chadzilla

corn people

My first real awareness to a 'corn diet' was from reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.  It was one of the unexpected realities that I walked away from while reading it... especially in contrast to an Asian cultural background as I read it while Ming and I were in Taiwan visiting family.  It highlighted a fact that if any Americans are not aware of now, they soon will be.  I have not seen the movie 'King Corn,' but it looks like it can offer the same publicity as 'Super-Size Me' did for previously available books such as 'Fast Food Nation.'  It it a testimony to the fact that Americans are made up of 2/3 corn.

So what in the hell is so bad about corn?  It helped the first American colonials to survive after being shown how to grow it by the Native Americans.  They ate it at the first Thanksgiving, right?  Corn tastes good and is more American than apple pie.  We are truly a 'corn-bread nation.'

Part of the highlighted problem is that we have based our diet around one single plant... just like our society is dependent on one single fossil fuel.  Instead of becoming more diverse in our system of nourishment, we have tunneled ourselves into one big ole corn hole.  We use corn to feed the livestock that supplies us with meat everyday... the big 3 American proteins beef, poultry, and pork... all fed on corn.  Cows cannot even sufficiently digest corn, but they are corn-bred because we have mountains of corn piled up.  Corn is further processed into the basic ingredients that all processed packaged items and fast food menus are made of.  Colas and sodas commonly nick-named sugar water are in actuality corn water.  HFCS makes its way onto almost every label on every package on our shelves and coolers.

So if cows ate grass, wouldn't we all be made of grass?  Not exactly.  Aside from being present in everything we eat, corn molecular structure is based on a 4 carbon molecule instead of the more common 3 carbon molecule.  This is a corn adaptation that allows the plant to photosynthesize by maximizing its carbon dioxide intake while minimizing its water loss due to evaporation.  Corn doesn't pick and choose carbon like most plants and intake a sizeable amount of not-so-popular carbon 13 isotopes.  Once cows eat corn they contain carbon 13 isotopes, then we eat the beef and contain carbon 13 isotopes.  When corn is processed into many of the disguises that exist on the ingredient labels of packaged foods, those foods contain carbon 13 isotopes that we in turn ingest as well.  We are carbon based life forms so this is a very important consideration in our diets.  Eons after we die, if someone digs up our remains and puts us under an electron microscope, they will see carbon 13 isotopes (ever heard of carbon dating?).  This isotope is part of the permanent fingerprint of corn.  We have more corn in our bodies than the people of Mexico who have integrated corn into almost every meal of their daily diets!

It's all a real shame too.  I love corn in its pure undisguised form.  I love corn cobs in my seafood boils.  I love corn tortillas and maque choux.  I love popcorn.  I love grilled corn with butter.  I even love grits and polenta.  It's a real shame... like a relationship gone sour by an overly dominating partner.  Like Edna Lewis said about grits in response to the many non-traditional grit dishes chefs were playing with years ago... "people should just leave grits alone."  We should all just leave corn alone too.

peru mucho gusto

... for Jenny.

A team member from Peru just gave Chef K an amazing book focused on the foods of Peru.  I feel obligated to re-mention Peruvian cuisine periodically because it can really explode in the near future.  It is the cleanest and more logically structured of all the cuisines of Central and South America.  Although I do not know the true history of it, I like to think it is because of the strong Asian influence that affects it.  It is a perfect fusion of Latin and Asian cuisine.  They also represented at Madrid Fusion 2006.

I mentioned 'The Art of Peruvian Cuisine' by Tony Custer before.  This book is much more detailed.  It's bigger and better and more beautiful.  The release of the book was April 2007, but it's outside the radar of books that we see popping up on our frequented websites and catalogs.  Prom Peru is government's tourism board and had done an excellent job putting it together.  It comes in a hard jacket similar to the El Bulli books.  Explanations are in Spanish and English giving it the potential to explode as an international culinary must-have.

Traditional recipes with clean modern presentations.  Many of these dishes are not altered or modernized.  They focus on the traditional components. 

So, if you are looking for something new and different with a lot of simple appeal, check out Peruvian cuisine.  With over a thousand varieties of potatoes in use with interesting preparations and giving birth to such international ingredients such as the tomato, Peru is worth a glance.  Nobu has roots there.  There are also many great Peruvian national chefs in the book contributing recipes and comments.  Gaston Acurio and Toshiro Konishi (who is also affiliated with the Umami Information Center) are represented.

Strangely though, for all of the links above I cannot find a website that allows you to buy the book.  So where to get it?  It seems that the Tourism Board of Peru would take interest in making this book internationally available, but it does not seem so easily accessible at the moment.  That's a shame because I want a copy for myself.  I cannot even find the price.

some offal good stuff

I feel honored to post this link to Chris Cosentino's website and food blog.  After perusing his cool photos and watching the videos on his site, I was compelled to write a comment.  It's humbling to have him post this comment (along with some scary other ones) in his latest blog entry.

