tip to the South, while serving it all on polenta, a hat-tip to Italy.
The finished dish marries the food of his childhood with the food
he discovered in his travels, and it’s all the better for it.
Other interesting parallels abound between the food here in the
South and the food he’s discovered in other parts of the world. “I
love Middle Eastern and North African food,” he tells me. “You
find okra in those areas, but also here.”
Okra, which is much maligned by those who find it slimy
(count me among them!), is prized by Dale. “We love it down
here,” he tells me as he begins prepping his next dish, a fast sauté
of okra and chickpeas. “Okra can be fried or stewed with tomatoes
or pickled.”
Dale’s technique for cooking it is ingenious in the way that he
avoids the slime factor. He gets a pan very hot, adds a splash of
olive oil, and adds the okra, which he’s sliced in half vertically. “If
you cook it on high heat,” he explains, “you sear it and lock in the
gumminess.”
The finished dish, which looks pretty Southern at first, gets
topped with house-made harissa and a yogurt sauce made with
lemon juice. Once again, it’s a tribute to Dale’s two primary
influences, his childhood and his travels.
Dale’s final dish, which is an homage to a dish he ate at Albert
Adrià’s Inopia, in Barcelona, is simply a pineapple dressed with
lime sugar and pomegranate seeds. At Inopia, the dish got a drizzle
of molasses from the Canary Islands, but here Dale uses cane
syrup that his friend Jocelyn’s dad has been making in his