On a cool night last spring, I parked my rented car on the side of the road and got out of it in front of a small white building in La Madera, New Mexico. I came to this country town with a ticket to Shed—45 minutes before my last cell reception—it was a dinner program by chef Johnny Ortiz. Ortiz, trained in Alinea in Chicago; Willow Inn in Lumi Island, Washington; and Saison in San Francisco returned to his hometown to cook and show the flavors of New Mexico on this land.

I knocked on the wooden door and walked into a warm room with candlelight. On the far wall, shelves were piled with clay dishes and bowls. A clay pot in production is placed on the table to dry; a similar container filled with dry farmer's Anasazi beans, bubbling on a wood-burning stove. Ortiz and his dog greeted me, and his shack partner, Afton Love, handed me a mezcal cocktail and placed it on a real rock-rose quartz to be precise. , Was selected from the handmade clay Ortiz collected from the nearby valley. These stones infused the smoky beverage with texture, wine-like minerals, and immediately set the tone for Ortiz's exploration of local foraging and historical cultivation ingredients.

Ortiz balances simplicity and sophistication in his dry-flavored bison tasting menu; elk tartare; and foraging pine nuts, mushrooms, cactus, and asparagus, but I have always focused on clay the most. Ortiz uses his hand-made unglazed pottery to hold all the food, and every bite of perfectly seasoned food contains minerals. Then the beans arrived. Towards the end of cooking, Ortiz stirred a large amount of hand-grated red pepper sauce. "But actually, the main star is the clay cooking pot," he said. He explained that the pot is made of alkaline clay rich in mica, which softens the spicy acid paste and sweetens it.

Read more: How to start cooking in a clay pot

The Bean Pot mica clay from New Mexico gently transfers heat to the beans and cooks the beans evenly in an alkaline environment, thereby neutralizing any toughened acid from the beans. Slow cooking increases the natural sweetness of beans, resulting in unparalleled results. Take home: Orion Langdon Bean Pot (from $125, pasquals.com) Get the recipe: Clay Pot Red Chile Beans

Ortiz ended the meal with wild vanilla tea in an unglazed clay cup. This infusion was mixed with the original mineral flavor of the clay, allowing me to take a deep sip and affirm the place again. It tastes like the first good Burgundy I have ever drunk. I cook from Paula Wolfert's pioneering Mediterranean clay pot cooking, and dabble with rice in Chinese clay pots and beef stew in ceramic saucepans. But the taste and texture I just tasted participates in the clay in a way I have never experienced before.

I can’t wait to leave New Mexico and want to learn more about claypot rice. After eating the mica-boiled beans, I wanted to make a pot at home, so I contacted Katharine Kagel, the chef of Cafe Pasqual's, a classic Santa Fe restaurant, who is an expert on mica clay pots. She praised the versatility of clay for cooking. "There are so many shapes!" she said. "And because they are metal-free, you can use them in an oven, stove, or microwave."

The language of clay Clay: According to Merriam-Webster, clay is an earthy material that is plastic-like when wet, but hardens when dry. Unlike metals, clay containers accumulate heat, and metals are good at conducting and reflecting heat. Ceramic: Clay that has been fired to remove moisture and harden. Vitrification: The process of heating clay until it becomes glass; the vitrified material is impermeable to liquids.

Pottery: Clay that is fired at a low temperature to harden but not vitrify, so it is still somewhat porous. Terracotta Warriors are the most common culinary pottery. Stoneware: Clay is fired at high temperatures, so it is impermeable to liquids; it may be partially or completely vitrified. Bean pots and soup pots are usually made of stoneware. Flame vessel: Ceramics can withstand thermal shock (sudden temperature changes) and are highly resistant to chipping. Unlike pottery and stoneware, flameware can go from the refrigerator to the oven, and can be heated directly when empty.

Like Ortiz, Kagel likes to use mica clay pots from the clay of the local volcanic bed. The unique pregnant belly pot, whose mica content makes the surface look shiny, is the legacy of the late Apache potter Felipe Ortega, who died in 2018. Ortega learned this process from a 90-year-old Apache blind woman named Jesúsita. Martinez was one of the last people who knew how to make a jar, shortly before her death. For more than 40 years, he has been making pottery and teaching a new generation of potters the craftsmanship. This is a laborious process. First, curl the wet clay and roughly shape it into a container, let it dry until leather-like, and then scrape it until smooth. After drying again, sand the jar with sandpaper and then sand with river stone to create a perfectly smooth surface. The dry pot is pit-fired using wood such as red cedar; the oxygen content during the firing process can predict the final color, from pale yellow copper to sparkling pitch black.

Donabe Donabe is made of coarse porous clay, which retains heat well and distributes it gently. Slow and uniform heat extracts the taste of meat and vegetables into the broth, introducing their essence into the pot, while retaining the taste of each food, resulting in a rich, clean (rather than turbid) dish. Take home: Kofuku Donabe (from $270, toirokitchen.com) Get the recipe: Miso Tofu Hot Pot with Ramen

The root of Ortega's dedication to making these pots lies in their obsession with perfectly cooked beans. "When I saw him for the first time, he handed me a pot and some beans, and said,'Don't add any seasoning, call me in the morning,' like a doctor," Kagle recalled. "My God, I didn't expect beans to get so much flavor from the pot."

