YOU know it’s happened to you. Inspired by a trip abroad, a restaurant meal or even just a TV show, you decide to expand your culinary horizons. You’ll learn to cook southern Indian food, you think. Or Cantonese. Or Catalan.
At that point, the shopping (or mail ordering) begins. If it’s Mexican you’ve decided to master, before long a tortilla press, epazote and dozens of dried chilies are on the kitchen counter ready to go.
This is, generally speaking, a very good thing. Anyone who cooks regularly tends to become bored with not only their standard dishes but also the flavors of those dishes. Adopting a new cuisine offers escape from the routine and — depending on your level of skill — some pretty fantastic meals.
The only problem is that, for many of us, it’s not long before the epazote and chilies are tucked into the back of the spice cabinet, the tortilla press joins the other unused gadgets in the high cupboard, and we’re back to our standbys. Like summer storms, sudden culinary enthusiasms tend to pass quickly, leaving in their wake perhaps a dish or two that we actually cook from time to time.
I’m certainly not immune to this impulse. I have my share of obscure spices and specialized devices gathering dust in my kitchen.
But over the years, I’ve also found a somewhat unexpected benefit from these forays into new cuisines. I’ve stumbled across a handful of what you might call “power ingredients,” products that not only add distinctive flavor to the dishes that they are traditionally used in but also insinuate themselves into my routine cooking, giving it new life.
On a trip to Istanbul many years ago, for example, I fell in love with muhammara, a concoction of walnut and bell pepper used as a dip and sometimes as a sauce for kebabs. I recognized the nuts in the mix, along with the roasted bell peppers, lemon juice, cumin and chili peppers. But there was also a deeply beguiling, sweet-tart taste that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Turned out it was pomegranate molasses. Made by boiling down the juice of a tart variety of pomegranate, this thick, dark brown, deeply flavorful liquid is also used in Turkish pilafs and, in southern Turkey, in the ubiquitous shepherd’s salad. In other Middle Eastern cuisines, it is most often found in soups and stews.
I brought a bottle home specifically so I could make muhammara, which my friends loved as much as I did.
But since the bottle was there on the shelf, and since I had become a big fan of its flavor, I started using it in nontraditional ways. I substituted it for half the vinegar in vinaigrettes, slipped a spoonful into lamb stews at the end of cooking, mixed it with sparkling water for a summer drink, used it as a glaze on roast chicken, drizzled it over ice cream, even added a tablespoon or two to classic American grandma-style desserts, to very good effect.
It has become a standard workhorse flavoring in my pantry, one that not only tastes great but also has the advantage of being outside the familiar American culinary vernacular.
Fortunately, it is now readily available in most American cities, at any Middle Eastern market and some Asian stores. The most widely distributed brand, Cortas, is perfectly fine, but another brand called Indo-European is slightly richer and less bitter.
This is only one of the many potent flavor boosters that can be appropriated from relatively unfamiliar cuisines. Over the next few months, we’ll check out a number of them, exploring how they are used traditionally and how they can be slipped into your daily cooking. The more you use them, the more uses you’ll find for them.
In other words, we’re going to exercise a little benign culinary imperialism, appropriating ingredients and adding them to our larder. No one gets hurt, and dinner becomes more interesting.
