The Subtle Revolution of Matcha Poached Eggs || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

In the restaurant and media worlds of northern California, where I worked during the 2000s, “simple” was ubiquitous. The finest compliment you could grant a dish was that it was simple. A simple tomato sauce on spaghetti. A simple roast chicken. A simple salad of garden lettuces with baked goat cheese. An entire region’s cuisine seemingly born of one word. Mid-to-late 20th century cookbooks that helped spawn the California cuisine movement, like Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, broadcast the adjective. Twenty-first century cookbooks, like 2007’s The Art of Simple French Food by the doyenne of Bay Area food, Alice Waters, trumpeted it.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “simple” as follows: 1. Having or being composed of only one thing, element, or part. 2. Not involved or complicated; easy. 3. Being without additions or modifications; mere. 4. Having little or no ornamentation; not embellished or adorned. I will add an additional definition: 5. Makes Scott want to place a shotgun in his mouth and remove the back of his skull.

Everyone’s heart was honorable. You procured good ingredients from good farms and farmers and cooked good food. The heart can lie, though. Too often the cooking was slight, contrived in its sameness. A Californized version of country French and Italian cuisines that wielded simplicity like a cane. Restaurant kitchens feeding people by European groupthink. Who wants to eat only in restaurants what you could make at home?

A ray of light cracked through the haze the same year Waters’s book was published. In 2007, The Breakaway Cook appeared. It did the unthinkable: guided the notion of simplicity down new paths. Its author, Eric Gower, lived and worked in Japan for more than 15 years before returning to San Francisco. During that time, he inadvertently built a new culinary lexicon, one that relied on big, powerful ingredients like miso, pomegranate molasses, citrus, habanero chiles, ginger, kaffir/makrut lime leaves, and matcha.

The two powerhouses of this condiment. 📷: Denny Culbert

One recipe from The Breakaway Cook upended my ideas of cooking: matcha poached eggs. So effortless that it makes simple seem ornate. You combine matcha and coarse salt, then dust it on poached eggs that have been laid on buttered toast. We all know the combination of salt and eggs is mighty tasty. The addition of powdered green tea is alchemical. The egg’s savoriness intensifies. A delicate sweetness murmurs. I do not understand how a subtle addition does this. I no longer wonder. I merely eat the reawakened staple and marvel.

Gower now runs a matcha-fueled company called, predictably, Breakaway Matcha. It sells high-grade matcha, served at some of the Bay Area’s best restaurants, along with ceramics and other matcha-related implements. Me, I am in New Orleans, still starting my mornings with his revelatory eggs 11 years later.

Breakfast will ever be the same. 📷: Denny Culbert

Poached Eggs With Matcha Salt

Serves 2
Adapted from Eric Gower’s The Breakaway Cook

This recipe is so bare-bones, you could skip making the matcha salt and instead sprinkle both flaky salt and matcha over the eggs. Careful, though! You might find a matcha landslide careens onto your eggs if you’re not judicious.

• ¼ cup sel gris (gray salt) or other coarse salt

• 1 teaspoon matcha

• 2 slices of bread

• 2 eggs

• Butter

1. Stir the salt and matcha together in a small container until the salt is fully green. This mixture will last for ages, so best to mix it together in a jar or some such container in which you can store it.

2. Toast and butter the bread. Do this first so you don’t have to worry about it while the eggs are poaching.

3. Poach the eggs in your favorite manner. Mine is to bring a small saucepan about ⅔ full of water to a simmer over the lowest possible heat. If you want to lessen the chances of straggly egg whites, first crack each egg, one at a time, into a fine-mesh strainer, and scrape off any whites that pass through the strainer’s bottom. Then add the remaining egg to the saucepan, stirring gently so the egg doesn’t stick to the base of the pan. Repeat with the other egg. Each egg should cook for about 4 minutes, or until the whites are set.

4. Lift the finished eggs from the saucepan with a slotted spoon or spider strainer and onto a towel to blot moisture from the egg while it’s in the straining implement. Gently slip the eggs onto the buttered toast. Sprinkle the top of each egg with a bit of matcha salt. Eat!

The Best Californian Food I Ever Ate Was Indian | RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

I’m a child of California. I love a salad. I love avocado toast. I love a carne asada taco served on a double layer of warm corn tortillas. From a restaurant, from a truck. It does not matter. I also love all the ways in which the iconic restaurants of northern and southern California—the Chez Panisses and Zuni Cafés of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Lucques and Spagos of Los Angeles—have put the state’s unique and vast bounty to use in dishes inspired by the traditions of France and Italy.

