Recipes with lots of ingredients that produce a worthy result

[Shalmanese]

One of the things they say is the mark of a good chef (at least in the European tradition) is the ability to edit and pare down the number of elements on a plate. The urge to pile on different ingredients inevitably leads to confusion and conflict. This appears to be less true in Asian cooking where it's not uncommon to have recipes that call for 30 or 40 ingredients.

What are some recipes that call for an extremely large number of ingredients while still tasting good?

[Chris Hennes]

Mole, in Mexican cuisine, springs to mind: the key to a great mole is to get those 20-30 individual ingredients to harmonize, so that no single ingredient rises above the others. When done well, it's awesome.

[Chris Amirault]

Gumbo, especially if you consider all of the ingredients in your andouille and tasso separately. Not sure you'd get to 30, but....

[syoung68]

Anything in the Alinea cookbook. Well maybe not anything, but certainly most recipes call for more than your average number of ingredients.

[Moopheus]

One of the things they say is the mark of a good chef (at least in the European tradition) is the ability to edit and pare down the number of elements on a plate. .... This appears to be less true in Asian cooking where it's not uncommon to have recipes that call for 30 or 40 ingredients.

It may be, for once thing, that there is a difference between "ingredients" and "elements on a plate". An Indian spice paste or Mexican mole sauce may be complex and composed of a long list of individual items, but they don't really act as 20 things in the dish; they are a single element. You experience them as a unified whole. When you cook, either you have made your ingredients work together or you haven't; the number really doesn't matter.

[PopsicleToze]

Joong definitely comes to mind. I keep a printout of this pictorial in my reference folder under "Heavy Investment Cooking". Boy, they took me a loooooong time to make, but it was worth every second.

Pictorial

Rhonda