David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Surrealist Video

A sta­ple of Andean diets for thou­sands of years, quinoa (KEEN-wah) has been tout­ed as a super­food recent­ly for its high pro­tein con­tent and poten­tial to solve hunger crises. It’s rep­re­sent­ed by the usu­al celebri­ties: Kate Moss, Gwyneth Pal­trow, Jen­nifer Anis­ton … and David Lynch. Oh yes, have you not tried David Lynch’s quinoa recipe? Well, you must. If you’ve remained unswayed by the glit­terati, per­haps this very Lynchi­an of pitch­es will turn you on to the grain. Watch the first part of Lynch’s video recipe above, part two below. It opens at peak Lynch: puls­ing omi­nous music, gar­ish light­ing, and the obses­sive kind of patience for the slow build that may be David Lynch’s alone.

By Part Two of Lynch’s video recipe, we are ful­ly immersed in a place seem­ing­ly far away from quinoa, a place of the por­ten­tous topog­ra­phy of David Lynch’s inner life. Every­day objects take on a mys­te­ri­ous glow­ing res­o­nance. Small rit­u­al­is­tic exchanges stand in for glob­al shifts of con­scious­ness.

So in a way, maybe we’re still close to the mag­ic of quinoa. Lynch made the short video as an extra for the 2006 Inland Empire DVD. As Dan­ger­ous Minds points out, its cur­rent YouTube iter­a­tion “looks like crap” and “there’s at least a cou­ple of min­utes miss­ing… it’s still worth a look.”

If you don’t have David Lynch’s patience but do have his taste for quinoa, read the full recipe below. It’s like­wise full of delight­ful asides and digres­sions.

Yield: 1 bowl
Cook­ing Time: 17 min­utes

Ingre­di­ents:
1/2 cup quinoa
1 1/2 cups organ­ic broc­coli (chilled, from bag)
1 cube veg­etable bul­lion
Brag­gs Liq­uid Aminos
Extra vir­gin olive oil
Sea salt

Prepa­ra­tion:
* Fill medi­um saucepan with about an inch of fresh water.
* Set pan on stove, light a nice hot flame add sev­er­al dash­es of sea salt.
* Look at the quinoa. It’s like sand, this quinoa. It’s real real tight lit­tle grains, but it’s going to puff up.
* Unwrap bul­lion cube, bust it up with a small knife, and let it wait there. It’ll be hap­py wait­ing right there.
* When water comes to a boil, add quinoa and cov­er pan with lid. Reduce heat and sim­mer for 8 min­utes.
* Mean­while, retrieve broc­coli from refrig­er­a­tor and set aside, then fill a fine crys­tal wine glass—one giv­en to you by Agnes and Maya from Lódz, Poland—with red wine, ‘cause this is what you do when you’re mak­ing quinoa. Go out­side, sit, take a smoke and think about all the lit­tle quinoas bub­bling away in the pan.
* Add broc­coli, cov­er and let cook for an addi­tion­al 7 min­utes.
* Mean­while, go back out­side and tell the sto­ry about the train with the coal-burn­ing engine that stopped in a bar­ren, dust-filled land­scape on a moon­less Yugosla­vian night in 1965. The sto­ry about the frog moths and the small cop­per coin that became one room-tem­per­a­ture bot­tle of vio­let sug­ar water, six ice-cold Coca-colas, and hand­fuls and hand­fuls of sil­ver coins.
* Turn off heat, add bul­lion to quinoa and stir with the tip of the small knife you used to bust up the bul­lion.
* Scoop quinoa into bowl using a spoon. Driz­zle with liq­uid amino acids and olive oil. Serve and enjoy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

The Recipes of Famous Artists: Din­ners & Cock­tails From Tol­stoy, Miles Davis, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, David Lynch & Many More

10,000 Vin­tage Recipe Books Are Now Dig­i­tized in The Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book & Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness