I like spending time dissecting my favorite dishes that I've eaten from around the world in an attempt to replicate them at home while remaining authentic and true to the original. Often times the goal is not only to replicate them, but to try to make them better. Imagine the satisfaction that you get from enjoying Neopolitan Style pizza as good as you had in Italy, or Gyros better that any Greek restaurant you ever ate at.
Sometimes this means hacking or modifying existing kitchen appliances (in the case of trying to transform my Weber BBQ into a wood fired pizza oven, or my rotisserie chicken maker into a gyro cooker), or sometimes it's flying in or sourcing ingredients from around the world- like San Romano tomatoes or Tipico 00 flour from Italy, Saffron from the middle east or Chorizo sausage from Spain. This quest also often requires you to grow (Heirloom Tomatoes or Shishito peppers) or even catch things (Dungeness crab) yourself.
I've spent many a 'evenin wasting time in the kitchen trying, experimenting, adjusting - sometimes even over the course of a week of consecutive evenings to perfect the same dish and usually, after enough perseverance, announcing to my wife and the rest of the world that I won't ever have to eat at the restaurant that the dish originated from again!
In my next few posts I'm going to trying to break down some of these dishes and tell you how I created them at home myself. Stay tuned!
