdo it, but don’t skimp either—get every leaf covered in some paste.” Then, see how the color looks. “I like kimchi that’s vibrantly red, which means it’s really well seasoned and the chile flakes are fresh,” Choi says. If your chile paste looks too dark or too brown, that means your chile flakes are old. Use them soon after buying, or store them in the freezer to retain their color and freshness.

Step 4: Let It Ferment

Traditionally, kimchi makers would bury their batch in the ground in earthenware pots to ferment. But since the neighbors will likely talk if you start digging holes in your backyard, a vessel on your kitchen counter will work just as well. Coil the cabbage pieces into a large airtight jar or crock, leaving at least 3 inches of space at the top to prevent the bubbly, fermented juices and gases from oozing out (something Choi says has happened to her countless times). After 2 days at room temperature—or more if you want it really sour and funky—transfer the jar to the refrigerator for another 5 days. After that, it’s ready to eat and will last up to a year. “The whole idea of kimchi is that it’s long-lasting,” Choi says.

Korean Kimchi Stew with Pork Belly and Tofu (Kimchi-jjigae)

The post How To Make Kimchi With Chef Esther Choi appeared first on Saveur.

This pellizcada recipe comes from the women of Mexico’s Yo’on Ixim, a Pueblan school and community center for indigenous Tzotzil Maya. To make the base, a thick disk of corn masa is griddled on a comal, then formed into a nest for saucy toppings—in this case salsa and cheese. When cooking on the stovetop, a dry cast-iron skillet works great as well.

Featured in: “The “Women of the Corn” Share More than Maize at Yo’on Ixim.”

What You Will Need

• Cast-Iron Skillet
• Wide Spatula

The post Blue Corn Pellizcadas with Salsa and Queso Fresco appeared first on Saveur.

This tangy relish from Nova Scotia native Florence Jackson makes use of shoulder-season produce. Serve it alongside meat and fish dishes to add a bright note of sweetness. While chow chow can be used immediately, consider making it ahead or canning a few jars as its flavor improves with time. If you still have tomatoes left from the harvest, be sure to check out all of our tomato recipes.

Featured in: “The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking in Nova Scotia.”

What You Will Need

• Large Bowl
• Mesh Strainer
• Small Bowl
• Medium Saucepan

The post Green Tomato Chow Chow appeared first on Saveur.

The Tsotsil Maya call themselves the people of the corn. It grows readily in their home, in the foggy cloud forests of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the lush highlands in which their ancestors grew the grain for thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived. According to Mayan creation beliefs, humans were made from corn itself—white corn for men, yellow for women.

Blue Corn Pellizcadas with Salsa and Queso Fresco

Earlier this year, I visited a group of Tsotsil, far from their rural homeland, in the central city of Puebla, 65 miles southeast of Mexico City. They are an indigenous people who still speak their own language and maintain much of their rural way of life, but have come north temporarily with their families to work, perhaps to help pay medical bills or build a small cement-block house at home. When they make the 18-hour bus journey to this sprawling city of 3.5 million, they don’t carry much, but they do bring their food traditions. Life is very different here, where the Tsotsil women must shop the local markets for fresh corn and find a local molinero, or grinder, to make fresh masa for tamales and tortillas.

I had come as a guest of Yo’on Ixim, a small school and community center on a side street in the Loma barrio, to work with the women and help them share their stories and food traditions in a small cookbook. Yo’on Ixim began as a collaboration between Rosalina Ordóñez, a Tsotsil woman, and Samantha Greiff, a Mexican-­American born in Puebla. When they met in 2013, Ordóñez was selling chewing gum on a busy street corner. She spoke little Spanish and could neither read nor write it. But soon, these two very different women with barely a common language were working together—Greiff teaching Ordóñez Spanish, Ordóñez teaching Greiff enough Tsotsil vocabulary to learn about their culture and life.

Five years later, Yo’on Ixim has become a real school, with blackboards and cubby holes, three salaried teachers, a handful of volunteers, and 60 students, from age 4 to 38. Located in the same poor neighborhood where the families live when they are in Puebla, it is also a community center and cooperative, where Tsotsil women—typically unschooled and married by 14—can study and work together on intricately hand-embroidered gifts and weavings to sell at the tourist markets and online. Yo’on Ixim means “heart of corn,” a reminder that we are what we eat. My arrival coincided with an end-of-term celebration, and the schoolroom had been repurposed for an afternoon of making hundreds of blue corn tortillas on a coal-heated comal (griddle).

