chadzilla

soja sauce

This sauce was mentioned briefly by David Bouley at the ICC during his demonstration incorporating Japanese ingredients and techniques into Western cuisine.  Chef Richard was sitting next to me, and elaborated on the sauce.  The recipe was first taught to him by a Cambodian (I think) cook back in the 80's long before I ever dreamed of working in a kitchen.  Having never heard of it before, the idea was very interesting to me.  The recipe as given to us by Richard goes like this.

Soja Sauce

• 1 cup soy sauce (or light soy)
• 2 shallots (chopped)
• 1/4 cup ketchup
• black pepper
• 1 # whole butter

Saute the shallot then add the soy sauce.  Whisk in the ketchup, and add black pepper.  Bring to a simmer.  Do not reduce the liquid.  Whisk in the butter as in a beurre blanc.  Strain and hold warm.

I guess it just fascinated me to have a sauce made of soya, ketchup, and butter.  What a hell of a sauce for steak and fries.  The flavor is really great for such a simple novelty sauce.  We used it on a Peruvian sushi dish with evoo poached shrimp.  I've searched the web for a recipe similar to the one from Richard, but all I could find were Indonesian recipes using kecap manis (or ABC), tomatoes, soya, and butter (or no butter).  Maybe this is the origin of it.  A few sites seemed to refer to soy sauce as soja (not sure what country uses this term).  Kecap is a loose term meaning fermented sauce and encompasses a variety of sauces.  Of course, there is the theory that ketchup is derived from kecap so maybe Richard's version comes from a misinterpretation by someone along the way.  His version does make complete gastronomical sense no matter how authentic (or lacking in authenticity) it may be.  It takes 2 ingredients high in umami, soy sauce and tomato ketchup, and combines them with the creamy fatty goodness of butter.  No wonder it tastes so good.

analyzing taste

It's difficult for a chef to comprehend the physiological side of taste... even though it's been a long stretch of years since the writing of 'The Physiology of Taste' by Brillat Savarin.  We deal with taste everyday yet we really do not understand it.  It would be the same as trying to explain what evokes a feeling when observing a great painting or hearing a great song.  It would be except that it's largely different.  The difference is that a lot of flavor can be explained chemically, while the similarity is that these are like colors and it is the artist's combination of them and arrangement of them that evokes feeling.  As modern-thinking chefs, we cannot help but be fascinated by this logical and scientific side of flavor.

The difficulty in this is that the chef is (the great & vast majority of the time) not a scientist.  It reminds me of a comment in the question & answer section of Alex Stupak's presentation at the ICC.  Someone asked about the scientific approach to modern additives and about needing to truly understand them.  His response was that cooks everywhere use cornstarch everyday, but most of the time cannot explain why or how it works on a molecular level.  A lot of literature on the subject of taste is written for those with a lot more college education in the areas of chemistry, biology, physics, and other various sciences than most chefs.  I emailed Martin Lersch from Khymos about my desire to learn more about this and my dilemma.

To set-up a beginning platform, or starting point, there are a few interesting facts relayed to me by Martin.  These are as follows...

• Although flavor compounds are inherent in all foods and are measureable, another way to gage flavor is by analyzing OAV's (odor activity values).  It is estimated that only 20% of taste comes from flavor molecules, but 80% comes from aromas.  This gives us a direction in which to look.
• There is still a great deal unknown about what makes some flavors jive while others do not.  We can observe flavor molecules and pair foods that share the same ones, but this is not a foolproof system.  This is how a lot of Blumenthal pairings are discovered.  There are database's available that list flavor molecules in foods, but the list is limited to the research done.
• We taste the 4 basic flavors in this order with sweet being the least sensitive and bitter the most.  Sweet - Salty - Sour - Bitter
• There are 10,000 tastebuds on the tongue and they are all replaced every 3 weeks.
• There are from 5 to 10 million receptors for volatile compounds in the nose of about 1000 different types of receptors.
• Some taste combinations are synergistic while others are suppressive.  Khymos has a great chart for referencing these here (scroll down to the green and red chart).
• Umami is delivered mainly through 3 amino acids.  Monosodium Glutamate (MSG), Disodium 5'-Inosine Monophosphate (IMP), Disodium 5'-Guanosine Monophosphate (GMP).  All 3 enhance each other.  IMP and GMP enhance sweetness.  All 3 generally enhance salt.
• Salt enhances MSG and natural glutamate in foods.  Therefore salt and glutamate are synergistic.

