A Crash Course in Guyanese Cuisine | Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted
This is Georgetown, the Catholic Guyana, a tiny South American country that sits right on the edge of that mighty Amazon jungle.
Located on the northern edge of South America, this English-speaking nation is made up of thousands of square miles of untamed rivers and dense rainforests. I'm starting my journey on the coast in the capital city of Georgetown, which boasts an exciting fusion of Caribbean, Indian, and European cultures.
Now I'm here to make super talented gathering chef Velvet Adams, who's responsible for putting this somewhat unknown cuisine on the culinary map. Thanks, Buzz, Chrissy!
"Way, take care!"
"Right, this is the market where Delvin. Welcome to my country. Absolute pleasure!"
Chef Kelvin Adams is determined to introduce Guyanese cuisine to the world. After honing his culinary skills in the remote jungle cooking for oil drillers, he returned to his home in Georgetown to open the Backyard Cafe, a hot spot that celebrates his country's exciting one-of-a-kind dishes.
"When you think about how small the reputation of Guyanese cuisine is on the culinary map, right? Yeah, I'm hoping to find this sort of the DNA of that."
"Well, you're gonna get that! Yeah, so I'm gonna show you the market area and show you how I do it."
Guyana’s warm and tropical climate is year-round growing an incredible variety of produce, everything from your garden standards—those cherry tomatoes, beautiful Chinese long beans. Every household is gonna use this every day, too, Hottia root vegetables, one of which forms this starchy basis for much of the country's cuisine, cassava.
"This right here is the essence of what Guyana is all about! It serves like a root vegetable."
"It's a root vegetable. We got some cash up here too—a very unique product made from the bitter cassava, not the sweet cassava. And the bit excessive ax has cyanide in it. And this is why you wouldn't see that selling on the marketplace. I can take a heart, elephants now. Unless processed properly to remove the cyanide poison, bitter cassava can kill."
"And you're finishing that inside that?"
"You've finished this in our Pepperpot, which is a national dish of ours."
"Pepperpot is a meat stew created by Guyana's native Amerindian people, and I'm excited to try it! And would it be like a chicken Pepperpot, lamb?"
"No, well, this here is a lubber Pepperpot lover. So we're talking like a one-ball, like a noir pig."
"No, this is a big rodent."
"Are you saying useful rat? It's a big rodent? Wow, good stuff!"
"Weighing up to 26 pounds, l'abbé is a dog-sized mammal that lives in the Guyanese jungles. Its meat is that prized delicacy. It's actually quite nice. Yeah, it tastes sort of almost like a little suckling pig. It's actually very sweet."
"So could you do this with a chicken or a pork? Does it have to be rodent?"
"Doesn't have to be rodent. You could do this with chicken or pork."
"Is our pride and joy right here?"
"Harras this?"
"No, not the rat, the Pepperpot! The Pepperpot!"
"The Pepperpot and the kazran—that was good by the way, really indeed a nice little start of an insight into this Guyanese cuisine."
"So with all of this that I've shown you, yes, deep-rooted with our Amerindian people, right? The Amerindians are our first people, and we take pride and joy in our first people."
Delvin explains that the origins of Guyanese cooking lie with the Amerindian people, and my mission is to head to the jungle village everyone to spend a week immersing myself in their culture.
"You're gonna get on a plane, you get in the jungle, hunt, fish, and you can learn their ways and hopefully you'll learn a whole lot from them. At the end of the week, Delvin and I will cook for the tribe's chief, who will decide whether I'd come to grips with the cuisine that's existed for thousands of years."
"Right, no pressure, no pressure. Failure is not an option!"
"See you in the way, but see you, buddy!"
"Thank you!"
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