Indholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2017 i SAVEUR

Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, Yewande Komolafe rarely cooked. But a?ter she moved to the States at age 16 and worked for 15 years in restaurant kitchens (Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta, New York’s Momofuku Milk Bar), she developed a newfound curiosity about higerian classic. “My mother, who still lives in Lagos, guided me,” she says. Komolafe, now a professional recipe developer, received additional pointers from Tunde Wey, a Nigerian cook living in New Orleans (and founder of the “Blackness in America” dinner series), YouTube, and a wise woman from her local African grocery, where she picks up suya spice, black cardamom, and garri. 1. SUYA SPICE “Used as a dry rub, suya is a blend of ginger powder, chile powder, onion powder, paprika, garlic powder, sea salt, and kuli kuli,…

Structurally speaking, ice cream is a lot like bread. They’re both foams— networks of compounds connecting millions of tiny air bubbles—and as you’d do with a bread dough, you can tweak an ice cream’s formula to adjust its texture. Enriching a bread dough with butter will make the loaf more tender. The same is true for ice cream; the more butterfat you add (i.e., the more cream as opposed to milk), the richer the ice cream will be. (Paradoxically, more butterfat also translates to a lighter, fluffier ice cream, which is why super dense gelato relies more heavily on milk than cream.) And as bakers add sugar to bread to keep it soft and moist, ice cream makers alter consistency with sugar. By binding with liquids, sugar molecules prevent an…

First, a coincidence: 1.8 million years ago, about 500 miles up from the southernmost tip of Africa, in a widemouthed cave dug into an eroded hillside, Homo erectus discovered barbecue. He’d been an ape, not all that long ago. But his teeth had shrunk as his brain grew; he was now having trouble chewing raw meat. He had recently lit his first fire. One day, Homo erectus threw a carcass onto the flame. The burning meat grew tender. He bit in and lived to see another sunrise. That cave is called Wonderwerk, the Afrikaans word for “miracle,” and it happens to be located within the borders of South Africa, a country positively obsessed with grilling meat. Is it a coincidence that meat was first grilled on what would become South…

The summer I visited James Baldwin at his home in Provence he was working almost constantly, fine-tuning the manuscript that would become If Beale Street Could Talk. Most of our exchanges occurred around the table at lunch or dinner. It was 1973, and I was a 25-year-old fledgling French professor, who just happened to be dating Baldwin’s best friend, a fellow Queens College professor named Sam Floyd. Just after our arrival we gathered presciently around what Baldwin would later baptize as his “welcome table,” an outdoor dining table nestled under a grove of towering cedars. He had just come up from a self-imposed sequestration in his basement living quarters where he spent most of his days writing. I’d met Baldwin before in New York City with Sam, and his face…

We’ve seldom met a stuffed bread we didn’t love, and khachapuri— Georgia’s national dish and the country’s catch-all term for various breads filled with cheeses— is the latest and most tempting example. (Search “coffin bread,” “bunny chow,” or “scaccia” on saveur.com for more.) Sometimes flat and chewy, other times tender and fluffy, khachapuri dough comes in many forms, and its myriad potential fillings are adapted and improvised all over Georgia. For months we’ve been turning out our own classic and creative variations from the test kitchen (nine kinds to be exact), but our favorite is one of the most traditional and recognizable: adjaruli khachapuri, a yeasted crust with a gooey filling of salty brined cheese, runny egg, and melted butter. While you may be tempted to eat one of these…

First, look for their silvery eyes. And the murky holes where they nest, the way their legs sprawl out across the swaying seaweed as they swish from place to place. Danai Kyriaki, Greek zoologist, schoolteacher, and diver, is describing how to hunt an octopus as she prepares to go in after her purple prey. She paddles through the bluegreen Aegean, ducking her head below. At first, nothing is visible except a few fish too small to eat and shelled mollusks stuck to rocks. Kyriaki, 26, lives in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-biggest city, but she returns often to Chalkidiki, a series of peninsulas in the north, to reconnect with the sea. She started spearhunting at 12 when her father, an experienced hunter, handed her the gun for the first time. Away from…

1850s CHARLES PHILIPPE AUGUSTE CAREY In the mid 19th century, the still-life genre had begun to shift from painting to photography. Props became less symbolic, more literal. In Carey’s Still Life with Waterfowl, which pictures meticulously hung birds, a saucepan suggests that the waterfowl will become food. Gone are the more magnificent piles of animals present in paintings, which both represented status and served as vanitas (symbols hinting at death, decay, or ephemerality). This is a particularly elegant example of using food in its raw form as still life; other examples from this period often lacked the grace of the paintings they were emulating, and could seem cluttered and grotesque. His work is reflective of the time, but in a way, very ahead. Perhaps Carey was purposely trying to forge…

