How do you keep in touch with new contacts in style? Moo has a great “Printfinity” feature where you can print multiple backs to your cards, making it easier to display a photography portfolio or a series of ideas. Inspired by these design-oriented quotes, I decided to create a series of food and marketing-related twists on traditional proverbs for my personal cards. Check it out:
Nights in culinary class move in a dance of steel and time pressure. Yank out the wishbone. Quarter the chicken. Sear the skin. Chop the mirepoix. Simmer the stock. Strain the sauce. Pull the chicken from the oven. Plate the food. Run to the front. Hope for the best.
Chef Ray glanced at my plate of poulet sauté chasseur (hunter-style chicken) and gave me a hard look. “I think I’ve told you this before,” he said. “This plate. What’s wrong with it?” I looked down at my chicken. Among the finely shredded flakes, there were some unruly tufts of parsley perched on top, shamelessly advertising their prowess at escaping my knife. “I know, I know,” I apologized, “the parsley isn’t chopped small enough. And there’s some pieces of stems.”
With a spoon, he pointed at a resolutely intact parsley leaf. “Look,” said Chef Ray, “you spent two hours making this dish, and you put herbs like this on the plate it and it just ruins the presentation.” He chased the offending chunk of parsley to the edge. “The chef that taught me insisted on really finely chopped herbs, so since that’s how I was taught, this is a pet peeve of mine too.” Chef Ray prodded at the chicken. “This is cooked well, it’s not overdone and the skin looks great. But you put parsley like that on the plate and that’s the first thing you see.” I bowed my head. “Yes, Chef.” He sighed. “All right, start cleaning up.”
God damn it, I hate chopping herbs.
You know what it looks like when Chinese people chop herbs? Like a lawnmower belched huge piles of foliage on the table. And that’s perfect. We embrace chunky cilantro and scallions like Sir Mix-a-Lot loves chunky booty. Let me show you some examples:
Here’s a plate of Five Spice Beef from China House in Mountain View. It looks like they didn’t bother chopping anything, they just threw entire stalks of cilantro on the plate.
Maybe we need to look at a better restaurant? Cult favorite Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco has won all sorts of awards, so let’s take a look at their mapo tofu. Yup, you can definitely see big pieces of leaves and stems floating on that chili oil.
And my personal favorite, Double Cooked Pork from Happy Kitchen in LA. THEY ONLY USED CILANTRO STEMS!
Let’s review the most common culinary school sins:
In other words, no matter how hard you try, your plate is never good enough. Wait, this is starting to sound familiar…
Maybe the solution is to give up on cooking?
At least my extra tournage work at home paid off. Chef Ray looked at my potato cocottes and said they looked great without other comment. Phew.
I can’t even imagine how much of a pressure cooker it would be to compete on TV. (Well, maybe I can. This piece from pastry chef Allison Robicelli is a hilarious read if you’d like to hear more.) I would have a nervous breakdown. Or start pouring fish sauce on the judges’ cars.
Whatever. My new favorite food photography blog is now Dimly Lit Meals for One (exactly what it sounds like).
Clearly the solution is to start chopping like this guy:
After four lovely years at WordPress.com, I’ve decided to move my content to a new domain: http://www.crystal.kitchen (Thanks ICANN for releasing those new top-level domains!)
I’ve implemented a 301 site redirect, so visitors from the web will be automatically sent to the new site, but if you follow this blog via RSS or email, please update your subscriptions and bookmarks to the new location.
And remember, pans pulled out of the oven are hotter than they appear.
François Payard is a top pastry chef, a long-standing innovator in New York’s dessert scene and winner of a James Beard award in 1995. Which is why it’s incredibly jarring when he’s looking at you from 10 feet away, asking what’s in egg whites. “Yes you, I’m looking at YOU in the second row,” he says. “Uh,” you stammer, “it can’t be lecithin because that’s in yolks…so albumin?”
Payard was giving a pastry demo for students at the International Culinary Center, and we were all there to learn some of his techniques (and secretly hoping for dessert samples). Today’s tasks: chocolate phyllo dough, caramel, chocolate rice crispies, chocolate chantilly cream. With a comfortable patter, he explained the steps he was taking while quizzing us to make sure we were paying attention. “I don’t make the phyllo dough, I buy it, like everybody else. Now, brush clarified butter and cocoa on phyllo, and between each layer, sprinkle some sugar to allow caramelization. It comes out almost like puff pastry, or if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was bad puff pastry because you have the layers but it doesn’t rise.” He picked up a heavy pan. “We want to make sure it stays flat, so then you”—whack!—”hit it like a mal boyfriend, with the back of a pan or a rolling pin.” He added more phyllo, butter and cocoa in repeating layers. “What’s the best way to cook phyllo dough?” he asked. “Use a sheet pan, upside down, with at least three trays on top to make sure it stays flat. See, all these little things will make you a chef, not a student. Always ask why you’re doing something. I’m not here to show you what I can do, I’m here to show you what you can do.”
Payard continued. “We want to make an incredible caramel. What will help give flavor to my caramel? You, in the middle.” The girl hesitated. “Salt?” she said. “Exactly,” said Payard. He demonstrated how to warm and whip cream to prevent it from exploding when being added to the sugar, and drizzled the caramel on white parchment paper to see if it was the right color. “Does anyone know what’s chocolate chantilly?” he asked. “It’s 2 cups heavy cream and 1 cup chocolate. Because it’s so simple, it’s easy to fuck it up. Your chocolate must be hot, and your cream must be cold. It’s all about technique.” Payard paused to look at us. “So, don’t fuck it up.”
