If you're a dedicated cook ...
- rosemary
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
"I’ll admit it's a labour of love, but so very worth it." Ixta Belfrage
This will be a quickie I think. It's inspired by this recipe for A curry leaf, cherry, coconut & hibiscus crudo on a red millet tostada which turned up in Ixta Belfrage's substack newsletter. (I think the link will work - if it doesn't just do a Google search.)
It arrived in my email this morning. As you know I am a huge fan of Ixta. Her food is truly exciting, and generally only a tiny bit difficult - not even difficult. Just not dead simple. However, this one, by her own admission 'a labour of love', is so complicated and contains so many difficult ingredients, that I thought it was worth a few words.
First let me explain a bit about the actual recipe which she describes in her introduction as:
"a crisp red-millet tostada topped with a swoosh of lime-leaf yoghurt, a zingy mix of raw fish, cherries, coconut chilli oil, hibiscus-pickled onions and aubergines that are first roasted then marinated in a sweet-sour mix of tamari, maple, curry leaves, lime leaves, cinnamon, ginger, garlic and chillies."
And then she goes on to say:
"I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the best recipe I’ve developed all year - coconut, cherries, chillies and curry leaves are a match made in heaven. There are a few different components, so I’ve listed each as its own mini-recipe. "
'A few different components.' Well I imagine your eyes are already glazing over a bit and so were mine. However, because I write this blog I thought this might be an opportunity to ramble around the idea of complicated recipes.
Those components are not just the steps involved but it's also the ingredients. So I'm starting with them. The list is very long - and within that list there are several which I'm absolutely sure you won't have in your pantry and several others that you probably don't.
Here are some of those - first the absolutely nots: Red finger millet flour (aka raggi flour); ancho chillies, cascabel chillies; pasilla chillies; arbol chillies; pul biber flakes/Aleppo chilli; roscoff onions; dried hibiscus flour. Then the probably not, although available - and I'm using me as the template here - some of you might use some of these things all the time: liquid coconut oil or light avocado oil; dried habanero chilli; rice vinegar; masa harina; curry leaves; tamari soy sauce; kaffir lime leaves.
Now she does give suggested substitutes here and there but not many.
Then there are the 'mini recipes' within the whole. There are five of them. And you can watch her do it on an Instagram demonstration - one of those quick mini videos where the cook makes the whole dish in about a minute flat, and in the process makes it look absolutely effortless. In fact I don't think any of the steps involved are particularly difficult. Once you've sourced and assembled all of those ingredients, there's not a lot of complicated process - maybe the tortillas. I don't know how long it takes either. Probably not that long.
Now the recipe was inspired by a trip to Sri Lanka - there's a cocktail with similarly complicated ingredients as well in the newsletter - so maybe she bought some of the ingredients there and took them back to England with her. Maybe they don't have such strict quarantine there. Besides she's a recipe developer, a professional, and no matter how tiny her kitchen she would have access to specialist suppliers - and maybe Britain has better stocked supermarket shelves anyway.
There is also another Instagram post, in which the tostadas are arranged slightly differently again. I also wonder whether this was an earlier version. There are no quick videos or lists of ingredients here. It's a taster. As a recipe developer I'm guessing you start with an idea, try it out and then keep adding or taking away ingredients, change the process, change the look until you arrive at perfection. Every now and then I do notice a recipe from one of my favourite cooks that seems to have two different versions - which they publish - which implies that they think that the second version is indeed an improvement on the first. And I guess when we are making tried and true recipes at home, then we do the same thing. Sometimes, just because of what we have in the fridge on the day, so you have to substitute, sometimes because you don't measure properly, or you forget to stir, or check the oven ...
However - going back to Ixta's recipe - no matter how delicious it might look I shall not be making it. For me it's partly because this is just a snack - to go with that cocktail - and it's a lot of fuss for a snack. That said, as a complete aside, I often find that 'free' amuse bouches which you sometimes get in restaurants and also small entrées are the most interesting things on the menu. The other main reason is the ingredients - and that's completely putting aside all those chillies - findable or not - too much chilli for this house. And I'm guessing that most people, don't really recognise the subtle differences in taste between them all. You could of course just use Ottolenghi's Aleppo and other chilli mix.
A very brief aside. As I was looking to see if somebody had actually either tried the recipe or published it, I found on a website called Lola's Cucina - a recipe for Hibiscus tostadas. At first I wondered whether one had been inspired by the other as, at first glance they looked very similar. But no - first looks can deceive - this one dates from 2017 and is much simpler Everything except the hibiscus flowers - although they are rehydrated from tea - and the jicama - another one of those yam like vegetables - is readily available in your local supermarket - even ready-made tortillas. And its beans not fish or aubergines. A different audience, and possibly a lower level of skill on the part of the writer produces something that almost everyone who cooks a bit could attempt.