Of course, I had to order one.

For the past 20,000 years, people have relied on clay as the basic building material for shelters, storage rooms and tools. Religious and cultural origin stories illustrate the importance of clay to early civilization. The gods shaped the earth's material into human form. (Fun fact: In her origin story, Wonder Woman was also carved from clay.) Modern scientific theories (have you heard of the original soup?) actually point out that the minerals and water in the clay are the sparks of life The perfect conditions. But perhaps the most important thing for mankind is that clay becomes a cooking utensil. Early earthenware pots allowed food to be easily cooked on the fire, which had the effect of reducing bacteria and releasing digestible nutrients. Even today, clay plays a huge, even quiet, and civilized role in human progress. (Reader, you are reading this story thanks to clay. The computer industry mines clay to obtain rare earth elements for use in laptops and mobile phones that you undoubtedly have at your fingertips.)

As metals became cheaper and abundant, clay pots were no longer popular, but the two materials were not the same. Clay cookware heats more slowly and more uniformly than metal, and can hold and dissipate heat more dispersedly. These qualities make it an ideal choice for stews and curries, stews or tender roasts (where the juices are produced from roasting steam), and evenly and perfectly cooked rice or beans. Around the world, clay is still used to make certain dishes that metal cookware cannot replicate: biryani and fish curry in India; moles, beans, and biria (and mezcal) in Mexico; casseroles and casseroles in southern France. Mashed beef; tagine from North Africa; caramel glazed pork with fish sauce in Vietnam; crispy rice from Hong Kong; jollof rice from Ghana; spicy chicken stew (kedjenou) from Côte d’Ivoire; a pot of soup from Korea; cooked in a large outdoor pot A Sri Lankan feast; Spanish cazuelas filled with hot shrimp and slowly cooked fish and vegetables; Boston baked beans; and Brazilian Baredo.

Tagine Tagine's cone-shaped lid keeps it cooler than the base during cooking, collecting and condensing aromatic steam, which continuously spreads the ingredients. Ori Menashe of Bavel, Los Angeles, said: “The taste of cooking in a tagine can’t be replicated in any other container,” and it’s impressive at the dining table where you can celebrate all the aromas in the steam. Take home: Colorful Circle Cooking Tagine ($70, treasuresofmorocco.com) Get the recipe: Apricot Lamb and Butternut Squash Tagine

Although the general thermal properties of clay are universal, a single clay bed has specific properties that give unique properties to cooking vessels made of clay. For example, for those mica clay pots, the clay from Taos Pueblo, New Mexico has a high content of mica, which can produce thin, strong, and good heat transfer containers. After the cooked food is removed from the heat source, it stays hot in one of the pots for several hours.

The ancient dried-up riverbed of Lake Biwa in the Iga region of Japan is home to a special type of clay that contains fossil fossils of marine life trapped. When fired in the kiln, they will burn and create tiny air pockets in the clay, which can hold heat very effectively. Iga clay is the preferred medium for making Donabe, a low-profile pot with a lid for cooking rice, fresh tofu and soup.

Chef Kyle Connaughton uses Donabe to cook most of his dishes at SingleThread Farms, his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Healdsburg, California. "Donabe is about the terroir of clay," he said. "Iga clay is unique; its heating method can accurately extract the flavor of the ingredients." This feature also makes it an ideal dish to keep food warm on the table, so in SingleThread, Connaughton uses beautiful utensils to bring guests Many dishes came.

Earthenware pots Earthenware pots are wrapped with thermal diffusion wire to prevent thermal shock, so that they can be used at high temperatures. They are also very suitable for single-portion soups and stews. Take home: Chinese clay pot (from $8, wokshop.com) Get the recipe: Salmon and Cabbage Ginger Crisp Rice

Naoko Takei Moore, a friend of Connaughton and co-author of the cookbook Donabe, imported Iga donabe into her store in Los Angeles, Toiro Kitchen and Supply, where she also held Donabe cooking classes. One of her favorite dishes to teach is yosenabe, a casual mixed hot pot. "For busy parents, Donabe will change your life because you gather your family at the table to cook together," she said. Her photo #happydonabelife under the Instagram hashtag exudes the enthusiasm and enthusiasm of modern clay pot chefs.

Clay is even suitable for cooking in its raw, unfired state. Last fall, Connie Mattis and her team at East Fork, an innovative desktop company in Asheville, North Carolina, hosted a special dinner where clay took the form of a more rustic cooking medium. Drawing inspiration from traditional Indus Valley and Chinese cooking techniques, they collaborated with local chef Matt Dawes to invite guests to wrap seasoned buttered quail with raw clay and fig leaves, and put them in a charcoal fire . The clay heats and dries quickly, forming a shell in which the birds steam. Cracked and brushed off the ashes, the clay bag reveals fully cooked, slightly smoky quail. "Everything tasted more flavor, with the aroma of fig leaves and spices," Dawes said.

