Month: October 2017

Albania’s food revolution: unique ingredients, lost wines and returning chefs put country on the culinary map During Balkan nation’s 45 years of hardline communist rule, food was rationed, cookbooks were burned and recipes were lost, but a new generation of Albanians are making good use of some amazing indigenous ingredients PUBLISHED : Thursday, 19 October, 2017 Tristan Rutherford 14 Nov 2018 From 1945 to 1991 Albania was the Mediterranean’s hermit kingdom. After the second world war, the country, led by Enver Hoxha, became a hardline communist state. His goal was for the country to be completely self-sufficient – all food was rationed, collectivised and canned. Fishing was discouraged because boats were considered a way to escape. Cookbooks were burnt and traditional recipes were lost. Its coastline’s juicy Adriatic prawns – beloved in neighbouring Italy and Greece – were presumed to be inedible and were fed instead to pigs. Stewed meat bones with tinned pears and grain gruel would have been considered a luxury. A taste of the good life in a rural Macedonian bolt-hole But a few young Albanian chefs are returning home after years of cooking at some of the world’s top restaurants. They’ve come back to reinvent Albanian cuisine, taking what they’ve learned abroad and using the fabulous indigenous ingredients, they are making what is one of Europe’s most inventive culinary scenes. “We are trying to preach the ingredients forgotten by modern society,” explains Albania’s most celebrated chef, Bledar Kola. The chef is only 33, and most recently worked in Copenhagen’s two-Michelin-star Noma. “Take this kulumri,” he says, holding up a wild sour plum native to Albania. “It’s sensationally tasty but nobody could remember how to cook it.” Bledar and I are drinking pressed cherry juice in his new slow food restaurant, Mullixhiu, in the buzzing Albanian capital