In a matter of minutes, all of these simple components were ready to come together. Payard used a ring mold to cut out a short cylinder of rice crispies, topped it with a plump dollop of chocolate chantilly and a sharp wedge of phyllo. With a sprinkle of powdered sugar and several smears of caramel on the plate, the composed dessert was as elegant as an Oscar gown. “It’s not about complication,” Payard explained, “it’s about the right ingredients.” He waved at his cookbooks, sitting on the edge of the workstation. “In America, no one likes this book because it’s too complicated. But you should look at the components, maybe there is a chocolate sauce that you can use, or something else that you can take away. Pastry is always time consuming. In a restaurant, you already have the chocolate sauce made, you always have rice crispies on hand. If you start from scratch, it will take you four hours.”
Continue reading “Hit It Like a Mal Boyfriend” and Other Lessons from Chef François Payard
The Drawing Center is hosting Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, the first major museum exhibition of Adrià’s notebooks and visualization tools. As you may know, Adrià is widely acknowledged as one of the best chefs of our time, someone who radically impacted the way cooking has evolved in the last decade or so. For over two decades, he helmed the kitchen at El Bulli in Roses, Spain, where his staff rigorously experimented with the play of aromas, textures and flavors. You may never have an opportunity to try Adrià’s spherified olives, pine nut marshmallows or rose-scented mozzarella, especially since El Bulli is now closed. However, if you’ve ever encountered a traditional dish remade in another form (like a sandwich presented as a drink) or a contemporary menu without defined categories (appetizers vs entrees), you’ve probably tasted Adrià’s influence.
The popular conception of creativity is that creative insight just happens, out of the blue, in the shower, or when you’re least expecting it. In Adrià’s eyes, the creative process is not really about spontaneity, it is an extremely organized process. El Bulli was tasked with preparing 30+ dishes per diner each night, with the goal of never serving the same dinner twice, particularly for repeat customers. The pressure to constantly come up with new and innovative dishes was immense. While some of El Bulli’s dish concepts were created spontaneously and inadvertently, more often the creative process looked like this:
We search (using a method):
Regional cooking as a style
Influences from other cuisines
Technique-concept search
The senses as a starting out point for creativity
The sixth sense
Symbiosis of the sweet/savoury worlds
Commercial products and preparations in haute cuisine
A new way of serving food
Changes in the structure of dishes
Adaptation
Association
Inspirations
Deconstructions
Minimalism
Changes in menu structure
*******synergy*****
AN IDEA
We develop the idea with the help of methods or with intuition
Tests
Analysis/Reflection — We use the mental palate
Finish and final tests = PROTOTYPE
Serving the diner
Final retouches
THE DISH CATALOGUED
If you attend the exhibit, don’t forget to check out the film screening downstairs, which includes a photo of every dish served at El Bulli.
Dear readers, I have a confession to make: while I work in the seafood industry and am an avid seafood lover, I have never filleted a fish. It’s not for a lack of opportunity per se. The thing is, I was raised in an Asian family where the policy on fish was, “If you can’t pick out the bones, then you don’t deserve to eat.” So we cleaved our fish into large steaks or steamed it whole, with a splash of soy sauce over a shower of ginger and scallion strips. It was simple and satisfying, no need to get fancy.
Which brings us to Fish Week, or lessons 8 and 9 at culinary school. “What’s wrong with just buying filleted fish?” someone asked. “Nothing,” replied Chef Ray, “except that you don’t really know how fresh it is. Unless they fillet it in front of you, you can’t check the eyes, the gills or the skin. You can only smell it for freshness. Hell, you don’t even know if it’s the fish they say it is.” We mulled that over. “This lesson was originally written so that each team fillets a fish together. But that’s silly, what’s the point of filleting just half of the fish?” said Chef Ray. “I ordered enough fish so that each of you can fillet one round fish and one flatfish. Let’s get to it.”
In just a few deft motions, Chef Ray slit the striped bass along its spine and gently removed a fillet. “Use long, smooth strokes guys. Don’t saw at it, and make sure you bend your knife so that it scrapes against the bones,” he instructed. You could hear his blade rasping against the spine. After both fillets were removed, Chef Ray slid his knife between the meat and skin, and gently stripped it away. What remained was a perfect slab of fish, pink and well shaped. It looked simple enough.
“Remember to always check the freshness of the fish before you start!” said Chef Ray. “Clear eyes, taut stomach, bright skin, gills full of blood, no fishy or off smells.” I blotted my fish with a clean towel to dry it, and began snipping off the fins with kitchen shears. “Watch out for the spikes in those dorsal fins, they can really hurt!” warned Chef Ray. With my fish knife (thin, flexible and very sharp), I began slicing against the spine. Wait, is that bone or meat? Why is the skin not slipping off? I glanced across at my partner’s fish; he’d already finished his fillets and was cleaning his carcass of entrails. “Five more minutes!” said Chef Ray. I hurried to remove the skin and yank the remaining pin bones out with pliers. Two fillets sat on the cutting board, mangled by cuts and disappointment.
The process for filleting flatfish is a little different than for round fish. Flatfish have four fillets, not two, and swim horizontally, with their bellies parallel to the seafloor. You begin by slitting down the center of the fish, following the spine, then take out two fillets from the top of the fish, and two from the underside of the fish. It’s much easier to fillet a flatfish and the fins are floppy, so you can’t stab yourself inadvertently. After tackling my flounder, I was left with four ragged but mostly respectable fillets, and a carcass which would be used for fish stock.
Continue reading Good Thing There’s Sauce: How to Butcher and Cook Whole Fish