Latest / Chef's PSA Podcast / David Breeden: Classical Foundations, Modern Precision & The Philosophy of Perfection (Ep. 172)

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David Breeden: Classical Foundations, Modern Precision & The Philosophy of Perfection (Ep. 172) · Chef's PSA Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello chefs, this is Chefs PSA podcast.
• 0:02
  I'm your host Andre Natera. Today we welcome back Chef David
• 0:06
  Breeden for Part 2. This time we go deep into
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  culinary philosophy, cooking methods, stock making, sous
• 0:13
  video cooking, the proper way to handle ingredients.
• 0:16
  Chef David gives us a master class on culinary excellence.
• 0:21
  Stay tuned. Chef, you know the the DMX song
• 0:38
  here we go again here we go again It's good to have you back
• 0:44
  Last time you were here we spent a lot of discussion talking
• 0:47
  about, you know, the journey from, you know, your upbringing
• 0:52
  to. Becoming the chef.
• 0:55
  But today we're going to talk a lot about technique, cooking
• 0:57
  philosophy, and, you know, just just some of the things that
• 1:03
  you've developed as a chef in terms of your creativity, your
• 1:07
  methodology and the practices. One of the first, I want to
• 1:12
  share a story with you. First of all, when I was, I was
• 1:15
  in San Francisco, I was in Napa and we were at the farmers
• 1:18
  market and I was with a group of chefs and we're wandering around
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  and this was like part of my culinary evolution as a chef for
• 1:27
  me. And I've had a couple.
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  So you go from 0 knowing nothing to culinary school.
• 1:32
  So you have like a foundation, you know, you know how to make
• 1:34
  Roux, you know how to make bechen, all the five mother
• 1:36
  sauces and at least you think you do, right.
• 1:40
  And then so that was like a big step up for me from nothing to
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  now I have vocabulary and fundamentals.
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  And then I worked in a kitchen where, you know, we're making
• 1:51
  pasta, we're making desserts and I'm the saucier.
• 1:53
  And I'd go in off the clock early and make the soup because
• 1:56
  every day we had a soup of the day and making the stocks.
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  And it was, it was, it was a wonderful experience for me.
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  That was like my second evolution because now I had the
• 2:05
  theory. But it's like now I have the
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  practice and with the chef's little and let's put oxtail in
• 2:09
  the stock. And no, no, 40% celery.
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  Not, not, you know, 25% or whatever.
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  And so now I'm, I'm putting a little personality on the food.
• 2:18
  So now here I am a few years later, I'm in in the Bay Area
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  and we're at the farmers market and I think I understand food,
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  but I really don't, you know, I think about how naive I was back
• 2:28
  then thinking that I was, you know, hotshot chef and I
• 2:30
  understood food. And I'm walking through the
• 2:32
  farmers market and this this vendor has grapes and he tells
• 2:37
  my friend, try some grapes. And so my friend tries them and
• 2:41
  he's like, oh, fuck, these are amazing grapes.
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  And you know, I kind of have an eye roll and they're like, you
• 2:47
  want to try the grapes? I'm like, I'm all right.
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  I've had. I've had grapes before.
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  Yeah, I know what grapes taste like.
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  And, you know, the farmers like these are really good.
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  And he goes into, it's like, yeah, I get it.
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  I'm I'm all right. I've had grapes.
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  And then my friend is like, no, no, you should really try these
• 3:00
  grapes and, you know, to placate them both.
• 3:04
  I thought, fine, I'll try the grape.
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  And I tried it. And it was like that Ratatouille
• 3:09
  moment where like my brain just kind of my consciousness went
• 3:13
  into the universe of food and I was like, what did I try?
• 3:17
  I've never had a grape. Like I had no frame of
• 3:18
  reference. And since then either, like I've
• 3:21
  never tried a grape that good. And I probably have, I just,
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  I've had it then. And it was, it was an
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  evolutionary jump in my own ability as a chef because it was
• 3:31
  at that moment that I realized ingredients.
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  You know, it was like, you have the technique and you have the
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  foundations from school. And now I have a little bit of
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  scratch cookery under my belt. But this is like, OK, this is
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  the next level. This is the ingredient level and
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  respecting them. Have you had those?
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  Moments and what? Were they?
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  That's a good question. I mean, it's kind of like a come
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  to Jesus, right? Like you're like, OK, here's
• 3:58
  the, the, the pinnacle of this ingredient and I had no idea it
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  even existed. And, you know, I talk a lot
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  about the turnips and I think that in our, in our profession,
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  I, I had a transcendental moment around the turnip.
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  That was if you, you go to any grocery store in the United
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  States, you can buy a turnip, You can buy a rutabaga.
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  They're usually coated in wax. So the rutabaga will be the
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  turnips have been sitting around since God knows when they look
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  like corrugated cardboard when you cut them in half.
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  You know, I think the turnip for me was really the one that gave
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  me that eye opening moment. If we talk about like raw
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  produce, there's quite a few of those moments.
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  And I experienced most of them in, you know, probably most of
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  which was Peter Jacobson, the vegetable whisperer or they what
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  the leaves call the wild farmer. But the turnip for me was such a
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  humble ingredient. It's almost derogatory.
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  I think it was Hemingway that would call someone a silly
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  turnip. Like you're just the kind of
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  like a lesser class, right? It's like a turnip is the for
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  the food of the of the poor, the turnip, you know, do I look like
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  I just fell off the turnip truck?
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  You know, like, I mean, it's kind of a thing, right?
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  So I love, I love the turnip. And I remember pulling a turnip
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  fresh from the ground that when you cut it and you smell it has
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  this faint aroma horseradish. It's kind of sweet.
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  It's kind of it's really delicate, soft, not the dried
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  version that we know from from a modern market, if you want to
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  call it modern, but any, any, you know, go to any grocery
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  store that the turnips going to be horrible for the most part, I
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  should say. So for me, that was the gateway
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  was wow, the term's actually an exceptional vegetable.
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  This is brilliant. And it really opened my eyes to
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  learning how to work with the product from the earth.
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  And you know, I speak about the turnip a lot with the philosophy
• 6:24
  of taking the backseat to the vegetable and the turnip that
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  did I mention the turniph in our last conversation?
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  No. Maybe you did I.
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  Don't, I don't think if I'm repeating, I apologize, but it's
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  important, really important to me.
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  So what? And here's the here's the kind
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  of the philosophy and there's a lot of those aha moments, but
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  the, the, the quote UN quote epiphanies.
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  But really the turnip was the gateway because when you work
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  with, with, with Mother Nature, with the farmer, with the gifts
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  from God, with the gifts from the soil, we plant a seed of a
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  turnip and we have turnip sprouts.
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  Make a little salad with turnip sprouts.
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  There's nothing else you can really do.
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  You're not going to wilt them, cream them, do this or that.
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  You seed those sprouts tightly in a row and they grow to micro
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  turnips. So you pull every other one and
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  you have a micro turnip. You can't braise them, you can't
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  really saute them. It's irresponsible to do so.
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  You can't certainly go not going to puree them, make soup of
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  them. You have crudite.
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  You're listening to what the vegetables telling you to do.
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  When you another week goes by, they grow some more, you
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  intermittently pull every other one again and you have a turnip
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  that's yay size. Maybe you can quickly saute.
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  Maybe, maybe it's best just serve shaved in in in my mind
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  that I won't really cook them yet.
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  And then you have that expression.
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  So no matter what I want as a chef, I take a back seat to what
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  Mother Nature is telling me to do and I listen to that
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  vegetable once again. Another week goes by.
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  They grow more because as we intermittently pull, they have
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  room to grow. Then I have something that I can
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  have some dexterity with and we call it what we could put a
• 8:23
  knife on it. So then I'm now I can put a
• 8:26
  knife on and I can show some technique, I can show some
• 8:28
  turning, I can show something like that.
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  But generally it's really at that point still just season and
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  serve raw, few more days. Week goes by, they've had time
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  to grow into something that we can actually start to cook.
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  And I can have it roasted a little bit in beef fat, serve it
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  with some something, a little more fork and knife, maybe with
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  an entree and maybe comfy them in duck fat and serve them with
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  a piece of sturgeon with, with cabbage and mustard sauce or,
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  or, you know, whatever. But I'm still interpreting what
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  it's telling me to do. So, So for me that, that was a
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  huge part of my, of my learning, my growing, my philosophy,
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  development of the philosophy was to take myself out of it and
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  listen to what it's telling me to do.
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  So then the next step in that is you have larger turnips that are
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  no longer, I don't care if I want crudite.
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  You're not cutting batons and serving crudite.
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  That's just not appropriate. You're not, you're not really
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  going to, you need to, to actually cook it.
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  So that now I have soup, I have the lute, I have a base for
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  sauce. Maybe I make a turn of cream
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  that I braise the greens in to then have braised turnip greens
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  with turnip cream season with a little of that horseradish
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  because remember when we slice it, we smell it, get that
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  beautiful aroma of that horseradish.
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  So we would accentuate that. So now I have a complete, like a
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  really complete flavor profile. Maybe I cream the greens and put
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  them in a pierogi. And now I have that element so
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  that if I have a couple of different expressions through
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  the field, you know, there's, there's they don't all grow
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  exactly the same. So now I have maybe a little bit
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  of crude to say a greens and a pierogi, a slice on top of my
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  surgeon with that's been comfy and duck fat, so on and so
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  forth. So now and maybe a volute of the
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  turnip rounds out the entire thing.
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  I didn't do anything to interpret what it gave me.
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  And my, and my favorite part is in the very end of the season
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  when we clear the field, because as the field grows, it starts
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  to, it needs to be managed, it needs to be maintained.
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  It starts to look ugly. And we clear everything at one
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  time and we have a lot of of product that maybe is unsightly.
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  Maybe it has the tracks of a worm that go through it because
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  they crawl around, you know, through the soil.
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  Maybe there's, you know, there's some, some, some different
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  things there. The greens are not, are too
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  tough to really use at that point.
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  So we clear the entire field so we can till the soil, prepare
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  for the next crop. And we have one or 200 lbs of
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  large, unsightly, visually only visually flavors, paramount,
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  beautiful, unsightly turnips. And then we will make my
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  grandmother's turnip relish. So we'll dice, we'll clean and
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  dice all the turnips. A little bit of apple, a little
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  bit of sweet onion, a little bit of dill, mustard seed, caraway
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  or brine with white vinegar. Salt, finite amount of sugar.
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  I don't like things sweet. If I want to get sweet, I'll add
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  sweet later. In general, I don't really use a
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  lot of sugar, specifically white sugar I don't really love.
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  And then we preserve hundreds of pounds of this beautiful turnip
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  relish. Well, actually, let me just
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  quickly just back up. After we brine it, osmosis takes
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  place, it breaks the cells, it releases its juices.
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  I count for those juices in the ratio instead of water, so I get
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  that pure turn of juice in there.
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  Separate the two, run this through a meat grinder, slightly
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  liais this with a percentage of ultratech stand pre high.
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  Put the two pack together and I have this brilliant turnip
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  relish. So you'll see that a lot of my
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  cooking, that's something I use all the time.
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  And then the turnip really drives my cuisine because of
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  that. But that that would be, I think
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  my #1 epiphany was learning to take a back seat.
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  When when that happened and other epiphanies similar to
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  that, do they happen in an instant like a lightning bolt of
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  inspiration or or is it a gradual process?
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  Sometimes. Sometimes it's immediate, yeah.
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  And sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
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  Yeah, And you'll stare at that thing that you know needs to be
• 13:00
  improved, but it works good enough.
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  And you'll just look at it for I can remember the the real stock
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  story. I think we're going to talk
• 13:06
  about that later. But I looked at it the same way
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  for 25 years and it didn't necessarily need to be improved.
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  It was good enough, but good enough isn't really good enough.
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  But doesn't need to evolve right now.
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  And it took a real catalyst. So I think that's the important
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  question. What was the catalyst that made
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  that epiphany? Yeah, what was it?
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  Well, for that one was the the the necessity to scale, you
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  know, so there's you learn through scale and production
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  that your methods for a 5 lbs does not work for £500.
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  Yeah, maybe it's not. Applicable, right?
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  Yeah, we did. We, we, you know, had to manage
• 13:45
  a large catering operation and this was in California and we
• 13:49
  had artichokes and. You're doing a banquet.
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  For 1000 people with artichokes on, it's like like.
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  The way you do it. For service is a lot different
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  than you know, like I'm in charge of the artichokes like
• 14:00
  fuck, how do I how do I clean 1000 artichokes Roland that can
• 14:05
  well, no, it wasn't that and and the fact that they're all here
• 14:08
  already so now I got to figure this out.
• 14:10
  So one of the guys that I was working with showed me something
• 14:14
  and it wasn't like it, you know, sometimes when you're in a knife
• 14:20
  fight, you need a knife. Sometimes when you're in a
• 14:22
  gunfight, you need a gun. Yeah, it's the right, right tool
• 14:24
  for the job, Right. So this isn't the right thing
• 14:26
  that I would do in a smaller, you know, fine dining setting.
• 14:28
  But it is something that I need to do when I have to do 1000 of
• 14:30
  them and it's just me having to do all the artichokes.
• 14:32
  Yeah. So we would precook them whole,
• 14:36
  you know, with the, you know, and some sort of acidulated
• 14:39
  solution. So, you know, they wouldn't
• 14:40
  oxidize too much. They would oxidize, but not not
• 14:43
  as much. And then clean them after they
• 14:45
  were cooked versus before it was so much easier.
• 14:47
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 14:48
  It was like night and day, you know, the choke just.
• 14:50
  You just pull it out, come right.
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  Yeah, right off. And it's like for that
• 14:54
  application, it was perfect, but it wasn't.
• 14:56
  And I was always careful to show people that because you know
• 14:59
  what it's like. And I imagine and I.
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  And I kind of want to ask you this when I would sometimes be
• 15:06
  hesitant to show people things that I knew not because I was
• 15:11
  gatekeeping is because I don't want them to think that that's
• 15:13
  appropriate for everything, correct.
• 15:15
  And so in a position like yours, everyone holds onto your every
• 15:20
  word that you, you say, they see you do it once and that's
• 15:23
  approved like, well, chef did it so we could do.
• 15:26
  Yeah, Yeah. You know, well, that's a great,
• 15:28
  that's, that's great. Well, you know, a lot of what I
• 15:31
  really subscribe to is, is if this, then that.
• 15:34
  Yeah, because it's not, there are no real absolutes.
• 15:37
  And I'm very careful about using the words from now on because
• 15:44
  from now on is infinite. From now on, we will dot, dot,
• 15:49
  dot. But when I have new information
• 15:52
  is not from now on any longer. And and we were speaking the
• 15:56
  other day. And I think that, you know, an
• 15:57
  important thing is, is my opinion is absolute for me.
