Sweet potatoes are here! Don't wait till Thanksgiving to celebrate one of earth's perfect foods

By Leslie Brenner

There’s nothing like a sweet potato, hot from the oven, simply roasted till it’s super tender and caramelized syrup oozes out of its orangey-purple skin. Slice it open, push the ends together to reveal the gorgeous, meltingly soft flesh, and send in your spoon. What a treat, that custardy bite: It’s luscious and rich, autumnal sweet chased by an earthy, mineral tang.

How many other plant-foods can you think of that are delicious and satisfying enough to be an entire meal with no added ingredients? Beans and lentils could almost be that, but impossible to enjoy them without salt. A perfectly roasted sweet potato needs no such seasoning.

Naturally, sweet potatoes are also spectacular dressed up — as in the gratin with sage-butter and thyme I love to serve for Thanksgiving.

But I’m not waiting till the holiday to indulge in sweet potatoes: This weekend I’ll roast a few of them, dress them up (or not). and swoon. From now till my favorite food holiday, there are all kinds of ways to enjoy them.

Slather with miso butter and layer on sliced scallions and furikake (Japanese seasoning mix), for something transportingly delicious. One of my very favorite autumn dishes, it makes a dreamy (meatless) dinner, either on its own, preceded by a salad or followed by a soup, or some braised lentils, creamy white beans or soupy mayocoba beans.

Miso butter, if you’re not familiar with it, is a brilliant invention: Just combine softened unsalted butter and miso in equal amounts. (White miso is ideal, but any kind will be good.) Slit open the sweet potato, and slather it on. It’s delicious just like that, or you could grind on some black pepper. Or dress it up as in this photo (and recipe).

A sparkling autumn salad

Sweet potatoes are also marvelous in a fall salad, playing off another favorite autumn ingredient: pomegranate. The gem-like, tangy juicy seeds commune gorgeously with the creamy richness of the sweet potato; baby kale provides the perfect deep-flavored, earthy base and and toasted pecans add crunch. Again, great with just a soup to precede or follow it. (Roasted black bean!)

Slice and layer in a gratin

When Thanksgiving rolls around, I always make one of two sweet-potato gratins. The first was dreamed up by food writer Regina Schrambling, a frequent collaborator when I was Food Editor at The Los Angeles Times many years ago. Unlike those candied gratins so popular at holiday time, this one is savory — enriched with cream and butter and heightened with lots of fresh thyme.

The second savory gratin turns Regina’s version on its side — stacking the slices upright in the baking dish — and adds the classic Italian combination of brown butter and sage. It’s kind of outrageous.

RECIPE: Sweet Potato Gratin with Sage-Butter

Choose your sweet potato

Wondering what type of sweet potato to start with?

For any of these dishes (and any other I might think of), I always choose the garnet variety: Garnet sweet potatoes are exceedingly moist and sweet, not as starchy as some other varieties, and their flesh stays a saturated orange color when cooked. You’ll recognize them by their dark, purply skins. In fact, I love this variety so much I never buy any other.

Can’t commit to one of these iterations? Just go ahead and roast one plain. No recipe necessary — scrub the skin (you’ll definitely want to eat it), poke the tines of a fork in it in seven or eight places to create vents, so it doesn’t steam inside, lay it on a small baking dish or quarter-sheet pan lined with parchment and roast at 400 degrees till it’s very soft and oozing dark syrup. How long depends on the thickness of the sweet potato; a medium-sized one that’s more long and slim than fat and squat might take 45 or 50 minutes; thicker ones can take more than an hour.

Eat it piping hot, with nothing on it. Incredible how good it is, right?


Cookbooks We Love: 'Budmo!' deliciously captures the spirit of Ukraine (we laughed! we cried!)

By Leslie Brenner

Budmo!: Recipes from a Ukrainian Kitchen, by Anna Voloshyna. Rizzoli, $39.95.

Here’s one to judge by its irresistible cover: Budmo!, a Ukrainian cookbook from San Francisco-based chef, blogger and cooking instructor Anna Voloshyna. With its borscht-pink rose motif, enticing assorted zakusky (cold apps) and built-in exclamation point, it promises — and delivers — an exuberant, delicious good time.

