Chef at Home

Archive for October, 2009

Sometimes a fog rolls in. You may not see it coming. A fog clouds your vision. It also forces you to use your other senses in ways you may not have foreseen. A fog can be good if you are willing to pay a bit more attention.

 

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A golden orb which illuminates our kitchen.

 

Texas toast and butter steamed eggs have never had it so good; neither have our palates.

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When you have an idea or theory it is better to test it than wait to get around to it. All to often, I wait to get around to it. One idea was about the flat iron steak and its availablity from other animals beside the known steer. It turns out veal flat iron steaks are becoming readily available at local grocery stores; question answered. The second connected theory (pun is not intentional) was about the sinew or connective tissue in hangar steaks and flat irons. The ideas grew from work with pressure cooking the fat and silver skin from a sirloin and remembering a conversation with Wylie about his work with venison silver skin. The theory was that we could tenderize these connective tissues, generating a delicious gelatinous treat from the connective tissue and extracting gelatin into the cooking medium. Yesterday, the store had veal flat iron steaks un-butchered which allowed us to work with a new version of a cut of meat we enjoy while testing the idea about connective tissue. It turns out both ideas work. The connective tissue is better than bone marrow once we pressure cooked it for an hour. The flat iron is juicy, meaty and easily bonded to itself to create a thick veal steak.

 

As Aki likes to say, you are never going to know unless you try.

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I love the Amazon pre-order function. Not only do we get the latest books at a discount, shipped via two day Prime, because we use it that much, but once the books are ordered we can forget about them. Then on rainy Tuesdays like today we get a special delivery from our local UPS man. Today three great looking books arrived on our doorstep. Momofuku, The Craft of Baking, and Artisan Breads Every Day. It’s an abundance of riches that we have no time to read at the moment, those who follow my Twiiter know that my computer crashed and burned last week and I lost the entire hard drive, but neither of us could resist taking a few moments to flip through the pages of all three new additions to the library. Maybe we’ll take them with us to Hawaii in December to read. Of course then we’d have to carry them on the plane…maybe they will just be something great to decompress with after a long day of cooking, writing and entertaining Amaya. No matter when we delve into them, it’s nice to have something so intriguing to look forward to.

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Do you consider yourself a good baker? A great cook? A top notch chef? Are you a blue ribbon winning home baker? Have you begun an underground restaurant because you gave such stellar dinner parties? Do you think your palate is superior to anyone you eat with? Is your cookbook collection the envy of everyone? Is your recipe based blog highly trafficked? Do you give homemade candy as gifts? Have you taken innumerable cooking classes? Do you consume eggbeater for the recipes,  or for insight into professional cooking? Did you read Michael Ruhlman's Ratio? Did it radicalize or bore you? Inspire or confuse you?

Recipe: a method for achieving some desired objective.

I'd like to pose a question.

Do recipes get in the way of learning to cook, bake?

At what point does a baker, a chef, no longer need recipes, or, when are recipes needed and when are they crutches?

It's too many questions, I know. Not of which can, truly, be answered. But I'd like to involve you in considering them with me.

Because I've worked a number of professional cooking/baking venues, and I've recently jumped from large scale bakery baking to tiny batch plated dessert component baking, these questions have come banging on my door in the middle of the night. They're many, and loud. And they don't let me sleepwalk through. They don't let me stay still. They make me itch with their curved lines and that enigmatic dot at their end.

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Questions.

Questions without answers.
But questions that beget learning, delving, growing, understanding.

And then there are more questions.

Recipes, to get back to the subject, are validated. Everyone likes a good recipe. Recipes are passed down on notes, in book, translucent oily index cards. Unique handwriting scratchings. Recipes are whispered, graffitti'd, brought to the grave, tattood and celebrated.

Millions of trees have been cut down in the name of recipes. A cookbook is born every second. Recipes are facts. Recipes are coveted. You can trade a recipe like money, and there are as many recipes that 'wprk' as there are that 'don't work.' No one can argue with a good recipe, right?

And some recipes will live forever. In our hearts, in our minds. O recipe, we love you. For cliches ever on.

Is it blasphemy, then, to want to do away with recipes? Will I be witch hunted and burned alive for public view? Should I now beg for mercy, while you're silently collecting stones?

Recipes.

What are they, though?

Recipes represent certainty. They are certainty. They represent logic, arithmatic, and maybe even math. And we hate, we despise, we murder, we denounce uncertainty. We approve of Empirical and we're not afraid to erase its opposite.

We love facts. We love when things make sense.

Well, many of us at any rate.

Intuition.

Intuition represents uncertainty. Intuition is touchy-feely. Intuition is something beyond logic and is sometimes re-named as common sense. Intuition is related to psychic and many people would disregard all such subject as hokus pokus, never even needing to wash their clean logical hands of it because to them it never existed in the first place! Intuition is not empirical. Intuition is heart and love and none of these things exist under a microscope.

You either have a good sense of direction or you don't.

Intuition.

What is it? We define it by what it is not because we don't know what it is. And we despise uncertainty. We discard illogical. We call it crazy, hysterical, ridiculous, a farce, a scam; we want to stand on the other side of it and put it in the dunce's corner.

But you know what?

It's fear. We are terrified of uncertainty. We embrace safety & surety and we do everything in our power to keep groundlessness at bay or, better yet, throw it in the bay.

Can intuition be taught? Inspired? Can inspiration be dispensed? Does it take one great teacher to move you beyond, and delve you deeper, or many? Or none? Do you either have it or you don't?

