The Archive of Lost Condiments

Finding three new lives for every ingredient gone awry

[Note: this is very much a “service journalism” kind of post …if you’re not keen on it, come back in two weeks, December 3^rd, when I’ll have a new post to share. Next week I’m taking off for the holiday, and for a chance to generally replenish my addled brain.]

When holidays approach, it’s time to take inventory of the refrigerator contents—and for me, such inventory inevitably provokes some moments of regret. Normally I’m extremely good at mitigating waste—chicken bones and vegetable scraps get thrown into big bags for future stock cooking, miscellaneous nuts and fruits get chopped up into yogurt or oatmeal, and the odds and ends of rice and pasta bags find their way to grain salads and baked casseroles. For many folks, recipes do a lot to ensure that new ingredients are introduced into our arsenals—we religiously purchase whatever authors prescribe, with the assumption that the right ingredients will produce the right results. When shopping outside of producing a specific recipe, I shop based on the wide array of uses I can imagine. It’s my version of rocks-paper-scissors: spinach beats romaine for versatility, but kale beats spinach for shelf-stability. Rice beats pasta for a range of dishes, but couscous beats rice for speed of preparation. Frozen seafood always beats fresh for weekly planning, but salmon beats shrimp vis-à-vis quality. Ingredients are stashed for future use—a knob of ginger is almost immediately sliced into ½-inch thick pieces and frozen for easy grating, and whole containers of Thai chiles are thrown into the freezer for soups, stews, and sauces. Half-opened cans of coconut milk, tomato passata, and curry paste are poured into 1-oz. cubes for future chilis and curries; even hulled lemon and lime halves are thrown into plastic bags and frozen to infuse into batches of iced tea. Nothing is wasted via my intricate calculus that foregrounds the concept of improvisation over intentionality.

However, in my recent shift to regular recipe testing for my gig at SAVEUR, I’ve found myself accumulating a surprising number of single-use condiments: flours, oil, and condiments newly introduced to the pantry that I haven’t touched since that initial preparation. The point of buying specific ingredients for these recipes is to honor the author’s intention, a move that’s especially important when preparing foods from across the globe. Though many authors will volunteer substitutions, especially when writing for a predominately Western audience, using the originally intended ingredient forces readers to go outside of their comfort zones (and very often, to discover the bounty of global grocery stores and supplies near them). But it also creates a challenge after the recipe is made and edited, where I realize I’ve hit the limits of my knowledge. Do I know enough about pan-Latin cooking to put the chile pastes to their fullest use in an array of traditional dishes? Or do I have to move from a place- and history-based understanding of ingredients to a sensory-based one to give them a second life? More often than not, I find myself leaning towards the second, to trying to imagine foods that can use these ingredients free of time and place, to go solely on what flavor potentials they provoke. It requires me pushing the most commonly used ingredients to the back of my brain, and making space in the front for creative uses of those ingredients I don’t yet know and love.

It’s not unlike the process I use to decide if I’m going to buy a scholarly book (or back in the day, what I’d use to get off the fence about a new CD purchase). If I found myself consulting more than three chapters, or listening to more than three tracks, I knew it was going to get repeated use in my house, and would bring it home. The same thing is true when I buy cookbooks for myself—if I don’t open the book and immediately see three recipes that provoke my curiosity, it’s very likely going to languish on my bookshelf. (Hence, why my baking books are gathering dust). So finding three good reinvented purposes for each item is the goal, to ensure that nothing goes entirely to waste, even when its uses are less than immediately evident.

So here goes: instead of offering you recipes for what I’m making or eating on Thanksgiving, I’d much rather offer up ideas for five items on the fringes of one’s fridge, in the back of the oil-and-vinegar cabinet, and buried in the baking pantry in the coming weeks. I hope my internal logic for how one ingredient can be applied in multiple directions appeals to you, and gives you some ideas on how to rescue the pantry orphans in your own home.

• Ají Panca and Ají Amarillo: Both of these chile pastes came into my pantry while testing a classic Peruvian roast chicken recipe from Sandra Gutierrez’s Latinísimo, and the results were fantastic. But to use each of them on their own, I need to understand what they each contribute to a dish. Ají panca is a rich red-brown chile with a flavor not unlike smoked paprika—slightly smoky, slightly sweet, not terribly spicy. New use #1 is a go-to for chile sauces in our house, to stir a spoonful into ketchup for dipping roasted potatoes. New use #2 is to use it instead of tomato paste to enrich a pot of beans or rice, giving it a second or two to toast before adding legumes and broth to cover. New use #3 is to combine 1-2 spoonfuls of ají panca with softened butter, then spread on bread and top with cheddar for an irresistible grilled cheese sandwich.

  In contrast to its redder smokier sibling, ají amarillo is made from tiny yellow chile peppers that pack an enormous capsicum punch. They’re generally chopped up with garlic and onion as the foundational trinity of Peruvian dishes and give a subtly fruit but noticeably spicy flavor to almost every dish. Use #1 for this is in a salad dressing--blended with a mellow apple cider vinegar and with some basil or tarragon stirred in, this will brighten any meal. Use #2 is a Peruvian classic, a dipping sauce where the paste is mixed with mayonnaise and/or yogurt to accompany roasted vegetables or meat. Use #3 is cocktail-centric—mixing a little ají Amarillo into a sugar syrup (or warmed/thinned honey, agave, or maple syrup)—and then mixing with tequila for a lightly punchy margarita.   