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  Not, not absolutely. That kind of sounds bad absolute
• 16:06
  for me given the data I have right now.
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  But I am not ever in a position to be egotistical enough to
• 16:15
  think that it's great forever. Because if someone comes by and
• 16:19
  shows me something or I learned something or I read something or
• 16:21
  I get something that gives me different perspective and
• 16:26
  different information, my opinion will immediately evolve.
• 16:32
  And that that's very important because like you said, if you're
• 16:35
  serving 1000 people, it's a very different technique than if
• 16:38
  you're serving 5. And if you're serving 1000
• 16:40
  people with five chefs or you're serving 100 with 25, there are
• 16:47
  two different ball fields, right?
• 16:48
  And honestly, I've all, I have often tried to minimize my
• 16:55
  reliance on labor. I, I minimize my reliance on
• 17:03
  equipment. I've had access in my career to
• 17:10
  vast quantities of exceptionally driven individuals, the desire
• 17:15
  to develop their talent. I have had access to incredible
• 17:22
  equipment and, and techniques and R&D situations and, and
• 17:28
  those things. And I, I can remember when I
• 17:31
  started the, when I came back to the French Laundry, they had
• 17:37
  freeze dryers, they had centrifuges, some sort of
• 17:44
  distillation type items. Not not the Rotovap type things,
• 17:48
  but there were some, some, some tools and you could put into a,
• 17:54
  a, a $50,000 medical grade centrifuge, 3 liters of liquid
• 18:04
  in maybe 8 different vials or six different vials, 6500
• 18:08
  milliliter vials. And you could spin out, let's
• 18:11
  say orange juice, for example, freshly squeezed oranges, and
• 18:15
  you could yield a 125 grams of this exceptionally flavorful
• 18:23
  orange paste with a $50,000 machine that had a footprint of
• 18:29
  a rationale oven. I never touched it.
• 18:36
  I never once thought it, never once in my life that I touch it.
• 18:39
  I cannot, I cannot base my cuisine to rely on that.
• 18:48
  I cannot base my cuisine to rely on having 50 chefs standing
• 18:52
  around like the old stories of elderly splitting pine kernels
• 18:57
  for hours on end. When I see those things, no
• 19:00
  disrespect to any of those chefs that and the, and the work that
• 19:04
  they do, I know it's very popular for me.
• 19:07
  I'm, I'm a, I'm a Craftsman, I'm a high end production specialist
• 19:12
  and the method, and a lot of that comes from butchery.
• 19:18
  The methods that I that I employ and document are based on the
• 19:25
  ability to have consistent production.
• 19:30
  The foundational cuisine that I develop supports in the in the
• 19:41
  what do you call the iceberg analogy?
• 19:45
  You always see the iceberg, right?
• 19:46
  10% success and no one sees what's under.
• 19:49
  Right. What I really work on is what's
• 19:51
  under and then that 10% on top or 5% or 1% probably
• 19:56
  realistically 1% is artistry, is is the finial move, the
• 20:02
  finishing move, the finesse, the touch.
• 20:05
  It's all based on thousands and thousands, thousands repetition
• 20:08
  of building strong cabinets, strong bases.
• 20:13
  But also with a a little bit of intentionality.
• 20:15
  So it's not like an automaton where you're not just going
• 20:18
  through the motions, you're thinking about them.
• 20:20
  Of course. Yeah, of course.
• 20:21
  Yeah, and I think that's what really makes the food that you
• 20:24
  make exceptional. Last time you were here, you
• 20:27
  talked about, I'm paraphrasing, but maybe you said you were a
• 20:31
  conduit from Mother Nature. How do you put that into
• 20:35
  practice? Can you expand upon what you
• 20:39
  mean by that? Yeah, I, I mean, I think
• 20:42
  ultimately, I think ultimately as a chef, what?
• 20:46
  OK, what what is a chef? A chef is a manager of a
• 20:53
  hospitality operation. You're a manager.
• 20:58
  So not only, you know, there's, there's the, the human
• 21:01
  component, there's the coach component, there's the mentor
• 21:04
  component, There's the, there's the development of culture and
• 21:10
  guest service component. There's all of those different
• 21:12
  things that go into, and none of it has really to do with
• 21:14
  cooking. I think Alan Ducasse said a
• 21:21
  turbo without a chef will always be better than a chef without a
• 21:27
  turbo. And Ducasse is, in my mind, the
• 21:30
  greatest chef of all time. And, and you know, we didn't put
• 21:35
  him on Rushmore. There's a very specific reason
• 21:37
  because he's already there. It's it's a known, you know,
• 21:44
  without the product, I have nothing.
• 21:48
  You and I stand beside each other and we cook dinner.
• 21:51
  If you have a better basket of product and you stay out of the
• 21:58
  way, you're going to have a better dinner.
• 22:01
  And I can take subpar product and overwrought it, overwork it,
• 22:05
  over conceptualize it to the end of the earth, and it's only
• 22:09
  going to make me look foolish. It's not going to show up on the
• 22:13
  plate. And a lot of that has to do with
• 22:15
  how I feel about it. I can't.
• 22:18
  I there's this little crass. You can't Polish a turd.
• 22:22
  Yeah. You can't put lipstick on a pig,
• 22:24
  Right. It's like you.
• 22:24
  There's those old sayings in there for a reason.
• 22:26
  So. So for me to be a conduit for
• 22:34
  Mother Nature's spoils, the fruit of the earth, the gifts
• 22:42
  from God, I have to interpret them.
• 22:45
  Much like the Turnip story, I'm an interpreter and I'm taking a
• 22:48
  backseat to what it's telling me to do 90% of the time.
• 22:54
  There are times when I'll take artistic license, I'll have
• 22:57
  inspiration. There'll be the aha moment when
• 23:00
  you cut a sunchoke and you smell the sunchoke and you're like,
• 23:05
  man, that is the best smelling artichoke I've ever smelled.
• 23:09
  But it's a sunchoke. It has more flavor of an
• 23:12
  artichoke than an artichoke does.
• 23:15
  So all of my dishes where I cook artichokes, there's a huge
• 23:19
  amount of sunchokes involved. If I make artichoke puree, it's
• 23:23
  probably 50% sunchoke. If I make artichoke stock, it's
• 23:28
  going to be all the bitter leaves with a high ratio of
• 23:32
  sunchoke because it carries that foundational flavor.
• 23:35
  And so that's kind of telling me what to do.
• 23:37
  So I listen to it. So then I try to make these
• 23:39
  things happen in a way to where they come together to highlight
• 23:44
  that flavor. But so if I'm a conduit for the
• 23:47
  ingredient, if I carry it, which means basically I carry it from
• 23:51
  point A to point B minimally processed, and then show it in
• 23:59
  an expression that resonates with the guests, if the guest
• 24:04
  loves Peaches, I should not poach them in licorice.
• 24:11
  You know, maybe poach the fennel ball with a little licorice.
• 24:14
  The Peaches maybe don't really need licorice.
• 24:18
  You know, there's 1000, there's a thousand of those that, you
• 24:20
  know, kind of kind of things that are very popular.
• 24:23
  Maybe you know, the artichoke doesn't need vanilla.
• 24:26
  Right. You know, it's just confusing.
• 24:28
  I, there was a gentleman one time who I have great respect
• 24:32
  for who told me that he loves to finish his potato puree with
• 24:39
  white chocolate. And I like drop the mic.
• 24:44
  I'm like, I'm out of here. I don't, I don't believe in
• 24:47
  that. That's not if you have to say to
• 24:50
  somebody, no, trust me, it works.
• 24:54
  You, you, it doesn't work, you know, the flavour profile or the
• 24:57
  concept or whatever. But I know people do things and
• 24:59
  I'm not. There's artistry too.
• 25:01
  I mean, I, I have a lot of respect for all chefs from all
• 25:05
  walks of life, from all price points.
• 25:09
  The work that we do in the craft I, I can have an opinion about,
• 25:15
  but I don't judge. I don't when I go out to eat,
• 25:18
  I'm going to have a good time. Yeah.
• 25:20
  I'm not looking down my nose at people sometimes.
• 25:23
  I mean, I'm not really, I don't really have that much presence,
• 25:26
  but I do have a reputation of and I'm respected amongst us and
• 25:30
  our peers as we all are. We respect each other.
• 25:34
  When I go out to dinner, I go, I go out to have a good time, you
• 25:37
  know, and I and I enjoy the foods, the foods that are
• 25:39
  prepared for me and I'm grateful for the experiences that I have.
• 25:43
  I know this is a long round way, but the conduit.
• 25:45
  But but it's, it's so it's so true, you know, kind of on the
• 25:49
  subject, but maybe a little, a little detour.
• 25:52
  As we've talked about, it's like sometimes I just want to, I just
• 25:58
  want pancakes from cracker, you know, Yeah, like dining and then
• 26:02
  there's eating and like nostalgia.
• 26:03
  And it's like you could appreciate everything from, you
• 26:07
  know, the, the, the jumbo stack with, with butter and, you know,
• 26:10
  fake Maple syrup. Yeah.
• 26:11
  Because it, it has a place in my memory, in my food memory.
• 26:14
  Absolutely my nostalgia, right. Yeah.
• 26:16
  And I could appreciate that very much, as much as I can, you
• 26:19
  know, the the best dinner ever, right?
• 26:21
  And everything in between. If you if you love food, you
• 26:24
  have to. Love all of it.
• 26:26
  Oh, yeah. Right.
• 26:27
  Yeah. But there's many different
• 26:28
  reasons, right. And you mentioned it.
• 26:29
  I mean, you nailed it in the nostalgia.
• 26:31
  Yeah. So it doesn't have to be the
• 26:33
  best. It has to make me feel that way.
• 26:36
  But so when I have a great ingredient, it makes me feel
• 26:39
  good about that ingredient. So that's why you with the
• 26:41
  better ingredients, if you just kind of stay out of the way and
• 26:44
  you feel good about them, you're going to cook a better meal.
• 26:46
  Because I'm over here overworking this subpar product
• 26:51
  and I don't feel great about it. And I'm just trying to force
• 26:54
  this into it. And you can taste it.
• 26:56
  You can taste it and you can feel it.
• 26:57
  This how it's, it's anxiety, it's the stress.
• 27:00
  It's like, that's why I think all kitchens should be happy
• 27:01
  kitchens. Yeah, happy cooks make good food
• 27:04
  for sure. But so Cracker Barrel I love.
• 27:08
  And for me, I, I eat there frequently.
• 27:12
  I drive, I'm, I'm, I'm all over the country a lot and I, I
• 27:15
  really enjoy it, but I'm always the, I like the meatloaf.
• 27:18
  Yeah. Country fried steak, always hash
• 27:21
  brown casserole. And I always get 2 portions of
• 27:24
  fried okra because I, I eat as much okra as I can because, you
• 27:28
  know, I live in California, New York City for 20 years.
• 27:30
  There is no okra. So that's my, that's my guilty
• 27:34
  pleasure there. And, and unsweetened tea.
• 27:36
  Yeah, yeah. So.
• 27:39
  Yeah, I, I, I love. I.
• 27:41
  I love all aspects of food. You know, it doesn't.
• 27:43
  It doesn't matter. Like if you're cooking and it's
• 27:47
  intentional and it's delicious, Yeah.
• 27:50
  I mean, who am I to? Who am I to judge, right?
• 27:53
  You said the right word, Intentional.
• 27:55
  Yeah, it has to be intentional, you know.
• 27:57
  So we talked about this. This is kind of again, a little,
• 27:59
  a little detour, but we talked about this, you know, at length
• 28:05
  because I've, I've criticized it, but I haven't criticized it
• 28:13
  without an understanding of why it happens.
• 28:17
  And it is when you're a young cook and you start to 1st be
• 28:22
  able to express yourself on the plate.
• 28:24
  You start to go after 30-40 touch points on like, I'm going
• 28:29
  to have five different purees and I'm going to have, I'm going
• 28:32
  to cook it two different ways. And, and you do so much and it
• 28:35
  ends up being a bad dish because it, it's not recognizable.
• 28:39
  There's no really intention behind what you're doing other
• 28:42
  than showing off how much you know.
• 28:43
  And I think as chefs, we all go through that.
• 28:46
  It's the wrong thing to do, But, but it does serve a purpose in
• 28:51
  your, in your culinary development and, and that that
• 28:55
  side is not off to talk about the reason that's beneficial.
• 28:59
  It's not because you want it on the menu, but you are going to
• 29:04
  learn rapid prototype 40 different things right away.
• 29:08
  What you might not be able to do because you're going to
• 29:10
  experiment like, hey, I don't know what carrageenan is, I'm
• 29:13
  going to put some over here. I'm going to like, and you're
• 29:15
  going to experiment. It might not work, but you're
• 29:17
  learning from it and it's part of that developmental process of
• 29:20
  the failure. Without a doubt, yeah.
• 29:22
  Yeah. I think also is access to
• 29:24
  because if you do a trio. You just.
• 29:29
  We were talking about you just. Did three dishes, yeah, you
• 29:31
  know, and in my apprenticeship that was very popular to do you
• 29:37
  know, the elk shop with Spatzel beside the filet of halibut with
• 29:43
  mango salsa beside the dot dot dot, whatever, whatever.
• 29:47
  Maybe, maybe it wasn't always trio, always definitely a duo
• 29:49
  for sure, surf and turf of some kind in East Tennessee.
• 29:52
  But I think there's value to that as long as your audience is
• 30:00
  is buying into it and you you have to play to your audience.
• 30:03
  And I'm, I'm a simplistic person when it comes to it there.
• 30:06
  It may seem technical, but it's actually pretty simple because
• 30:11
  the techniques and recipes are bona fide.
• 30:16
  It's not experimental. So it might be a little bit.
• 30:19
  It might seem like there's a lot in the background, but the
• 30:23
  flavors in the presentation should be pretty simple.
• 30:28
  I remember Laurent Gras had a menu at L2O and it was singular
• 30:35
  flavors and I just adored it. What Lawrence probably one of
• 30:42
  the greatest of all time, right? He's incredible.
• 30:47
  His whole menu was singular flavors and, and, and I think a
• 30:52
  lot of that comes from from his study with Ducasse, where, you
• 30:57
  know, Mr. Ducasse would serve a piece of Belgian endive that was
• 31:01
  braised in OJ and lightly caramelized with a marmalade of
• 31:07
  endive and almonds with a raw endive salad and a little
• 31:12
  drizzle of beef shoe. And it would be like a dope,
• 31:16
  right? Like a traditional province all
• 31:17
  dope and and there's that layering of those same flavors
• 31:22
  and those expressions of those same flavors.
