Table of contents for April/May 2017 in SAVEUR

This past November, in Tokyo, I stood pressed against a bar with five grown men, in a barely lit space the size of a walk-in closet. When someone moved, the rest of us shifted like a single organism. Winestand Waltz, a “standing bar” in Ebisu, was a testament to the Japanese penchant for making the most of small spaces. It was hidden so expertly from passersby that my taxi driver had to interview a cook at the adjacent café before he found it. After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed the Jacques Tati posters, Le Creuset casseroles, and slim volumes of Symbolist poetry. Yasuhiro Ooyama, the bearded proprietor who’s known as the “wine professor,” poured me a cloudy pink brew that smelled like watermelon candy and wet poodle…

If you’ve never been in the presence of a day-old calf, they happen to be disconcertingly large. Recently I followed one—the color and size of a golden retriever—as it stumbled around Diane St. Clair’s barn, bleating loudly. Rain pounded on the roof, my boots were spattered with mud, and my neck ached after a five-hour drive. But it hardly mattered. I’d come to this sparsely populated corner of western Vermont to taste the country’s most sought-after butter. In a tiny creamery just off the barn, St. Clair reached into a refrigerator and took out a pound of her product—four dandelion-yellow balls in a large Ziploc bag. A former New Yorker with no experience in food production, she began making butter almost by accident, after buying a pair of Jersey cows.…

My friend Olivia’s mother and aunt are preparing quintessential Basque dishes for dinner. There will be blistered padrón peppers, along with baked goods. For the moment, it’s a squid cook-off, and the sisters eye each other’s mise-en-place in the aunt’s apartment kitchen in Biarritz, an elegant beach town wedged between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic Ocean. • When most people think of Basque country, they think of Spain, but the region is made up of seven provinces, three of which are in France. The French portion, called Iparralde in the Basque language, has its own way of doing things. Dinner’s at eight, not 10, and it’s a full meal. While Olivia’s mother and aunt squabble over just how much garlic is too much for their dishes—both end up lovely, though…

To make khorkhog, first gather stones from a river. Now set the stones over a bed of coals. When they’re blazing hot, toss into a large cauldron and add the meat of one lamb, salt, potatoes, a little water, and some vodka. The animal, butchered and killed that day in honor of our arrival, had hung to dry from the rafters of one of the gers (yurts) belonging to the Bayraa family of Mongolian nomads. The master tent where we would sleep was a wonderland of oilcloths, Soviet garb, and bright cacophonous Asian fabrics. We’d set out from Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, with our driver and guide, Shatarbal Dugerjav, former diplomat to Bulgaria, and a single cassette tape of Mongolian folk music that sounded like horses whinnying and eagles screaming.…

“I love my mom with an almost scary fierceness,” writes Amy Thielen in her funny, straight-shooting memoir Give a Girl a Knife (Clarkson Potter, May 2017). In it, the James Beard Award winner, cookbook author, and saveur contributor traces her path from small-town Minnesota to the cutthroat lines of Manhattan’s finest restaurants—where she worked under Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and David Bouley—and back again. Throughout, she recalls lessons from Karen, her no-nonsense Midwestern mother, who helped guide her along the way. Here, three kernels of inherited wisdom from the book that every cook should know. 1 HOW TO CLEAN A COUNTERTOP When I was 9 years old, my mom taught me how to wipe the countertop in the following very specific way: You soak the washcloth in steaming-hot water, wring it…

1 Fall in love with lampredotto OF ALL THE SENSORIAL DELIGHTS AVAILable in the overstimulating tourist trap that is Florence—making out in the moonlight on the Ponte Vecchio; communing with Botticellis and Donatellos; pairing fire-charred Chianina bisteccas with back vintages of Le Pergole Torte—could it be that a sloppy street snack of stewed tripe ranks among the very finest? Behold, lampredotto, Florence’s preeminent cibo da strada, a Renaissance-era sandwich named for its putative resemblance to boiled lamprey flesh. There’s no way around it: The stuff is ugly. Wrinkly, flaccid, grayish beige, it emerges from its vat of indiscernible bouillon, wobbling on the end of the trippaio’s (tripe-seller’s) carving fork. That such a pile of innards is beloved in such a stylish, wealthy merchant center—and has been for over 500 years—is…

THERE’S A TYPE OF PERSON WHO TRAVELS TO THE DINGLE PENINSULA to build a village from scratch, one with a schoolhouse and cobblestone streets. There’s a type of person who, after leaving art school, after failing as a tailor and working with at-risk youths, moves to Dingle and, with virtually no kitchen experience, opens not just a restaurant but an ambitious restaurant with menus composed only of food grown or caught on the peninsula and in surrounding waters. There is a type of person who gives up a successful career in the metropolis of Dublin and moves to Dingle to become a poet. And there’s a type of person who abandons New York to bring his young family to Dingle, to make ice cream from what is arguably some of the…

As you crank the creaky handle of a molino de mano, the hand-operated grinder seen on the left, a flurry of ground corn cascades out the front and a gust of air rushes by. It’s half the satisfaction of making your own masa, an essential building block in much of Mexico’s cuisine. The other half? Consuming it. While you can buy instant masa mix at most supermarkets, fresh masa has an unparalleled sweetness and richness, as if you’d melted a pat of butter onto summer corn and transformed it into a dough that could be griddled, fried, or steamed. I learned how to make it from Gonzalo Guzmán, my coauthor of the Mexican-focused Nopalito cookbook, out this April. Guzmán grew up on fresh masa in Mexico and now uses 300…

High up one of Lisbon’s interlocking hills in the neighborhood of Mouraria, where many of the city’s immigrants reside and the homes lean perilously into one another, I’m eating cracked crab on the jammed cobblestone patio of Cantinho do Aziz. It swims in a delicately scented coconut broth seasoned with piri-piri, a bright red chile common among Portugal’s Mozambican community. All around me, diners sit at tables festooned with brightly colored African cloth. Twinkle lights zigzag overhead. Khalid Aziz’s father opened the restaurant 33 years ago, when the family first arrived from Mozambique, a country that, until its independence in 1975, had been occupied by Portugal for over four centuries. His father’s patrons were almost exclusively other Mozambican emigrants. Aziz, who shares his father’s name, took over three years ago…

Dark Magic The briny flavor and dramatic color of cuttlefish ink It may be spring, the season of vibrant pink rhubarb, pastel green peas, and emerald ramps, but I’ve been gravitating toward the moody hue of cuttlefish ink. For “Tripe and Truffles” (pg. 32), we tested Pitti Gola e Cantina’s risotto al nero, a hearty cuttlefish ink–stained arborio rice (recipe at right). Though a relative of the squid, the cuttlefish has notably different ink. Where squid ink is more purple and less viscous, a cuttlefish’s is jet-black and jelly like with a reflective sheen. Delicately briny, it lends pasta and risotto sauces a subtle, oceanic salinity and intense coloration. Beyond pasta, consider working a few drops into pizza dough, soup broth, or white bean dip. You can find jarred ink…