John Wise

Hours of organization, research, notes, recipes, and preparation inspired by our pantry of incredible diversity; that’s how I spent a recent Saturday. It all started with a video I watched while drinking my morning coffee, in which the person was sharing the 9:3:1 rule for salad dressings. With nine parts oil, three parts acid such as vinegar or lemon juice, and one part emulsifier such as mustard, you have the building blocks of a basic vinaigrette. I liked his thoughts about a lemon and basic dressing, but it was his list of additions for emulsifiers that captured my attention. My basic recipe, prior to today’s short clip, has been 4 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons vinegar, a heaping teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a finely sliced shallot, a microplaned clove of garlic, salt, and pepper.

DeepSeek (my AI of choice) told me to keep the mustard but add some wasabi. It also noted that sherry and rice vinegar are best for complementing the wasabi; cool. I then asked if I could integrate Colatura (Italian aged anchovy sauce) into my recipe; it said sure and that it was interchangeable with an anchovy fillet or two. The proverbial one thing leading to another went to work. While we were in California, I was thinking about bringing miso back into our diet after my bungled attempts some years ago. Using white miso was its recommendation, and a lot less than I was experimenting with in those early days.

I have four pounds of eight varieties of heirloom garlic pre-ordered that will arrive this month; it’s currently curing at the farm where it was grown. So, I asked about using roasted garlic in my dressing and also freezing it; now I know how to work with that. In the video I’d been watching, Gochujang (Korean chili paste) was mentioned as a possible add-in for dressing along with Harissa (Tunisian chili paste) and even egg yolk as an emulsifier. With those in mind, we (AI and I) created more variations of salad dressings. Back in May and June during our road trip into the Midwest and Canada, we were buying locally prepared relishes, such as Vidalia Mustard, Green Tomato, Beet & Horseradish, Piccalilli, Chow Chow, and plain Vidalia Relish; recipes using those regional ingredients were created and logged. We were on a roll.

We now have more vinegars than anyone needs at a given time, such as four different kinds of sherry, red wine, champagne, white wine, balsamic, apple cider, rice, fermented coconut nectar vinegar (Filipino Sukang Tuba), Korean Daesang Chung Jung One persimmon vinegar, Chinese Chinkiang black vinegar, and the Japanese Mizkan brown rice black vinegar. Recently I bought a couple of bottles of La Guinelle Banyuls vinegar and learned today that I should be pairing it with a type of extra virgin olive oil I don’t have. While we have bottles featuring the Picual and Arbequina olive varietals, along with the Nocellara Etnea olives grown on the slopes of Mount Etna, and some blends for everyday cooking, there are a few gaps. In all, I was covering peppery, bitter, intense, mild, fruity, buttery, herbaceous, balanced, and grassy notes, but I didn’t have a sweet, buttery, nutty olive oil. So, a bottle of Frantoi Cutrera Primo from Sicily with its Biancolilla cultivar will be joining the pantry. This was what was needed for the Banyuls. At some point, I’ll find us the Arbosana and Koroneiki cultivars to round out the breadth of Italian, Spanish, and Greek olive oils.

Finally finished with all that and almost 50 dressing recipes richer, I could turn my attention to soaking some Flor de Junio beans from Rancho Gordo for our next salads and then starting the next batch of granola. Actually, I started soaking the almonds, rye berries, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and oat groats yesterday. Then in the evening, I drained them, ground them to a rough mixture, and added walnut oil, eucalyptus honey, and homemade vanilla that has been aging for half a year using organic Mexican vanilla beans and vodka. Mixed and placed on dehydrator trays, the granola will slowly dry for the next couple of days at 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 Celsius) before I mix it with rolled oats and store it in a Ute Indian hand-painted pot we bought in Southwest Colorado on the Reservation about 15 years ago. The only thing I don’t do is smudge to purify the vessel or wave crystals over the granola as it was set to dry.

I should add that the reason for the labor of finding and creating so many salad dressing recipes is so that we don’t grow bored with the many salads we’ve been eating. Our pantry is stocked with about 120 pounds of heirloom dry beans we use for various dishes, including our salads. We have literally hundreds of varieties of tinned fish represented by 60 types of fish, including the standards such as sardines, mackerel, and tuna; we also have a sampling of anchovies, branzino, carp, cod, dorade, eel, garfish, geoduck, hake, John Dory, milkfish, octopus, razor clams, rockfish, salmon, saury, scallops, skate, sturgeon, trout, tuyo, and zander. Obviously, some are smoked, most are in olive oil, some are spicy, and others are in curry. Some of these fish are strictly for eating from the can; they were too expensive to see them get lost in a salad or rice bowl, so we eat those plain or with bread. As for the photo above, it represents a recent shipment that arrived from Australia.

To continue enjoying so much fish, beans, and greens, I figure different dressings paint these healthy bowls with flavor profiles that are forever shifting. In line with that, and while at our local grocery picking up some things, I asked the produce guy if anyone ever bought the rutabagas on display. He was honest; he said no. The truth was that those, along with fennel, turnips, celery root, parsnips, leeks, kohlrabi, and radicchio, hardly, if ever, sell, but are there to let the customers feel that the store is well stocked. He added, “It’s a loss, but they are cheap enough that the company absorbs the waste.” FYI, the black beans in this photo are known as Soja Noir; they are black soy beans with green insides, not the traditional black beans one might think they are.