• 31:24
  So the whole menu was singularly flavored and it was like 12
• 31:29
  courses and every ingredient that was expressed had multiple
• 31:36
  fats facets of the, of the flavor of that ingredient,
• 31:40
  whether it was through a dehydration, whether it was and
• 31:42
  it wasn't, it was very simply presented as well.
• 31:45
  And I, I think I had that menu maybe four or five times and it
• 31:49
  was always different because it's of whatever's exceptional.
• 31:52
  And, and I think that's just really, I think that's paramount
• 31:57
  for success. And it takes a real, a real,
• 31:59
  this is going to sound bad. I'm not trying to offend anyone,
• 32:01
  but in my opinion, it takes a real chef to be able to strip
• 32:04
  away all the extra and, and serve the ingredient that you're
• 32:11
  proud of. And then also it takes a great
• 32:16
  charismatic, business minded person to be able to develop the
• 32:20
  relationships where you can continually gain access to those
• 32:23
  products. And it started, I mean, I was
• 32:25
  just on that beef farm in, in, in Kentucky, incredible
• 32:30
  operation. And I said to them on the way
• 32:34
  out the door, we never talked about price.
• 32:35
  We never talked about anything. I said, how many head do you
• 32:38
  slaughter? So I started doing the math.
• 32:41
  OK, so you can consistently produce X amount of this much
• 32:44
  that will show like this. And I'm and, and we start
• 32:49
  talking about how can we serve each other in different ways
• 32:53
  and, and how can we show up for each other in different ways?
• 32:55
  And I said, to be honest with you, I'm already sold because I
• 33:00
  like you guys and these conversations and the time that
• 33:03
  you spent with me, the lunch that we had together, we're
• 33:06
  chopping it up, talking about things or whatever.
• 33:08
  And I said, this is more important to me than anything
• 33:11
  else is I want to develop a relationship with you guys.
• 33:14
  And then that relationship will serve us through everything that
• 33:17
  we work through. I don't really care how much it
• 33:18
  costs right now. We'll work that out later.
• 33:20
  And and that's how it starts. And I used to do that with the
• 33:24
  mushroom purveyors. I would do that with my with my
• 33:26
  ceramicist. So I would, you know, it was, it
• 33:28
  was all it would always start. And honestly, I learned a lot of
• 33:31
  that from Thomas too. And Thomas never pressured us
• 33:34
  with the bottom line. And I think I told the story
• 33:38
  about the, the croissant in in in our last sit down that we had
• 33:45
  and it we can figure out the economics.
• 33:50
  What we have to have is consistency.
• 33:52
  We have to have good relationships, maintain good
• 33:54
  relationships, be there for each other and have consistent
• 34:03
  product and that's really important.
• 34:06
  That's that's really paramount for success in my opinion.
• 34:09
  Yeah, Yeah. No, absolutely.
• 34:11
  You know, it's, it's funny, you know, going back to Laurent
• 34:13
  Gras, who's ahead of his time, you know, he had that blog.
• 34:16
  Oh, yeah. Remember we had that blog when
• 34:17
  he was opening up L2O and that was brilliant.
• 34:20
  I would, I would, you know, my it was in my computer every
• 34:23
  single day. We talked about this the other
• 34:25
  day. It was one of the first to put
• 34:26
  out a digital. Cookbook.
• 34:27
  That's correct. Yeah, yeah, which not a lot of
• 34:29
  people know about. And it was like, it wasn't like
• 34:31
  a super high end cook. It was like country cooking.
• 34:33
  Yeah, great. Yeah, he was a pioneer.
• 34:36
  And I don't think enough people know who he is.
• 34:37
  But the people that are listening, you should look him
• 34:39
  up, right. If you don't know who Laurent
• 34:41
  Gras is, like do some, do some, do some deep dive research on
• 34:44
  perplexity AI and yeah, due diligence.
• 34:47
  Yeah. Do your due diligence on it.
• 34:50
  How do you, you know, going back to staying out of the way,
• 34:53
  letting the ingredients, you know, do the talking?
• 34:57
  How do you, how do you teach that to young culinarians that
• 35:00
  are coming into the kitchen when they're not familiar with that,
• 35:02
  when they want to do 40 things on the plate?
• 35:05
  Well, that's a, that's a great question because you also have
• 35:08
  to let them run with it a little bit.
• 35:09
  And I and I like to let them run with it.
• 35:11
  My team, I, I was always very fearful of suppressing their
• 35:19
  ambition. I, I would always have
• 35:24
  commentary and I would always offer perspective.
• 35:29
  But my team generally operates in a very high level and I don't
• 35:35
  have to be in love with everything that they do.
• 35:40
  What they do has to be excellent.
• 35:43
  So I mean, for instance, for example, there were days, I mean
• 35:47
  I worked, I tried to generally work five days a week.
• 35:51
  They would write menus when I wasn't there.
• 35:54
  I'm not micromanaging their menus.
• 35:56
  I provide them structure, I provide them recipes, I provide
• 35:58
  them philosophy, guidance, discipline, tools, resources as
• 36:05
  Thomas provides me to provide to them and are provided, I should
• 36:09
  say, and, and when they get really creative, I try to let
• 36:18
  him run with it. And usually when it doesn't
• 36:22
  work, if they're smart, they self evaluate and they they
• 36:27
  will, they will reel it in. If they really love something
• 36:30
  that sucks, I will definitely say but but but but what I think
• 36:36
  sucks. The reason that I don't like it,
• 36:38
  it's not because it's horrible. It's not because it's not season
• 36:40
  right. It's not because it's not
• 36:41
  textually correct. It's not because it is
• 36:44
  philosophically out of line with the cuisine.
• 36:46
  They've, they've already been doctrine indoctrinated with that
• 36:51
  if I've done my job correctly. So then they can kind of color
• 36:55
  outside the lines. And because we're looking at the
• 36:58
  my, my judgments are based on the top 1/2 of 1% of opinion of,
• 37:07
  of like here's what like boom, here's why the bottom 99.590
• 37:13
  point, whatever not 5% is, is already been laid.
• 37:16
  That that, that that concrete foundation is laid.
• 37:19
  So I'm really criticizing to the NTH degree to get, but that's
• 37:26
  what that level is, yeah. Can you can you give a specific
• 37:30
  example without naming the person of a nice that you had to
• 37:33
  say no to and maybe what was wrong with it?
• 37:35
  I think it's more conceptualized, Yeah.
• 37:37
  I can't tell you a dish exactly, but I think it's just whenever
• 37:40
  you conceptualize something that I can look at something from
• 37:43
  across the room and see the genesis behind it.
• 37:50
  And so you have all this cookie cutter stuff because of this
• 37:53
  visual dopamine addicted world that we live in through
• 37:55
  Instagram, through all that. I'm on that stuff too.
• 37:57
  I like it, but I there's getting back to everything, but I can
• 38:02
  see that this is just a carbon copy of a of a the 321 pick up.
• 38:12
  It's just the carbon copy. It has the tweele.
• 38:15
  The tweele has the dots of this tight gel that won't make this
• 38:18
  tweele soggy. The tweele is finished with the
• 38:21
  dust. The dust is finished with the
• 38:23
  herb. The herb is dipped on the end
• 38:26
  and like, like, it's just this over.
• 38:30
  I, I, it's like culinary masturbation of the NTH degree,
• 38:33
  you know, And then that's wheel goes on top of of the, the thing
• 38:38
  that's wrapped in the thing, that stuff with the thing that's
• 38:41
  under the thing. And it's just like this, like, I
• 38:44
  mean, I've got one chance to do all my culinary stuff and I'm
• 38:46
  just going to slam it right here.
• 38:48
  And it's just too much. And I just tell the guys, like,
• 38:50
  how about you take all that and you just spread that through the
• 38:53
  entire menu, put one of these elements on every single thing
• 38:58
  because sometimes they really only get one dish.
• 39:00
  Like we were talking about the trio to run with.
• 39:03
  And it's like, be patient, be exceptional at one of these
• 39:09
  things. And sometimes it's a little
• 39:13
  hypocritical because I will also do the artichoke dish.
• 39:16
  We're going to go back to the artichokes in terms forever to
• 39:19
  my favorite ingredients, but I'll do the artichoke dish.
• 39:20
  It has like 10 expressions of artichoke.
• 39:22
  Yeah, but I, you know, I'm not into the tweels.
• 39:25
  I'm not into the, I'm not, I'm, I'm just unfortunately, it's
• 39:30
  just become something. I'm not into a lot of the kind
• 39:32
  of Microsoft and you know, I'm not, but the people that are.
• 39:38
  I love it because I go out and eat and I enjoy it.
• 39:40
  I'm not it. It might, it's my personal much
• 39:42
  like arc, much like an artist with paint.
• 39:45
  It's my personal way. I like to express myself through
• 39:49
  the ingredient that I have that just doesn't really always serve
• 39:52
  me unless as a very specific purpose.
• 39:55
  I will throw, I will throw one out there is the the random
• 40:05
  barrage that is everywhere. The little little flower.
• 40:10
  You get this little random borage flower that's just
• 40:14
  everywhere and it's like what is the purpose?
• 40:18
  But if you actually grow borridge, the leaves are
• 40:21
  beautiful braised in Roman cuisine.
• 40:24
  They would serve them with lamb. It goes great with cucumbers.
• 40:27
  It's a pretty sure in the cucumber family.
• 40:30
  So now if you have a brilliant dish of cucumbers with chilled
• 40:33
  roasted lamb leg season with a little bit of Rosemary and lime,
• 40:38
  a little bit of creamed borridge leaf with a few borridge
• 40:41
  blossoms. Now to me that's that makes
• 40:43
  sense. But if you just get like this
• 40:46
  Punnett of rando flowers and you just like love bomb your dish
• 40:52
  with this stuff, it's like, OK, that doesn't make sense.
• 40:54
  But I think all professional chefs kind of realize that.
• 40:56
  Yeah, I, I I'm probably overstating you, obviously, and
• 40:59
  I apologize, but that's one that, you know, it's like, So
• 41:01
  what does it really speak to? What does it really do?
• 41:03
  What does it do for you? What's it do for the dish?
• 41:06
  It would be better without it if it was a cabbage dish.
• 41:09
  Imagine, maybe take a puncher and make a little or a little
• 41:13
  beautiful little diamonds of the cabbage that are marinated with
• 41:16
  cider vinegar. And you do.
• 41:18
  That's your accent. That's your statement.
• 41:22
  You know, that was the Salaf Vert.
• 41:24
  The Salaf Vert was the gateway for that kind of unilateral
• 41:28
  expression. And that came from Gonyear.
• 41:31
  That was an inspiration from Pierre Garnier, the true
• 41:35
  culinary artist. You know.
• 41:37
  You know, Mr. Dukas is a different kind of artist.
• 41:41
  Dukas is a businessman. Dukas is a classicist,
• 41:48
  incredible ingredient. He's I learned from him.
• 41:51
  He when he came to the United States, Mr. Dukas wrote a book
• 41:53
  called Harvesting America. He went through our entire
• 41:57
  country. He said I cannot do a restaurant
• 41:59
  in New York City unless I find every single one of the best
• 42:03
  purveyors in our country in the United States.
• 42:06
  And he wrote a book that celebrates all of them before
• 42:11
  the Essex House opened. Oh, I didn't know that.
• 42:14
  That was so important to him, but because he's not going to
• 42:17
  ship all the stuff from France, it doesn't resonate.
• 42:20
  We have brilliant fish in our waters.
• 42:22
  We have brilliant lamb in Pennsylvania.
• 42:25
  We have incredible chickens in, in, in, in West Virginia.
• 42:28
  We have what what we have it here.
• 42:31
  And he tapped into that and he went to those farmers, those
• 42:34
  fishermen, the foragers, and he grabbed them.
• 42:39
  He brought them in. He is the truth.
• 42:41
  He's he's brilliant. But Garnier is the Picasso and
• 42:48
  Garnier cooks with this emotion that is just ever evolving, ever
• 42:52
  changing, just just of the moment of the minute.
• 42:58
  Every dishes is how does he feel at that time?
• 43:02
  And when you watch him speak and he speaks English, actually
• 43:05
  there's a lot of really good videos and you can listen to
• 43:07
  him. He's he's very articulate in
• 43:09
  English, which is kind of surprising just because of his
• 43:11
  age and where he's from. He speaks very fluently and he
• 43:16
  can articulate his artistry so well that you can feel, at least
• 43:22
  I can feel maybe because I really admire him, but I can
• 43:25
  feel it. So the Salad Merit was the
• 43:28
  original gateway to that. And the only requirement is
• 43:34
  everything's green. Have an expression of green.
• 43:37
  What is it? You know, green can be in
• 43:39
  flavor, can be a visual, could be green is under ripe also,
• 43:44
  Right? Right.
• 43:45
  Yeah, yeah. I may have got off a little bit
• 43:50
  of food. Green is under, right?
• 43:51
  But it's also green is also under, you know, like when
• 43:53
  you're talking about the green cook and.
• 43:55
  Oh, correct. Right.
• 43:56
  So, yeah, it's. You're under, right.
• 43:57
  You're under, right. You're under, right, Right.
• 43:59
  That's a great. That's great.
• 44:00
  Yeah. So maybe we have the.
• 44:01
  That's why the garbage guys do it.
• 44:04
  Yeah. Yeah, they're under, Right.
• 44:05
  But there's something to be said about classical education and
• 44:10
  technique because, you know, the what they teach you in school
• 44:14
  that doesn't belong on the plate shouldn't be on the plate like
• 44:16
  that. That's like, yeah, that's like
• 44:18
  the the fundamentals. And somehow we know that because
• 44:23
  we're all, we've all been in the industry, we've all been
• 44:25
  educated to a certain to a certain degree and then we start
• 44:28
  doing it on our own and we forget that, but we see.
• 44:30
  But this is the exceptions rule because it needs Boris flowers
• 44:32
  and, you know, an inappropriate amount of nasturtiums or
• 44:35
  whatever, right? Yeah.
• 44:36
  But it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't it, it doesn't make the
• 44:39
  dish better. Maybe it does visually.
• 44:42
  You can maybe make that argument.
• 44:43
  Maybe it does visually, but there, there was a lot in the
• 44:48
  foundational of the foundations of cooking that I, I think
• 44:55
  sometimes we don't really appreciate him and pay attention
• 44:59
  to and some of that's in stocks, right.
• 45:02
  So I, I love stock making. I love it.
• 45:06
  You know, I was, I was, I was telling you the other day, and
• 45:09
  I've, I've said this on chef's PSA on the, you know, on the
• 45:12
  little quotes. It's like, why was the saucier
• 45:15
  always the coolest person at the kitchen?
• 45:17
  Yeah. You know, when you were coming
• 45:18
  up as like, you look at the saucier and yeah, they, they
• 45:21
  were always, they were always a jerk.