Which begs the question of who is Ixta's audience for this recipe? She is young and 'cool' but surely the young and 'cool' are probably not up to this. Or is it just the ingredients that are the trouble. Ottolenghi, in his early days, was famous for difficult and long lists of ingredients. He has simplified as he has grown older, but also because of his popularity he has caused many ingredients - once rare - to now be stocked in supermarkets - sumac, more different chillies, pomegranate molasses, harissa, not to mention his own spice mixes and pastes. However, yes I really thought that Ixta's recipe was completely over the top however delicious
So I tried to find some better thoughts than mine about complicated recipes but really only found one that ruminated on complicated versus simple, written by a lady called Monica Saigal, who had been taken aback by a reader of her Indian cookbook - aimed at the simple end of the market - who told her "Your recipes are too simplistic". When questioned on this Monica Saigal reports:
"She loved the dish, and so did everyone who ate it. But it did not fulfill her cooking aspirations. “Indian cooking is supposed to be hard,” she said. “And this book made it seem easy. That isn’t real Indian cooking, right?”
In answer to the question that Monica Saigal then asked herself - "Does a recipe need to be complicated to be good?" she went on to say that:
"Conjuring a recipe that relies on only a few ingredients yet sends your taste buds into an orgasmic frenzy takes a great deal of understanding of ingredients: how they work individually, how to make them work together in perfect harmony, and how to cook them just right. It takes years of experience to learn, and to be able to teach, “simplicity.'”
Which is indeed food for thought. So I continued my search for answers re 'complicated' as a turnoff, and 'simple' as potentially disastrous, with not much success. However, I did discover that there were a surprising number of people out there, who did indeed seem to want something more complicated.
And when I think about it I guess I sort of do. Or do I? Don't I want to make something impressive every now and then, or something that takes a little more time and work? Yes I do. Especially if I am cooking for friends or family. I remember this dish - Brown sugar meringue roulade with burnt honey apples which I made for our family Christmas a few years ago. It's an Ottolenghi recipe and it sure did look impressive - almost like in the picture - the fact that the meringue cracked was fine, in fact it was a deliberate feature. It was delicious - but rich. However I suspect it's really an example of special, impressive, even exciting, but actually relatively simple. Not dead simple, but if I can make it so can you, because I am hopeless at meringue.
Apart from those people on the discussion websites who wanted to cook something complicated I also found several publications happy to oblige with a list. Gourmet Traveller had a list, and the recipes to go with it of 34 difficult chef recipes. This is just one - Marco Pierre White's Strawberry shortbread which is actually quite simple in that the ingredients are just the shortbread that you make, strawberries and cream. But look at the assembly. It looks simple - but I'm willing to bet it would be really difficult to get it looking so perfect. I can just see everything falling all over the place. I mean the strawberries would have to be the exact same size for a start, and when you pipe the cream into the middle it would probably knock the whole thing out of whack. An example of simple being not simple I think. Although possibly not complicated. Just requiring a lot of skill.
Maybe Jacques Reymond's Délice soufflés of fromage blanc would be more difficult. Simple ingredients again, other than the fromage blanc but Gourmet Traveller does suggest a mix of cottage cheese and ricotta instead. Another simple but tricky thing - but maybe worth trying some time.
Well you have to be in the mood for this kind of thing don't you? You have to be prepared for complete failure - like the fish quenelles I once made. They totally disintegrated as I cooked them - quenelles are sort of like gnocchi - but Julia Child, whose recipe it was - said this might happen, but never fear just strain it and pack it into a dish and cook in a bain marie for a bit and it will be a mousse not quenelles. Well I did, and when I cut into it to serve to my guests - I think it was an executive wife meal for some of David's customers - the whole thing collapsed. Very embarrassing.
Nevertheless it's good to challenge oneself every now and then. And then just as I was about to give up on the 'research' I found this - the World's most complicated dessert from Australian chef Anna Pluviou, after a period in Singapore, which she says is:
"an exploration of Singapore, from breakfast through to dinner."
Personally I think it looks rather silly. It apparently has 101 steps and 15 components, takes days to make and needs the help of five chefs to plate it.
Which rather makes Ixta's tostadas look like a walk in the park and probably delicious too. Not to mention more plentiful. Surely you would barely taste half of the components in that Singapore thing.
YEARS GONE BY
November 25
2024 - Nothing
2021 - My other cookbook indulgence
2020 - Missing
2017 - Zucchini or courgette?
2016 - Curry and the British
Comments