Of course, this is a very humble beginning.  The real question is what to do with it or how to use it.  I have not really had any sort of epiphanal moment about that yet.  There is much more information either on Khymos or linked to it that deal with other aspects of flavor including volatile aromas, their solubility, and how they are released and lost.  Heat releases aroma, but then it is lost.  Certain flavors and saltiness may be masked when ionically bonded to other molecules.  The science still is young.  In the meantime, I guess the chef must rely on his own tongue and do what he has always done... taste and smell everything.

dinner highlights

The dinner on Tuesday night, although it was for our corporate food & beverage director, was also a great chance to showcase some of our food ideas for most of the departmental managers and our peers in the hotel.  We all work together everyday and interact through good and bad situations, but this allowed us to really explain what we do without words.  At a corporate meeting recently, one of our corporates had a tendency to repeatedly mention passion and ask the question, 'what is your passion?'  To us, the answer to that should be obvious to everyone.  Our intention was not to answer this question with words, but with taste, sight, smell, and touch.  Chef K also was requested to sit down for the dinner, which allowed us even further to show our team strengths... but also allowed for him to speak about each course, the ideas behind them, and any other antecdotes that might be appropriate.

So, here is a recap of that night.  Keep in mind that the photos were taken in the heat of action.  Food shots are as is.  We had to plate up in an emptly function room on the 4th floor away from our kitchen which obviously created it's own challenges... the biggest being food temperatures.  Most of the plating was done by myself and our assistant sous chef, Marianne.  Of course, desserts were plated by Fabian.

Below are the peas & carrot cake hors d'oeuvres from the previous post.  We topped them with an old-school tribute star-tipped whipped mascarpone and dusted the plate with mint butter powder.

We opened the meal with a rip-off of Josh Dechellis' idea from the ICC.  Just by coincidence, we even used the same fish, kampachi, because we had it on hand.  We press/cured the sashimi slices of kampachi between thinly laid out slices of serrano ham for 24 hours.  It seemed a shame to serve the fish without the serrano so we cut them into small ravioli-style squares.  They are topped with thin shaved melon confit and we added honeydew drops to the plate.

Skipping around a little, here is a dish we called 'Peruvian sushi.'  The sliced roll in the back is causa potato dough wrapped in nori with tobiko.  We poached shrimp in evoo with citrus.  The 2 sauces are an aji amarillo cream and soja sauce.  The shrimp is topped with a small sprig of cilantro tempura.  We do not see any use of Peruvian ideas in menus anywhere, and we feel that this cuisine is ripe to be explored.  Peruvian cuisine has the simplicity, control, and balance of Japanese food with the vivaciousness of Latin-American food.  If anyone is looking for a new ethnic cuisine to explore, try Pervuian.  A great book to add to your library is "The Art of Peruvian Cuisine" by Tony Custer.  Proceeds from the book go to helping the children of Peru.

The next course was a cobb salad.  This was an inside joke due to the fact that we've had much grief from various corporate family members who all believe that a cobb salad should be made in various specific ways.  We quietly retaliated with this version of our own.  The actual 'salad' is baby mache with jellied tomato seeds.  The plate is dressed with an avocado ranch.  We incorporated a 2 hour egg (62C) for the boiled egg component and a bacon blue cheese marble.  Fresh cracked black pepper and sunflower seed salt are put on the plate for the egg.  It ended up being the all around favorite of the evening.