Why We Love It

Budmo! means “let us be!” — the Ukrainian equivalent of “cheers!” At this moment in history, that beet-pink exhortation speaks volumes. So much more than just a toast, it’s the spirit of Ukraine existentially defending itself against Russia. No way will we let you beat us; we’re Ukraine! Look at our fabulous, irrepressible, irresistible culture! Our food! Our drink! Our resolve! Budmo! Let us be!

Author Voloshyna was born and raised in a small town called Snihurivka in the southern part of the country, 120 miles from Odessa. Her introduction is a terrific mini-tour of “the breadbasket of Europe,” as the country is known. Its various regions are their own distinctive micro-cultures, from Western Ukraine (the Carpathian Mountain region that borders with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova) with its sheep’s milk cheese and Hutsul polenta, to the meat-potato-and-cabbage lands of central Ukraine, to the sour cream, dill and herring of Odessa.

Yet there’s plenty of overlap, and anyone of Eastern European ancestry will likely recognize touchstones.

My family has Ashkenazi Jewish roots in Western Ukraine on my dad’s side and Odessa on my mom’s side, and when I came upon Voloshyna’s recipes for chicken noodle soup, cold beet borscht, eggplant “caviar” and “Famous Odessa Forshmak” — a herring mousse served on toasted rye bread — I was quite literally brought to tears. I never knew exactly why my family ate these kinds of things when I was a child, and turning the pages of Budmo! for the first time was like a culinary coming home.

How About Those Recipes?

Never one to resist a Russian Potato Salad, I dove in with Voloshyna’s vegetarian version, an herbal, pickle-y regional spin. So good! Its elevated pickle level makes it highly crave-able.

I also had to try Georgian eggplant rolls, studded with pomegranate seeds, which are now in season. Filled with a paste made from walnuts and herbs and drizzled with pomegranate molasses, they were wonderful — and fun to make.

RECIPE: Anna Voloshyna’s Georgian Eggplant Rolls

Conveniently, both of the above recipes can be prepared in advance, making them ideal to bring to a potluck or serve at a holiday party.

Feasting Ukrainian-Style: Zakuska!

Or do as the Ukrainians do, and serve them as a zakuska. “All kinds of salads, spreads, cold cuts, cured meats, and fish are called a ‘zakuska,’ which simply means ‘appetizer,’” Voloshyna writes in a chapter devoted to them.

“Zakuska arrive at the beginning of the meal to arouse appetites and accompany first toasts. Some zakuska, especially various cold cuts and briny pickles, stay on the table throughout the whole meal for following every shot. Those small, flavorful bits are perfect for mellowing out fiery horilka (vodka) or other hard liquors. Don’t forget to say ‘Budmo!’ right before you drink your first shot.”

I adored another appetizer, that Famous Odessa Forshmak pickled herring spread — a herring-lover’s treat, for sure, fabulous with dark rye. Suddenly, those little jars of pickled herring perpetually in our fridge when I was a kid made sense: our roots in Odessa! But Southern Ukraine isn’t the only herring-loving place in the world; in France, marinated herring with boiled potatoes is a bistro classic, and in Sweden pickled herrings in myriad forms can be found on smorgasbord spreads. In Japan, herring roe (kazunoko) is a prized delicacy, and the forshmak’s assertive flavor would likely be appreciated by aficionados of hikarimono — the category of sushi known as “shiny silver fish,” which are often marinated.

Also, I love the name of the dish — say it out loud and you can’t help but feel Ukrainian: Famous Odessa Forshmak!

RECIPE: Famous Odessa Forshmak

Of course Budmo! is about much more than zakuska. There are wonderful-looking soups, including three borschts — a beautiful cold beet version for summer; a warm, mushroomy vegetarian one for winter and a green sorrel borscht for spring. There’s a chicken soup that looks like it might rival my mom’s, with the added advantage of hand-cut noodles. I also have my eye on a hearty chicken and vegetable soup with buckwheat dumplings that look suspiciously like matzoh balls.

