29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brunch Is Best With Some Surprises. Try This Edamame and Yuzu Dip.
When Ravinder Bhogal was growing up in Kenya, as 'Daughter No. 4' (as she wryly puts it) in a family with Punjabi roots, the avocados in her backyard were the size of coconuts. She'd crush sugar right into the flesh and spoon it out. No such luck in England, where she moved with her family at age 7 on a day of icy rain, to a dark, damp flat without central heating.
Recipe: Avocado, Edamame and Yuzu Dip With Furikake
Years later, the memory of those giant, buttery fruits, plucked warm from the sun-drunk trees in her grandfather's plot of red earth, came back to her as she was trying to compose a brunch menu for her London restaurant, Jikoni ('kitchen' in Kiswahili). Brunch is a black hole for chefs. In theory, it is good: a meal without rules, unmoored from proper hour, abundant, anarchic, oversating, stupefying, staunchly opposed to those pallid guardrails of modern life, efficiency and productivity.
In 1895, the British journalist Guy Beringer — who is commonly credited with introducing the 'brunch' portmanteau in print, in the short-lived periodical Hunter's Weekly — praised the meal because 'it renders early rising not only unnecessary, but ridiculous.' The argument was not for sloth but for debauchery: Bypass breakfast for brunch, and you can stay up as late as you like the night before, consequence- and conscience-free, dancing on the table and embracing ruin.
How did such a delightfully illicit meal become so staid, so forgettable? Blame us, the diners, who throng the sidewalks on a Sunday morning, demanding our pancakes and avocado toast. Bhogal wanted to find a way to please but also surprise the crowds. She's known as a chef who bucks convention, simmering whole mangos — pits included — in curry, on the logic that, first, a whole mango is the greatest luxury and honor you can offer a guest, and second, 'If you can pick up a chicken bone and gnaw on it, why not a mango stone?' Her 2020 cookbook, 'Jikoni,' has the subtitle 'Proudly Inauthentic Recipes From an Immigrant Kitchen.'
Mulling over how to give new life to avocado toast, she turned to citrus, the startling sourness that 'makes you involuntarily smile,' she says. Yuzu is sweeter and gentler than lemon, with a sherbety tang; it's light where avocado is luscious, a fragrant evanescence against the fruit's heft. (If you don't have it on hand, try squeezing together lime and clementine.) She started to ponder other additions: ginger, with its own subtle sweetness and restorative sting; soy sauce standing in for salt, but rounder and deeper; toasted sesame oil, earthy and plush on the tongue, making everything it touches more intensely itself; edamame for body (and protein); and sambal like a red flare.
The result, after a tumble in the food processor, was voluptuous, cooling with a throb of heat from the sambal and, in the yuzu's mellow brightness, a callback to that lost sun. She dusted it with furikake — she makes a vegetarian version from scratch, swapping out bonito flakes for a crackly calligraphy of fried shallots — and served it at the restaurant heaped on toast under a poached egg's fat cloud. But it's so good, you can dispense with the formality of framing it as a meal and eat it straight as a dip, as Bhogal does at home, dunking in the likes of carrots, radishes, tortilla chips or Thai prawn crackers ('the spicy ones,' she insists), those ossified gulps of briny air.
'This couldn't be simpler,' she writes in her most recent cookbook, 'Comfort and Joy.' The only hard part is choosing the avocado. You want one with a little give; if it's rock-hard at the market, she warns, it'll go straight to rotten, and you'll never get the sublime creaminess in between. To make it ripen faster, she likes to pop it into a bag with bananas 'and let them make merry,' she says.
Making merry by mixing ingredients and traditions might well be Bhogal's mantra. She remembers the small jikoni of her Kenyan childhood as a place of cozy chaos, where the women of her sprawling household forged a new language out of multiple heritages, grabbing words from Kiswahili, Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu and English like spices out of the larder. When her family decamped to London, she mourned those clamorous, gilded days. Then she settled in, looked around her and learned that you keep loving the world; that this, too, could be home.
