LONDON — Sometimes, when my test kitchen crew and I create a new dish, we do it to fit a greater narrative: the story of a season or of a day, about the person who inspired the dish, or a particular ingredient.
Other times, it’s flipped: The narrative follows the recipe. I can just fancy making and eating something, most likely from what is in my fridge and cupboards, and then, once it’s made and eaten (and tweaked and properly tested), think of something to say about it all.
This dish of grilled portobellos with chile sauce is definitely in the second camp. Its main aim was to introduce a relatively easy yet flavorful bell pepper and chile sauce that could be made in bulk and used for pasta, spread as a pizza base, drizzled over an open-faced cheese sandwich or served alongside some eggs. In this case, it was puddled onto a platter with some lime-spiked sour cream, then topped with grilled mushrooms and onions. That this final grilling stage took less than 15 minutes made it feel like a near-instant meal.
Yet what was “just” a versatile, relatively easy dish — a fast track to big and satisfying vegan flavors — ended up inadvertently aligning with the food trends I was reading about for the year ahead. This lovely, timeless vegetarian meal turned out to be very 2022. The synchronicity!
Mushrooms — hearty, absorbent, “meaty” mushrooms — are forecast to be a major ingredient for 2022. And it makes sense: They fit well in a plant-based diet, where so many will continue to turn in response to the climate crisis, and they’re packed full of umami, the seductive savoriness also known as the fifth taste, which we’ll all want more of.
It was interesting to see what the other trends forecast were — the rise in from-scratch cooking; the projected popularity of hibiscus, yuzu and sea greens; edible utensils to combat single-use containers — and how so many of them come in response to the last two years. But it was also nice to see how the cooking that has always felt so right to me — bolstering the flavor of vegetables, then centering them on the plate — made the dish so right for this moment.
I say this not to toot my own horn, or to suggest that I can read tea leaves. But rather, I say this to celebrate what so many have believed about vegetables for so long: that there is nothing more exciting, delicious, versatile, practical and satisfying in the kitchen.
Along with the shift toward vegetables come words like reductarianism, for example (cutting down on meat without going fully vegan) and climatarianism (a desire to reduce one’s carbon footprint); meat-free offerings on fast-food menus; and the growing popularity of ingredients like umami powder.
For all the new, though, it all takes us back, simply, to vegetables. This recipe calls for mushrooms, but it could have been sweet potatoes or eggplant (wedges of either work really well in place of the mushrooms in this dish). Their flavor is then enhanced, simply, with olive oil, seasoning and spices, and drawn out by heat. In short, grilling, roasting and charring vegetables are cooking methods as old as time, yet as timely as can be.
Recipe: Grilled Portobellos With Chile Sauce, Sour Cream and Corn Nuts
