Hi Everyone,
We like bun-bun but not burnt food. Blackened dishes can often end up looking burnt but they aren’t. Blackening is a cooking technique that yields significant char on the surface of food that at first glance can seem burnt. The spice combination and billowing smoke give the food an intense, desirable flavour.
The technique is easy and ideally suited to quick cooking ingredients such as fish, shrimp and chicken breasts. Pork chops and steaks can be blackened too but I find those to be not as successful given that they need to be cooked for particular lengths of time and temperature to get the requisite degree of doneness. However, getting a cut that is thin and quick cooking on a grill or in a hot pan would be ideal. Certain vegetables work well with this cooking technique – eggplant (baigan), onions, ripe plantains, fresh corn on the cob, okra, asparagus, mushrooms, zucchini, large, sweet peppers (bell peppers). There is just one of important thing to note when blackening food (I can see you shaking your head saying that you knew it was too good to be true), that is, you have to put up with a lot of smoke, and it is the type of cooking that is best done in a kitchen with open windows or outdoors. If you live up North, in Europe or other places in which your kitchen might be windowless and the house/apartment outfitted with smoke detectors, well, you might want to leave this type of cooking for the warmer months when you can cook outside.
The cloud of smoke comes from the blackening process. Here is how it all works. The ingredient (for ease of reference, let’s use fish) is dipped in melted butter and then dredged in a blackening spice mix. The fish is then added to a smoking hot, dry, cast iron pan. When the fish makes contact with the