But none of those celebrated temples of high gastronomy have changed my understanding of the transformative power of freshness, that linchpin of California cooking, like the cooking of Niloufer Ichaporia King has. It first happened at a meal offered once a year at that keystone of California cuisine Chez Panisse. Later, King’s book, My Bombay Kitchen, would become a kind of rulebook in my own kitchen.

When I lived in San Francisco, the region’s savviest cooks, food writers, and diners stammered, with stars flickering in their eyes, anytime King was discussed. Every year for Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebrated on the spring equinox, King would take over the kitchen at Chez Panisse for one night. The meal was a set menu. A not-cheap one. I went.

This was in the late 2000s. Probably 2007. I don’t remember the exact dishes I ate. I was no doubt hungover before the meal. And after. (That’s just how that period in my life was.) But that one dinner shifted my thinking—and my cooking. Her food slapped me awake. I had eaten a lot of Indian food in restaurants in the U.S. Some dosas and uttapam at south Indian restaurants, a whole lot of chicken tikka masala, stewed okra and naan at north Indian spots. King’s food was a swerve. The ginger, the garlic, the cilantro, the lime, the heady spices: all there. Her cooking tasted like that other food’s snappy cousin. Same bloodline but with a clean shave, a pressed shirt, and handsome shoes.

I ate King’s Nowruz dinner at Chez Panisse again the following year, and around that time her cookbook was published. It captures everything about why her food is so singular, so influential on my own cooking.

The sharp pop of fresh ginger and lime in a cucumber salad. Fish fillets slapped with a coconut-herb chutney and steamed in banana leaves. A sweet and fiery tomato chutney.

Me, cooking it up. 📷: Denny Culbert

King’s lineage comprises Parsi, emigrants to India who left Persia centuries ago because of religious persecution. Parsi food exists at the intersection of Iranian and Indian. It’s a cuisine that’s lavish and humble, delicate and forceful.

It’s also a food culture obsessed with eggs. And potato chips—or as Parsis call them, wafers. If you love two foods that much, why not combine them? The Parsis have, with particular joy. They call it wafer par ida. Sounds like a joke. It isn’t.

You cook onions and fresh chiles and then add cilantro. You could add chopped ginger and garlic, too. You don’t have to. But you should. Then you destroy a few handfuls of potato chips with your fists and toss them in. Crack eggs into the pan and cook until the eggs are set. That’s it. Part of the allure of this recipe is its ease. Better still, the recipe harnesses the ability of fresh ginger, garlic, chile, and cilantro to transfigure a dish that could be satisfying but also one-dimensional into something truly transcendental.

Yes, you want this for a stabilizing meal the morning after a debaucherous night—which is most nights in New Orleans, where I live. Yes, you want this if/when you are stoned. Yes, you want this pretty much anytime.

Or I certainly do, at least. Because it reminds me of the power of one meal to steer a lifetime.

Parsi Eggs With Potato Chips
Adapted from Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen

The ginger and garlic aren’t required—I didn’t use them the last time I made this, which is the dish you see in the photo. It’s a good—make that great—idea to add them, though. Still, neither you nor the dish will suffer if you omit them. Also, be sure to use a newly opened bag of chips. For that fresh chip flavor and crunch, of course.

INGREDIENTS
A tablespoon or two of butter or vegetable oil—or a mix of the two
1 small onion, chopped
2-3 hot fresh chiles, finely chopped
1 small garlic clove, grated
¼-inch piece ginger, peeled and grated or finely chopped (optional)
About ½ cup coarsely chopped cilantro
1 cup of plain potato chips
4 eggs

DIRECTIONS
1. Warm the oil over medium heat in a large skillet. When hot, add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until it softens but hasn’t browned.

2. Add the chiles, garlic, and ginger (if using). Cook until fragrant, just a minute or so. Add most of the cilantro (reserving some for garnish) and the potato chips and stir gently, making sure not to crush the chips.

3. Now make four holes in the chip mixture. Crack an egg into each of the holes. Dribble a tablespoon or so of water around the edge of the skillet and cover with a lid. Cook until the eggs’ whites are set, 2-3 minutes. Garnish with the remaining cilantro and serve immediately.