There are enticing rye pelmeni filled with beef and pork and sauced with brown butter, spices and herbs; a recipe for crispy potato kremzykly (kremzykly is the Ukrainian word for latkes), and a really cool-looking set of garlicky yeasted rolls baked in a cast-iron skillet, called Garlic Pampushky. (A better name even than forshmak?!)

A Warming, Transporting Stew

The book’s homey, rustic main courses made long for the Ukranian grandparents I never knew. (My parents were both orphans, raised by aunts and uncles, with no great cooks among them that I found. For the record, my beloved great-aunt who raised my mom was a wonderful baker, not so hot as a cook.)

Don’t look for Chicken Kyiv (or even Chicken Kiev). Instead there’s a garlicky Georgian chicken in a pot; voluptuous cabbage rolls stuffed with barley and mushrooms; Voloshyna’s grandma’s roasted duck; pork shank braised with sauerkraut and beer; and one that I tried but wouldn’t make again — bell peppers filled with ground pork and rice (the recipe worked fine, but the dish was dull).

I did love a Crimean Beef Stew with Chickpeas. Voloshyna writes in the headnote that she had tried the dish many years ago in a small Tatar restaurant in Crimea, but after Russia annexed the country she was unable to return for the recipe, so she re-created the dish from memory. First it’ll fill your kitchen with enchanting aromas; and then it’s soul-satisfying to eat. It’s excellent served with buttery rice and topped with pickled red onions, as Voloshyna suggests, but honestly just as good without the pickled onions if you’d rather skip them.

RECIPE: ‘Budmo’ Crimean Beef Stew

In terms of sweets, there are baked apples filled with Tvorog cheese (you can sub French fromage blanc) plus raisins, pine nuts and cinnamon; vyshyvanka, or baked bars filled with plum or black-currant jam. Most exciting to me is a many-layered, dreamy-looking “Glorious Honey Cake,” the signature dessert at Voloshyna’s pop-ups.

I do need to note that inexperienced cooks may hit some snags with the recipes in Budmo!. Yields were sometimes wacky; if cooked exactly as printed, the forshmak and Russian potato salad recipes would each have served a small army, so I halved the ingredients for each in our adaptations. Instructions were sometimes unclear, as with the Georgian Eggplant Rolls, which, had I exactly followed the instructions would have made eight gigantic knife-and-fork rolls rather than a passel of hors d’oeuvre-sized ones as shown in the book’s photo. (Again, our adaptation corrects that.) And ingredients could be more precise: What does a “medium potato” weigh, and is it red, Idaho or Yukon gold? Perhaps One the book was rushed to press due to its newsworthiness, and didn’t benefit from as careful an edit as it deserved.

Still, the recipes themselves are solid and absolutely worthwhile, so hopefully Voloshyna will sell a jillion copies, and she can do a bit more hand-holding and recipe-zhuzzhing in a future edition.

I do hope that will be in the stars, because all in all, Budmo! is a wonderful book, delightfully animated by Voloshyna’s engaging voice and charming stories, and brought to life by her vivacious photos. Yes — save for the shots of herself cooking (nicely shot by Maria Boguslav), the author is also responsible for the appealing photography.

Clearly it was all a labor of love — from apples to zakusky.

Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with a sumptuous, authoritative version

By Leslie Brenner

October 20 is one of our favorite food holidays of the year: World Butter Chicken Day.

Murgh Makhani, also known as “Butter Chicken,” is arguably the world’s most beloved Indian dish. It’s certainly one of our favorite dishes at Cooks Without Borders, and our recipe — developed and tweaked over a number of years — has a special story. It also has a stamp of approval from Monish Gujral, the Delhi-based chef and restaurateur whose grandfather created the dish 102 years ago.

What — an actual person created Butter Chicken?

That’s right. “Butter chicken was invented by Kundan Lal Gujral at Moti Mahal, which was established in 1920,” explains Monish Gujral, who today presides over what has become the Moti Mahal empire of some 250 restaurants around the world.

The first World Butter Chicken Day, in 2020, celebrated the centenary of the restaurant that birthed the dish.

Curious as it may sound, the idea for the food holiday came from Cooks Without Borders; we wrote about it that inaugural year in an article for The Dallas Morning News. Pranjali Bhonde wrote about it last year for Whetstone.

