I like to mix it up with fusion food
Chef Ixta Befrage tells PRUDENCE WADE about her world of influences for her new recipe book
WHILE most of us tend to get recipe inspiration from Instagram or cookbooks, Ixta Belfrage has a rather more unusual outlet: her dreams.
“I dream a lot about recipe development,” the 31-year-old chef admits. “It’s not about particular dishes, but I’ll dream about combinations. I keep a notebook by my bedside, because quite often I’ll wake up with an idea and I’ll need to write it down, otherwise I’ll forget.”
Many of these combinations will be found in Mezcla, Ixta’s first solo cookbook (she co-wrote Flavour in 2020 with mentor Yotam Ottolenghi).
Ixta’s friend came up with the title, and it immediately felt right. “It’s the perfect word,” she says of ‘Mezcla’. “It means mix, blend or fusion [in Spanish], so it’s the perfect word to describe the recipes, and also my background, and me.”
Ixta’s background and culinary influences are certainly eclectic. She lived in Tuscany, Italy, for four years (“my formative childhood years”), as her father worked in wine. Ixta has strong childhood memories from this time – mainly related to food.
“My best friend in Italy, her family ran a restaurant, a classic Italian trattoria with incredible food,” Ixta reminisces. “Her granddad made all the pasta for the restaurant in the laundry room in their family house, and I would always go hang out with him and watch him cook."
There are plenty of Italian-inspired dishes in the book but there are other influences too. Ixta’s mother is Brazilian (and she lived there for a year when she was 19), while her father was born in the US but moved to Mexico when he was 14 – that’s where he met Ixta’s mother.
Italian, Brazilian and Mexican flavours run through the book – along with other cuisines from all over the world – and are part of Ixta’s efforts to reclaim the word ‘fusion’ in cooking. “I think people used to assume that when you say something is fusion, it was confused and lacked in focus, and the flavours were all over the place and didn’t make sense,” she muses.
“Maybe in the early-2000s or the late-90s, that might have been the case, with chefs doing fusion cooking.” But she suggests that’s changed now.
“If you really think about it, most dishes were fusion before they became classics. For example, one of my favourite Brazilian dishes is moqueca [a seafood stew] – it’s a classic Brazilian dish but it’s actually a mix of West African, indigenous, Brazilian and Portuguese
influences coming
together.
"Even classic dishes were once probably a fusion of other things.”
While Italian, Mexican and Brazilian cuisines might not have lots in common, what they do share, Ixta indicates, is “big, bold flavours”. With plenty of Italian and Mexican chains on the high street, many of us have a relatively good grasp of the basics of each cuisine – but Brazilian might be a little bit more unknown.
She says: “One of my favourite ingredients in the world is red palm oil, which is ubiquitous in Brazilian cuisine. I’m sure a lot of Brazilians assume it’s a Brazilian ingredient, but actually it’s from West Africa, and was brought over by the Portuguese.”
Ixta’s upbringing and family background isn’t the only thing that influences her cooking. When she was younger and trying to figure out her path in life, she settled on following her passion in food – and with no experience, sent out her CV to a few restaurants asking for a job.
“I didn’t expect anyone to get back to me, but the next day I was woken up by a phone call from a very grumpy chef who was like, ‘Can you come in for a trial?’,” she remembers. “I actually had no idea who was calling me, where they were calling from, and when I showed up it turned out to be Nopi – which is one of
Yotam’s [Ottolenghi] restaurants.”
Ixta spent nine months at Nopi, which she admits to finding “extremely difficult – I was one [woman] of 15 or so men in the kitchen”.
While she says things at the Ottolenghi group are different now and there’s much more of an emphasis on a more equal gender split in the kitchen, she was happy to soon find her way to Ottolenghi’s test kitchen – a team of chefs who come up with new recipes.
“I didn’t even know recipe development was a job,” Ixta says. “I didn’t know how many avenues there were in food.”
She worked in the test kitchen for four-and-a-half years, and says of her old boss Yotam: “He had an influence on my cooking before I even met him, but working with him was an incredible experience. I don’t think anyone’s ever surprised to hear he really is as kind and wise and wonderful as he seems. He gave us the freedom to be creative. I wouldn’t have written this book without his support.”
Mezcla: Recipes To Excite by Ixta Belfrage, £26, Ebury Press. Photography by Yuki Sugiura