Recipes/Fennel Sausage, Gochujang and Vodka Paccheri

Fennel Sausage, Gochujang and Vodka Paccheri

One of the leitmotifs of my cooking is fennel seeds – a signature ingredient used in both Punjabi and Italian cuisines – in almost everything. I adore the punchy lemony-anise hit they bring to any dish, sweet and savoury. For this reason my usually sparse refrigerator is rarely without Italian fennel sausages – grilled whole to a blackened char for the ultimate sarnies, or split open to sizzle in a pan for dreamy fennel sausage ragus. The spicy-savouriness of gochujang is the perfect note to add to this aniseedy chord, amped up further by the taste-magnifying effects of vodka. With flavours this loud, only very gigantic pasta – like satisfyingly huge paccheri – will do. The bigger the better!

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It was the daytime clubbing scene where the boundaries of bhangra and Asian underground were pushed, blending Punjabi folk music, classical Indian melodies and Bollywood anthems with hip hop, R'n'B, soul, dance and garage. I remember South Asian friends bunking off college on Wednesday afternoons, heels in their bags, to get to afternoon raves. Created by and for the diaspora, they served a generation of young adults, united by a need to party coupled with a need to be at home in time to make roti. I encountered offshoots of the scene much later, through the queer-desi night Club Kali and sporadic bhangra DJs that played Popstarz at the Apollo. Those 2am moments on the dance floor were rare times I could be every layer of my identity at once, illuminating with lasers what was often concealed by the code-switching of my life by daylight. Identity is like lasagne: each layer unique, but transformed when brought together as a whole.

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Brown Toast & Malted-Coffee Ripple Ice Cream

Gurdeep Loyal · Flavour Heroes

I adore breakfast ice creams in every guise. Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco is famous for its Drunken Breakfast – a delicious combination of cornflakes and bourbon. I’m always mesmerized by the menu at Morgenstern’s in Greenwich Village, New York, which has flavours like almond croissant, chocolate granola and blueberry-maple pancake. And the one time I ate at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, its bacon and egg ice cream was a true highlight. My all-time favourite was a brown toast ice cream served at an unassuming dessert bar on London’s Brick Lane. My riff on it adds a syrupy malted-coffee ripple… ice cream for breakfast with an espresso kick!