Gower - The breakaway cook : recipes that break away from the ordinary

This book is dedicated to all of us free-wheeling
cooks who delight in new discoveries

Breakaway cooking is a new and powerful way for home cooks to think about what to put on the table. Its a style of cooking uniquely suited to todays dizzying array of choices of what and how to eat. It pays homage to the culinary traditions and ingredients of half a dozen or so countries, yet it breaks away from all of them to create a new and coherent way to cook.

Breakaway food is simple to prepare: it requires little or no previous cooking experience and takes little time. Its powerfully flavored and reaches far and wide for inspiration and ingredients. Ah, fusion cooking, you might say. Not at all.

When people ask, Whats the difference between breakaway cooking and fusion? I say that breakaway cooking is fusion that actually makes sense. Both are attracted to the combination of disparate and often surprising elements, but breakaway cooking, unlike much fusion cooking, consciously keeps things simple. Breakaway cooking is for home cooks who arent interested in novelty for noveltys sake (in contrast to cutting-edge fusion restaurants, which constantly seek to lead the pack), but whose cooking can be improved radically with the introduction of a few key global ingredients.

I use what I call global flavor blaststhings like miso, pomegranate molasses, and tamarindwhich are flavor-packed, intense ingredients that typically take a lot of time and care to make from scratch but are now widely, inexpensively, and conveniently available in ethnic markets and online. You can add a tremendous amount of flavor to a dish simply by incorporating some of these robust flavors into your cooking, with very little effort or expense. And a cardinal rule of breakaway cooking is to season with authority. Part of the foods vibrancy is derived from concentrated flavors that play off one another. This is especially true with salt, which forms the baseline of many of the dishes presented in this book.

Breakaway cooking is simultaneously about the fast and mindful preparation of food and about the slow savoring of that food. This is really what the slow food movement is about. You can, in my opinion, cook slow food quite quickly; its the savoring of it that takes up so much time (usually the entire evening, if things go well). One goal of breakaway cooking is to create simple combinations of textures and tastes that make you silently pause in gratification at the interplay going on in the mouth.

Moreover, breakaway cooking stresses the power of presentation. Serve your meals on excellent pottery and use glassware and table linens that really appeal to you; all are worth splurging on, considering how much time youll spend with them. And plating should always be simple, almost effortlessnever stack or pile food in a way that requires deconstruction or even carving. As a diner, I prefer to simply lift bites into my mouth using chopsticks (wood feels much better in my mouth than metal does) and not have to do any work at the table at all.

Breakaway cooking also has a time/hassle component. If a dish takes two days to prepare, barely five minutes to eat, and another day to clean up properly, somethings wrong. Breakaway cooking is about making great food with little to no hassle.

But breakaway cooking is about a few other things too. Its an approach to food that dissolves a lot of the tension that many of us feel about cooking and eating, about the role food plays in our lives. We all want to enjoy great food, but the never-ending battle between time constraints, creativity, and sheer information overload leaves us feeling paralyzed.

We spend so many hours of our lives shopping for food, preparing it, cooking it, consuming it, and cleaning up afterward. Most of us do it every day. If we can rise to what often feels like a tyrannical daily event without dread or fear or anxiety, it can be an anchoring presence for the other twenty-three hours of the day. Once we acknowledge and embrace the huge role that food inevitably plays in our lives, good things begin to happen.

I spent most of my twenties and thirties living in Japan, where it is very easy to walk out the door anytime and get a decent, inexpensive, and nutritious meal. Traditional, everyday Japanese cuisine is a thing of simplicity and wonder, and for years I frequented the restaurants of Kyoto and Tokyo with unflagging enthusiasm. But eventually it dawned on me that, not only did I enjoy cooking dinner at home, but I often liked the food that I cooked better too. The reason was simple: I cooked food made expressly for my own palate. I didnt care if the food I made was considered traditional or untraditional, authentic or inauthentic: the only thing I cared about was whether it tasted good. My cooking epiphany came when I realized that my palate is almighty: the only right way to cook something is to cook it so it tastes good to you. That notion is the heart and soul of breakaway cooking.

In the beginning I enjoyed the process of reproducing classic Japanese dishes, but once I mastered those, I liked tweaking dishes in ways that tasted good to me. I like eating tofu, for example, in the traditional way, with soy sauce, scallions, and grated ginger. But I also like mixing soft tofu with pomegranate molasses and egg and baking it, or drizzling it with good olive oil, fresh herbs, and sliced fruit and dusting the dish with salt and pepper. Edamame (fresh soybeans) are great just shucked and saltedpretty much the only way theyre eaten in Japanbut theyre even better when you puree a handful of them with a vinaigrette of choice and then dress the rest of them with that sauce. Udon is lovely in a traditional dashi (broth made from kelp and dried bonito), but it takes on a new life altogether when you blend mint, cilantro, fresh ginger, lemon, and olive oil and work that into the cooked noodles. Traditionalists might cry foul, but who cares? I am the one eating it.

When I moved back to San Francisco after fifteen years in Japan, I discovered that my breakaway style of cookingusing Japanese ingredients in unorthodox yet delightful ways by combining them with the best organic bounty I could findcould be expanded radically by the cornucopia of beautiful ingredients I was seeing everywhere. Indian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Mexican markets beckoned, and I began, much as I did in Japan, by purchasing unfamiliar ingredients and playing with them, getting to know their flavor profiles. And by combining these new (to me) tastes with whatever seasonal produce I happened to find at farmers markets, I began to make some really good food, food that paid homage to certain ethnic culinary traditions but that broke away from the confines of authenticity and toward something more organic, lively, and simple. The principles of breakaway Japanese cooking, I discovered, could easily be transferred to other culinary traditions.

The recipes that follow are simple to prepare. While Ive tried to be clear and precise in the recipes and descriptions, I intend for them to be suggestions and guides. When you use recipes as broad outlines rather than as tight scripts (as I hope you will use mine), you tend to substitute or omit altogether some ingredients called for in any given dish. I happen to love each one of these, yet even I, the author, seem incapable of making them the same way twice. Quite a few of the dishes were happy accidents, the result of an almost-bare fridge and a snarling stomach. The entire spirit of this book urges you to ignore anything I say in these recipes: try them as written once and then use them as a backbone or an entry point for new dishes that youll create, given the ingredients you have on hand, time constraints, energy levels, or anything else that guides your cooking.