My Ugly Delicious Journey — Intro
Food has been an important theme in my life. Ever since I failed math in high school ( yes it is possible for a Japanese and an Indian person to fail at math…)and was recommended to take agricultural science, I became obsessed with food. Every aspect of it, starting from how it’s made, to how we cook it, to how we consume it.
Underlying all of that was the constant question of “ How do we make this industry as sustainable as possible?”
The pursuit of that question has led me to today. Where I am currently running a small vegetable CSA business in rural Kyushu, Japan. As a part of the vegetable sales operation, we buy the leftovers straight from the farmers (the ones that don’t get sold or are deformed) and make it into sides in the Obento boxes, as well as pizza toppings depending on our requirements.
As our operations have become defined over time, I have taken the responsibility of Chief food innovation officer (technically not an official title... but a more self-labeled one…)of our team. What that means is that I am responsible for coming up with new ideas for recipes for the weekly market that we organise. Armed with my experience of undergrad, and grad school communal-international-cheap cooking, and my bible “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat, I took on this challenge.
The theme of our Farmers Market is “Re-discovering food.” What that means is we re-introduce familiar vegetables that are grown locally ( like cucumbers, aubergines, potatoes ), as well as slightly out of reach vegetables ( like beetroot, and Jerusalem artichoke), and cook them in a way that is accessible to the general public. That way the public can discover interesting ways to cook their local vegetables and enjoy a market day out! Which then introduces the idea of increased healthy, conscious local consumption of vegetables to a rural community.
The food development process started with a simple tomato-based pizza with seasonal vegetables as toppings. That then slowly evolved into burdock root kinpira pizza, mayonnaise spinach pizza, dessert apple pizza, and the list goes on and continues to evolve.
At first, I was reluctant to share this new side project with my non-work friends. Mainly because I felt like this wasn't “real” pizza. Perhaps because it was me… an un-professionally trained culinary fauxpert experimenting with different genres of food that might be considered taboo or blasphemous, to say the least. Which made me feel like what I was doing was almost unsharable.
However, something shifted in me during a conversation with my family. We stumbled across the show Ugly Delicious on NetFlix by David Chang (The mastermind behind Momofuku). The crux of the show was to take one culinary genre, and trail through its history starting from the original version of the dish, to its bizarre evolution and interpretation of the dish without letting go of the essence and respect that comes with the dish.
That inspired me to change gears, and push the boundaries of what my amateur cooking skills can do with the art of evolutionary cooking. So this is my Ugly Delicious journey. Join me! as I share new and slightly edgy recipes as I experiment with this project. See you on my next post… and wish me luck! ❤
