This meal is our riff on the classic Mughal cooking of India, (see our Tandoori Turkey recipe), which reflects a love for simmered creams, yogurt marinades and intensely aromatic spices in meals like this gravy based Sabzi Kurma, which traditionally uses just vegetables.
We love the exotic flavors of this fabulous Thai soup, spicy, a bit sweet and salty, creamy, with fresh lemongrass and galangal flavors, with a sumptuous umami taste. It’s easy to prepare and is crazy addictive with an intoxicating aroma.
This one is the umami bomb of Thai street food, the most exotic flavored and juicy lip smacking chicken ever put on a stick.
These bad boy salmon steaks were two inches thick and came into our market so shimmering and fresh… for us, that was an instant yaasss!
Rebekah is a California girl, born and bred, but I grew up in a little town in Illinois, and my geographical boundaries were Lake Michigan, corn fields and factories. It was a time and a place where there was almost zero opportunity to experience exotic foods, flavors and cuisines. Butsince I was a boy, I just naturally craved the exotic… coconut, limes, mint, spices,and the smell of garlic and ginger. Thai and Vietnamese meals have all that stuff,and when I figured that out in college and beyond, those are the restaurants Iwould always seek out… and I learned from all those meals how to make them.
This feast, known as Kori Gassi in the Tulu speaking Bunt community of Mangalore, on the west coast of India, is a wonderfully pungent chicken gravy dish. This is a fabulous umami bomb from the Land of Spices… India.
This dish is the ultimate exotic feast from South Asia, combining fantastic spices and umami flavors into one wildly savory dish. We don’t find these flavor combinations in any other cuisine. When the spices of Malaysia and Persia were combined with the local Thai flavors like cilantro, lemongrass, garlic, galangal, wild onions or shallots, fish sauce, peanuts, tamarind, spicy peppers and coconut cream, a feast was created out of the fusion of culture, commerce and conquest… and the wild tastes that were created make this curry one of the most beloved in the world. Polls of culinary experts have rated Massaman Curry as the best dish in all the world. But within traditional Thai cuisine itself, it exists only in the south… and even at that, the unique combination of spices that are used in Massaman curry are not generally used in other Thai dishes.
In our wild savory kitchen, we are always searching for new flavor combos, creating dishes which explode with umami tastes that are unique. This simple little feast is a mashup of different cuisines, like worlds colliding in your mouth.