Fabian's dessert was a chocolate olive oil cake topped with coconut foam and goat cheese ice cream.  The black dots are a black sesame seed sauce along with a chocolate brush and rosemary syrup.

Without taking up too much more space, I have left out a couple of courses.  Some of my pictures were too bad to post.  Among the missing courses were a Greek rouen duck plate and an entree of dry-aged cote de boeuf.  Both of these meats were from 4 story hill farm in Pennsylvania.  Maybe more about these later.

peas & carrot cake

We have begun prepping for a Tuesday night dinner for our corporate food & beverage director.  The menu was written last minute, which isn't to say it isn't good... it just means no time to order anything special in and less time to prep everything.  There is also a logistical difficulty with the actual execution of the courses.  The dinner is set for 32 (mostly in-house management) and will be on the 4th floor.  This is a problem since our 2 kitchens are on the 2nd and 3rd floors.  The plates, once finished, cannot be transported up and down elevators, so we will have to plate in the small spaces of the 4th floor.  Our building, although quite new, was not designed with any back or house thought in mind.  Like I said, it presents a logistical problem... but one the chef has to be able to work around.  It just takes coordination with banquet and stewarding staff and a lot of forethought (transporting hot boxes with mise en place, plating area, communication with staff).

One of our hors d'ouevres is 'peas & carrot' cake.  The ICC in New York has inspired us in many ways.  One of them is to melt the void between sweet and savory.  We designed 3 small bites to go with this them during the pre-dinner reception.  The peas & carrot cake was based on a recipe for beet cake by Marcus Samuelesson in Art Culinaire magazine.  We took the same genois base and substituted carrots for beets.  The peas were studded in later like raisins in regular carrot cake.  We plan to cut it into small cubes and serve it with mint butter powder.  The other 2 items in the theme that will accompany the cake are smoked salted cocoa krispy treats and compressed watermelon with nuoc cham pipette.

The small diced carrots are first cooked down in simple syrup.  They are then blended into a sweet sticky puree that is folded into a whipped eggwhite, sugar, flour, butter mixture.  I added spices of cinnamon and cardamom to the carrot.

The cake is studded with peas and baked at 375F.

We'll see how easy it is to cut tomorrow when we take everything into the final stages.

a better grilled eggplant

I have never really liked the over-use of grilled vegetables on plates even though I've put more than my share out back in the day.  Guests request them, but I don't get it... they are usually not very good.  One of biggest driving reasons for this dislike is the grilled eggplant which is usually part of the ratatouille-colored melange.  I cannot stand the oily mushy texture of it although the flavor is good.  When removed from the heat early to leave the texture al dente, the eggplant will not have that nice cooked flavor. 

Today, I applied the use of compression to help with the aspect of texture.  I cut an eggplant slice and removed the skin, placed it in a plastic bag and compressed it on medium pressure.  This one happens to be infused with some mushroom vermouth essence for the simple reason that I just made some and also, I figured it would be cool and offer an additional and necessary umami jolt to the veggie steak... about 1 to 1.5 oz essence in the bag with one slice.

This is the texture afterwards.  The eggplant is much more dense and meaty.

...and an even closer look at the breakdown and compression of the cell walls...

So, I rubbed some olive oil, salt and pepper on it and grilled it.  It was much easier to grill than a flimsy standard eggplant slice, taking on the cross-hatch marks nicely and forming a thin skin-like layer on the outside (not sure what causes this, but it helps a lot).  Flipping it with the spatula was like flipping a burger or steak.  It even looks like a piece of meat.  I had actually made a decent grilled eggplant that was incredible to eat.

The inside was juicy and a bit softer... like warm eggplant pudding but firmer.  Look at the 'skin' on the fork cuts below.  It forms naturally.  This may be the ultimate vegetarian burger.  The texture is cool enough in itself and then you can also infuse any flavor you want into it during the vacuum process. 