In Puebla, the men and boys easily blend in, with their modern clothes, but the Tsotsil women wear their native blusas—blouses of handwoven fabric, laboriously embellished with heavy black wool and fine, colorful metallic threads—over long black embroidered skirts, secured by woven cummerbunds, which are worn from the time the girls are very young. The extensive handiwork in a woman’s clothes is her pride and often her most valuable possession. Outside Puebla these garments could be treasures, but here the bright colors are a tell that the wearer is a migrant worker, rendering her invisible in many situations. Not all locals are kind, or open to trying to communicate with women who struggle with Spanish. Taxi drivers refuse them rides. Even shopping for groceries can become a nuanced cross-cultural dance. But as a unit of blue and purple, with several children in tow, the women of Yo’on Ixim moved through the giant Mercado Hidalgo at the southern end of the neighborhood, inspecting stall after stall of avocados, chiles, pineapples, nopales, or cactus paddles, and the prized pollos rancheros, yellow-skinned long-necked farm chickens that hang with heads and feet intact. After the group conferred and carried out some mandatory haggling with the shopkeeper, they bought several chickens for soup. Then their shopping bags quickly grew heavy: 37 pounds of fresh ayocote beans for tamales, 11 pounds of tomatoes, 11 more of onions, a bag of green peppers and chiles for salsa, and a bulging sack of dark green chayotes—small, dense squash—also for the chicken soup.

Upon return to Yo’on Ixim, the women carried in a squat tin coal stove, and the school space became an impromptu kitchen. There was a casual grace to the way they worked together: one holding the pot for another, while a third shooed several toddlers away from the fire. An older woman taught a younger one how to wrap the bean and masa tamales in banana leaves; Ordóñez, the cofounder, handled a machete like a paring knife. This way of working together is not traditional for the Tsotsil. In village families, the mother-in-law usually rules, but here in the city, it is experience and confidence that determines who adds the salt and tastes for seasoning, who sets the rhythm pressing pale blue masa to make tortillas.

Caldo de pollo is at once the simplest chicken soup and a celebration of bounty and community. It is, like most shared dishes the Tsotsil make, really just a vehicle to eat masses of tortillas. Hundreds of the disks, charred from the comal, were kept warm in baskets and plastic wash tubs lined with clean kitchen towels. The ayocote beans studded a dense masa for tamales steaming over a tin stove. Pellizcadas, a sort of thick tortilla, featured pinched rims to hold in spoonfuls of a simple tomato salsa and crumbled fresh cheese. Each dish celebrated corn, that heart of Tsotsil culture that tethers these families to their homes in the cloud forest so far away.

Mexican Chicken and Vegetable Soup

Tamales with Black Beans

The post The “Women of the Corn” Share More than Maize at Yo’on Ixim appeared first on Saveur.

Salteñas are the essential Bolivian breakfast pastry, consisting of a subtly sweet dough filled with saucy meat, vegetables, and sometimes egg, sealed with a braid, and baked.

Pasteles de queso are fluffy pockets of sweet fried dough filled with squeaky white cheese and dusted with powdered sugar. They’re often paired with api morado, a hot, spiced drink made from purple corn.

The chola, La Paz and El Alto’s traditional sandwich (named for the country’s indigenous women, who often serve them), is a pile of soft and crackly roasted pork shoulder, pickled onions and carrots, and ají chile sauce on a bun.

Ocas, Andean tubers that look like wrinkled fingers and taste like a sour potato (at right), are red, yellow, or sometimes a tie-dyed peachy pink. They’re one of hundreds of tuber varieties found in Bolivia’s Highlands.

Chuños are potatoes that have been repeatedly freeze-dried over the course of frigid Highland winter nights, and then stomped on and freeze-dried again. Something of a survival food, they’re a bit funky, like a potato truffle, and will last a decade in a root cellar.

Ulupica peppers’ minuscule size—similar to a small cherry pit—belie their heat (very spicy) and importance (as the progenitor of all capsicums).

Coca leaves are sun-dried, then chewed or brewed as tea for energy, appetite suppression, and—for the Altiplano tourist—to ease altitude sickness. They’re sold by women often seen sucking on a cheekful of coca themselves.

The post Market Foods of La Paz appeared first on Saveur.

It always smells like Christmas in Pinerolo. Whatever the month, visitors to this little Piedmontese town 30 miles southwest of Turin are greeted by the season’s essential olfactory cues as soon as they arrive—baking spices, candied fruit, the slow rise of buttery dough. These seem to be in the very pores of the place, and it’s no wonder: Since 1922, Pinerolo has been home to Galup, a bakery-factory that specializes in northern Italian enriched breads, an operation that defines this small town—from its aroma to its employment options.

