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Drying and Dehydration

Active drying or dehydration as the technique

17 rungs across 16 volumes

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Africa

Guinea, Sierra Leone & Liberia

Build umami from smoke and dried shellfish, deliberately, because the fresh fish is often unusable raw

Konkoué catfish, dried bonga and dried crayfish are not simply flavourings of convenience.

Ghana & Nigeria

Dehydrate into powders and dusts

Ikoyi's raspberry salt is dehydrated raspberry with cloves, smoked paprika, cinnamon and dried scotch bonnet, dusted on at the last second.

Chad, CAR & the Sahel Margin

Separate your two dried fish, and build a stock from the small one

The biggest technical point in the volume, and the one British writing gets wrong most consistently.

Chad, CAR & the Sahel Margin

Adopt the kilishi two-stage dry for every protein you dry

A borrowing that needs declaring. Kilishi is documented as a Kanuri and Hausa technique, and the Kanuri are a Lake Chad basin people spanning Nigeria, Niger...

Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi & Mozambique

Kapenta, matemba and usipa are a base, not a garnish

Kapenta is Limnothrissa miodon and Stolothrissa tanganicae, two Lake Tanganyika clupeids introduced into Lake Kariba and Cahora Bassa and now the cheapest...

Angola, Namibia & Botswana

Dry curing with no heat, and water activity as the instrument

Biltong looks like jerky and is not, and the misunderstanding is dangerous rather than disappointing.

South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini

Dry cure by weight loss, and understand that the vinegar is doing a specific job

Biltong is not jerky. Jerky is heated to at least 71°C. Biltong is air dried with no heat lethality step at all, which is why the process specification matters...

Asia

Armenia and Azerbaijan

Salt, press, dry, then coat

Basturma's real method, best sourced from a thirty-year Los Angeles basturma maker whose technique descends from family makers in Armenia and Lebanon: fresh...

Uzbekistan & Tajikistan

Ferment in the dark, dry in the sun

Qurt and suzma both depend on the same discipline as rakfisk or skyr elsewhere in this atlas: patience at a controlled, moderate temperature, not heat used to...

Europe

The Alps and French-speaking Switzerland

Dry buckwheat pasta patiently, not fast

Crozets were originally cut small specifically so mountain travellers could pack and carry them, and are dried slowly, close to 48 hours, at a temperature that...

Poland

Dry the casing before you smoke the kiełbasa

Genuine Polish kiełbasa is smoked, not merely seasoned, and the two smoking traditions are genuinely different techniques, not two speeds of the same one.

Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania

Read skilandis's cure as an engineering problem, and solve for Britain's climate rather than Lithuania's

Skilandis, cold-smoked at around 15°C for two to three weeks and then dried at 8 to 18°C and a controlled 75 to 90 per cent relative humidity for anywhere from...

The Canary Islands

Boil in near-seawater salinity, then dry the pot down hard

Papas arrugadas depend on a specific two-stage process: potatoes boiled unpeeled in water salted closer to seawater than to any ordinary cooking liquid, until...

The Adriatic and Albania

Match salt, wood and wind to the microclimate, not to a single recipe

The whole point of this coast's charcuterie is that there is no one cure.

The Americas

Chile

Merkén, smoking and grinding

Sun-drying to a violet colour concentrates and stabilises the chilli before smoke ever touches it; a comparatively short, roughly thirty minute hot smoke over...

Paraguay

Build queso Paraguay at home, because nobody else will sell it to you

This is the volume's clearest case of a technique forced into existence by a sourcing gap rather than chosen for its own sake, and it earns its place on the...

Oceania and the Pacific

Samoa, Tonga & Niue

Fermentation and stone-roasting, koko Samoa's own technique

Koko Samoa is fermented and sun-dried before it is ever roasted, the single documented fermentation step in this entire volume outside the ferment bench below...

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