I know that compression isn't new and we've done a bit of it with fruits and vegetables, but there is a unique texture achieved when preparing eggplant this way and grilling it.  That's a good thing because we need ideas for a corporate food and beverage dinner this Tuesday and the menu is overdue.

I guess in its simplest application, eggplant slices can be flavored and compressed, and held in their bags as line mise en place for a cheaper and more tasty version of the veggie burger.  In more advanced applications (depending on what essences would be infused)-- grilled babaganoush, grilled moussaka, eggplant parm... just playing off of classics alone not to mention the infinite unusual flavor combinations we may discover.

star chefs icc photo album

After sorting through so many, I've realized that I actually have about 1000 pictures of the ICC Congress hosted by StarChefs.com in New York.  I can't say that I've picked the best, because a lot of the shots are blurry or just plain bad... but they all represent a moment.  They are in no particular order either.  You can view them by scrolling down the left sidebar to the photo album star chefs ICC 2007 or just click here.  I wanted to interject my witty anctedotes on each one while they are still in my memory.

Note:  There are much better photos actually taken by a professional on Star Chefs.

Sorry Ed and Chris.  For all of the time we spent hanging out with you guys, I realize that I never took any pictures with you... but the conversations are what's important now.  Keep us informed what's going on at BlueZoo (and all of your projects and the future of Satavo, Ed).

Brian... what are you doing here if you're boycotting my blog?

A view of la Manzana Grande from the ICC room at the top of WTC 7.

earth & sea concepts

Ed's comments on my last post had me thinking more about concepts conveyed at the Star Chefs ICC.  Although there were many... and I mean many things to walk away with, there was one that was on my mind this morning.

I appreciated the movement by (mostly) the Spanish Chefs there relating food back to Mother Earth.  Whether it was the use of white clay as an ingredient, or making compost broth to spark memory, or just disguising potatoes as rocks, the theme seems more evident to me now.  Having chefs like Andoni Luis Aduriz speak of the importance of using the freshest home-grown produce around his mountain region or being entranced with Dan Barber's passion for sustainable farming and animal domestication pushed us all to think more about the origins of our ingredients.  It was going beyond the purveyor, further back to the farmer or the sea, and then to ponder the Earth and the Sea themselves.  It reaches out on a philisophical and religious level... that we are born from and will one day return to the earth... and even back to the sea on an evolutionary view.  There is definitely a zen-like reasoning for taking food to this level.  It is the ultimate deconstruction of food and life (which are parts of the same).  Maybe it's too much thought for someone who just wants to eat, but as a chef the concept is mind-jarring.  It also goes hand in hand with the movement of taking food down to the molecular level.  Without sounding cheezy (God forbid I say anything cheezy), it was the ultimate representation of the circle of life.

processing

There are moments of pause when you choose to perform a function on your computer, and (especially if it's already bogged down with information) the little hour glass pops up in place of the pointer icon and just blinks indefinitely while waiting for the action to complete.  That is where my brain is right now.  We all experience brief moments of reflection after reading something interesting or inspirational, putting together a dish, or performing new tasks when the mind must digest and filter through information.

The past few days have been like a hundred-fold exponential of that.  After returning from the Star Chefs International Chefs Congress (aside from the mental overdose) we have pages of notes, scribblings on all sorts of paper, business cards, photos, digital voice recordings, and video to filter through and organize in a cohesive manner before any of the information becomes lost in our heads.  We met a good number of other chefs whom we had made contact with before and walked casually around an army of the chefs that we admire and study on a regular basis.

We thinking about where to begin with all of this, I have no idea.  Reflection will run its course naturally, and I will try to convey information wherever and whenever possible.  Time is of the essence now, because there are mountains of other issues to focus on when returning to the kitchen today.  The short time available to devote to the breakdown of information (for a few days) will be spent on organizing the information.  I have temporarily pulled out my photo albums so that I may have a few days to sort through the 800 plus pictures I have just ripped into my laptop.  Until I can establish an order and attach titles and descriptions to each one, I will leave it invisible.

