Top chefs pick their most coveted ingredients

Truffle

A popular choice for chefs when it comes to lavish ingredients, truffle tops the list for Tang Group executive chef Vixa Kalenga and Chefs Warehouse Beau Constantia’s chef Ivor Jones.

As Kalenga points out, you need very little of it to change an ordinary dish into a gourmet experience. He finds that it pairs perfectly with the ingredients used in both the Japanese and Chinese cuisines he covers at Tang. His favourite truffle dish is their signature Shiso oysters — a bestseller.

Jones enjoys the truffle freshly grated atop a dish of coal-roasted fig with a burnt-honey-andgoat’scheese nougat dressing. It’s a superb pairing; the deeply intense and umami truffle working well with the fruit-based dish while offering an absolutely smashing combination of textures as well.

Japanese Shoyu

Ashley Moss, one of the chefs behind critically acclaimed Fyn and hot spot Ramenhead, both in Cape Town, goes for a Japanese ingredient called shoyu — a type of soy sauce. The team imports a variety of artisanal shoyu from Japan, which brings real depth of flavour to dishes, balancing salinity and adding a rich umami roundness. And it’s great in a bowl of ramen, too.

Cultured butter

Amori Burger, the chef at Kloof Street neighbourhood eatery Upper Union, looks locally for her indulgence, opting for butter made by Maria van Zyl at Cream of the Crop. The cultured butter, made by hand, has a much richer and deeper flavour than the store-bought variety. As to why it’s the chef’s pick — aside from its being among the best butter available in the country right now — it reminds her of the kind she enjoyed as a child. At Upper Union it is served with the kubaneh-bread course for a flavoursome start to a meal.

Abalone

The chef and owner of Salsify at The Roundhouse in Camps Bay is all about abalone, sustainably farmed on the West Coast. Ryan Cole sees it as a proudly South African ingredient, albeit one we couldn’t get because of poaching. Now that it is sustainably farmed it’s accessible and can be a beautiful ingredient when prepared correctly. At Salsify, it’s blanched in dashi and then set in a toasted ginger and mirin tea, with the result being a wonderfully rich, deep, and smoky combination of flavours, served with white-sturgeon caviar and an egg-yolk dressing.

• From the March edition of Wanted, 2023.