This unused diversity had me considering the ethnic grocery stores in the area and what offerings they have that we can incorporate into our diet of raw or roasted veggies mixed into our ever-complexifying salads. From the Hispanic markets, I can add verdolagas (purslane), huauzontle (a kind of broccoli rabe meets quinoa greens), chayote (squash), nopales (cactus paddles), calabacitas (another squash), epazote (herb), jicama (a root veg described as a cross between apple and potato), and camote morado (a purple sweet potato).

From our dozen or more Asian stores, the options grow to include gai lan (a Chinese broccoli), tong ho (chrysanthemum greens – like fennel + arugula + a hint of mint), lotus root, yu choy (choy sum), water spinach, shiso (perilla), mizuna (greens), daikon (radish), tatsoi (greens), komatsuna (greens), Napa cabbage, baby bok choy, watercress, pea shoots, and amaranth greens (spinach-like). This is the world outside of iceberg, romaine, and baby spinach. But there’s a big win here, too: price and a new palette of flavors. I suppose it’s a good thing that most people are creatures of habit and turn their noses up at this stuff, as increased demand would drive prices higher, and maybe we’d be relegated to iceberg lettuce.

During this exercise, I learned that there’s more to olive oil than whatever is cheapest at Walmart, and that these oils are described with words reserved for wines, such as buttery, fruity, mild, intense, balanced, grassy, green, floral, sweet, peppery, herbaceous, bitter, pungent, robust, and volcanic (meaning earthy). Vinegars have their own key descriptions, such as sharp, citrusy, refreshing, neutral, bright, delicate, fruity, mild, deep, warm, nutty, woody, rich, savory, malty, smoky, sweet, musky, sour, and thick. How all of these pair and work with different emulsifiers depends on the greens, veggies, beans, and any other ingredients we are interested in working with. This is a relatively complex chemistry that I don’t intuitively understand yet, but AI does, and it has helped extend my knowledge and culinary options.

There is a caveat I bumped into along the way comparing American AI and Chinese AI. American systems have a cultural bias that appears to cater to popular U.S.-centric culture, likely from influencers and corporate marketers pushing hegemonic agendas that dictate what is (should be) on the average American’s plate. On the other hand, the Chinese AI, DeepSeek, in my case, is pushing facts and tapping suggestions that broaden my knowledge with no regard to what’s popular in our local grocery stores.

I noticed this when working on this project: I tend to resort to a 2:1 ratio of brown rice to quinoa when I’m making a grain dish; I asked for alternatives. AI suggested I consider farro, freekeh, bulgur, buckwheat, millet, spelt, kamut, wheat berries, sorghum, amaranth, and barley. It continued, saying that I could make up a “power grain jar,” where I mix equal parts farro, quinoa, millet, and green lentils and simmer for about 25 minutes. The next step was me asking it to take it further: what grain combos based on similar cooking times would work, and which of my grain mixtures would benefit from the addition of lentils. So, pre-mixed grains sounded great, but frozen blocks of already prepared mixtures sounded even better, and these silicone Souper Cubes turned out to be the perfect solution for adding convenience to using whole foods that can be time-consuming in their preparation. As square frozen blocks, they stack perfectly in our freezer and can be thawed in minutes. This particular mixture is black caviar lentils and toasted freekeh; yes, I know freekeh is already toasted, but toasting it before cooking it adds more impact.

Finally, there is a seismic shift going on in our diet, which, to me, is in large part possible due to AI acting as my nutritionist, consultant to all things gourmet-related, and effectively my personal culinary alchemist. The other part of the equation is that, to deal with growing older and managing our health, we need to eat well. A single grocery store simply cannot feed Caroline and me without us making great sacrifices. The spectrum of what we can eat at home is unmatched by the restaurants far and wide in all of Arizona. Our local grocers have to appeal to the dominant buying segment of the market, which at this time means the lowest common denominator of relatively bland choices.

Over the years, we’ve had friends who brought us into the foods of India, Myanmar, Thailand, Japan, China, the Middle East, and Mexico, while our explorations of the United States and Europe have afforded us the opportunity to sample flavors from coast to coast and country to country. The internet has broadened the scope and scale of a kind of personalized grocery store we shop at. The ethnic diversity in our cities has created incredible demand and offerings for Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indian ingredients, which have benefited our options, too. Specialty growers of heirloom beans, grains, and produce, along with meat and fish, combined with small makers of things like natto, shrubs, fermented products such as kefir and sauerkraut, small-batch vinegars, bakeries now using locally sourced ancient grains, and even some chains such as Penzey’s that make fresh spices and dried herbs available, are all part of our routine. By the way, if you think you’ve had bay leaves, I suggest you visit Penzey’s for their Turkish laurel, open the bag, and be prepared to be amazed at what they are supposed to smell like.

All of this is an incredible indulgence and luxury to the two of us, though I think it’s also a shame. The American dominant food culture, by and large, has become homogenized and downright bland. Butchers are now rare, specialty bakeries that do exist are incredibly expensive (the sprouted sourdough multigrain we buy is $14 a loaf), and even Whole Foods limits its offerings to what Amazon’s algorithm tells them will sell to wealthy clients whose diets are typically as boring as those who shop at Winco. For those who will never know what a nice bread with Bordier butter and Jacobsen’s flaked salt from Netarts Bay, Oregon, is like, or who are afraid to try some amazing Nassari Boquerones (vinegar- and oil-prepared white anchovies), they likely can’t see the value in tracking down some ayocote beans, a Picual olive oil, or learning how great ingredients might change the way they see their Standard American Diet, commonly known as S.A.D.