• 45:23
  Yeah. They their shit didn't stink.
• 45:25
  Their sauces were great. And everyone, it was like when
• 45:28
  you're a young cook, you idolize the, the sous chef, but you kind
• 45:30
  of hate the sous chef, right? Yeah.
• 45:32
  Yeah. Then you idolize the saucier.
• 45:33
  Like, yeah, those are the two people that you idolize.
• 45:35
  But the saucier is always the heir apparent.
• 45:37
  Yeah, right. You know they're in line.
• 45:39
  The sous chef always respects the saucier.
• 45:40
  Yeah, right. Yeah.
• 45:42
  The sous chef was like, huh. Yeah.
• 45:43
  That's my guy. Especially when you got a good.
• 45:44
  Yeah. Or the girl, right.
• 45:45
  That's my chef. Yeah.
• 45:47
  But for you, I know stock making is important.
• 45:52
  Can you kind of get into what your stock making process is?
• 45:54
  Because it's a little bit unconventional.
• 45:55
  Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
• 45:57
  Well, you know, I mean, there was a great catalyst for that.
• 46:00
  I mean, as we know, I said the saucier, there's a, there's,
• 46:04
  there's a trifecta of, of relationships.
• 46:07
  So the saucier in most kitchens is also the meat roaster who at
• 46:15
  one point was the butcher. And so then that triangle of
• 46:20
  skills really builds everything. And typically you know this, the
• 46:25
  butchers produce all the bones for the stocks and a lot of
• 46:29
  times they will manage that process.
• 46:32
  So it becomes a full, a full circular life, life cycle of,
• 46:38
  of, of the meat for the program from, from, from, from carcass
• 46:43
  to plate. So the stocks for me in the
• 46:49
  beginning were a burden. It's something you use.
• 46:57
  It's just something you have to do.
• 46:58
  You got to produce a stock. You can't buy the stock, you
• 47:01
  know, not that you can't. There's a certain machismo too.
• 47:07
  You, you, we make all of our own stocks.
• 47:09
  We do this, we do that. That's just that's kind of
• 47:11
  restaurant that it is. And it's just unheard of to
• 47:13
  purchase from the outside, or at least it was.
• 47:16
  There's several very good options nowadays to do that.
• 47:19
  And and we'll talk about that super stock concept in a little
• 47:21
  bit. But for me, you know,
• 47:28
  everybody's got the 90 liter kettle or, or, or pot.
• 47:32
  You put a 50 pound, 50 lbs of bones, you put X amount of
• 47:36
  water, put X amount of tomato, put X amount of feet, gelatin of
• 47:39
  some sort, X amount of mirepoix, X amount of aromatics.
• 47:45
  You turn it on, there's stock. And it's almost the same in
• 47:52
  every single restaurant across our country, coast to coast,
• 47:56
  north to South, because we're all taught fundamentally the
• 48:00
  same way. And at the French Laundry, we
• 48:07
  would cook anywhere from 350 to 500 lbs of bones a week.
• 48:12
  It's an arduous task. Yeah.
• 48:14
  It was just so much lifting, so much cooking, so much hot trash,
• 48:22
  like refuse. You know, it's like, just so, so
• 48:24
  much. It's like, how can we get this
• 48:26
  off our plate? And Thomas decided to purchase
• 48:32
  an existing stock company. We looked into having other
• 48:36
  people produce them for us. And it's not that we weren't
• 48:39
  happy with the work they were doing.
• 48:41
  We just thought we could take it to a little bit of another level
• 48:44
  if we could control it. And so we partnered with an
• 48:47
  incredible gentleman named Mitch Mitchell out of the UK.
• 48:51
  And he, and he, he owns and, and runs True Foods UK.
• 48:56
  And, and as you can imagine, London for one city, for
• 48:58
  example, they don't have a lot of room for kettles and socks
• 49:03
  and every one of those kitchens and the old quote UN quote,
• 49:05
  London dungeons. Thank you The Clash.
• 49:08
  But so he created bespoke products individually for chefs
• 49:15
  and he was able to do it in a way that that was at minimum 100
• 49:20
  times better than what they could do in their own kitchens
• 49:23
  because he can manage it. He ran the Hassett program.
• 49:25
  He ran this he ran that he could purchase better bones.
• 49:29
  He because through through through volume he could he he
• 49:32
  was also is excuse me not was is incredibly intelligent
• 49:37
  businessman. He's he's brilliant, really
• 49:40
  sweet guy. His wife Jack, she'll kill me.
• 49:45
  But Jackie love she's never called her that.
• 49:50
  She's she's an incredible human being too.
• 49:52
  And the both of them, I love them dearly.
• 49:54
  So we partnered, we, we partnered with them to teach us
• 49:59
  how to make our stock in volume incredible.
• 50:05
  So what happens is when you take a 50 LB batch and you turn it
• 50:09
  into a £500 batch, the same rules no longer apply.
• 50:14
  So we would blanch our bones. Everyone knows this.
• 50:18
  This is a it's almost like folklore.
• 50:21
  You mean you blanched the bones for the brown veal stock?
• 50:25
  Yes, we blanched the bones. We purged them of any impurities
• 50:30
  through a blanching process. And then strain the water, spray
• 50:36
  the bones down, put them back in the pot, cover them with hot
• 50:39
  water and, and this is the 50 LB method and add tomato paste, add
• 50:45
  Mirpal. Add this, add that and cook like
• 50:47
  you would cook stock. What makes it brown is
• 50:49
  oxidization and my yard reaction over time.
• 50:55
  It oxidizes over time and starts out very red and it turns brown
• 50:59
  through long cooking, slow caramelization or oxidization,
• 51:04
  probably more appropriately. But I'm also not a food
• 51:07
  scientist. So let's get Harold McGee in
• 51:09
  here and we can chop it up. But he he will give us the the
• 51:12
  definite. But that's the way that I
• 51:13
  understand it. And when you turn into a £500
• 51:17
  batch, you don't have the ability to blanch those bones
• 51:25
  any longer, especially in a steam jacketed catalog, right?
• 51:28
  It takes 4 hours to come to a simmer.
• 51:31
  So it's like, what do you do? You're starting with frozen
• 51:34
  bones. You don't have an area to slack
• 51:36
  them out. And when you're going to run
• 51:37
  batch after batch after batch, you have to really recalibrate
• 51:40
  this entire process. So what we did was Mitch says
• 51:45
  tell me exactly how you do it. Tell me exactly what you want to
• 51:48
  see. And Devin Nell and I went to
• 51:51
  went to the facility and we worked with him for months on on
• 51:56
  to get exactly what we expected on the end.
• 51:59
  And he taught us how to get there by banning our traditional
• 52:02
  methods. Incredible because every single
• 52:07
  step improved, the cost improved, the labor improved,
• 52:11
  the quality improved, clarity improved, everything improved.
• 52:16
  And what we're able to do through that formulaic
• 52:18
  conversion is much of my cooking is based in percentage or
• 52:23
  relationship to each other. This ingredient to that, we were
• 52:28
  able to realize how much time and energy we were wasting
• 52:33
  because we were taught to do it that way and we never thought
• 52:37
  about it. So that's one of those
• 52:38
  epiphanies, aha. Maybe I need to look at these
• 52:42
  things that I've just kind of always done.
• 52:46
  So what we did two notable things is if you make a roasted
• 52:51
  stock, can you roast 500 lbs of bones efficiently?
• 52:56
  Where? Where are you going to roast 500
• 52:59
  lbs of bones? We can roast 50 lbs of bones in
• 53:01
  any kitchen if it that you can get in a standard oven.
• 53:06
  If you spread between two, you're going to do it really
• 53:07
  well, £500.10 cases of bones. How long does that take?
• 53:12
  Yeah, how much labor, right? Time, labor, energy, gas for the
• 53:16
  oven. Maybe even a little bit of
• 53:18
  danger. Windows.
• 53:19
  You got a little bro. Sure.
• 53:21
  Rendered fat. Yeah, right.
• 53:22
  Yeah, yeah. It's a it's a serious problem,
• 53:25
  Yeah. So if you want to do a roasted
• 53:29
  stock, you put the bones you roast, depending on which stock
• 53:35
  it is, 10 to 20% of the original weight of bone that goes in, you
• 53:39
  roast really well. So if we did 200 lbs of bones,
• 53:43
  we may do 40 lbs of bones, anywhere from 20 to 40 lbs of
• 53:46
  bones. Roasted really well, spread out
• 53:49
  really nicely, laid out really nicely, cooked perfectly.
• 53:53
  And they go in in the last two hours of reduction.
• 53:58
  Not to stop cooking the reduction at the same time.
• 54:04
  That's when the mere paw goes in.
• 54:05
  So the last two hours you're putting in the 20% of bones that
• 54:08
  are roasted perfectly and the mirror paw standard mirror paw,
• 54:12
  carrot, celery, onion, whatever you use.
• 54:13
  Yeah, yeah. What about?
• 54:16
  What about your air mats? Same time.
• 54:18
  Same time. Two hours, yeah.
• 54:19
  The difference is So what goes into the pot is your bones, your
• 54:24
  water, or if it's super stock, your stock, stock #1 super
• 54:28
  saturation method. So water, bones, gelatinous
• 54:35
  component, whether it's tendons, feet, whatever, it might be very
• 54:40
  important, very, very critical to any stock.
• 54:43
  You must have an additional gelatinous component.
• 54:47
  Tomato paste. If it's going to be a brown
• 54:51
  stock that intend to show like Demi gloss, you must have tomato
• 54:56
  paste at that time. It needs to cook.
• 54:59
  It needs to cook out with that. But So what happens when you
• 55:03
  don't have any roasted elements in there?
• 55:05
  And when you don't have the mere pawn in there?
• 55:09
  It is a breeze to strain. You do not have that veg cooking
• 55:15
  for 14/16/18 hours, dilapidating, just turning into
• 55:19
  muck and mush in the bottom of the pot to then strain
• 55:22
  constantly strain and swirl and da da da da da da.
• 55:27
  But it's done. You don't do that any longer.
• 55:29
  It goes in in the end, and guess what, you use about 10 to 15% of
• 55:34
  what you would have started with, really.
• 55:38
  But we put, we put 5 lbs into 5 gallons because that's the
• 55:41
  ratio. But if you only have two gallons
• 55:43
  over here, or liters, kilos or whatever, but it's like it's
• 55:46
  proportionate. Yeah, you don't need that much
• 55:48
  veg. And the veg is that much fresher
• 55:50
  cut that much smaller. It releases that aroma and just
• 55:54
  cooks out. Why would we put it in the
• 55:56
  beginning? So putting in the veg at the
• 55:59
  beginning, sometimes you'll notice you have a background
• 56:03
  flavor of like Maripol, I guess, right.
• 56:06
  Yeah. But you can't identify it.
• 56:08
  You just know they're like there's something back there.
• 56:12
  Do you? So you're saying you taste more
• 56:14
  of the the onion, the carrot, what?
• 56:16
  Whatever's in there if you put in the the remaining two hours,
• 56:18
  Correct. Yeah.
• 56:19
  Yeah. And it's like not necessarily
• 56:20
  that you want to taste it, but it's just a layer.
• 56:23
  It's a layer and it and it cooks out and it needs to cook out.
• 56:27
  But so I agree with you about the layering process, but does
• 56:31
  stock need that layering process?
• 56:35
  Because where does the stock go? It doesn't go to the plate.
• 56:40
  It goes into the sauce pot. Yeah.
• 56:42
  So you don't need, you don't need that.
• 56:47
  You don't need that. The fresher flavor comes from
• 56:49
  that at the end and then in your sauce pot.
• 56:55
  So we go right into sauces. That's where we're at now.
• 56:58
  So the so the sauce method is also very different.
• 57:02
  So now I have in my sauce pot, let's say I have my brown
• 57:06
  chicken stock made exactly the way we're talking about.
• 57:10
  I have my chicken thighs skin on bone in maybe a dozen of them in
• 57:15
  a beautiful little Rondo Browning up perfectly.
• 57:20
  I had a little bit of my mirepoix.
• 57:22
  Whatever I choose to do, let's say a sweet onions and
• 57:25
  mushrooms, I'm going to end with thyme flambe with a little
• 57:29
  cognac or Madeira, whatever it might be.
• 57:33
  Then I add my stock to that, simmer short, 30 minutes, maybe
• 57:44
  strain that. When I strain that, I put raw
• 57:48
  mushrooms in the Chinoa. Raw thyme in the Chinoa.
• 57:53
  You put them through the grinder or anything?
• 57:55
  At this point, no. I mean, however, it depends on
• 57:57
  whatever the I mean, if it's in mass, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 58:00
  And if it was in mass, I would add it to the pot to give it the
• 58:04
  the ability to kind of come out. But so then I have that layer
• 58:07
  because the layer that's closer to the plate is, is more is
• 58:13
  paramount for flavor versus the one that's farther from the
• 58:16
  plate. Three days ago when I started
• 58:18
  the stock, it's irrelevant. What I need out of that stock is
• 58:22
  I need an emulsion of water tomato.
• 58:25
  If we choose to make that brown sock, water tomato gelatin and
• 58:29
  flavor from the bone, collagen from the bone, whatever,
• 58:32
  whatever that is, that's what I need to carry those flavors And
• 58:36
  it picks it up over there on the other end.
• 58:38
  Now that is backwards to what we're taught, but what happens
• 58:42
  is everything amplifies along the way.
• 58:44
  And this, I mean, we can do a sauce making like like a clinic
• 58:48
  and we could talk about it. I mean, I'm really, it's really
• 58:50
  important to me. Well, let's do it.
• 58:52
  It's a different, you know, it's a different, it's a different
• 58:54
  thing. It's, it's really different.
• 58:56
  And, and that's something that I can consider myself pretty well
• 59:00
  versed in. There's better saucier's out
• 59:02
  there, without a doubt. Tons of them, maybe hundreds of
• 59:04
  thousands of, I don't know. But but but but but my
• 59:07
  perspective is valid and it's tested.
• 59:10
  So we we left off on you're putting mushrooms through the,
• 59:13
  I'm sorry, objection. Yeah, so it picks up that aroma,
• 59:18
  you know when you smell that. I love in that case, button
• 59:22
  mushrooms or I put mushroom essence.
• 59:25
  Essences are another part of the stock making process or sauce
• 59:28
  making process essences. We write about them a little bit
• 59:31
  in the book too. Mushroom essence.
• 59:35
  I learned that from a dude named Tarver King.
• 59:38
  They made it at I learned it from Tarver King at The
• 59:44
  Woodlands Resort in probably 2003 in in Summerville, SC and
• 59:50
  he came from the end of the Washington.
• 59:54
  It was something that they made. Yeah, it would take what's.
