Like most things Israel-Palestine, Falafel is steeped in politics. Both countries claim Falafel as their national dish. I was able to find a number of articles from both sides decrying the other for claiming Falafel. These two articles in particular stood out, “No Matter Where It Originated, Falafel Is Still Israel’s National Food” and “Israeli Appropriation of Falafel“,…

There are two questions I frequently get when I talk about Clcooks with people, What is the best/worst dish you have made? The best dish is to hard to choose but I think I found a new contender for worst dish in Tavë kosi. The way Savuer described it made it sound so good “Garlicky…

A little while back, I did the 23andMe DNA test and I was shocked to see that I had no Costa Rican/Nicaraguan DNA in me. How was I so adept at making Gallo pinto in college then? All jokes aside, Gallo pinto is an easy to make, affordable national dish. Considering I had most items…

Russia has been in the news quite a bit lately however that is not where I got the inspiration to make two of Russia’s national dishes. Netflix has a show called Chef’s table that features interviews with Chefs of highly acclaimed restaurants. In the third season they have an episode that covers a Russian chef, Vladimir…

I was looking forward to this one! Ramen has been a favorite of mine for a long time but I feel due to instant noodles it has a bad reputation and is seen as a poor mans food. To combat this perception, I decided to make Ramen over Sushi to represent Japan. I put a…

In some of the video games I play, progress is stopped until you have a item that allows you to progress. One of the items that was stopping me from progressing in my national dish quest was not having the ability to make pasta/noodles. To resolve this I bought a pasta maker and decides to tackle…

Every chef has a favorite spice, mine is Paprika. Hungarians adore their paprika and it features heavily in their cuisine and in their national dish Goulash. Shocking to me was that there is so many varieties of Paprika as outlined here Különleges (Special): The brightest red paprika of all, with a good aroma and very mild, sweet flavor.…

Sometimes it’s hard not to seem pretentious when cooking national dishes. I was looking for a dry white wine to use for this dish and the assistants at the store were helping me. In the process of helping me, they asked what I would be using the wine for and I told them to make…

I find it interesting that neighboring countries can share the same national dish. Researching this further however, it is not that shocking considering Argentina and Chile were both colonized by Spain where Empanada’s originated from. I looked and looked and could not find a substantial difference in how these countries prepare the dish.  I was hoping…