2018 Atlanta Kitchen Notebook
An in-depth look at some of our favorite dishes and cocktails from our time on the ground in Atlanta.
Benne Seed Origi-Saro
At his Plate Sale pop-up, Mike Sheats cooks the food of the African American South through the lens of his McCrady’s and Staplehouse training. Thumbing through American Food: The Gastronomic Story, he stumbled upon ogiri-saro, a fermented melon or squash seed paste from Sierra Leone. Sheats bends it toward the South using benne seeds from Anson Mills. He boils the seeds to a mush before straining the paste and setting it out to dry. He then wraps the mass in banana leaves, salts the leaves, and ferments the packages at room temperature for five to seven days. “It’s a powerful smell, but that’s how you know when it’s ready,” says Sheats. The resulting product is sweet and nutty with ample funk and umami, lending itself to curries, soups, and stews. “A little goes a long way.”
Pasta With A Shrimp Crush
Sauce passatina generally involves crushing tomatoes and basil or puréeing chickpeas and vegetables. For the passatina at St. Cecilia, Chef Craig Richards passes sautéed shrimp and tomatoes through a food mill, extracting all the fats and funk from the shrimp heads, sweetness from the meat, and toasty notes from the shells. “I read about the technique somewhere, and it really said St. Cecilia,” says Richards. “It seems like something a fisherman would make.” Richards pools the deep orange sauce between smoked eggplant mezzalune that burst open with a puff of air and finish with palate coating creaminess. Together, the shrimp (Georgia coast), eggplant (a locally farmed Chinese variety), tomato (San Marzano), and basil (Thai) scream summer in Sicily via the thoughtful technique from an Atlanta chef.
ABRAcadabra: Strawberries from Hops
At Cooks & Soldiers, Bartender Javonne Carter’s ABRA is a split-based cocktail with a split personality. At first glance, it looks like a boozy sipper with ¾ ounce each Amaro di Angostura, Evan William bourbon, Ron Matusalem white rum, and, plus two dashes Angostura bitters and ¼ ounce simple syrup. But Carter takes it out of stirred territory with ½ ounce lemon juice and a healthy shake with ice. In a magical twist, he shakes ½ ounce local Three Taverns Brewery IPA in the tin and tops the cocktail with a simple, heady foam. The interaction between the hops, amaro, and spirits produces wild herbaceus strawberry notes, and cocktail—disorienting and delicious—finishes bitter and dry.
Vanilla and Proud!
Pastry Chef Christian Castillo didn’t exactly consider food costs when he added an all vanilla dessert to the menu at Atlas in Buckhead, but he was thinking about how to explore a single flavor through temperature and texture. “It’s vanilla bean, all the way!” says Castillo of his St. Honoré ode with, get ready: vanilla sponge, warm vanilla caramel-stuff ed vanilla profiterole, vanilla bean-almond praline, vanilla semifreddo, and vanilla whipped cream. Born in Argentina, Castillo enlivens much of his menu with flavors of home—hibiscus, guava, yerba mate, cacao fruit but his warm/cold/salty/sweet/ crunchy/soft vanilla St. Honoré is Atlas’ most popular dessert. “I like to change the menu constantly ... I get bored. And this has been on a long time,” he says. Castillo may be tired of making it, but his all-vanilla masterpiece is anything but ... vanilla.