Read: “Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with the real thing — made quicker, easier and lip-smackingly delicious

Our Monish Gujral-approved version of the dish is a glorious way to celebrate — tonight, this weekend or anytime the craving strikes.

Cookbooks We Love: The flavors of India's cultural capital shine in 'Kolkata'

By Leslie Brenner

Kolkata: Recipes from the Heart of Bengal, by Rinku Dutt, photographs by Steven Joyce; 2022, Smith Street Books, $35.

We’ve fallen in love with ‘Kolkata’ — the debut cookbook from London food-truck proprietor Rinku Dutt — set to be published this week, on Tuesday, October 18.

Backgrounder

Author Dutt was born and raised in London, but her family is from Kolkata (the Indian city that was known under colonial rule as Calcutta), and has always maintained close ties. In the heart of West Bengal, Kolkata is considered the cultural capital of the country; it’s nicknamed “The City of Joy.” It was there that her great-grandfather founded a restaurant, Central Hotel, whose named changed after Independence to Amber. (It’s still open!) Dutt began her career in banking, and was also a classical Indian dancer. She later spent three years living in Kolkata, working in the fashion industry, diving deep into the food culture and falling even more in love with the city than she already was.

Returning to London in 2014, she founded the Bengali food truck and pop-up restaurant Raastawala with her father and brother, and contributed Indian recipes to several of the Leon cookbooks.

Why We Love ‘Kolkata’

Dutt paints a captivating picture of the city and its culture (aided by Steven Joyce’s evocative photographs), offering such a strong sense of it that invokes a sudden longing to get there. “The architecture may be damp and deteriorating,” she writes, “but it is all so vibrant with colour. The bells ringing in the temples, incense sticks burning, smelling the aromas of food being cooked in the houses as you walk by, the balconies, the crumbling paint, the rickshaws, autos and yellow taxis . . .”

Happily for those who mean to get there, Dutt provides (buried near the end of the book) a compelling list of restaurants to visit.

Meanwhile, Dutt does a wonderful job explaining how people within the culture eat — something that too few cookbooks achieve:

“Unlike many cuisines where a meal may be comprised of one or a few courses, in Bengali cuisine, all (and often that means many) dishes are served together, but their are eaten in very specific combinations, one after the other. A classic order (and one that we use at our family table when entertaining and when in Kolkata) starts the meal with rice, followed by a bitter (shukto or shaak) palate cleanser, then a dal (a lentil dish) with a bhaja (battered fried vegetables), then a vegetable dish, a fish dish and next a meat dish, with a chutney and a salad on the side.”

She adds that an everyday meal in most Bengali households consists of “rice, dal, a vegetable and either a meat or fish dish.” That’s a useful blueprint for how to use the book — for weeknight dinners, or for more elaborate entertaining.

Masoor Dal (Red Lentil Dal) from ‘Kolkata’

Dutt’s recipes, many gleaned from her grandmother and other family, are wonderful — particularly in the way they layer spices — and they’re simple enough to be do-able for home cooks. Many are prepared using a karai (or kadhai, an Indian pan with steep, sloped sides) or a wok. We tested them using a wok; a deep skillet with sloped sides would work just as well for those we tested.

A Delicious Place to Start

Kolkata is on the Hooghly River, just inland from the Bay of Bengal, and Dutt describes a food culture that reveres seafood, so we dove in with Shrimp with Poppy Seeds — Chingri Posto. A dish the author learned from her mother, who had fond memories of her own mother making it, it’s easy, memorable and delicious.

This Cauliflower Dry-Fry — Phulkopi Bhaja — is also excellent, and easily achieved, cloaked with nigella seeds, turmeric, a bit of dried red chile and chopped cilantro. Our only complaint was there was too little of it; we doubled Dutt’s ingredients in our adaptation to make enough to serve 4 to 6. (It seems more worth the effort to make a whole cauliflower head’s worth; if there are leftovers, they’re still delicious.)

RECIPE: ‘Kolkata’ Cauliflower Dry-Fry (Phulkopi Bhaja)

And here’s a heart-warming Red-Lentil Dal (Masoor Dal, shown abobve) we’ll be making on a regular basis.

