About the project

In this blog, I will challenge myself to go beyond the casual global, culinary exploration I have been doing until now. I will cook one dish from every single country on the planet.

One dish per country

I will cook at least one dish from every single country on the planet. A quick visit to Wikipedia gives the current count of sovereign states as 206 ​[1]​. If I ‘visit’ one country per week, this will take as 4 years. That is a massive undertaking.

Choosing one dish per country is not just unfair. It is incredibly, inconceivably, glaringly obviously unfair. A single main and maybe a few sides cannot begin to cover thousands of years of culinary history shared by millions of people in a country. Reducing a giant country like China or India with a billion people each, both covering large areas with multiple climates, geography regions and ethnic groups to a single dish is insane. Is India best represented by creamy dal makhni from Punjab, crunchy pani puri from the streets of Mumbai or a few steamed breakfast idli with coconut chutney from Chennai?

Instead large countries should in all likelihood be represented by one dish per province/state. But that would add 22 weeks for China, 28 weeks for India, 85 weeks for Russia etc. And besides, where do you draw the line between large, multidish-countries and single meal countries? One dish per country it has to be.

How to choose that one dish

The next question is, what dish do you pick to represent a whole country? The only answer I have is that there is no objective way to do it. Instead I will take the unscientific route and pick

• a dish I know and like and want to showcase; or
• a meal that incorporates a, to me, unfamiliar ingredient or technique; or
• something recommended by people I know; or
• a dish which is suggested during this adventure; or
• something that fits with other recipes on this blog; and
• is vegan or convertible without too much loss.

One thing that makes this choice easier is that culinary regions are not based on countries: often neighbors share ingredients and food culture to at least some degree. If I find many interesting dishes for one country, chances are I can find neighbors that also make one or more of the dishes, giving me an opportunity to feature multiple dishes and tick of a few extra countries.

In this blog, I will challenge myself to go beyond the casual global, culinary exploration I have been doing until now. I will cook one dish from every single country on the planet.

Disclaimer

I will try to cook one or more dishes for every country on the planet. Obviously, I am not from 99.5% of the countries. Best case scenario is that I know someone from the country and have visited it myself. Most of the time though, my research is based on different websites and books, without me ever tasting the real dish (which often is non-vegan anyway).
In other words: these recipes are not authentic but I hope you readers will enjoy my renditions and veganized versions of this small sample of the world’s different cuisines.