It is mid-November, and the area’s smaller bakeries have just begun their year’s panettone making, readying for the seasonal wave of customers. But Galup has kept a steady pace—they make panettone (and other enriched breads, like pandoro and colomba di pasqua) year-round, though as elsewhere, the fall sees their production skyrocket in anticipation of the holiday season. Head of packaging, Ombretta Sana, tells me they are now making up to 6,000 loaves each day, which is set to increase to 10,000 in December. (Galup’s workforce, usually 25, triples between September and February.) As I wander around the factory, the uniformed workers in white hair nets move hurriedly at each stage of the production line, from mixing to wrapping, giving the place a Santa’s workshop kind of mystique.

Panettone—the golden, fruit-freckled, egg-yellow bread of northern Italy—has become a winter mainstay across the entire boot. Stories abound about its roots, a favorite being that it is pane di Tonio (Tony’s bread), the result of an experiment made by a brilliant medieval court chef who had nothing to serve for Christmas dessert. In fact, says Italian food writer Stanislao Porzio, panettone is more likely related to a whole category of enriched breads popularly eaten for Italian religious feasts during the Middle Ages. Prized ingredients—good eggs, butter, and dried fruit—were added to bread dough to create something regal and festive.

Those original loaves likely resembled the style found in Milan today: unfrosted and in a tall, rounded cylinder, like a chef’s hat. (In Turin, you’ll find panettone basso, a lower, squat round, decorated with a slick of egg white, sugar crystals, and, often, hazelnuts.) Italians will slice and eat panettone for breakfast on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, or as a dessert alongside ice cream. They are largely purists with their panettone, I learned, but some deviants cover slices of it with maraschino or cognac, then top it with whipped cream, for a more cake-like presentation.

Every winter, Italy produces nearly two loaves per every resident, many for international export. The country does more than $50 million of panettone business in the U.S. alone. (Galup is available Stateside through Eataly stores.) But for a product so widely distributed, traditionally made panettoni are shockingly uncommercial, filled with expensive ingredients and time-consuming to make. In Pinerolo, little expense is spared on the quality of ingredients: candied citrus from Calabria and Sicily; fat sultanas from Turkey or Australia, soaked in marsala wine; Piedmontese hazelnuts for dusting; the best Italian milk, butter, eggs; and farina forte, a strong, specially formulated 00 flour.

The most important ingredient, however, is free: The bread must be fermented with local wild yeasts, which are responsible for the great variations in quality among brands and makers. At Galup, the pasta madre—”mother” yeast—is a descendant of the bakery’s original from 1922, and has been fed with flour and water every four hours ever since. “It’s not just a yeast,” bakery owner Giuseppe Bernocco says. “It’s our yeast.”

Panettone is widely considered to be among the most difficult products for a baker to master, an art form rather than a mere bread. Industrial and artisanal renditions alike require two levitaziones—two distinct stints of rising to get the dough to swell and the resulting bread to its trademark pillowy texture. The best ones also call for a fine balance of timings, temperatures, pHs, and techniques. Earlier in my trip, Andrea Perino, of cult artisanal bakery Perino Vesco in Turin, told me his process takes 40 hours in total; in small bakeries like this, one session will yield just 60 or so breads, at most.

As his giant electric mixer massaged a bundle of stretchy yellow dough between its long, elbowed arms, he added another tub’s worth of butter, then a container of yolks, then more butter, and then more yolks. Just when I thought no more could possibly be added to what looked like an absurdly rich, golden dough churning in the mixer, another mound of ingredients would fall in to be combined. (Almost half of the average panettone’s volume is butter.) This extensive kneading creates a network of gluten, a web through which the yeast pushes up to give the bread its bounce, which in turn deposits its crowning proliferation of fruit on top.

Mechanization is essential, given the volume that a place like Galup needs to produce. The production line is a sea of midcentury machinery supervised by a workforce that, in many cases, has been here for decades; it’s a curious mix of the mechanized and the handmade. A giant vat of dough is tipped slowly into another container before being divided into individual paper wrappers. Ida Badino is one of three people who operate the machine responsible for spezzatura, cutting out the loaves. She has worked here for 44 years and controls the size and weight of each ball of dough—reminiscent in shape and color, I can’t help but think, of a yellow Labrador puppy—and makes sure that each dollop hurtling up the spinning belt is uniform in proportion. Armies of panettoni then march through a giant oven. Each 2-pound bread needs an hour at around 350°F to reach precisely 194° in the center, the temperature that the company feels best ensures a light, golden, and pillowy dough. It is baked and then cooled upside down to prevent its crown from caving in on itself.

There’s a sense of everything rising: the dough, the fruit, the heat, the scent, and the Alps that tower above the town. On the road above Pinerolo, the light is soft and gauzy, as though diffused by a piece of tulle. The snowcapped peak of Monte Viso looms in the distance, a reminder of Christmas’ imminence. The air smells sweet up here too.

The post This Italian Town Always Smells Like Panettone appeared first on Saveur.