It’s a chilly early summer’s day near Gribanovo, a village some 30 miles outside Moscow. A group of young Russians, plus one emigre journalist (me), are ambling through a lyrical meadow fit to inspire Nabokovian reveries. Dragonflies hover and flit. The bells of an onion-domed convent ring in the distance. Fickle northern clouds turn a menacing charcoal and loosen a few fat raindrops, then decide to spare us nature lovers on a brief escape from the pressures of Putin’s Moscow. Our Katia, Anna, and Sasha do what Slavic girls have done since pagan times when confronted with a blaze of poppies and dandelions: They make head wreaths while humming a song. I, the misty-eyed exile, pause on a tree stump to fill my lungs with the long-forgotten scent of fresh…

Kombu, a green kelp that’s sold in dried, leathery sheets, is a basic building block of Japanese dashi. We’ve been using it to make a full-bodied vegetarian stock (see “How to Think About Vegetables,” page 36) but hated the idea of throwing it out post-simmer. That got us thinking: Why not use it in a pesto? Soaked or cooked kombu blends easily into a silky sauce and plays well with any combination of pestofriendly aromatics (citrus zests, garlic, chiles), herbs, and nuts. The slightly briny pesto is perfectly suited to light seafood dishes and is more likely than herb pestos to keep its bright green hue when hit with the heat from grilled meats or steaming bowls of pasta. burgers, or tossed with roasted or steamed vegetables. Add a heap…

“An octopus has three hearts, not one. Their hearts pump blood that is blue-green, using copper as the oxygen-carrying molecule instead of the iron which makes our blood red.” —P.G.S., Other Minds Q: After spending so much time observing octopuses and cuttlefish, was your appetite for the creatures deterred? A: I don’t eat octopuses anymore. I stopped at some stage during the writing of Other Minds. I regard this as a somewhat sentimental decision, though. I am not a vegetarian, and in general I try to avoid eating the products of cruel factory farming. Compared to other kinds of meat, octopuses are not a particularly bad animal to include in your diet, as octopuses are wild-caught, shortlived, and not endangered. They are sensitive animals and I think they often suffer when…

“Ten years ago, I didn’t know what a collard green was,” says Fred Razzaghi from behind the counter at Fred’s Country Kitchen in downtown Atlanta. Construction workers and courthouse lawyers are eating elbow to elbow, their lunch platters loaded up with fried chicken and collards, smoked wings and hoecakes. It’s a local’s place, where a meat-and-three plate will run you less than six bucks. But there is another item on Fred’s menu that his most discerning customers are sure not to miss: a bowl of his homemade yogurt. Topped with honey, ginger, chopped strawberries, and crushed walnuts, Fred’s yogurt is tangy and rich, but it isn’t Greek. It was born in Mianeh, an ancient, rural town in northeastern Iran where Farhad Razzaghi— Fred’s given name—is from. Growing up in the…

When you think about it, ice cream is a miracle. You start with milk, one of the most chemically complex foods we eat. Add sugars to reduce its freezing point, and egg proteins and emulsifiers to obstruct ice crystals. Then you stick this gloppy stuffin a portable freezer and pump it full of air until spinning butterfat globules coalesce to give it form. That’s bananas but somehow it works. Weirdest of all: Making it yourself is actually very easy. Frozen dessert technology has come a long way since the days when Emperor Nero would send Roman slaves into the mountains to harvest blocks of ice, shave it down, and sweeten it with honey. In 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia patented the first ice cream freezer, but it required relentless hand-cranking…

IT’S GETTING CLOSE TO LUNCHTIME AT THE MARKET IN SAN JUAN LA LAGUNA when a vendor named Horacio tells me that I need to try some puchon-ik. San Juan is a quiet village of around 10,000 people in the highlands of central Guatemala, on the shore of Lake Atitlán and within walking distance of several volcanoes, including one that’s spewing puffs of ash on this particular afternoon. At the lakeshore, motorboats zoom up to the wooden dock several times an hour to drop offsmall groups of European backpackers or local women balancing baskets of food on their heads. A steep road leads uphill to a concrete building with a small indoor market, where Horacio Cotuc works at a chicken stand. I’ve just arrived in town, and when I mention to…

WAX ON Not all good things bees make come in bear-shaped bottles When a friend’s beekeeping dad sent us two frames of honeycomb from his family’s rural Pennsylvania property, the whole saveur team came running to snap photos and nibble on pieces. Bees produce honey during the warmer months to eat during winter, building tiny wax cells (honeycomb) in which to store it. Since healthy hives produce far more honey than the bees could ever possibly consume, beekeepers build hives with removable frames they can access quickly to harvest the honey and comb without disturbing the bees’ dwelling or damaging their supply. The comb itself is not only edible but has a delightfully chewy, tacky texture. As with honey, the flavor and color of combs from different producers will depend…