What if you're somewhere in between? What if you sit on a fence, are a switch, can go both ways, are all ways, like bois & grrls, can see beyond what's at the tip of your nose, have a thing for sublimating the paradigm, live outside the pink box, use a recipe and intuition both, think with all of your brain, don't believe in opposites?

I believe in recipe and intuition both. Combined. In tandem. A guild, if you will.
I believe, though, that recipes can {sometimes} block intuition. {Especially when used alone.}
I believe if one places the recipe before what one knows to be true, that's where {some of the} trouble begins.
That's when "Bad Things Happen."
And, so, I beg of you to consider this.
I ask you to step outside the comfort and safety of recipes, especially only ever making a recipe once, or casting aspersions upon a recipe and it's supposed author/parent because 'it didn't work!' for you.

A recipe is a guide. A recipe is a series of suggestions, of possibilities. A recipe is a ratio.

One of the very first 'cookbooks' ever suggested to me was Le Repertoire de la Cuisine. While it is a compilation of recipes and methods, there are no measurements, no implicit instructions. Upon first glance there are merely lists. And yet, what one finds, upon closer and inquisitive inspection, is patterns.

And within patterns, there lies quiet learning.

Protein always does the same thing, whether in flour or chicken, egg whites or oranges.
Leavening can always be relied on to rise, whether via yeast, baking powder, egg whites, steam.

You may cook and bake for very different reasons than I, I know. You may not be seeking what lies around the corner from your tried and true tested recipes. You may think I'm relating recipes to life in a way that's silly and indulgent. You may not think everything is related, as I do.

I'm not asking you to set fire to your cookbook collection or never spend too many hours again on recipe based food blogs. I'm not even asking you to humor me by swallowing what I have to say whole.

All I'm asking, suggesting, is that you consider.

Consider stepping back from recipes. Consider how you learn, how you jump to the next level of learning, how you quietly cross lines and borders into new cooking/baking territory.

When you feel the bicycle under you, un-held, unsupported, for the first time, it's an exhilarating, terrifying, ebullient thrill! You don't know how you don't tip over; it's magic!

Baking is alchemy.

Tried & True Science, and mystery both.

Ingredients respond as much to logic as they do to love.

Recipes are ratios, but no ingredient stands still. Flour is not one thing, and neither is water. Ever block of butter, all around the world, will react differently. Even two sugars are not what you think they are, even though they look the same under a microscope!

If ingredients are alive, and changeable, then so must be recipes. And us; those who use, abide by, share, trade, give, alter, mix, fight with, discard, write & re-write, must also be amenable to holding on and letting go both, all.

Recipes & Intuition live on a spectrum. They are not opposites. Both are certainty & uncertainty. Two sides of one coin.

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There seems to be some understandable confusion with the announcement of our upcoming “web series”, ALTERNATE UNIVERSE. Reactions varying between “WTF!!??” and ” This time he’s jumped the shark for sure.” While shark jumping is always a danger–particularly since me and my partners take a perverse delight in flirting with just that with every new outrage (The family friendly Sardinia show being an example of a profoundly risky rub up against ‘off-brand,’ late-era Fonzarelli), these dark, nasty, frequently foul TWO MINUTE LONG web extras are not a replacement for NO RESERVATIONS. They are not a pilot for some new, family friendly, watered down follow on. They are instead brief, often violent, alt versions of NO RES–representing things we could never have done on the actual show-or the way things should have gone on the show–or animated acknowledgments of what already went terribly wrong on the show. Or, for example, my take on the network’s “Travel Bug” promo campaign–about which I was, shall we say…dubious.

They’ll appear on the fan site–for those who wish to click on them. I wrote the damn things–so there’s nobody to blame but me if they’re not as quick, nasty–and funny as I think they are. And I want to thank Andrew Zimmern and Samantha Brown in advance–for their extraordinarily good humored participation in one particularly lurid episode. I hope we don’t freak out their fan base.

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Years ago we attempted to make shrimp rigatoni. The results deflated me and the idea and our pasta extruder were put on the shelf. Now, with a bit more knowledge and a faded memory of past failures we decided to tackle the task again. The newest results showe promise and present new questions. We were able to make true rigatoni with shrimp which were delicious. The questions were about whether or not the results were better than the original and worth the effort in making them? As I type I realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our rigatoni is shrimp. The snap remains as does the intense flavor.

 

With rigatoni getting there it is time to reveal. My real goal is to make shrimp shells. Unfortunately inexpensive and
slightly expensive pasta extruders do not come with a die for shells. For now we will continue refining the rigatoni and perhaps venture into fusilli and macaroni. If anyone is up for sharing a pasta extruder for proteins feel free to drop a note, it would be great to be able to say we ate a bowl of shrimp shells.

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We have continued to work on aerated scrambled eggs from cooking medium, to time, to temperature. What is equally exciting is how they are dispensed and the cloud-like feeling they bring to a dish. We can now serve what appears to be a simple bowl of, well they do not quite resemble, scrambled eggs. Bare with our the poetic license. The surprise is what lies beneath the eggs. What have we hidden? What will balance the decadent cloud of eggs: caviar and creme fraiche, smoked salmon or steak tartare, bacon and brioche, corned beef hash, lobster fried rice? The savory ideas are relatively easy, what about if we sweetened the eggs: stewed fruits, maple pudding, french toast croutons? In this presentation we have not even touched upon the final topping: a gratin of crumbs, herbs, something lighter, a fine film, a crisp.

 

All these ideas from a carton of eggs.

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