Who shrunk my food !

Just how exotic are exotic cuisines today. You surely don’t need to travel half-way around the globe to savor them.

They are so alarmingly near that it does take quite a bit of the zing off the exotica-factor !

World-food has just shrunk, well who shrunk my food !

Exotic cuisines derive from their rarity, awesome facts and the mammoth stretch it needs for you to reach to them.

Say for example the cuisine/s of the Malagasy speaking tribes of Madagascar may sound exotic for us but for them it is daily bread and butter.

You can easily count a hundred cuisines in a modern metropolis and is growing by the day. Ethnic cuisines are getting delocalized. They are also getting a contemporary-makeover.

I am a great believer in simplicity and the cuisine which is surfacing is truly ‘simply-exotic’

Tasting menus present an entire new dimension to world cuisines and literally shrink them on your plate and latter on your palette.

Exclusivity is still a defining factor. A diner takes notice of the source of his food. The food supply chain is an ever changing more complex grid, you can source products from a plethora of destinations some even abstract but surely proportionate to your passion to hunt them down to your kitchen pots.

At this point I sometimes do wonder the credibility and appropriateness in cooking application/s of exotic ingredients in the hands of novice chefs. Well just because we don’t need to break much sweat to get them the novelty factor and awesomeness gets seriously undermined.

I remember cooking a prized black cod or a now-humble bunch of green asparagus with ginger-fingers owing to the value as well as the perceived value of the ingredients when they were rarer.

Well coming back to the shrinking cuisine/s,  I feel exotic cuisine needs to be redefined.  

Well traveled and well exposed diners get an extravagant amount of variety to lay their fork on and new-age diners are an insatiable lot.

So till then.. on my piece on exotic cuisine redefined !

By : Devraj Halder