Chef Chris Cosentino says: “you can’t create future unless you understand history. If there’s not a grounding in history, then it just doesn’t make sense. And it’s also easier to draw from history than it is to just make shit up!”

Chef Kim Alter – Nightbird

To me when people are cooking at home, unless they’re baking recipes or guidelines, not everybody has the same ingredients that restaurants have. Everybody has different markets and different seasons, and it’s really about adapting to what’s available in their moment and in their place.
Then it’s really about learning to think on your feet and know what flavors work together. So, something very simple as broccoli. You know, people think of broccoli as like this green tree that you get a giant wedge of it on a plate at like a steakhouse. But there’s so many varieties of broccoli. There’s broccoli de Cicco, there’s broccolini, there’s broccoli rapini, there’s sweet broccoli. Then, you have all these other broccoli’s, there’s arugula rabe, which is a broccoli. You have all these like sprouting broccolis purple sprouting broccoli. Then it’s such a simple thing as taking a penne pasta, and in the pan you have very basic things, you need garlic, you need olive oil, you need chili flakes, lemon zest, lemon juice, and you can use broccoli, but you chop it, you peel the stems and you chop it up and you start by cooking the broccoli stems and then you feed in the garlic and then you start adding your pasta to it. Once you add your pasta, then you add pasta water, then you add olive oil. You add the broccoli tops, which are the soft tender bits that cook really quickly. So it’s really about understanding a product, then it boils down to timing and being prepared in advance and having all the stuff cut properly.

The restaurant industry as a whole will change. For starters, you’re not going to see people smiling anymore because they’re going to be wearing masks on their faces.

We are Trade people. So ultimately, everything’s based on technique!

Patience is gone because everybody’s so hooked up to their phones and their computers and to what’s next.

Remember, we’re here to make people happy and if you let your ego get in your own way, you’ll lose.

There are thousands of French grandmas who have cooked before me that will cook French food better than I ever will.

Salumi is about mastering patience, mathematics, and techniques.

We’ve chosen a career where we’ve signed an oath to take care of people. That’s the hospitality business.

Chef Chris Cosentino

Chef Chris Cosentino

Cockscomb

Jackrabbit

Acacia House

Rosalie

Chef Cosentino’s Podcast

Chef Cycle for No Kid Hungry

Chef Chris Shepherd – UB Preserv

Chef Drake Leonards – Eunice

1. First you scale the ingredients.
2. Then, you mix the ingredients. You can mix them in one shot or mix them in different steps.
3. You can let the dough rest between mixing for the first fermentation.
4. Then you will divide, reshape.
5. Let it rest again.
Then you will shape it,
6. Then you are ready to proof it (second fermentation).
7. And finally you will bake it.

For the sandwich bread you will do this process in about an hour before the oven.
For a sourdough bread you can easily go to over 24 hours sometime 72 hours.

The best way to use leftover croissant s from the day before.
1. Start by opening your croissants in half with a knife without separating them completely.
2. Bechamel sauce preparation: melt the butter in a saucepan, add flour to it and little by little, with a whisk, add milk (the quantities are to your liking). Leave to thicken over low heat, stirring constantly. Add salt, black pepper, and nutmeg.
3. As soon as your béchamel is ready, melt the cheese and spread it inside the croissants. Add a slice of rolled ham, then more béchamel and grated cheese.
4. Put in the oven at 350 ° f for 20 min while monitoring.

Bread and food pairing:
– The baguette is good for sandwiches
– The country bread or the sourdough bread, I like when it is combined with a deep flavor, like cured meat for example, like a nice dry sausage, you want to enjoy the nice deep flavor on the bread as well.
– We avoid the contrast for some cheese for example. I like cheese with baguettes because that way I can really taste the cheese and not the bread. If the bread is too sour, you will have a wrong combination of flavors in your mouth. And if you really buy the cheese for the cheese, I will eat it with the baguette.

The real baker follows the dough and not the reverse. If you are in a rush somehow the dough is going to make you pay the next day.

You can always go back to your dream, but an opportunity, you take it or you leave it, as it might not come back.

The two critical aspects of bread baking at home are temperature and time.

A Dutch oven, to me right now, it’s the easiest tool to use at home for bread making and you can really get nice results, a nice crunchy and shiny crust. To me that’s the tool best yet.

Magnol French Baking

Baker Matthieu Cabon

Magnol French Baking  

Farmer Lee Jones from The Chef’s Garden says “We are going to create a whole entire generation of gardeners because once they garden as a child and they learn how fun that is, they understand that the carrot comes from the soil and when they can go with mom and dad and harvest that and bring it in and cook it, and then eat it and realize how good it is and they have a connection with where the food’s coming from and how it’s grown and how much work it takes to grow it. We’ve got a generation of gardeners!”