• 59:57
  What's the process? With 5 lbs of mushrooms and 500
• 59:59
  grams of water and you grind the mushrooms, put them in a pot,
• 1:00:04
  put the water covered with a lid, bring it to the simmer, let
• 1:00:07
  it sit at room temperature for half an hour or so.
• 1:00:11
  They'll let everything just percolate.
• 1:00:13
  Let it come out. Mash that through.
• 1:00:17
  China cap and then and then pass it through a Xinhua and we have
• 1:00:20
  this beautiful mushroom tea that is the flavor and it costs next
• 1:00:24
  to nothing. And the 5 lbs of mushroom costs
• 1:00:25
  next to nothing flavor of explosion of mushroom in your
• 1:00:29
  mouth. And so then that essence is
• 1:00:32
  spawned that which, which was also one of those epiphany
• 1:00:36
  moments, spawned the tomato essence, spawned corn essence,
• 1:00:42
  onion essence, artichoke essence.
• 1:00:44
  And those are 5 vegetable essences that I use in my
• 1:00:46
  cooking a lot. They're always there.
• 1:00:53
  They're always in my cuisine, always in my cuisine.
• 1:00:56
  And is it the, is it the same or very similar process for all
• 1:00:59
  three? So you know, you talk about the
• 1:01:01
  mushroom close grinding. The tomato one's raw.
• 1:01:04
  Yeah, OK. Yeah, the tomato one's raw.
• 1:01:06
  It's tomato water. Yeah.
• 1:01:09
  I changed the name to tomato essence, so it fits my my
• 1:01:13
  philosophy. Corn ass.
• 1:01:15
  It's the same. You get an aroma of almost like
• 1:01:17
  Tamale broth, like the steam, you know?
• 1:01:19
  I mean, there's just love that, right?
• 1:01:23
  And then the Artichoke 1 uses all the trimmings with about
• 1:01:29
  equal parts of water in a pot. Bring it up hard.
• 1:01:33
  It's very bitter, almost like bitters.
• 1:01:35
  Very bitter. Forward grassy tastes like
• 1:01:39
  artichoke. Problem with eating artichokes
• 1:01:42
  is when you get to your artichoke, it no longer smells
• 1:01:46
  like artichoke. It no longer tastes like
• 1:01:47
  artichoke. Your fingers smell beautiful
• 1:01:50
  like that beautiful green artichoke like that, that light.
• 1:01:53
  But how do you capture that flavor?
• 1:01:54
  It's very hard. But so then the dish in this
• 1:01:56
  book is everything artichoke. And that was where I I really
• 1:02:01
  picked up that from. And that's actually from Gonyea
• 1:02:05
  as well. Yeah, yeah, that was, you know,
• 1:02:10
  it's a constant inspirational process.
• 1:02:13
  But so the sauces so that, you know, maybe it has, I mean, so
• 1:02:16
  that sauce that we're talking about, let's let's rewind this.
• 1:02:19
  That has the chicken with the mushrooms and everything.
• 1:02:21
  Guarantee it's going to have a liter of of mushroom assets in
• 1:02:24
  it as well. Yeah.
• 1:02:26
  So then everything is so powerful.
• 1:02:29
  We get it all done, we strain it.
• 1:02:31
  What do we do? What's classical, What is what
• 1:02:35
  is the indoctrination of cooking that we come up from tell us
• 1:02:39
  that we have to do to that sauce.
• 1:02:41
  Reduce it. Exactly.
• 1:02:43
  Reduce to Napay, right, Right. And I don't subscribe to that
• 1:02:47
  either, no. So what do you?
• 1:02:48
  What do you do? I liaid 100% of my sauces.
• 1:02:53
  And, and I'm playing a little bit naive, right?
• 1:02:55
  So I'm taking letting people inside of, you know, behind the
• 1:03:00
  scenes. Six years ago, we're having
• 1:03:03
  coffee and this is before this book comes out and we're talking
• 1:03:07
  about Roux and Bermanier and and, and, and, and and all these
• 1:03:12
  things. And you're blowing my mind back
• 1:03:13
  then because, because, because you're telling me how you're
• 1:03:20
  using Roux. And I had never, I, I wasn't
• 1:03:24
  using it anymore at that point in my career.
• 1:03:25
  I was reducing my sauces, right? Bringing them to where I needed
• 1:03:28
  them. And when you started telling me
• 1:03:30
  about Roux, it blew my mind. So I want you to blow their
• 1:03:34
  mind. OK.
• 1:03:36
  Well, I mean a lot of it has to do with the environments that I
• 1:03:40
  was trained in. I was trained in in my early
• 1:03:45
  cooking career in a very classical kitchens and
• 1:03:49
  everything was made in the in the classical way.
• 1:03:52
  And there was always liaisons, mostly flower, mostly Roux, and
• 1:03:58
  often times there would also be corn starch, which I am a huge
• 1:04:01
  fan of. But when we came up, we were
• 1:04:03
  taught that using Roux and using corn starch, you're a Shoemaker
• 1:04:06
  in your hack, right? In a way, right?
• 1:04:08
  I don't know, no disrespect to anyone.
• 1:04:10
  I'm an advocate of these things and no disrespect to the people
• 1:04:13
  who feel that way, that they're also OK.
• 1:04:16
  Their perspective is right to them.
• 1:04:18
  That's fine. I'm not judged.
• 1:04:19
  I don't. It's not about that.
• 1:04:20
  I'm just sharing my perspective. So I knew these methods and I
• 1:04:26
  knew how to make these sauces and when I went into the
• 1:04:29
  environments which I worked in for a very long time, that it
• 1:04:35
  was almost like a badge of honor.
• 1:04:37
  We reduce our we don't thicken any.
• 1:04:39
  There's no flour in our sauces. There's no this, there's no
• 1:04:41
  that. And we just reduce it until and
• 1:04:44
  it's like, OK, well, you burnt the lobster heads and you and
• 1:04:47
  with it and when you flambeit it with a cognac and the and the
• 1:04:49
  pan was burnt and I can taste it tastes like scorched earth.
• 1:04:53
  So congratulations, you just amplified that to the NTH
• 1:04:55
  degree. You know, that's like the smart
• 1:04:57
  ass side. You know, it's like, well, it
• 1:04:58
  sucks. So congratulations, nice badge.
• 1:05:02
  But but for me, there was always a yield component that was
• 1:05:05
  really important and that flavor component was really important.
• 1:05:08
  So if I make my stock correctly, if I make my infusions, my
• 1:05:13
  essences correctly, whatever I choose to do, if I reduce my
• 1:05:15
  wine correctly and I have my flavor, if I reduce to
• 1:05:21
  consistency, why? And I just said it, it's
• 1:05:25
  rhetorical. Why am I reducing it for
• 1:05:28
  consistency, not for flavor? Because my stock that goes in my
• 1:05:34
  foundational process, that's there, that's the flavor.
• 1:05:38
  I don't need to amplify it. We amplify it through reduction
• 1:05:41
  because of palatability. So then your palate picks it up
• 1:05:45
  in a different way. OK, well if I add a liaison of
• 1:05:48
  some sort, we choose different ones for different reasons.
• 1:05:52
  Now I have palatability. It's a win win.
• 1:05:56
  Look at any Eastern sauce making.
• 1:06:03
  The broths are incredible. Look at Dashi.
• 1:06:06
  It's made in 5 minutes. It is incredible.
• 1:06:10
  Why? It's super saturated.
• 1:06:13
  It's super saturated and the flavors are added at a time at
• 1:06:17
  it for a reason. The the the the kombu and the
• 1:06:21
  dried mushroom go in for the umami.
• 1:06:23
  You release this and they're held at this temperature for X
• 1:06:25
  amount of time. You then add your turnips or
• 1:06:28
  what you choose, whatever you may add.
• 1:06:31
  I'm not a I'm not a well versed on Easter cooker but I
• 1:06:34
  understand the concept. And then right before you strain
• 1:06:38
  it my friend, you had the bonito.
• 1:06:43
  Stir it around, pass it immediately and it's flavor
• 1:06:46
  bomb. So then would you ever, ever,
• 1:06:49
  ever in your heart of hearts reduce that to a glaze?
• 1:06:52
  Yeah, right. No way.
• 1:06:53
  But you may have a bit of cornstarch to it to give it a
• 1:06:56
  little more palatability. Maybe the wakame did that or,
• 1:06:58
  excuse me, the combo or, or or what have you.
• 1:07:00
  But so that was kind of my thought process behind that
• 1:07:03
  because I needed to be able to yield more sauce.
• 1:07:08
  I needed to be able to yield more sauce.
• 1:07:10
  So how do I do that? I make the sauces in a different
• 1:07:13
  way. We would take 50 lbs of bones of
• 1:07:16
  veal. Bones will yield 50 lbs of bones
• 1:07:19
  and 7 cows feet with the rest of the percentages of the formula
• 1:07:22
  will yield 16 liters of Finnish veal stock after cooking for
• 1:07:27
  close to 36 hours, maybe 30 hours depends on the reduction
• 1:07:32
  process. That then goes on top of roasted
• 1:07:36
  bone in the traditional method on top of roasted bones that are
• 1:07:41
  roasted a little too hard in my opinion.
• 1:07:43
  And and this that if you choose wine, you don't whatever,
• 1:07:48
  whatever the flavor profile is. And then that gets simmered for
• 1:07:51
  45 minutes to infuse and then it gets strained again.
• 1:07:54
  And it goes into that pot and it comes down, gets strained into
• 1:07:58
  another pot and it comes down, you strain to another pot and it
• 1:08:00
  comes down till consistency. So I have 50 lbs of bones.
• 1:08:07
  I have all this time, energy, effort, and I've got a liter and
• 1:08:10
  a half of this gloss over here. And I put a little drizzle on
• 1:08:13
  the plate. Right.
• 1:08:15
  Like, and everyone treats it like gold, right?
• 1:08:18
  Because you have to, because you put, yeah, several days and
• 1:08:21
  hours worth of work into it. And then you know, someone
• 1:08:23
  accidentally like throws it away.
• 1:08:25
  Yeah, exactly. I have a good dishwasher, sorry
• 1:08:27
  about that. In the quarters, Yeah, but but
• 1:08:31
  really, what's the? For what?
• 1:08:33
  For what? Because I want, I want a full
• 1:08:35
  grey coonspoon of sauce on my plate.
• 1:08:37
  Yeah, you know, I want like 2 ounces of killer sauce.
• 1:08:42
  I want, I want to be like begging the dining room team for
• 1:08:45
  another little brioche bun so I can scarpette on my my shoe.
• 1:08:48
  Like it's like the sauce is an experience.
• 1:08:51
  It's not a drizzle. A little beet S inside of
• 1:08:54
  garmache thing is one thing, but if you have a beautifully cooked
• 1:08:59
  filet of halibut and you give me a little drizz of like, get out
• 1:09:03
  of here with that. Like what is?
• 1:09:05
  To me it's just like, it's not, it's not correct.
• 1:09:09
  No, I mean, you bring up an excellent point.
• 1:09:11
  So, you know, going into the conversation around thickening
• 1:09:15
  agents, so everything, because correct me if I'm wrong, but you
• 1:09:20
  also take a, a very modern approach and a very traditional
• 1:09:24
  approach at the same time, because you do things like
• 1:09:27
  prehydrated xanthan gum and you also do things like root, which
• 1:09:33
  are both very appropriate, like you talked about earlier,
• 1:09:35
  knowing, you know, letting let the the dish, the ingredient
• 1:09:39
  tell you which, which one's appropriate.
• 1:09:41
  But for people that don't know, how do you determine when do you
• 1:09:45
  use the traditional, the Roux? When do you use the the xanthan
• 1:09:49
  gum or Agar or whatever the case may that's a that's a great.
• 1:09:54
  Question and I think that sometimes you use both.
• 1:09:57
  It depends on what it is. I'll give you I'll give you 2
• 1:09:59
  examples, but for one, so we have to classify them.
• 1:10:02
  We have to start by classifying them.
• 1:10:04
  So there's setting agents, there's emulsifiers and there's
• 1:10:11
  thickeners and they're they're each a little bit different.
• 1:10:14
  So something like carrageena and Jelen and Agar would be setting
• 1:10:19
  agents. They operate in a little bit of
• 1:10:21
  a different way. The thickeners would be the
• 1:10:24
  traditional hydrocolloids that really swell like flour or
• 1:10:29
  cornstarch if swell inside the sauce and bring it kind of
• 1:10:32
  together. And then emulsifier or, or also
• 1:10:37
  the, the the happy orchestra ultratechs.
• 1:10:40
  My favorite ultratechs 8 incredible would be in that
• 1:10:43
  camp. I use them for different
• 1:10:46
  reasons. I there's different, different
• 1:10:47
  things for different reasons. And then the emulsifiers would
• 1:10:51
  be something like pre high. And, and so the, so the genesis
• 1:10:55
  behind pre high is how do you scale Anthem gum?
• 1:11:04
  Yeah, do that. It's very difficult to do add
• 1:11:06
  water to it to make it heavier. So I used to, I do a lot of
• 1:11:09
  hunting and I load a lot of my own shells.
• 1:11:12
  And I have very specific scale that will, that will measure to
• 1:11:16
  the most finite grain. And I think there's 37 grains in
• 1:11:22
  a gram. And when we load bullets, the,
• 1:11:24
  the ammunition, the, the, the gunpowder is per grain and
• 1:11:29
  there's, I think 37 per gram. So then you can actually, so if
• 1:11:33
  you load it in grain grains, if you measure the xanthan in
• 1:11:38
  grain, you can get a more precise.
• 1:11:41
  And so I had these little bullet reloading scales in the kitchen
• 1:11:44
  that we would use. And it's like, this is
• 1:11:46
  ridiculous. And I have to like go through
• 1:11:47
  this endless process of trying to treat teach they already a
• 1:11:51
  lot of times they don't even know metrics.
• 1:11:52
  And now I'm teaching them like this 4th degree of metric.
• 1:11:54
  And it's just like, OK, so I was inspired by something I saw
• 1:12:00
  Laurent Gras do a very, very, very long time ago.
• 1:12:03
  I don't even know if he knows if he did it or or how I saw it.
• 1:12:06
  But that's the genesis of the pre high comes from Laurent.
• 1:12:11
  I saw something that they did that was inspirational and they
• 1:12:16
  basically made pre hide. I don't know if they knew they
• 1:12:18
  did, but it's. This anthem Water.
• 1:12:20
  Basically, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:22
  Exactly. And and and and it was, it was a
• 1:12:24
  little less precise and a little.
• 1:12:26
  It worked in different ways. They use it in different ways
• 1:12:28
  than I would use it. So maybe the story is incorrect
• 1:12:30
  that I'm, I'm about to share right now, but but I heard a
• 1:12:34
  very similar story about Laurent Gras that he was and I don't
• 1:12:36
  know if this is true. This is just like off memory off
• 1:12:39
  a story that I heard from somebody.
