The Secret Ingredient: Dates

Lukas Volger on dates and recipe development

ICYMI, I published a feature story in TASTE magazine about refilleries, inspired by my conversation with Larasati last month. I love refilleries and see them as an important part of changing our relationship with food, but it was illuminating to learn just how hard the business is and the ways scale is leveraged against the independent grocer.

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I first came across Lukas Volger’s style of cooking through his project #28daysofoatmeal, which documented, well, oatmeal, but oatmeal in such creative and tantalizing ways that I as a fellow savory oatmeal-eater instantly felt a kinship. Lukas is a low-key vegetarian who managed to publish an entire cookbook about veggie burgers (and then a second edition) at a time when it seemed like Impossible meat was the only thing we were supposed to be eating in a bun. Outside of cookbooks, Lukas shares great recipes at his newsletter Family Friend, and our conversation wandered into the way he approaches recipe development and the limits of the recipe as a format, which doesn’t represent the way he (or most chefs) actually cook. It was an excellent conversation that made me think hard about the cookbooks I love, and made me want to throw some dates in a really hot oven.

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The thing that first came to mind is dates. I didn't grow up eating dates at all, and I'm not really a dried fruit person, so I wasn’t drawn to dates. Then I don't know what changed but suddenly I was like, Oh what are these delicious caramely, pudding-like, versatile, fiber-rich, potassium-rich fruits that I’ve been overlooking all this time.

I recently got to try a fresh date. I had always thought it was a dried fruit but it actually isn’t really. They ripen on the vine — so when you buy a box of dates, that’s what it looks like on the tree. A fresh one looks like a little yellow plum. The skin is taut. The flesh is pale, or at least the variety I had. It’s almost an apple texture, crisp and water-rich. And then its flavor was very mild compared to a mature date, but it was sort of like honeysuckle. It’s incredible the way the sun transforms this thing into something like candy.

I’ve been cooking with them a lot while I’m exploring plant-based proteins and looking for ways to jazz them up. There's a tofu dish I developed where you sear tofu and then throw sliced-up dates in the pan and they get a little crispy, the skin sort of shrivels up and the fruit becomes even jammier. You add thinly sliced onions and other spices and they all melt into the dish and it has this wonderful sticky quality. I also made a new veggie burger recently with tempeh, where I was using dates as a lead flavor, and it worked really well as a binder too. So it’s been fun to inject them in places where I’d never really thought to.

You know Shuka? The chef Ayesha there would broil dates and then shower them with lime zest and really good olive oil and a fruity smoky pepper. I’ve totally caught up to that idea, I make that at home all the time. It’s one of those sweet-savory things that’s nice at the beginning of a meal.

Kate: It’s interesting that all of these applications are in savory dishes. Do you use them in any desserts?

I’ve made these vegan snickers, where you fill the date with peanut butter and then dip it in dark chocolate and freeze it. Sometimes I use hazelnut butter and put a little dried mandarin orange or dried mango in there, and it’s a really good candy. I just put some in biscotti. But you need to get the firmer varieties for baking unless it’s going to be a sticky pudding type thing or blended into the batter.

Every time I’ve bought dates it’s like a tub, it’s a lot. I have them in this big mason jar and when I open the cupboard, they’re right there, so I get inspired by the fact of their presence. And I guess that’s where a lot of my cooking comes from, I just hate food waste and my kitchen small.

This is something that's so hard to teach, but I feel like you really learn how to manage your food, whatever food you have on hand. But it’s like a muscle, you have to develop it. It's difficult to teach in cookbooks because the recipe is so fixed. You go through these stages with editors and copy editors and proofreaders, and they’ll make you specify things like “extra-virgin olive oil.” I'll say somewhere in the book to use whatever oil you’ve got, but for consistency purposes it has to say “extra virgin olive oil” in every recipe. Or I’d like to say, if you have leftover roasted butternut squash on hand, use that instead of beets. But it makes the recipe look more complicated. The more information you put on the page, the more overwhelming it becomes.

I also feel like a lot of people still struggle with vegetarian and plant based meals. So I try to lead by example and show that it’s actually not that difficult, especially if you start thinking about meals in this sort of composite way. Like earlier in the week, I roasted all this butternut squash and cooked down all these greens. And now I can just throw some farro in the rice cooker and fry an egg and pull that together into a nice grain bowl. One of my big takeaways from working in restaurants is seeing how modular all the cooking is. As a prep cook, I’d prepare sauces and the vegetables and I would make the stocks and then the line cooks would bring those together and finesse them into the finished dish. And so it was a way to step back from the granular aspect of a recipe in a cookbook and see it more like a dance of a couple of different elements.

I want people to learn how to cook intuitively and resourcefully. As I was saying before, it's difficult to do in a cookbook format. But I feel like, if the barrier is time, I'm trying to write recipes to come together pretty quickly. If it's money, I’m pretty sensitive to the cost of the ingredients. And I think once you start cooking, it becomes more familiar and intuitive. So my end goal is always to get people to choose to cook dinner for themselves rather than order takeout or do a frozen meal. Cooking is such a satisfying and an enriching aspect of my day that I want to share that.

K: You’ve mentioned some of the challenges with the recipe format, but did you find it difficult to get into writing recipes?

No, I’ve always been drawn to recipes. When I was little, my mom and I would sit in the backyard with a stack of food magazines. And in the newspaper, there’d be a recipe every Wednesday and we’d clip it out, because it’s a free recipe, it just always seemed so cool to me. I remember her exchanging recipes with people and they’d jot them down on index cards.

I feel the physicality of the recipe lent it some value, and the transition to the Internet cheapened the perception of value. I think that’s where my affection for recipes comes from, from the physicality. Now a lot of people see recipes on the internet that are free, there's hundreds of thousands of them, and they’re not really conditioned to pay for them or to attribute value to them. So with Substack and other things, there’s been an effort to reset the narrative about the work that goes into developing these and the cost of the ingredients and the fact that this is active labor.

K: Can you give us your recipe for developing recipes?

In my mind there’s always a lead ingredient. Then you start out by examining its properties. So with dates, the flavor is this very full, complex richness. There's the texture, which can be sticky if you mash it and it can blend into something, or you can use chunks so that its presence is more apparent.

With the veggie burger I just made, I definitely needed the stickiness because I was using it as a binder. I was also thinking about tempeh being an ingredient from Java and Indonesia and all the tropical, spicy, floral, aromatic ingredients that go into Javanese and Indonesian cuisine. I thought about an Indonesian dish where the tempeh is cooked with whole dried chilies and coconut milk, and then the sweetness [of the dates] would make sense there. And then you might be able to build on those flavors with aromatics. So in the burger, I went heavy with fresh ginger and a bunch of garlic.

K: You know the podcast Song Exploder? This makes me want to do a Recipe Exploder podcast where people break down all the thinking that goes into recipe development.

You should definitely do that.

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