I would also like to thank Antoinette Bruno and Will Blunt from StarChefs.com for the incredible work that they have done.  With 2 years and a staff of 20 people, they have been able to accomplish a unity that ACF has failed to do with decades of time.  They have created a forum devoid of rank where chefs of all levels can convene as friends instead of as members, and casually interact with each other with humbleness and awe.  This is hands down the premier chefs event of the US.  Much more to come.

new york, new york

The day has finally come!!!

We fly out to New York today to attend the Star Chefs International Congress.  The anticipation has been building within me for weeks now.  The excitement almost cannot be contained.  I am going armed with only my cheap Olympus digital camera, and a moleskine notepad, and a pen.  My laptop is staying at home, so that means no new posts until late next week.  It's probably best not to have too many expectations, so I will just go with the flow.

Our only planned extra-event activities so far include attending the Gala Chefs event on Tuesday evening.  We also have reservations booked at WD~50 for one night, and Tailor (the website is so new that it doesn't yet show up on search engines and is over 75% unfinished at this point) on another night.  Tailor's concept is interesting.  Sam Mason has divided his menu into 'salty' and 'sweet.'  The new concept seems innovative and is an evolution from typically dessert-themed restaurants like 'Room 4 Dessert' by Will Goldfarb which I hear just closed down.  Goldfarb will be at the Congress for a demonstration, so it will be interesting if he offers his opinions on the subject.  Tailor stretches beyond the dessert restaurant by offering Mason-esque versions of dishes like pork belly, hamachi, and squab.  The restaurant is also a full lounge downstairs (It has 2 stories) with modern renditions of cocktails utilizing the Sam Mason bag of tricks.  Quite interesting and hopefully diverse enough to succeed.  Tailor's website is still in the baby stages since the restaurant opened only 2 weeks ago.

We also have tentative plans to hook up with one of our previous cooks from Venesuela who is living in New York city right now.  Maybe he knows a good joint to get arepas.  See you there, Antulio!

Posting will resume around the 20th or so of this month.  See you then.

apologies due

I have been taught early on in my cooking career that respect will get you a very long way.  This has definitely been proven true... you respect your chef, you respect the food, you work hard to earn respect from those above and beneath you, and you ultimately respect truth and integrity within the industry.  I guess it comes down to just being real.

There was a piece that I wrote a short time ago titled "dissappointed with the duck" that I have since deleted.  The posting was written out of anger and incredible dissappointment with ideals that I highly respected.  It represented a moment of my expectations being shattered.  More to the point, it was a misguided reaction to a false statement... that one of our own was sent home when the Fat Duck terminated its stagier program due to a walk-out of some of its chefs.  Again, this was totally and completely false.  It never happened.  There has never been a walk-out of chefs (or a chef) at the Fat Duck and the stagier program is still in place and going strong.  Since then, I am still feeling the anger and dissappointment, but it is focused in a different direction. 

After a couple of emails calling attention to the false information, I contacted the Fat Duck's personnel department to clear the air and clear my mind.  Less than 2 hours later Chef Ashley Palmer-Watts, Chef de Cuisine for Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck, gave me a phone call.

It was a truly humbling moment when Chef Ashley called me, and I was able to finally settly my mind on the issue.  I had posted untrue statements about his restaurant and stagier program and he could have truly put me in my place.  Instead he spoke with integrity and a casualness that made me feel even more humility than any tongue lashing could evoke.  He spoke like someone who is truly deserving to be the Chef de Cuisine at the greatest restaurant in the world.  It was a benchmark moment for me, not just as a chef, but as a professional in the industry who is expected to conduct himself with professionalism.  I have been humbled many times before, and it is part of the growing process.