• 1:12:40
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:12:41
  That he was frustrated with the cooks because they couldn't
• 1:12:43
  glaze vegetables. That's what it was.
• 1:12:46
  And so he created Xanthan water so they could glaze.
• 1:12:49
  So it would it would get that nice glaze on him.
• 1:12:52
  Uh huh. And I remember when I heard that
• 1:12:55
  story and I heard that maybe 2010, 2011 mm.
• 1:12:59
  Hmm. And so right away I was like,
• 1:13:01
  told to cook, like my Cook's good and glazed vegetables.
• 1:13:03
  See there? Yeah.
• 1:13:03
  Yeah. Like you're gonna.
• 1:13:05
  And but I didn't know what I was doing.
• 1:13:06
  I just put, you know, key bump that shit in, shake it in the.
• 1:13:08
  Yeah, like, try that. Yeah.
• 1:13:10
  Get like a, you know, a booger. Yeah, you got a xanthan booger.
• 1:13:14
  But I hadn't figured it out. And so when I did it in the
• 1:13:18
  restaurant that I was working in at the time, I noticed that like
• 1:13:22
  I'm making the situation worse because we didn't know what we
• 1:13:25
  were doing. Yeah, right.
• 1:13:26
  Because we're just like how much Xanthan?
• 1:13:27
  Like I didn't, I didn't figure that out.
• 1:13:29
  So I just said, you know, we're not ready.
• 1:13:31
  Just stop. Yeah, you know, let's glaze
• 1:13:33
  properly. Yeah, figure it out.
• 1:13:34
  Right. And then years later, I see, I
• 1:13:38
  see the the the French Laundry per SE book and boom, there it
• 1:13:42
  is pre high. And it took me back to 2010.
• 1:13:45
  And like, it's it's been formulated.
• 1:13:47
  This is correct now. That's the genesis, Yeah.
• 1:13:49
  That's really the genesis. And and, you know, I think that,
• 1:13:53
  you know, I'm proud. I'm very proud of that, of, of,
• 1:13:58
  of using the inspirations from, from the shoulders that we stand
• 1:14:02
  on. Yeah.
• 1:14:03
  Because we turned it into something that maybe they didn't
• 1:14:08
  know it was gonna happen. Yeah.
• 1:14:10
  But they are the inspiration for that.
• 1:14:12
  And so much love for Laurent for that and, and.
• 1:14:14
  And his was based on frustration and and whatnot.
• 1:14:16
  And if that's exactly where it comes from, it's so funny.
• 1:14:20
  I can't believe you heard that story too.
• 1:14:21
  Yeah, yeah, I had heard that. I don't know where I saw.
• 1:14:23
  It, I saw it. I was, I was one of the times I
• 1:14:25
  was there for dinner and I saw it and I'm like, what the fuck
• 1:14:27
  are you guys doing with that? Yeah.
• 1:14:28
  And it's like, OK, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig into that a little
• 1:14:30
  bit. But I'm a very, I'm a very
• 1:14:31
  structured person. So if it's, if it's not
• 1:14:33
  repeatable, you're not really gonna see it from my team.
• 1:14:38
  There's a few moments, you know, but, but, but it needs to be, we
• 1:14:42
  need to have a bar of measure so that if something goes awry, we
• 1:14:45
  have to be able to course correct and adjust.
• 1:14:48
  So that's for me, it's like everything has to has to.
• 1:14:50
  I don't care where we are as long as we know where we are
• 1:14:53
  because then we know how to get out of or get back to.
• 1:14:56
  That's important. That's really important.
• 1:14:58
  It's like Hansel and Reynold with the with the the bread
• 1:15:01
  crumbs. But so.
• 1:15:04
  Where were we? We were on pre hive, which by
• 1:15:06
  the way, for people that have never used it, it's a, it's a
• 1:15:08
  game changer. It's a game changer everywhere.
• 1:15:12
  When I learned about it, we immediately implemented this.
• 1:15:16
  We talked about this last time, immediately implemented in all
• 1:15:18
  the kitchens, taught everyone this is the way it works.
• 1:15:20
  And we made a big batch pre hive, you know, pressed it, put
• 1:15:24
  it in the in the cooler and everyone got what they needed.
• 1:15:27
  And then since then, anytime I've been hired as a consultant
• 1:15:31
  to go in and fix kitchens, what's the first thing I teach
• 1:15:34
  you how to do is like teach you how to make pre hide.
• 1:15:36
  It's gonna it's gonna save you in more situations than we
• 1:15:40
  realize. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:15:41
  Yeah, Yeah, I, I agree. And so, so that's an emulsifier,
• 1:15:45
  right. So pre hide is an emulsifier.
• 1:15:47
  We have thickeners, we have jelling agents and we choose to
• 1:15:50
  do different ones for different reasons.
• 1:15:53
  For me, traditional sauce making needs to be flour.
• 1:16:01
  And there's a few, a few reasons why.
• 1:16:03
  But look, I'm from East Tennessee.
• 1:16:05
  It's gravy country, man. You know, like we're, I, I knew
• 1:16:08
  how to make bechamel before I knew anything about what it was.
• 1:16:13
  And, you know, sausage gravy that was, that was my gateway
• 1:16:16
  drug for, for sauce making as well as soft scrambled eggs.
• 1:16:21
  So the sauces, traditional sauces need to have flour, but
• 1:16:27
  it doesn't need to be Berman. Yeah, necessarily.
• 1:16:30
  It can be bouf mignet. If I use beef fat, it can be
• 1:16:35
  lamb mignet, duck mignet, whatever, because it's
• 1:16:39
  appropriate and I don't have to knead it on the side.
• 1:16:43
  I can make the Roux in the pan. But I know that if I put in 50
• 1:16:45
  grams of fat to sweat this veg, that if I add 50 grams of flour
• 1:16:51
  and then I had 500 grams of this and then I have the 20%
• 1:16:54
  saturation. And so that's how my brain works
• 1:16:57
  and all of this. So whenever I formulate the
• 1:16:58
  sauces, it's all based on percentage to get me to that
• 1:17:01
  point. And I know that my stock has X
• 1:17:04
  amount of power for the flavor. I know where I'm at.
• 1:17:07
  I, I, and I always leave myself room for some reduction.
• 1:17:14
  But you're reducing to cook and develop flavor, not for
• 1:17:18
  necessarily consistency. So if my rule is that it's 20%
• 1:17:22
  or 10%, whatever, whatever the number is for, for the desired
• 1:17:24
  outcome, the liaison will start at 15 knowing that I'm going to
• 1:17:34
  cook for X amount of time to get me back to that 20.
• 1:17:39
  So there's a little bit of magic and, and, and, and knowledge
• 1:17:43
  that you have to have to know where you're going, but it gives
• 1:17:46
  you a much higher success rate to have a much more consistent
• 1:17:50
  flavorful sauce. And that would be flower
• 1:17:53
  specific. Cornstarch I typically use in
• 1:17:58
  anything that's clear, Obviously consummates.
• 1:18:00
  I thicken all of my consummates with cornstarch.
• 1:18:03
  I was speaking with someone the other day who was studying for a
• 1:18:05
  master chef exam and they were dumbfounded that I said that.
• 1:18:11
  And I'm like, well, why, why, why, why?
• 1:18:15
  Why is that weird? You have to add, unless you're
• 1:18:17
  sipping it like tea, it should have some sort of a napache of
• 1:18:22
  sorts. It should have some sort of a
• 1:18:24
  way that it coats your palate. It's thin.
• 1:18:29
  It's been clear of all solids. So I always add a little bit of
• 1:18:37
  cornstarch, maybe 3%, depends on the dish.
• 1:18:40
  If it's, if I serve it like broth, it's like 3%.
• 1:18:43
  And I'm explaining this and we're, and we're conversing, you
• 1:18:45
  know, that master chef stuff. But we both have a lot of
• 1:18:47
  respect for that. I, I think it's a, it's a very
• 1:18:49
  valuable. I, I enjoy that.
• 1:18:50
  I, I would love to, to, to try to be to a certified master chef
• 1:18:56
  from, from the ACF. However, my methods are too
• 1:19:00
  radical. They would just, they would
• 1:19:01
  blast me out of the water. No hate mail guys, please.
• 1:19:07
  But I admire them. I admire them and I admire their
• 1:19:11
  reverence for classics because I'm a very classic person with
• 1:19:15
  cuisine. But so we're speaking and I
• 1:19:17
  said, So what is that? What does a scafia do?
• 1:19:19
  He had some tap. He cooks tapioca in it.
• 1:19:23
  So is that not a starter? Is that not we're talking about
• 1:19:27
  the same thing. So why does why does scafia
• 1:19:30
  similar? Tapioca pearls in its consomme
• 1:19:33
  to give it palatability will hang time.
• 1:19:36
  So it hangs on your palate and the satiety presents itself in a
• 1:19:39
  different way and you feel, you feel it.
• 1:19:43
  If you drink bone broth, you don't want that thickened.
• 1:19:47
  It's different, it's tea, it's very different.
• 1:19:52
  So that would be a use for cornstarch and I would go up in
• 1:19:54
  percentages if I want to make a ragu.
• 1:19:57
  I mean, look at there's a, there's quite a few of them that
• 1:20:03
  I do that. I really love the visual, the
• 1:20:07
  shine. The cornstarch is incredible.
• 1:20:10
  It affects the palate in a no negative way.
• 1:20:13
  It's, it's, it's great. Flour's great too.
• 1:20:16
  As long as you cook it correctly, it's great.
• 1:20:18
  So then those would be the thickeners and then the, the
• 1:20:21
  gelling agents would be, would be, you know, the Agar or the
• 1:20:25
  gellin. I have, I have eliminated gellin
• 1:20:28
  for the most part for my cookery.
• 1:20:31
  I prefer Agar because I feel like it has a cleaner, cleaner
• 1:20:35
  flavor on the palate. You can't really perceive it.
• 1:20:37
  It's much to me. Gellin deadens the palate.
• 1:20:41
  There's something about it. It just flattens out the palate
• 1:20:44
  and you have to overwork the seasoning afterwards.
• 1:20:47
  I don't love it. I like how it performs better
• 1:20:50
  than Agar. It doesn't melt the same way
• 1:20:53
  Agar will melt if you serve it too hot.
• 1:20:56
  With regards to Agar, are you doing the same or a similar
• 1:21:01
  process of like pre hype but with Agar?
• 1:21:04
  I do one, yeah, yeah. We call Agra base and I don't
• 1:21:08
  use it a lot, but it's really good in gourmache.
• 1:21:11
  If you add like if you wanted to do a thickened yogurt, I give
• 1:21:16
  it. So if I wanted to make a yogurt,
• 1:21:18
  let's say I wanted to make a modern style Tadziki and I
• 1:21:21
  wanted to take some exceptionally thick Greek yogurt
• 1:21:24
  and add 500 gram like like X amount of, of, of cucumber juice
• 1:21:30
  gives it a light intent. Now my borage is going to come
• 1:21:34
  in, We're going to get some borage on here.
• 1:21:36
  So the, when you add some cucumber juice, it gives us a
• 1:21:39
  faint green color And what I need it to be raw flavor.
• 1:21:43
  You know, when you cook a cucumber, you can it's fine, but
• 1:21:46
  it starts to taste like a squash a little bit.
• 1:21:48
  You lose that, that green aroma. And so now my yogurt is thin
• 1:21:53
  like like like like crema or something, You know, it's not,
• 1:21:56
  it's not, it's not the same. If I blitz that with a bit of
• 1:22:00
  Agar base together and hit it with a touch of UT of the
• 1:22:05
  ultratechs, it'll come back together and have that texture.
• 1:22:12
  So then I do my beautiful cucumber salad, the cucumber
• 1:22:14
  yogurt, some pickled onions. Maybe I'm going to bring back my
• 1:22:18
  chilled leg of lamb on the side that's roasted and some Borge
• 1:22:20
  blossoms. Now you have a pretty awesome
• 1:22:22
  dish. Maybe some compressed little
• 1:22:24
  dill Franz and hit it with some dill pollen and wow, yeah, sign
• 1:22:29
  me up. You know, that's yeah, that's a
• 1:22:31
  good. Dish.
• 1:22:32
  We wrote a menu. We're gonna get tacos.
• 1:22:34
  There's some nod on the side, right?
• 1:22:36
  So the other day, only because I knew we were gonna talk again,
• 1:22:40
  I, I, there's something going on at home and I was gonna make
• 1:22:42
  some cream spinach. I told you there's some people
• 1:22:45
  that are listening. It's like, well, I know we're
• 1:22:47
  gonna talk. Let me pull out the book, get
• 1:22:49
  the the bechamel recipe, which by the way is brilliant,
• 1:22:53
  brilliantly written in terms of 100 grams or 505 hundred cream
• 1:22:59
  and milk. I want to say, and I'm going off
• 1:23:03
  memory, the Roux is 1515% with 77.5 flour, 7.5 butter
• 1:23:09
  percentage, percentage percentage.
• 1:23:11
  And then I want to say it's like 1% salt like yeah.
• 1:23:16
  And I. Find seasoning 1% good to go.
• 1:23:19
  I made it. My bechamel looked good,
• 1:23:21
  beautiful, right? I added some nutmeg, like the
• 1:23:25
  five year old nutmeg that was in my pantry.
• 1:23:27
  I tasted it was great. Then I put in, I put in the
• 1:23:29
  blender right in the Vita prep that I have at home and then
• 1:23:33
  mixed it with the cream. So it was great.
• 1:23:35
  It was great. And it's like it was a beautiful
• 1:23:38
  thing for me because it it took me back to cooking with Roux.
• 1:23:42
  It took me back to those kitchens when I was young and
• 1:23:45
  making Roux and it was delicious.
• 1:23:47
  And it reminded me that the classics are great and, and the
• 1:23:53
  fundamentals and they're there for a reason.
• 1:23:55
  And sometimes I think we dismiss we we throw the baby out with
• 1:23:58
  the bathwater for fashion. Fashion.
• 1:24:01
  Without a doubt. Fashion sometimes being gluten
• 1:24:04
  free. And so I guess the pop question
• 1:24:07
  popped in my head. How do you handle that When?
• 1:24:11
  Because in today's world, it's coming.
• 1:24:12
  I got I got all these allergies. I can't have gluten.
• 1:24:15
  I don't plan for that. I, I, I address them
• 1:24:18
  individually and I will do whatever it takes to make that
• 1:24:21
  guest happy. If the guest doesn't want flour,
• 1:24:23
  they're not going to get flour. Maybe, you know, I don't have to
• 1:24:25
  have the dining room team explain to them that maybe it's
• 1:24:27
  going to be wilted spinach instead of this or it's going to
• 1:24:29
  be, I just prepare the meal that they were, that they desire.
