The Sunday News
In my last article I wrote about moving into a new facility that will be the home to a brand new test kitchen. I realise that in my excitement I didn’t get to mention at least in part what the importance of a test kitchen has on the overall culinary landscape of Zimbabwe.
So here’s a bit of a detailed overview of Carl Joshua Ncube’s Test Kitchen at Jacana Homestead in Bulawayo.
Let’s start with our colonial history. Zimbabwe has been caught in a culinary vacuum ad it changed how we grow or cook food.
Firstly, communities were displaced by gender. For example, men were sent to mines and farms away from their families.
The knowledge of their ways and how food was prepared changed. Imagine that instead of rending to your own fields and hunting changes because you work for someone else full time where they introduce you to maize as a new cereal or starch.
Imagine no longer being able to brew your own types of liquor because it’s illegal or not being able to cross the river because there’s a border and now it’s another country. A lot has changed and so did our food.
In 2020 my wife and I moved into rural Zimbabwe as part of a four- year study to look into the past, present and future of Zimbabwean food.
This thesis seeks to find new and sustainable uses of ingredients and practices in getting food from farm to our tables.
The study looks at current food and eating habits and impacts on the environment. The past seeks to find secrets from pre colonization Zimbabwe and how our ancestors treated food. This is where a test kitchen comes in.
By finding sources of revenue from my restaurant consultancy business we will be able to setup a kitchen to experiment with our research findings so far.
The convergence of our past and present will help us create a futuristic culinary blueprint for Zimbabwe. For example, to curb overfishing one could argue that making a seasoning with Kapenta would have the essence or flavour still available but less Kapenta needed but higher revenues yielded from Kapenta being an ingredient to a seasoning.
The same applies to our local fruits in the forests that as they gain in popularity could lead to massive corporate exploitation of our local forests to meet the demands.
A test kitchen also hopes to help producers to have a marketing platform for little or low selling produce by coming up with creative uses of these ingredients before they perish.
Examples of this would be fermentation of cabbage as a condiment for salad or tomato sauces or picked carrots as an accompaniment to a rice and stew dish.
Presenting food to focus groups is a great use of a test kitchen. Companies launching new products can have an opportunity of it being used in a test kitchen to a select group of people to collect research data and feedback.
In Carl’s test kitchen the chef has already been showcasing products like what cuts of meat to use for what kind of dishes as well as recipes for MC Meats, types of alcohol and ways to make cocktails for Liquor Supplies or even the health benefits of baobab and recipes for baob Africa just to name a few.
As a chef the test kitchen will also help with the training of new talent in the culinary sector allowing young chefs to experience and play around with ingredients, cooking practices in what I like to teach as the 6t’s of cooking.
These are Taste, Texture, Technique, Temperature, Time and Theatre (we will look at these in depth next week I promise)
The public will get a taste of this new private dining experience when they book their next private event.
