Bottarga
A dried, cured sac of fish roe, typically from grey mullet, bottarga has been an essential ingredient in Italian and other Mediterranean cuisines for millennia, and as global distribution increases, its value is becoming fully appreciated by professional chefs and home cooks in the U.S. When grated over pasta, grains or vegetables, bottarga introduces a lively new dimension to the underlying dish.
A similar ingredient is used in Asia — the Japanese produce karasumi and in Korea it is called eoran — so bottarga is hardly limited to Italian cooking, but it pairs magically with pasta. At San Francisco’s Flour+Water, the ingredient is regularly used to embellish handcrafted pastas, such as green garlic spaghetti with Manila clams, pea leaves, preserved Meyer lemon and bottarga butter. Thomas McNaughton, who serves as Flour+Water’s co-chef with Ryan Pollnow, states, “Bottarga is an amazing product that blends salinity and umami.” Pollnow adds, “It does for Italian cuisine what fish sauce does in Southeast Asian cuisines. We love making a compound butter out of it to finish seafood pastas.”
Fenugreek
As the world continues to shrink, once-exotic Indian ingredients are finding their way into American pantries, and one of the trendiest is fenugreek, a clover-like herb native to the Indian subcontinent and Mediterranean. Fresh or dried leaves have culinary uses, and the powdered form of the seeds is a frequent component of the garam masala that flavors Indian curries. And because fenugreek imparts a caramel or maple flavor, Southern barbecue masters thousands of miles from Delhi are discovering that the unconventional ingredient contributes a distinctive flavor to their dry rubs. Fenugreek is also heralded for its therapeutic qualities — there is some evidence that it can lower blood sugar or reduce inflammation — and medical researchers in the West are studying its positive effects.