• 1:24:33
  And I just tailor to that. And it's as simple as when the
• 1:24:35
  ticket comes in, you know, order for 2/2 tasting one of the no
• 1:24:38
  gluten guys so fired up. They know and then they know
• 1:24:42
  they're going to make it. And it just needs to be made
• 1:24:45
  really well and it needs to be made with care.
• 1:24:48
  What are what are your thoughts on sous video and sous video
• 1:24:50
  cooking? A lot, Yeah.
• 1:24:57
  Well, I mean, I think we. We have to.
• 1:24:59
  We have to 1st to to responsibly have the conversation.
• 1:25:01
  We have to 1st define what is sous video.
• 1:25:03
  Yep. And literally, you know, we
• 1:25:05
  wrote a book in 2007 on it that we weren't really prepared to
• 1:25:12
  write, I think in my opinion. But we gave the information at
• 1:25:18
  that time of what we had. But so sous video literally
• 1:25:20
  means under vacuum, under vacuum.
• 1:25:23
  So we wrote under pressure. And sous video in every circle
• 1:25:31
  of life that I'm in has such a negative connotation.
• 1:25:38
  And so much so I've I've removed it from my vernacular.
• 1:25:42
  I don't, I don't use the term. I try not to use the term
• 1:25:45
  because it's just a term that's used that's bastardized to a
• 1:25:48
  degree that it kind of translate to the American public.
• 1:25:52
  That's just shitty cooking. And as professionals, we use it
• 1:25:57
  as a verb. It's, it's, it's, it's like it's
• 1:26:01
  a, it's a hey, you know, are you going to sue via it means are we
• 1:26:07
  going to poach it at a precise temperature for a precise amount
• 1:26:12
  of time? Isn't that much more romantic?
• 1:26:16
  You know, it's like, that's to me sous video, the we've
• 1:26:24
  destroyed that in this country. Sous video doesn't mean
• 1:26:27
  anything. We've put a technique, tried to
• 1:26:31
  put the term sous video up with grilled, sauteed and fried and
• 1:26:37
  it just doesn't work because so we're going to ultimately grill,
• 1:26:42
  saute or fry that item that may be poached at a precise
• 1:26:46
  temperature for a precise amount of time.
• 1:26:48
  So what I, what I do in my training is I, I rope all of
• 1:26:55
  that in together and it's called precision cookery.
• 1:26:59
  Precise temperature for a precise amount of time and for
• 1:27:02
  precision result, consistent result.
• 1:27:05
  And the think think of it like this.
• 1:27:12
  When we started cooking sous video, I remember Mccrady's, we
• 1:27:16
  had a dish on the on the menu. It was Chatham bake cod sous
• 1:27:20
  video. And we would cryovac this little
• 1:27:23
  piece of cod with clarified butter.
• 1:27:25
  And we had a third pan that was sitting on an open burner and we
• 1:27:29
  would drop it in and it was cooked until it was cooked.
• 1:27:34
  So is it sous video or is it poached or is it called feed or
• 1:27:39
  what is it? It's all all the above.
• 1:27:42
  But we were so proud to share that fact that it was Suvi Suvi
• 1:27:47
  day, as a lot of people say. And you'll have a lot of the
• 1:27:52
  restaurants that'll do steaks. In the butter bath.
• 1:27:56
  Yeah, well, I like that. Yeah.
• 1:27:59
  Yeah, he did a good job. Chris Lamadin.
• 1:28:01
  God rest your soul, my friend. But if you vacuum steak and
• 1:28:08
  poach it in the bag and it's done, it probably too low of a
• 1:28:11
  temperature for too little of an amount of time to get quote on
• 1:28:16
  quote perfect. And it's raw from edge to edge.
• 1:28:19
  And then they usually sear it before they do that because
• 1:28:24
  institutional knowledge tells you you need to.
• 1:28:26
  I'm very, I'm doing the completely opposite.
• 1:28:30
  And then you get a mushy, undercooked thing, and you've
• 1:28:34
  got some poor person in the dining room trying to explain
• 1:28:38
  that chef thinks this is perfect and here's why.
• 1:28:41
  And you're wrong. And it's like, man, I just want
• 1:28:44
  my steak cooked medium. Like, can you just cook the
• 1:28:46
  steak? You know, like every other
• 1:28:48
  restaurant in town cooks the steak.
• 1:28:50
  This sous video shit is garbage. So there was a lot of that that
• 1:28:54
  happened. I'm sure you've been on both
• 1:28:56
  ends of. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:57
  Yeah, I'll tell you, one of the big problems I had with sous
• 1:28:59
  video is you get it. You just make this up.
• 1:29:03
  You put a a lamb tenderloin or something in the bag with, you
• 1:29:06
  know, some thyme and butter, whatever, and then you open the
• 1:29:09
  bag and it stinks. Yeah.
• 1:29:12
  Like, and it doesn't smell appetizing.
• 1:29:15
  And then you're like, OK, what are we gonna do to, to take that
• 1:29:18
  smell away? But yeah, yeah, it doesn't smell
• 1:29:22
  appetizing. So, so there's been times when
• 1:29:27
  and by the way, not that it's not that it's my place to, to
• 1:29:33
  share my opinion every single time, but I've gone through
• 1:29:36
  moments in my career where I it's a it's a time and place
• 1:29:40
  thing. Like if I, if I need to cook for
• 1:29:42
  a lot of people, I'm going to use this.
• 1:29:44
  If I have an inexperienced team with me because I know.
• 1:29:47
  But then there's other times like, you know, we're going to
• 1:29:48
  cook it on the grill. It's it's a time of like we were
• 1:29:50
  talking about the artichokes earlier.
• 1:29:52
  Time and place to choose the right.
• 1:29:55
  A weapon, yeah, for the for the job, right.
• 1:29:57
  Well, I have a very good story that was one of those aha
• 1:30:00
  moments much like the real stock.
• 1:30:02
  It's like why change it if it works?
• 1:30:05
  We have other things that we're working on.
• 1:30:06
  We're always working right on improving things.
• 1:30:10
  So we were doing a dinner with my dear friend Gavin Case and
• 1:30:13
  you know, Gavin at Spoon and Stable.
• 1:30:16
  And I think we had like 50 lamb racks or so that were racked in
• 1:30:22
  probably 4 per bag or something. This short bones.
• 1:30:25
  It wasn't long bones. It was a little prime rib of
• 1:30:27
  lambs. I like to call it some beautiful
• 1:30:28
  cut from Keith Martin. Put them in the oven X amount of
• 1:30:35
  time, X amount of temp. But the sheer volume and I think
• 1:30:39
  the proximity of everything of how it was racked, I'm not sure
• 1:30:41
  what happened, but the the young chef who deemed that the the
• 1:30:46
  timer had went off. So damn it, it must be cooked
• 1:30:50
  with no evaluation, took them out, cut them out, had them all
• 1:30:54
  out. And I come by and I look at it
• 1:30:55
  and I'm like, guys, these are all raw.
• 1:30:58
  Like, we this is not going to work.
• 1:31:00
  And, you know, we're going to serve 250 guests.
• 1:31:04
  Yeah, we, we need this to be consistent.
• 1:31:05
  We're not going to be playing this game a lot.
• 1:31:07
  And so the young chef eager to please.
• 1:31:14
  Yes, chef, I'm going to get them all revacked right now.
• 1:31:18
  And I'm like this, this is going to take an hour, like no way.
• 1:31:20
  And they're all hot. And it's like, here, listen,
• 1:31:23
  give me a sheet tray with a rack.
• 1:31:25
  We're going to line all of them up.
• 1:31:27
  Just put them back in the rationale, Just put them back in
• 1:31:29
  the steamer. We're going to poach them until
• 1:31:32
  they're appropriately cooked. And like you mentioned, that
• 1:31:36
  blood aroma I've always had a problem with.
• 1:31:39
  I really, really don't like that.
• 1:31:42
  It's always bothered me. And you have to fight it later,
• 1:31:45
  which seems it's, it's, it's, it's backwards of what we want
• 1:31:48
  to do. But we've, we've done it for a
• 1:31:50
  while. And I remember opening to check
• 1:31:54
  the lamb and I opened the door, step back for a SEC.
• 1:31:58
  So we get poached and this scene comes out in this beautiful
• 1:32:03
  aroma of poached lamb, beautiful, incredible.
• 1:32:08
  And I look at it and the lamb is like, it's been just been
• 1:32:12
  baptized with steam. It's just brilliant.
• 1:32:14
  It's kind of rendered. It's got this gelatinous factor
• 1:32:17
  on the outside. It's not covered in blood.
• 1:32:20
  There's not none of that's going on.
• 1:32:23
  And I'm just thinking to myself, this is incredible.
• 1:32:26
  I can't, I like, I was shocked at how good it looked because I
• 1:32:29
  kind of felt a little bit like a hack for just throwing it in a
• 1:32:32
  steamer. And I was like, wow, that's
• 1:32:36
  really good. And so usually you take it and
• 1:32:39
  you have to dry it off with a towel, get the get the blood off
• 1:32:43
  of it. You know, this doesn't smell
• 1:32:45
  lovely. And I was like, OK, this is
• 1:32:48
  cool. So then I'm cooking and eating
• 1:32:50
  it all night. We're cooking it over wood fire,
• 1:32:53
  Holt roasting, grilling the whole racks over this hot wood
• 1:32:57
  fire with Hickory. They have this beautiful grill.
• 1:32:59
  It's Moon's table. And I'm slicing and eating it
• 1:33:03
  all night. And it tasted incredibly
• 1:33:09
  different than what I experienced before.
• 1:33:12
  So I realized immediately that I had to adopt that technique and
• 1:33:16
  I was going to remove the bag. And I had been removing the bag
• 1:33:18
  for some time from many processes and just leaning on my
• 1:33:22
  my understanding of time and temperature, you know, precise
• 1:33:26
  time, precise temperature for cooking.
• 1:33:29
  Maybe I would do in the casserole, maybe I would do it
• 1:33:31
  in, you know, I don't want the plastic.
• 1:33:32
  I'm scared of the plastic. You know, I mean, I got a
• 1:33:34
  plastic bottle right here, but I don't like that the I don't like
• 1:33:37
  the plastic and the micro plastics go in your brain.
• 1:33:41
  So, you know, like, I don't like that.
• 1:33:45
  So I immediately adopted that technique and it changed the
• 1:33:51
  flavor profile to change how I cook.
• 1:33:53
  And no longer do you have mangled, mismatched things
• 1:33:56
  because the bag torts things. And you know, so then that's
• 1:34:00
  what really got me started thinking about, well, is it sous
• 1:34:03
  video or is it poached because a steamer that has 100% of the
• 1:34:08
  humidity is, is poaching. Right.
• 1:34:11
  But so then we would also poach and be fat.
• 1:34:13
  We do things like we learn from from Chris Lamadu and Michael
• 1:34:15
  Mina. That was a very big, he was a
• 1:34:17
  big, very, very big influence on our cooking because he did it.
• 1:34:23
  I always admired the guys who are doing 300 plus covers, you
• 1:34:27
  know, And Gonier said that any restaurant worth calling itself
• 1:34:29
  a restaurant must serve 100 guests a day, period.
• 1:34:32
  Otherwise you're in art gallery. And that's from the the true
• 1:34:36
  artist. Yeah.
• 1:34:37
  You know, But so then that that that precise time and
• 1:34:42
  temperature leads itself into many, many, many other ways.
• 1:34:46
  But so that would be my advice to the young chefs out there is
• 1:34:48
  to truly learn how to master temperature, whether it's even
• 1:34:55
  in the oven at home. But whatever it is, is I
• 1:34:58
  remember I was cooking on the line in the crazy one time as
• 1:35:00
  Steven Green turns to me and he says, you know, you don't have
• 1:35:02
  to have an oven on 500 all the time or you don't, you know, he
• 1:35:05
  said. You know, you can adjust these
• 1:35:07
  burners. Yeah, right, magic trick.
• 1:35:09
  Yeah, because all the burners were just wide open all the
• 1:35:11
  time, and the oven was always at 500 because ultimately it's
• 1:35:14
  probably a 300 because you're opening so much.
• 1:35:15
  Yeah. And then when it was slow, I
• 1:35:17
  burned all my food. Right, Right.
• 1:35:19
  So do you have like a? Let's just take an example.
• 1:35:24
  You're doing a lamb loin. Yeah.
• 1:35:26
  For example, what do you put in the steamer at?
• 1:35:29
  And then what's the process? Yeah, right after that?
• 1:35:32
  Well, well, we call it the 123 method, right?
• 1:35:36
  It's poach, roast. Or, excuse me, poach.
• 1:35:43
  Rest arose poach rest arrows A. The resting process is
• 1:35:48
  incredibly important to allow it to equalize, otherwise it would
• 1:35:52
  take too long. So you cook it a little hotter
• 1:35:53
  than you want for X amount of time and you allow it to rest
• 1:35:56
  and equalize the cooking. And then your arrows, a slice
• 1:36:00
  insert. And then for Aeroze for for the
• 1:36:02
  peeps out there that may not know, but that's like to butter
• 1:36:05
  based or to grill or to, you know, Aeroze doesn't mean to
• 1:36:08
  grill. But what I'm saying is you
• 1:36:10
  finish it in a way. It's not just poach a slice and
• 1:36:14
  serve on the plate. It has to be flavored.
• 1:36:17
  So why do we Aeroze? Why do we base with butter?
• 1:36:19
  Is it a cook or is it a flavor? It's a little of both, but
• 1:36:23
  really it's the flavor. So if I'm going to take a piece
• 1:36:26
  of meat from raw and cook it, I don't add butter until it's
• 1:36:29
  cooked. And I had the butter with my
• 1:36:31
  herbs and aromatics to cook it. Excuse me to flavor it, not to
• 1:36:35
  cook it. But so then that 32123 process,
• 1:36:40
  poach, rest, aerosi slice and serve.
• 1:36:43
  Aerosi slice and serve are the same in the same same portion.
• 1:36:50
  It's essential for consistency. And that that mean it works
• 1:36:54
  every time because all my meat is already cooked to a degree to
• 1:36:57
  the turn it's where it needs to be.
• 1:37:00
  And we mentioned the saucier earlier.
• 1:37:04
  Hate him or love him, they'll make or break your restaurant.
• 1:37:08
  And so I had one at one time who were who will remain unnamed.
• 1:37:14
  You know who you are. I love you.
