AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

Re­porter

an­ge­lo.je­didi­ah@guardian.co.tt

A pholourie is not usu­al­ly the sort of thing one as­so­ciates with fine din­ing. It is of­ten sold from road­side stalls and ven­dors across T&T as a com­mon com­fort snack. But for Chef Sab­ri­na Nicholls, sim­plic­i­ty is nev­er enough.

From her Sab­ri­na Ex­ot­ic Caribbean Fu­sion food truck, lo­cat­ed at Ed­die Hart Grounds in Tacarigua, Sab­ri­na has spent more than a decade reimag­in­ing pholourie in­to her spe­cial cre­ations, stuffed with chick­en, creamy lamb and mush­rooms, steak and cheese, smoked salmon and cream cheese, shrimp and crab.

And per­haps the most fa­mous of all, dasheen bush pholourie, her sig­na­ture of­fer­ing that she cre­at­ed over a decade ago.

But it doesn’t stop there. Many peo­ple look for­ward to her wider va­ri­ety of am­char (egg­plant am­char, ap­ple and dasheen bush), along with her var­i­ous chut­ney flavours (sor­rel and paw-paw, pump­kin and pineap­ple, co­conut and tamarind, to name a few).

For Sab­ri­na, these cre­ations aren’t sim­ply about nov­el­ty, but about a unique ex­pe­ri­ence.

“We are fine din­ing wrapped in cul­ture. That’s our slo­gan,” Sab­ri­na told Guardian Me­dia, de­scrib­ing her culi­nary phi­los­o­phy.

But long be­fore Sab­ri­na had cus­tomers crowd­ing her food truck to sam­ple her ‘big­ger than usu­al’ stuffed pholourie and ex­quis­ite chut­neys, she was be­ing trained in fine din­ing cui­sine. It is there she fell in love with the sci­ence and pre­ci­sion be­hind culi­nary tech­niques.

“Food is not just food. Food could ac­tu­al­ly be art. I be­gan look­ing at it from that per­spec­tive. That is when I start­ed a deep dive in­to re­al­ly, re­al­ly get­ting to know the fun­da­men­tal knowl­edge about cook­ing,” Sab­ri­na said.

That re­al­i­sa­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence trans­formed her re­la­tion­ship with cook­ing. And even while run­ning a cater­ing busi­ness, Sab­ri­na al­ways made time for culi­nary in­no­va­tion by ex­plor­ing new flavours and culi­nary pre­sen­ta­tion.

When it was time to build her own busi­ness, she was not keen on sim­ply in­tro­duc­ing some­thing for­eign. Sab­ri­na opt­ed to rein­tro­duce foods that would have shaped our child­hood.

“I re­al­ly had a love for our tra­di­tion­al food. Things that give nos­tal­gia. Things that, you know, you could eat whole day. As a child every­body would have had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to eat a pholourie,” she said.

It is that nos­tal­gia that be­came the foun­da­tion of Sab­ri­na’s Ex­ot­ic Caribbean Fu­sion. The dasheen bush pholourie emerged from that vi­sion.

“I asked my­self, how can I fuse some­thing as tra­di­tion­al and near to our heart and fuse it with some­thing that I’m clas­si­cal­ly trained for. I was like, ‘Okay, I want to try some­thing.’ I want to merge the two. I want to still be able to give a high-end taste, but still wrap it in some­thing that I think every Trinida­di­an is fa­mil­iar with.”

This re­sult­ed in her mak­ing and sell­ing an ar­ray of chut­neys and am­char. It was well re­ceived by cus­tomers, but Sab­ri­na knew she need­ed to pair it with some­thing.

By ex­per­i­ment­ing in the kitchen, she in­cor­po­rat­ed dasheen bush in­to the bat­ter, along with el­e­vat­ing the sea­son­ings and flavour pro­file. The re­sult, she says, was un­like any­thing on the mar­ket, and cus­tomers im­me­di­ate­ly took no­tice, and her food busi­ness ex­plod­ed with suc­cess.

To­geth­er with her hus­band and two daugh­ters, Sab­ri­na has built a busi­ness not just out of cu­rios­i­ty but through re­silience, some­thing she said is re­flect­ed in Caribbean cul­ture.

“I just need­ed to show that our flavours were so ver­sa­tile. Noth­ing that I do I want­ed it to be nor­mal. I want to put my stamp on it. I want to show peo­ple that our Caribbean flavours could be utilised in so many dif­fer­ent ways.”

But hav­ing a busi­ness idea that fea­tured some­thing new and in­no­v­a­tive did come with some chal­lenges.

Sab­ri­na said that in­tro­duc­ing un­fa­mil­iar flavour com­bi­na­tions to the pub­lic can be an up­hill bat­tle be­cause some peo­ple are scep­ti­cal of any­thing that ap­pears to tam­per with beloved tra­di­tion­al foods and prac­tices.

How­ev­er, Sab­ri­na says mo­ments like these fu­el her mo­ti­va­tion. Some of her great­est sat­is­fac­tion comes from watch­ing doubt­ful cus­tomers be­come be­liev­ers in her prod­ucts.

“We make it our busi­ness to say, ‘lis­ten, you need to try,’ We hold them hostage,” Sab­ri­na laughed.

“It’s to con­vert per­sons to un­der­stand that our flavours are so unique. That is one of the things we live for.”

Through­out her ca­reer, Sab­ri­na says she has ob­served a ten­den­cy among some Trin­bag­o­ni­ans to as­sume that for­eign flavours and im­port­ed cuisines are some­how su­pe­ri­or. Her ex­pe­ri­ences com­pet­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly con­vinced her oth­er­wise, as she watched judges and au­di­ences mar­vel at Caribbean in­gre­di­ents and Trinida­di­an flavour com­bi­na­tions.

“I have proven time and time again that when I go abroad and com­pete and I in­fuse our Trinida­di­an flavours in­to any­thing I can put my hand on, they were ‘wow-ed’, they were amazed,” she said.

Whether it is a stuffed pholourie burst­ing with creamy lamb and mush­room or a spoon­ful of sor­rel chut­ney paired with the tra­di­tion­al snack, Sab­ri­na hopes cus­tomers ex­pe­ri­ence two worlds at once.

As her busi­ness con­tin­ues to flour­ish, Sab­ri­na hopes to soon be able to take a back seat and fo­cus more on a man­age­r­i­al role while al­so con­tin­u­ing to ex­per­i­ment and de­vel­op new flavours in her chut­ney, am­char and pholourie.

All this, in an ef­fort to con­tin­ue her goal:

“I want them to have the nos­tal­gia, but I want them to al­so ex­pe­ri­ence the fi­nesse of fine din­ing.”