You’ve Gotta Try This

This sumptuous dish gets a one-two-coriander punch, as chicken thighs are marinated in a thick paste involving lots of fresh cilantro (coriander) leaves and stems, and then ground coriander seeds are added as the dish cooks. Cumin, cloves, cinnamon, peppercorns and chiles add layered complexity. Once marinated (ideally overnight), it’s a snap to pull together.

RECIPE: Rinku Dutt’s Coriander Chicken

Still Wanna Make

So many things! I’ll want to concoct some Tomato and Prune Chutney to go with the Coriander Chicken next time I make that. There’s a “Rich and Thick” Lamb Curry (Kosha Mansho), “served up at most weddings and family gatherings” — high on the list. Lentil Cakes in Gravy looks magnificent, as do Onion Fritters (Piyaji). Eggplant and Spinach Dry-Fry will likely be on our table soon; ditto Ron’s Chicken Biryani (the author’s dad’s recipe). In the seafood department, Jumbo Shrimp in a Thick Coconut Gravy looks incredible, and so does Banana-Leaf Steamed Mustard Fish.

Speaking of which, considering that Kolkata is such a seafood town, I do wish there were more seafood recipes. Several of them call for salmon or tuna, as cooks outside of Bengal wouldn’t have access to the fishes used there; I found myself wishing Dutt stretched a bit to suggest less-Western solutions.

One more wish — in case the author has a second book in mind (which I hope she does!): a bit more help with ingredients, techniques and equipment. I know readers often skip over such “basics” chapters, but I felt this book could have used a brief one, answering questions like what’s the difference between white and black (aka blue) poppy seeds, something about various lentils, whether it’s worth buying karai if you don’t already own one, what type of potatoes are favored for these dishes, a bit about the dry-frying technique used a number of times, and so forth.

That’s small stuff, though. This debut cookbook is one we highly recommend. Grab a couple: one for yourself, and one for an Indian-food-loving friend. And it’s so pretty, it’ll make a fine holiday gift.

Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) will put a spring in your step and umami on your plate

Topped with bonito flakes, the Century Egg and House Tofu at Fat Mao in Vancouver (shown above) inspired our recipe for Silken Tofu with Mushrooms and Bonito Flakes.

By Leslie Brenner

Put yourself in possession of a bag of bonito flakes — or katsuobushi, as it’s called in Japanese — and your cooking life may never be the same. Shaggy, delicate and seemingly lighter than air, the ingredient is at once essential and superfluous, ephemeral and timeless. Paradoxical! Shaved bonito looks like sawdust, but it’s way more delicious.

The reason it’s so life-changing, if you’re a certain kind of cook, is that understanding how to use bonito flakes opens up a world of easy and outstanding Japanese dishes, as well as the ability — in the wave of a hand — to drop a mood-altering, umamiful flourish on a fun assortment of other dishes.

Let’s start with the traditional Japanese part of the katsuobushi equation. (Japanese cooks must be chuckling by now, for Japanese cooking simply cannot exist without the stuff.) Bonito flakes are a key component of dashi, the cuisine’s foundational stock. Packed with powerful yet easy-to-control umami, that dashi gives soups and dishes depth and breadth, a soft roundness that makes everything inviting.

Dashi could not be easier or quicker to make: Just steep a piece of kombu briefly in steaming water, drop in a flurry of bonito flakes, wait two minutes, then strain the liquid — dashi achieved. It’s the essential ingredient for miso soup. Just whisk in some miso, drop in tofu and other garnishes (scallions, carrots, onion, spinach, turnips), and it’s done. And delicious. With that dashi in your fridge or freezer, you can make miso soup in a flash, whenever the mood strikes.

Miso soup is made with dashi — of which bonito flakes are an essential ingredient.

RECIPE: Dashi

RECIPE: Miso Soup

Dashi is so essential that it’s the first recipe in many Japanese cookbooks, including star chef Masahuru Morimoto’s excellent Mastering the Art of Japanese Cooking.

