Hero worship
Gurdeep Loyal on his ‘flavour heroes’: the store cupboard ingredients he relies on to add punch to his cooking
“I WANT INGREDIENTS THAT CAN BE MIXED COMPLETELY DELICIOUSLY WITH OTHER FLAVOURS FROM AROUND THE WORLD”
Words: Gurdeep Loyal
The spark that ignited my latest cookbook, Flavour Heroes, came from a particularly nosy friend. Browsing through the abundantly filled shelves of my east London kitchen, she was quick to highlight that while they appeared to be filled with hundreds of different jars, bottles, tubs and tubes from around the world, many of these were in fact variants of the exact same things. And she was completely right: I had five different peanut butters, six tamarinds, five types of miso and over 10 varieties of mango chutney. This extended to my fridge, which contained three types of nduja – one in a glass jar, a thick slabbed slice, and a big bulbous sausage!
These ingredients are what I call ‘flavour heroes’ – taste-amplifying powerhouses that can turn up the volume of your home cooking every day of the week, no matter what you’re making. In my book, I spotlight 15 of the store cupboard staples that I turn to again and again, as freely as a painter might reach for colours in a palette or a composer to instruments in an orchestra.
Borough Market has been a constant source of inspiration for these daily cooking heroes and has cemented a few within my regularly replenished pantry repertoire. One such is Calabrian chilli paste, also known as crema di pepperoncini, a bright crimson-red paste made with red diavoletti rossi chillies, olive oil and salt. The jars sold at De Calabria have an intensely volcanic heat I find addictive. In the book I use it to make a Calabrian chilli-honey butter for drizzling over whipped feta, and in a slow-cooked short-rib ragu with broken lasagne.
Another hero of mine is pecorino Romano, a sharp tangy sheep’s milk cheese I use even more often than parmesan. It has a wonderful grassy brightness and nutty graininess. Many of the cheese traders at Borough sell pecorinos, some infused with black pepper and truffle, and L’Ubriaco Drunk Cheese even has a Sardinian pecorino that’s been aged for 10 months in red wine. I transform pecorino into a moreish cacio e pepe risotto and even use it in the crust of a savoury-sweet Italian apple crostata.
The very first hero in the book is harissa – a heady red paste rich in hot chillies, garlic, coriander, caraway and cumin, which I pick up fresh from Borough Olives. The aforementioned mango chutney is another ingredient for which Borough Market provides me with a cornucopia of options – the Punjabi-spiced jars from Temptings (pictured top), or the small-batch handmade Caribbean jars from Pimento Hill, which combine chunky fresh mango with hints of scotch bonnet pepper. I use mango chutney as the glaze for a root vegetable tart tatin with roasted garlic and also transform it into a marinade for crunchy breadcrumb-coated chicken schnitzels.
Raya is another stand I can spend hours browsing, and their Thai pastes, tamarind, miso, gochujang and toasted sesame oil, all of which feature in my book, are weekly staples for me, and ingredients that I have multiples of on my shelves.
This global hotchpotch of ingredients reflects my relationship with food right now. I want to be able to cook big bold flavours with little effort, every day. I also want ingredients that allow me to be playful at the twist of a lid and can be mixed completely deliciously with other flavours from around the world – nduja with gruyère, miso with cornichons, sesame oil with blueberry pancakes, harissa with manchego. To me these intercultural flavour combinations reflect the connected food world of today – and the adventurous palates of this most global of cities.
Flavour Heroes by Gurdeep Loyal (Quadrille Publishing) is available now
