I reactivated this blog to share a renewed vision and enthusiasm for the potentials of a local cuisine, inspired by several groundbreaking chefs including Rene Redzepi, Alan Bergo (The Forager Chef) and Pascal Bauder.
What is a local cuisine? There is no cut and dried answer to that question. One sense of the phrase is, the foods and preparation methods traditionally employed by the multi-generational inhabitants of a locale or bioregion, and that interpretation deserves respect.
Another definition of local cuisine might be, the exploration and development of a vocabulary of flavor based on locally found ingredients.
Obviously, between the two, there is overlap, and I am interested in exploring all interpretations, but I do see a great adventure in the latter.
I am particularly interested in what I think of as foundational ingredients. I might define foundational ingredients as those which provide a basic flavor palette for a local cuisine. So chiles, red and green, are foundational ingredients for much of our traditional local cuisine here in northern New Mexico.
I also think of foundational ingredients as being local foods, herbs and spices transmuted by various processes into forms which may be used in any number of different ways, and the transmutations may occur in multiple steps.
So for example, I could simply bake local plums into a clafoutis. Nothing wrong with that. But what if I lacto-fermented the plums (as Redzepi does) and use the resulting juice for the sweet-sour-salty in a vinaigrette, or for a sauce, or dried the fermented plums for a sweet-salty-sour flavor-bomb addition to pilafs and pastas and various other things? In the first example, plums are an ingredient. But in the second example, the plum is not simply an ingredient in a finished dish but has been transformed into a condiment which can in turn be used in any number of ways. THAT'S what I'm after, right there.
So, cooking not to make a finished dish, but perhaps to make an ingredient that may find its way into any number of finished dishes, or even a precursor, an ingredient IN that foundational ingredient.
I'll continue to share recipes for baked goods, basic meals, etc but I hope to focus and share what I am learning about our local plants and critters and how they can be transformed into parts of the flavor vocabulary of a new and vibrant local cuisine.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk 😉
Chicos and Beans, Ese! They go together like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But what ARE they, and why are they so good? Chicos are as far as I know an ingredient peculiar to northeastern New Mexico. Chicos are sweet corn which is roasted in an outdoor wood-fired adobe oven called an Horno (pronounced or-no, as rhyming with “porno,” but don't make that association with the older generation.) The result is that the corn is preserved, but it keeps its sweetness and the sugars in the corn are caramelized, resulting in a wonderful, distinctive flavor. It is best to buy them from someone who has roasted them, as one never really knows how old the ones in the stores may be. Just like beans, if they are more than a year old, you have to cook them forever to make them tender. The classic winter repast of chicos and beans is about the sweetness of the ingredients and how they harmonize with each other. The chicos provide the sweetness of roasted corn, the smoked ham hocks provide the swe
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