Everything I said, I mean whole-heartedly... except for misnaming Fergus Henderson as Ferguson (somehow I consolidated his 2 names into one).

Please do take the time to explore the different areas of Chris' website.  It is an interesting place in itself.  While offering page selections for press and events and bio information on Cosentino, it is maintained mostly to promote the use of the 'fifth quarter' or offal or 'the nasty bits' (as Bourdain calls them) as a necessary element of cuisine (as well as a respect level for the animals we kill and as a part of human survival throughout civilization).  This is the uniqueness of the site... existing more for the purpose of Cosentino's chosen passion instead of for the chef himself.  It isn't called chriscosentino.com but offalgood.com.  Plus, he reminds me of guys I used to work with when I attended culinary school in Rhode Island... which seems like a very long time ago now.

It also makes me want to do a 'Fifth Quarter' dinner in the near future... but as always the question is 'how will it be received, and will no one eat it, and will it become garbage the next day?'  I guess we can always grind it up and shove it in pig intestines... the customary way to enjoy it!

humbling literature

I just received this book a couple of days ago, and due to the intensity of the material and personal time restraints I am still on the first section.  It reads like an advanced college science textbook (with a cost to match it!).

If I can gain but a fraction of understanding from this text, it will be worth the price and be more valuable than an El Bulli book.  Everything from agar to xanthan is here.

introductions and basics

We've had the routine summer turn-over in our kitchen over the last 2 months.  As business slows ever so slightly, we are still running around and trying to cover everything... due to employees on vacation as well as turn-over.  One area of our focus now has been on training.  It's something that our hotel puts a lot of attention on, but as always, the kitchen is its own thing.  We don't fit into the norm.  It did, however, get us thinking... what restaurant or kitchen have we ever worked in where we were given an actual training.  There may be 2 or 3 days of working with someone else on a station, then you are tossed into the fire.  I'm amazed at how many new cooks show up to work and do not even have pen and paper.  It's true that training and learning are 2 way streets, and a cook has to reach for information.  Regardless of this common lack of real training, if we can make the process better then we will.

I started to focus on cooking processes used in our kitchen that new cooks may not be accustomed to.  True, we can show them how to use it and the physical steps that must be completed to achieve an end result, but if they do not understand what is happening during those steps it's pointless.  My first 'tutorial' or introduction plan focused on sous-vide.  This is to get the new person used to using the vacuum sealing machine and also to understand why we choose to cook with this method.  I hooked up the thermocirculator and began to cook eggs.  We ate a few at 62C, then ate more later at 65C, then more still at 70C.  This was done in reference to Herve This' explanation of egg cookery in the introduction the the "Sous-Vide" book by Roca and Brugues.  We sampled and observed the different levels of coagulation of proteins with the egg at the temperature intervals, and the team became motivated.  It felt a little like a classroom forum for a minute instead of our usual kitchen cranking out room service orders, hamburgers and chicken tenders for the pool, as well as fine dining dishes for the restaurant.  This in turn motivates me to do another tutorial on the next huge unfamiliar area of importance... umami.  Understanding this primal sensory phenomenon can be simple if approached correctly.

There is one question that Chef K and I had after eating the first batch of eggs at 62C.  All eggs that we opened had the same familiar textures as always (we usually do our 2 hour eggs at 62 for the softness of the yolk) except for one egg... which was much softer and appeared less cooked than the rest.  Why is that?  Is it due to irregularities in eggs that one may possibly contain different levels of different proteins?  Is it because our experiment was done with simple Sysco white eggs instead of hormone-free organic free-range farm fresh eggs?  I chalk it up to nature... and as with all other things in nature, there is always an anomoly and there is always imperfection... part of the beauty and surprise of nature.  Either that or it's chicken steroids.

cuisine evolution

Chef K had recently forwarded a copy of a David Rosengarten ariticle called "Coming Home to Le Cirque." (I would love to link it, but it is not available freely on the web as of yet)  Although the article is centered around the carnation and reincarnations of the Sirio restaurant in New York, it is also an editorial about the evolution of dining out.  He focuses on how cuisine has shifted over the past 2 or 3 decades towards the bizarre and sometimes ridiculous.

This has always been a huge area of interest for me.  Ever since reading "The Last Days of Haute Cuisine" by Patrick Kuh years ago, I am fascinated with the turns that the food industry has taken.  It is also true that the older we get and the more time we spend in this business the more we gain perspective on what this all means.  If anyone can remember working in kitchens only 15 years ago, you know what it means to be a line cook... to be the shifty Bourdainesque character sweating it out on the bottom rung of the food service hierachy only one step above the dishwasher.  Being a player in that role, we all sort of became in one way or another that character in the big picture.  I remember being looked down upon by waiters.  Then... slowly... things started to change.