The broth may be used to dress spinach, kale or other vegetables (a dish known as ohitashi), make a fabulous dipping sauce for soba, create nimono — Japanese-style simmered dishes, or the heart-warming egg, chicken and rice meal-in-a-bowl called oyoka don. Or pour hot dashi (instead of green tea) over a bowl of garnished rice, for a deluxe version of the homey leftovers-moment called ochazuke.

For anyone eager to dive into Japanese cooking, writes Morimoto, “making dashi should be your first order of business. Your cooking will never be the same.”

Katsuobushi, straight up

Making dashi isn’t the only thing you can do with katsuobushi — you can also use it straight out of the bag. Grab a handful of flakes and drop them on top of okonomiyaki — a savory, saucy pancake stuffed with seafood and vegetables. Watch it dance! The bonito flakes are so light that the heat from the pancake stirs it to catch air currents and wave around on the plate.

Our recipe is adapted from one in Sonoko Sakai’s inspiring book, Japanese Home Cooking.

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

Shizuo Tsuji’s seminal 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art offers a recipe for an ohitashi (those dashi-marinated greens) garnished with katsuobushi. It’s super easy, delicious, fun and dramatic.

RECIPE: Spinach with Dashi and Bonito Flakes

OK, wait — what is katsuobushi exactly?

Yes, let’s back up a moment to talk about the ingredient. Although it’s commonly referred to as bonito flakes or shaved bonito, katsuobushi can be made of either bonito or skipjack tuna; the fish is dried, smoked, sometimes fermented and then shaved. “In the old days,” writes Morimoto, “all cooks bought the fish in blocks that resembled petrified wood and shaved them by hand into fine, feather-like flakes. (Today, most buy preshaved katsuobushi, one modern convenience I can get behind.)”

Some experts write that katsuobushi should be refrigerated once it’s opened, and not kept more than a few days; Morimoto says it lasts “virtually forever” in your pantry. I used to keep — sealed in an airtight container — it in the pantry after opening it, but noticed that after six months or so it dried out. You want the flakes to be soft, not brittle, so I recommend storing it (sealed) in the fridge once it’s open.

You can usually find bags of katsuobushi in Asian supermarkets, usually in cellophane bags with red and white or red and black graphics. Sometimes you can even find them in well stocked generic supermarkets (they have them at the Whole Foods in my neighborhood). You can also find it online (including in the Cooks Without Borders Cookshop). The brands you find most often in Pan-Asian supermarkets and on Amazon are mostly similar in quality, but if you go to an excellent dedicated Japanese supermarket, such as Mitsuwa Marketplace, you can often spend a few more dollars and find katsuobushi of a higher quality (such as the one shown above). To me it’s worth it, especially if you’re using it as a garnish.

Do try these at home

My favorite dish on a recent trip to Vancouver, Canada was at a super-cool, laid-back spot called Fat Mao — Century Egg with House Tofu. (It’s pictured at the top of this story.) The dish consisted of that a thick layer of fabulously creamy house-made tofu topped with cilantro leaves, scallions, crispy fried shallots, a delicious “black garlic sauce,” quartered century eggs and a flurry of katsuobushi. Century eggs, in case you’re not familiar with them, are a Chinese delicacy made by preserving eggs in an an alkaline solution and ash — which renders the yolks intensely flavorful (funky! stinky!) and the whites gelatinous.

I sought to create a dish at home that conveyed a similar vibe, but that didn’t require making or procuring century eggs; I wanted something easy and relatively quick for instant gratification. In place of the century eggs, I found that dry-steamed crimini mushrooms tossed in a sauce made with black garlic was a weirdly excellent analog, providing a chewy-tender texture and loads of umami. Of course the organic silken tofu I picked up at the supermarket didn’t hold a candle to Fat Mao’s house-made tofu, but altogether I think the dish works really well.

Finally, there’s chef José Andrés’s Dancing Eggplant — from his 2019 cookbook Vegetables Unleashed. Quick to make — by zapping Japanese eggplants in the microwave till tender, slathering them with a sweet, salty glaze, then topped with katsuobushi. And yep, it gets its name from the fact that the bonito flakes wave around like they’re dancing on of the eggplant.