• 1:37:18
  Who wasn't great at that station, but was very good at
• 1:37:21
  many other stations. Took him a long time to learn
• 1:37:24
  how to do it. And I was having frustrations
• 1:37:25
  throughout service. So, you know, if you got, if you
• 1:37:27
  wreck a lamb saddle, you need 30 or 45 minutes to, to rectify
• 1:37:30
  that. Yeah.
• 1:37:32
  How do you fix that problem? So we're sending extra courses
• 1:37:35
  to tables where that's a, that's a table that may be targeted for
• 1:37:39
  a term for a VIP guest that's coming later.
• 1:37:41
  That not to rush them by any means.
• 1:37:43
  I don't mean that by any means, but but there's, there's,
• 1:37:46
  there's the chemistry in the process of a restaurant.
• 1:37:48
  And so you're really fucking up my game plan here because you
• 1:37:52
  overcooked or undercooked the lamb saddle or you undercooked
• 1:37:55
  the lamb saddle. If you cut it off the bone and
• 1:37:57
  you decide to carve it, you may as well have just never started
• 1:38:01
  because once it's carved, it's carved.
• 1:38:02
  You can't really rectify that. If you look at it and it's rare,
• 1:38:06
  then you could cook it a little more.
• 1:38:08
  If it's over, God willing, there's no way you're going to
• 1:38:11
  uncook it. So you're just screwed.
• 1:38:14
  And, and so that requires a great, great amount of skill.
• 1:38:17
  You have to know the meat that you have.
• 1:38:18
  You have to know the age of the meat.
• 1:38:21
  You have to know there's so much involved that just not any young
• 1:38:25
  cook can do. So I made a decision a long,
• 1:38:27
  long, long time ago because of my buddy that I'm going to cook
• 1:38:33
  all the meat from the past. That was a pretty good saucer.
• 1:38:39
  I knew I had to figure out how to cook it from the past so I
• 1:38:41
  could have consistent service. I didn't disrupt the dining
• 1:38:44
  room. It was always my goal to keep
• 1:38:46
  the dining room happy. The dining room team, of course,
• 1:38:48
  the guests happy, absolutely paramount for success.
• 1:38:52
  I need the dining room team to be happy with me, with the work
• 1:38:55
  that I do, the way my team performs.
• 1:38:58
  I need a general manager to be my best friend.
• 1:39:01
  And the way I was going to do that, but one, one of the ways
• 1:39:04
  was through good culture, good training and good, good, good
• 1:39:07
  relationships. But also I was going to make
• 1:39:08
  sure we didn't have these problems that we knew we could
• 1:39:12
  foresee these problems coming like a slow motion train coming
• 1:39:16
  towards you. So get in front of that problem.
• 1:39:19
  And that was one of the methods I was cooking all the meat from
• 1:39:21
  the past. So I started at that point quote
• 1:39:24
  UN quote cooking sous video and or poaching.
• 1:39:27
  And then that led to me cooking almost all, almost all meats
• 1:39:35
  cooked at a precise time and precise temperature.
• 1:39:37
  So even birds I would bake, I'd bake a lot of food.
• 1:39:42
  All the birds I'd bake. And then finish up Rosay.
• 1:39:46
  If they need they usually don't need it.
• 1:39:48
  I'd make them. I'll just bake them.
• 1:39:50
  I see. Slowly.
• 1:39:51
  And they cook just beautifully, unilaterally, just edge to edge
• 1:39:54
  slowly and beautifully and nicely aged bird quail chicken.
• 1:39:58
  I mean, I can remember when I was a kid, even at French
• 1:40:01
  Laundry, taking whole chickens, whole raw chicken and sauteing
• 1:40:07
  the skin on the outside to brown it.
• 1:40:10
  Yeah. Now how ridiculous is that?
• 1:40:13
  You have a It's going to take 50 minutes to cook this chicken and
• 1:40:17
  I'm sauteing the skin. But how many times have you seen
• 1:40:21
  your grandma cook the chicken or, or, or, or a Turkey?
• 1:40:24
  Has she ever sauteed the skin? It was a beautiful golden brown,
• 1:40:27
  right? Right.
• 1:40:28
  Why don't we bake it? Bake the lamb rack?
• 1:40:32
  Why don't you bake the lamb rack?
• 1:40:34
  You hammer it in the pan because the institution tells you you
• 1:40:37
  need to, and it's raw in the middle.
• 1:40:40
  And you slice into the little lollipop chops and they're burnt
• 1:40:43
  on the outside and it's raw in the middle.
• 1:40:46
  Put it in a little convection oven, baste it with a little
• 1:40:48
  Rosemary and olive oil and bake it until it's beautifully
• 1:40:52
  cooked. 13 minutes of lamb rack at 350°, perfect every single
• 1:40:56
  time, edge to edge, beautiful medium.
• 1:41:01
  But we're, we're, we were on top what we already knew.
• 1:41:05
  But so that's precise time and temperature.
• 1:41:06
  Whether it's sous video, whether it's poached, whether it's
• 1:41:08
  grilled, whether it's baked, I don't care.
• 1:41:11
  The young chefs out here get a handle on your time and
• 1:41:13
  temperature and understand and embrace it because we are in
• 1:41:17
  the, we are in the arrows. A mindset, right?
• 1:41:22
  All right, chef, normally we wrap up the show.
• 1:41:23
  I, I, I, I give you some speedball questions.
• 1:41:27
  How do you how do you do this in the kitchen?
• 1:41:30
  But because you've answered a lot of them, I'm going to go
• 1:41:32
  with some, some fringe, maybe some controversial ones over
• 1:41:35
  here. So lovely.
• 1:41:36
  And plus, you've this second time coming on, you may have
• 1:41:38
  already answered some of the Mount Rushmore ones already, but
• 1:41:41
  let's talk mushrooms to wash them or or not to wash them?
• 1:41:47
  What, what, what is your mushroom one O 1 general steps.
• 1:41:51
  Let's let's use more else as an example.
• 1:41:52
  More else come at the back door. What do you do?
• 1:41:54
  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Always wash, always wash.
• 1:41:58
  But I think it's a process. First thing I do quickly is is I
• 1:42:06
  don't buy for size I buy for quality and I grade in the
• 1:42:09
  kitchen and I buy tons so I'll buy 20 lbs if I need 5 and I
• 1:42:14
  grade. I grade for size and I do
• 1:42:18
  different things with different ones but they all have to be
• 1:42:20
  washed for sure. Specifically morels, porcinis.
• 1:42:26
  Not always, but. For morels, what's your what's
• 1:42:31
  your washing method? Submerge bowls of ice water.
• 1:42:37
  Or not like warm, warm water. Yeah, I like change.
• 1:42:39
  Yeah, not warm enough to cook them.
• 1:42:41
  Yeah, but I like warm water. I feel like it loosens the dirt
• 1:42:43
  up better than cold water. And that could just be just my
• 1:42:49
  strange brain working, but yeah. And then change.
• 1:42:52
  Never dump the baby out with the bathwater.
• 1:42:54
  Always. I mix, mix, mix, deep water,
• 1:42:57
  mix, mix, mix. And then let it settle.
• 1:43:01
  Take them out into another one and do that two or three times.
• 1:43:06
  Next next speedball question Chef truffles come in the back
• 1:43:09
  door. What's what's step one when the
• 1:43:11
  when the truffle dealer shows up?
• 1:43:15
  High 5 them. Thank you so much.
• 1:43:18
  I have I have really good relationships with my truffle
• 1:43:20
  people. You can imagine we probably use
• 1:43:22
  more truffles than anyone in the country.
• 1:43:25
  I would assume step one same grade.
• 1:43:32
  Grade by size, grade by shape. So all starts with grading, but
• 1:43:37
  certain ones are going to go to puree, certain ones are going to
• 1:43:40
  go to this for that. Generally they arrive pretty
• 1:43:43
  clean because you can't get them into the country code in the
• 1:43:46
  soil. So there's a cleaning process
• 1:43:48
  before they come. Specifically, the ones that are
• 1:43:49
  from Australia are typically more clean.
• 1:43:51
  The least clean ones are usually from Italy and I'm not sure
• 1:43:56
  exactly why and I'm Speaking of the Italian ones would be white.
• 1:44:01
  The French black truffles are by far my favorite paramount for
• 1:44:05
  for for French cuisine. You have to have the exceptional
• 1:44:08
  black truffle in some in some way shape or form in multitude
• 1:44:13
  of dishes. The cleaning I like to do as you
• 1:44:19
  need. I don't like to clean them until
• 1:44:22
  it's time to use them. And I clean 3 or 4 a day,
• 1:44:25
  depends on how much I need. And then the next week, I buy
• 1:44:29
  too many every single week. And when the next week shipment
• 1:44:33
  arrives, I clean everything that I have and I preserve it.
• 1:44:36
  And then I start with my fresh batch.
• 1:44:38
  And what I used to do was I would wait until the end of the
• 1:44:41
  season and I would buy 50 to 100 lbs in bulk.
• 1:44:48
  But what I found was, and of course you get some sort of a
• 1:44:51
  little discount for for a bulk purchase.
• 1:44:53
  But what I found was I would prefer to have the better ones,
• 1:44:57
  buy too many consistently throughout the season and
• 1:45:00
  preserve them as we go. Then I would prefer to do that
• 1:45:07
  than buy a bulk. What what do you what do you
• 1:45:10
  store them Like? Are you a rice person or are you
• 1:45:13
  a? Butter.
• 1:45:13
  Butter. Yeah.
• 1:45:14
  Whole butter in the bottom. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:45:16
  I don't like rice because it Wicks away it Wicks away the
• 1:45:20
  inherent moisture. Much like your cell phone when
• 1:45:22
  you drop in the toilet. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:24
  Fair enough. You know, And I know the Italian
• 1:45:26
  chefs love that and they they make the risotto out of it and
• 1:45:30
  that's cool, whatever. But it's not for me.
• 1:45:32
  I don't like to do that. I don't need to do that.
• 1:45:34
  I like them to retain as much moisture as possible.
• 1:45:37
  Let me tell you my favorite method for preserving them.
• 1:45:40
  What's that? You take them and you cryovac
• 1:45:46
  them in small, small packages and you freeze them raw?
• 1:45:51
  Yeah, I don't poach them. I don't simmer them in oxtail
• 1:45:55
  consomme. I don't put wine on them.
• 1:45:59
  I don't do anything to them. I preserve them as they are.
• 1:46:02
  And typically those will be served minced or and or pureed.
• 1:46:05
  They make a beautiful Vichy Swaz.
• 1:46:08
  They serve hot with a potato, potato leek soup that's pureed
• 1:46:11
  with probably 10% black truffle into it.
• 1:46:14
  And I serve it all season long. When they're out of season,
• 1:46:17
  they're incredible. A soft boiled egg with a
• 1:46:19
  beautiful potato soup. Truffles like incredible.
• 1:46:23
  Nothing better. 2nd to last question, chef, if you had
• 1:46:27
  advice out there for a young culinarian that is that's that's
• 1:46:31
  just getting started and you want to set them on the road for
• 1:46:34
  developing their their own career or their own philosophy,
• 1:46:37
  what would what would you tell them?
• 1:46:41
  Well, you know, career philosophy are two different
• 1:46:44
  things. You know, to develop your
• 1:46:45
  career, be patient, don't rush. Make sure you work for someone
• 1:46:53
  who's opinionated. They need to have an opinion.
• 1:46:57
  You don't want to work for a flip flop, someone who just
• 1:47:00
  blows in the wind. You don't want to work for
• 1:47:02
  someone if you're going to develop true artistry of, of of
• 1:47:05
  cooking who's driven by numbers. The numbers.
• 1:47:09
  If, if you're in a great kitchen, the numbers will take
• 1:47:11
  care of themselves in different ways.
• 1:47:12
  It's not by buying cheaper flour, buying cheaper butter,
• 1:47:16
  finding 1/2 of a penny per pound on something.
• 1:47:19
  Who gives 2 shits about that? Because the minute you cut that
• 1:47:21
  steak wrong, you negated all that flour you bought for the
• 1:47:25
  whole year. So it's irrelevant.
• 1:47:26
  So be better, be a better chef, be a better Craftsman, or for
• 1:47:29
  people who are opinionated about what they do.
• 1:47:32
  But also do not be so strict in your own opinion that you can't
• 1:47:39
  evolve at any given time. And we said earlier, my opinion
• 1:47:42
  today is absolute to the information that I have right
• 1:47:45
  now, but I evolve every single day as.
• 1:47:49
  As as the facts change, my opinion changes, correct?
• 1:47:52
  Yeah, correct. Last question, chef, what are
• 1:47:55
  you working on right now? Where can people?
• 1:47:58
  What can you share? Well, you know, I do, I do.
• 1:48:01
  I do a lot of consulting. I work with a lot of, of
• 1:48:04
  individuals that desire to have a certain style of service and
• 1:48:11
  cuisine, certain design in their projects.
• 1:48:16
  I, you know, I live in Franklin, TN, I'm in the mountains or at,
• 1:48:21
  well, I'm in Middle Tennessee now, but I'm close to the
• 1:48:24
  mountains where I'm from and, and near the, the lakes and the
• 1:48:27
  rivers. And I, I, I live in my best life
• 1:48:32
  with the, with the beautiful community that has welcomed me
• 1:48:34
  in so much. And I actually have a lot of
• 1:48:37
  work in Middle Tennessee and I'm grateful that I don't really
• 1:48:40
  have to leave that often. It's really brought me in
• 1:48:43
  specific projects. There's two that are very high
• 1:48:47
  profile that I, I will choose to not reveal yet, but they're, but
• 1:48:55
  they're very special and very special and near and dear to my
• 1:48:58
  heart. They mean a lot to me.
• 1:48:59
  Yeah. Fair enough chef.
• 1:49:01
  This was fun. We might need to do part three.
• 1:49:04
  OK, we got to get it. We we just roll it out.
• 1:49:06
  We just scratched the surface. We might need to go to Part 3,
• 1:49:09
  but this was great. It's good seeing we.
• 1:49:10
  Didn't get a fish cooker yet? Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:49:12
  We haven't even talked about brining fish.
• 1:49:15
  All right, Chef, thank you so much.
• 1:49:16
  Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 1:49:18
  If you want to support the show, if you're watching on YouTube,
• 1:49:20
  hit the like and subscribe button.
• 1:49:21
  If you're listening on Apple or Spotify or anywhere else, make
• 1:49:24
  sure you leave five stars. It's a five star podcast.
• 1:49:27
  I'm a five star man. If you want to get chef brains,
• 1:49:29
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• 1:49:33
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• 1:49:35
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• 1:49:45
  We'll see you next week at the Porno Music, no?
• 1:49:48
  Small address in the kitchen. Mix it.
• 1:49:50
  Drop the chef knowledge. No fiction.
• 1:49:52
  Stirring up the beats. Heat enough the session.
• 1:49:55
  Listen. Close classes in session.