Maybe it was working in New Orleans that made the stand-out so much more drastic.  New Orleans kitchens are old.  When I say this, I mean old-fashioned and old... old ideas, old equipment, old attitudes, etc.  Only very recently have things begun to change there.  I was just lucky enough to be doing Trotter-style food (as was the national influence at the time in the nineties)... or at least Trotter-style presentations.  Working in different cities afterwards broadened my scope and gave me influences from Spain and Asia and other great world cuisines.  It wasn't until the late nineties that I had even heard the name Adria in a conversation with a chef friend of mine in Santa Fe.  He had taken inspiration there to make an appetizer composed of foie gras and pop rocks.  Wow!  My mind was blown and I have not been the same since.  Afterwards, I would on and off spend time studying new ideas in food, broadening my understanding of the cooking process, and learning how to run kitchens and organize (it really all ties in together).

So where have we gone from there?  Rosengarten glorifies the days when restaurant menus were all the same and a chef only set himself apart by cooking one classic dish better than the next guy could.  He all but condemns the modern menu movement of combining uncommon flavors (or as he mentions several times... adding lemongrass to dishes).  I cannot say that he is wrong.  There are a lot of efforts out there that do not deliver what we want... good food.  There are also a lot of new things that work.  This is still a new time in cuisine.  We have gone buck wild and mixed everything we could.  We were blinded by foams and orbs, but the old rules of cuisine still apply.  If the food is good, then it doesn't matter if that sauce was in the form of a butter-mounted marchand de vin or a foam.  If it works, and if the dish is interesting and good, then we succeed.  The guys that we admire out there are no different that the Michelin-star chefs from 40 years ago in comparison.  In fact, it is only in comparison that the food of today seems so bizarre.  We should be thankful of this.  There are many industries in the world that go through amazing revolutions.  This is why I am thankful.  What an amazing moment in time to be a chef.  We have finally climbed up that ladder, and imagine how different "Kitchen Confidential" would be if written by a cook who started his apprenticeship today.

the thinking blogger award

As one blogger leaves the world of memes, I feel it is my time to enter...

One of my favorite blog (and website) authors has nominated me as one of his 5 choices for the Thinking Blogger Award.  I am humbly grateful.

As a result, I would like to list my top 5.  These are blogs that make me think.  These may differ greatly from person to person, but then it is a personal list.  The original is not necessarily centered around the sub-category of food blogs, but due to nature of my interests and the purpose of my blog that is the area in which my 5 will fall.

1. Ideas in Food  This was the original food blog for me.  I would not even be doing this if it weren't for the inspiring photos, ideas, and recipes... as well as just thoughts that Alex and Aki share with the world everyday.
2. Khymos Although fairly new, khymos is short on fluff and full of technical information broken down for the chef brain.  We all need to have it broken down once in a while.
3. Food for Design  Amazing and intimidating.  If nothing else, it will make you think.
4. Curious Cook  Harold McGee... need I say more.
5. lamargaritaseagita  An interesting sight by a food scientist/teacher in Spain.  Although I cannot read a word of it in Spanish and the English translation version is not perfect, it speaks a world of fascination to me.

Thats my 5.  They are all great in different ways.  Finding the time to read them all regularly is difficult.

the how and why

I have just pre-ordered Michael Ruhlman's forthcoming book, 'How I Learned to Cook.'  It's an interesting question... not how, but actually why?  There have been so many books glorifying the chef's role, or on how to become a chef, or the soul of a chef.  Sometimes, we really have to question the fascination with this subject.  That's pretty much what I get from this unreleased book, why do I want to do this... or better yet, why did I originally want to do it.

What he is talking about is not about learning to actually cook, but why do we choose to persevere in an environment such as the 'professional' kitchen.  The physical and mental stress of the job coupled with low pay makes one wonder.  He brings up the rookie cook's biggest anxiety as a major factor... the fear or realization of not being good enough.  Ruhlman says he learned out of anger.  A chef had called him out from everyone else.  Being told by the big man in the top position of the kitchen that you don't have what it takes can affect you in one of two ways.  You can buckle under the pressure as under a drill sergeant in boot camp, or you can get mad and prove him wrong.  Getting angry definitely has it's usefulness in the kitchen.  Some cooks cannot fight their way out of the weeds unless motivated by the pure anger of being buried in orders, waiters standing there looking smug and impatient, the expeditor yelling at them for food that hasn't even been dropped.  The anger sometimes can muster up enough focus to get things out when you've lost all track of the tickets.

I cannot say that anger was my primary motivation for learning to cook, but it wasn't far off.  It's sort of like finding a place that you fit in for whatever strange reasons.  This kitchen world with a population of crazy characters pushed by testosterone, distress, and excess gives citizenship to people of all peculiarities.  It is, in a strange sense, a warped pursuit of excellence.

It will be interesting to read what some of the chefs featured in the book cite as their initial motivations.

The book comes out on Halloween day and can be preordered on amazon here.

*Actually, the book stated above was not written by Ruhlman, but by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan.  Ruhlman was only using the reference to spark discussion as he does so often now in his blog blitzkrieg style.