After months of searching for clay pot restaurant dishes-from biryani in Adda Indian Canteen in Queens, New York, to moles in Masala y Maíz in Mexico City, to beef tagine in Bavel in Los Angeles-I am more and more convinced that clay pots are worthy of mine Have a place in the kitchen. But even though I am a professionally trained chef, I am still afraid of the idea of ​​cooking with clay at home. I researched deeply, carefully studied science, historical books, and religious texts, and talked to chefs and other experts about the sublime and intangible cooking in clay pots. All of these are enlightening, but they did not help me build confidence. I am still thinking hard about how to turn all this into my own home cooking.

So, it’s surprising that among everyone, it’s the international superstar, model, and legal home chef Chrissy Teigen. She posted a post on Instagram in which she made chili sauce for her husband John Legend Pepper. , Thus eliminating the idea of ​​cooking with clay. Tagine in clay. “I fell in love with Targis for the first time when I visited Morocco. This is one of my favorite places in the world,” Tegen told me later. She shared her passion widely: You can see David Chang trying to make tagines on the Netflix show "Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner" by David Chang, and she added one to Target's Cravings cookware series. "Cooking with clay feels like something people have been doing since the beginning, and the way that clay tagine retains heat is very comforting," she continued. As a parent of two young children, she found clay cookware very convenient. "I like braised or long-cooked food. You can prepare it in advance or cook it slowly for several hours without much care."

Teigen's comments made me realize that, in fact, we have used clay at home for many years: the ceramic insert of the slow cooker is the most widely distributed and used clay pot style in the United States today, with 12.7 million sold in 2018.

But traditionally shaped clay pots—especially those designed for direct heating cooking—produce dishes with nuances, rich flavors, and maintain their texture integrity beyond what a slow cooker can achieve. . I began to suspect that owning a series of clay pots might be the way to open up a new world of deliciousness in my home kitchen. But is the difference between clay cookware and metal worth investing in a new set of pots? I decided to test them.

Tarte Tatin “Clay is the best material for making caramel,” vowed by Jean-Baptiste Henry, the sixth-generation owner of Emile Henry, a French producer of flame products. "In metal, it will cook unevenly because of the heat conduction too fast. It is best for recipes that require slow heating, such as caramel and clay." His company sells shallow pans that are used to make caramel pastry tartines. . Take home: Tarte Tatin Set ($130, amazon.com) Get the recipe: Pear and shallot Tarte Tatin with raw goat cheese

F&W TEST KITCHEN collected more than 50 clay pots and started cooking. First, we boiled beans and compared dozens of bean cans from all over the Americas with Dutch cast iron ovens and stainless steel pots. In the blind tasting, beans cooked in an expensive handmade mica pot defeated all other beans. Those cooked in a stainless steel soup pot are relatively light, tough, and delicious. We repeated the test twice with a new taster and several different recipes, but the mica pot won every time. (It is worth noting that our second place winner is an old-fashioned Boston-style bean pot, and the price is only a small part of it.)

Next, we revisit Römertopf, which has been popular with home chefs since the 1970s. A rectangular baking pan with a lid, made of raw German clay from Ransbach-Baumbach, Germany. The "Roman pot" is often touted as a healthy way of cooking, because the glazed bottom does not require fat, and the unglazed porous The lid (soaked in water) before covering the plate) provides enough moisture to steam the contents of the pan. The result is juicy grilled chicken and vegetables with a strong flavor. During the test, a chicken was accidentally overcooked to an internal temperature of 190°F. It should have been hard and dry, but when the chicken was pierced with a knife, the juice sprayed out of the room. Forget the brine; forget the hair dryer-Römertopf is your key to making the best roast chicken.

Römertopf Römertopf's soaked lid generates steam in the container, which heats slowly and cooks evenly, producing succulent meat and concentrated vegetables. It's like baking in a salt crust without confusion. Take home: Römertopf Modern Series ($85, amazon.com or restonlloyd.com) Get the recipe: Römertopf Roast Chicken and Root Vegetables

In test after test, we found that everything cooked in clay tastes better than the same recipe cooked in a metal pan. The rice smells more floral and toasted, and each grain is fully cooked while maintaining its personality. The beans are creamy, very tender, and have no peeling. The braised pork tasted crispy and fresh, not muddy and heavy. Although I do not recommend burning and frying in a clay pot-the thermal shock of cold ingredients hitting a hot pan can cause breakage-but the gentle cooking method brings us a rich, delicious flavor.

The only disadvantage of clay pots is that they can break. Properly seasoning, cleaning and storing them are simple but necessary steps to keep them in good condition. Cooking with them also requires some practice—an awkward period of understanding each pot as an individual—I found that this allowed me to reinvest my senses and focus on the stove.

"On the basis of it, you cook in a part of the earth, which is very incredible," Ortiz told me when we caught up recently. "When you are willing to cook with these things—knowing that the pot may break, knowing that you can’t control everything—it will change the way you see the food you are cooking."