• Pumpkin pie spice: Don’t get me wrong—I love cinnamon, I love ground ginger, I love cloves, allspice, and nutmeg as individual ingredients. But the very idea of streamlining all of my spices into a single-use condiment is completely unappealing to me—especially when there’s only one pumpkin pie recipe I truly love. So I’m intentionally using this spice outside the bounds of the pie canon: Use #1, stirred into oatmeal; Use #2; tossed with seeds and nuts for a grain-free granola; Use #3: whipped into coconut milk or heavy cream for topping hot chocolate or coffee.

• Pomegranate molasses: Bought during the great Ottolenghi-binge of god knows how long ago. I like it a lot, but I wish somehow had told me how little I’d use it (especially when I could just pour a little pomegranate or cherry juice into maple syrup and get a similar effect, especially in small portions). So the new uses I’m aiming for: #1: Pomegranate molasses gingerbread, using my favorite gingerbread recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook, and amping up the ground ginger to maximize its fruitness. (Maybe even stirring in some dried cranberries or cherries, we’ll see). #2: Use it instead of grenadine (which is already made from pomegranate juice) in a Scofflaw cocktail. #3: as the foundational sweetness in my go-to holiday recipe of olive oil cake. (Plus it’ll give the finished cake a subtle pink tinge.)

• Sunflower butter: It’s part and parcel of the twenty-first-century parenting experience that you assume the need for a nut-free, allergen-safe option to give your kid for lunch. My default lunchbox sandwich is a PB&J (always made with Teddie unsalted smooth PB, like the good Massachusetts girl I am.) In anticipation of the new school year, I bought a jar of ground sunflower seed butter… and let’s just say our kiddo was less than enthused. It’s not surprising, given that sunflower seeds have a decidedly more bitter, less fatty flavor than peanuts. It’s also tough to convince kids of substitutes for some of their favorite foods. (I responded the same way as a child when I was told carob was indistinguishable from chocolate. It’s not.) So I plan to treat our barely eaten jar of sunbutter as a substitute for tahini. Use #1—a perfect topping for sesame noodles, especially when thinned out with hot water, sriracha, grated ginger, and honey or maple syrup. Use #2: the base of granola bars, especially ones where I can fold in other sweeter ingredients like golden raisins to counteract the bitterness of the sunflower base. (Also welcome here, pomegranate molasses.) Use #3: as the nut-free base of a basil pesto. (Sunflower seeds are not dissimilar in raw form to pine nuts, so they can be used interchangeably for pesto.)

• Buckwheat flour: Bought on a field trip to the King Arthur Bakery headquarters in Norwich, Vermont, along with a small bottle of sparkle syrup, natch. I had momentary visions of making buckwheat pancakes, only to realize that I already had a foolproof pancake recipe and was very unlikely to deviate from what I knew would work. Buckwheat’s name is hugely misleading, in that it’s not considered a cereal or a grass, and thus behaves quite differently as a flour for baking and cooking purposes. With botanical ties to sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb, buckwheat has a surprisingly tangy and nutty flavor, more like rye than whole wheat, which means it’s very well suited to savory preparations like crepes and crackers than to sweet treats. Use #1 then follows on the French front, by folding buckwheat flour into a bechamel sauce as the foundation of a mac and cheese or lasagne dish. Use #2: Take a cue from Japanese soba noodles by using buckwheat flour to make homemade pasta (and dressing it with a very light sauce of butter and scallions, itameshi-style). Use #3: Use buckwheat to prepare flatbreads, specifically Indian parathas, and let it be as flat as it wants to be, layered with as much butter or ghee as is necessary to give it the perfectly soft pullable finish I want.

While I’d like to think my ingenuity knows no bounds and that I can rescue almost any ingredient from the margins of culinary viability, I know that I must fix my mistakes first. In combing through the fridge for candidates on this entry, I spotted a mostly empty jar of caviar, used in tiny amounts for a stuffed fish recipe almost a year before. I had a brief moment of hope, madly googling, “How long can caviar stay good?” But sadly, some things must come to an end. It now lives at the bottom of our garbage pail, one more ingredient abandoned to the ages.

Recommendation: In a week of lots of late nights, we took an evening off to try an episode of The Fall of the House of Usher…and boy was I sleeping on this one. Even if you’re not an Edgar Allen Poe aficionado, this series will undoubtedly have something for you—like a perfect blend of Succession and Knives Out and a million puzzle-box-like shows that gets you hooked on its general whodunnit vibe and fantastic casting. (Mary McDonell? Zach Gilford? I’m there.) Definitely worth an hour (or more) of your time.

The Perfect Bite: Honestly, tasting your way through a refrigerator’s worth of condiments is time well spent. But I’ll give this space over this week to the delicious bowl of forbidden rice we enjoyed earlier this week. One of my many impulse buys at Christina’s earlier this month, this beautiful black rice has a fantastic chewy finish and is great with almost any meal. (Already planning to turn it into a stir-fry tomorrow with lots of semi-charred peppers on top.)

Cooked & Consumed: Speaking of pomegranate molasses, we tried out this recipe this week (minus the pool of pomegranate-lime juice and pine-nut topping), and couldn’t have been more pleased with the results. I like the idea that twelve different culinary experts in a room will cite twelve different roast chicken recipes and none of them will be wrong—to me, that signals the inherent virtue and inherent democracy of culinary expertise. A thousand roast chicken breasts can’t be wrong.