Grains of Paradise

On the Sheep's Head peninsula you can buy scallops, lobster and crab from the local fishermen. You can collect dulse, nori, wakame and kombu from the local beaches as well as sea kale, sea spinach and samphire.  In the local markets you can buy fish from day boats sold to you by the fishermen's own family. You can queue up for the local buffalo mozzarella on the morning it is made, and buy an array of hand-cured charcuterie. Our village has its own semi soft washed rind cheese, one of four such cheeses in the south west. Together they represent a regional speciality, which is celebrated throughout the world. In our local shop we can buy country butter, rich herby milk, cream and yogurt. And if we want local wild boar, venison, asparagus, chanterelles, we don't have to look very hard to find them.

But still our gaze can wander. Cookery books prompt us into new ideas and flavours, and, at times like these we count ourselves once again lucky, for we live in the age of the Internet.

Some years ago I tasted Grains of Paradise as served in the legendary restaurant Mugaritz, near to San Sebastian, in Northern Spain. Mugaritz's chef, Andonu Luis Aduriz, used them to decorate Chiporin - baby squid – and we were impressed by their fiery taste of pepper, ginger and cardomon, which is the spice family to which they belong.

When I read of them again in David Chang's magazine, Lucky Peach, my fingers started to itch for the keyboard. I googled away and found that I could get them through Amazon, through a company called Abbey Botanicals.

I probably could have also found onion and tomato powder if I'd looked, but again we are blessed locally with having organics supplier Fruit Hill Farm up the road, from whom we bought an indispensable dehydrator last year.

So the onion powder in the recipe was made simply by dehydrating and grinding an onion. For the tomato powder, sun-dried tomato was buzzed to a sticky clumpy powder, but I found if I gave it a second drying in the dehydrator (this could be done in a low oven) the next time I blitzed it it surrendered and became a perfect powder, the very umami essence of tomato, which is useful even itself to add to a host of dishes.

A tweeter made me laugh when I boasted of finding Grains of Paradise on Amazon. "What, only the grains? " she asked.

The truth is, the Internet gives us grains, but the real Paradise is here in Ireland, and, for us West Cork.

So here is my West-Cork-plus-the-Internet version of David Chang's Blackening Spice, which can be used with chicken, used to season flour for pan-fried fish or, as here, to make blackened chips.

Blackening Spice

1½  tablespoons grains of paradise
½  teaspoon coriander seed
½ teaspoon cumin seed
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 tablespoons mustard seed
½ teaspoon whole allspice
1 slice kombu seaweed (oarweed, kelp)
2 tablespoons onion powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons tomato powder
1 tablespoon smoked paprika

You might need to make the tomato powder and onion powder in advance.

Toast the grains, coriander and cumin in a dry pan to release their aroma. Grind the kombu. Then grind all the ingredients together. For this you can use a thermomix, food processor, coffee grinder or, if it comes to it mortar and pestle.

Blackened Chips – soak some very finely pre-cut potato chips in salted lemon water for 2 hours (1tab salt, 3 cups of water, juice of half a lemon.) The pectin in the lemon extracts the starch and the salt makes them crisper as well as being more tasty. Deep fry in oil heated to about 170º until just coloured. Remove, drain on kitchen paper, and scatter over a teaspoon of blackened spice mix.