It is our personal belief, says Farmer Lee Jones from The Chef’s Garden,  that God designed a system far superior to anything we can fake out chemically or synthetically. The way that we’re farming [in the US] chemically and commercially today is much like our Western culture of medicine. Once we get sick, then a doctor prescribes medicine to treat the symptom. The method of farming that we’re trying to do today is more like the Eastern culture. The Eastern culture is, get the body in balance to defend against the disease in the first place. So we have a sane healthy soil, healthy vegetables, and healthy people. We do the soil analysis based on the deficiencies that we find within the soil. Then we plant crop specific. This is what’s really cool based on the deficiency we plant cover crops. Different types of plants will accept different types of energy from the sun, buckwheat, Clover, vetch, barley. We even have a 17 variety cover crop mix that we use to give us a, it would be like, like us taking a multivitamin, the plants except different types of energy from the sun, so based on the deficiency in the soil, you plant crops specific. You let that land sit fallow and let the plants in and if you can visualize the leaves of that plant as antenna or receptacles, they accept the energy through the leaves into the stems, then down to the roots and then into the soil. Then the next year when we plant the turnip or the beat or the carrot or the radish or the zucchini or whatever it happens to be, it picks that back up and when we eat it, it builds our immune system. 

The Culinary Vegetable Institute’s initial vision was a place for the foremost chefs in the country to be able to come and to do experimentation and research and to be able to play. It’s an R&D lab. We have relationships with culinary equipment companies that have the best of the best and the newest ideas. Normally we have about 600 visiting chefs a year. The idea was originally for chefs to be able to come. It’s evolved into a place where we do corporate R&D and corporate retreats. So corporations come and bring their guests. As you know, the, what most of them usually did for many years was go out to Greystone and then toward the Napa Valley. There’s only so many times you want to do that. And so this really gives corporations an alternative to be able to come in. It’s kind of nice, they have a captive audience because you know, you’re out in the farm and so they’re not getting wandering off into a bar or some other thing. They’re focused on really building the relationships. It’s about relationship building and learning different ways to be able to use ingredients. 

For my Mom’s generation, it was all about convenience. The convenience thing was great, but I think it went too far, and we took our eye off, in America, of where the food was coming from.

The Chefs didn’t necessarily know what varieties to grow, but what they were telling us was about flavor, quality, and consistency.

What we’ve heard from chefs over the last 37 years is that flavor is the most important. The second is, flavor, and third is flavor. Flavor, flavor, flavor. And that’s really what we’ve based every decision on was the flavor, the integrity of the product, and how it’s grown.

We pick the vegetables even before daylight because we like to harvest very early in the morning at the lowest respiration rate of the day.

We’re the flee on the end of the tail at the end of the dog. We’re very small, 350 acres, but to make it even smaller, 250 acres of that in any one year is harvesting the sun’s energy.

Our carrots are testing 300 times higher in beta carotene than the USDA average.

The Chef’s Garden

Farmer Lee Jones

The Chef’s Garden Farm

The Culinary Vegetable Institute

Mark Manne Photography

Chef Roy Yamaguchi is the father of the Hawaii Fusion cooking style. In 2018 he celebrated the 30 year Anniversary of Roy’s restaurants. In 2020, he will celebrate the 10 year Anniversary of the Hawaii Food and Wine Festival. He was the co-founder back in 2010. Chef Roy Yamaguchi explains to us what Hawaii fusion is and how you came to create it.

Chef Jean Marie Josselin – JO2

Whether it would be a piece of fish, like a “opakapaka” or whether it be “moi” or whether it be kind of a reef fish, I look at the ingredients and then I try to figure out, how can I best present that. Whether it be steamed or, seared or whether it be grilled depending on the fat and the leanness of the fish itself. And then at the same time, do I want it more refreshing or do I want it as an appetizer and serve raw or do I want it cooked and more meaty? A good example might be, the local, swordfish. It’s called “shutome”. I try to look for the smaller eye, meaning that I look for the filets from the swordfish to be not a huge piece of swordfish where the loin could be five, six, seven, eight inches in diameter. Maybe look for a swordfish that’s smaller, that may have a three or four inch diameter and use that as a presentation. I want to make a steak. So some of those thought process comes out like that. And then do I want to do a hard sear or a soft sear or do I want to put a crust on it, or no crust, whether it would be a macadamia nut crust and then salt and pepper, then cooked all the way or maybe a medium rare. I want a sauce that’s a lot lighter, it could be a vinaigrette, utilizing, you know, maybe, the local lilikoi (passion fruit) or I want more of a richer sauce that may have some cream in it or maybe Chardonnay or do I want a more of a hardy sauce to make it completely different for someone to eat it with a red wine. So making a sauce made with demi-glace, or could decide for a Chinese style where, you know, steaming it and serving it with a kind of soy braised sauce like ginger and garlic and green onions that’s cooked with soy and little bit of sweetness, maybe Palm sugar.

When I was growing up, my father used to make baby back ribs. He would make it with a kind of a vinegary thing. So he would make it with black pepper and he would get garlic, salt, butter and red wine vinegar, and marinate the pork ribs and then he would grill it and then he would steam it, make it soft. That was stuck to my mind. But I said to myself I want a rib that’s more Asian. By putting the hoisin sauce and oyster sauce and soy sauce, ginger, garlic, green onions, add a little sugar, maybe I can make this marinade that I can call it my own and make it Asian. That’s the process I went through. Getting that marinade made and then I said to myself I really want to make it kind of like stand out a little bit more. I’m going to smoke the ribs first with kiawe wood, that’s a local wood, local tree here. So getting kind of the smokiness in there and then rub it with this marinade, make it Asian. And then I would grill it again, so it’s twice cooked, to get more flavor in there. So, and that’s how that was developed.

I like working with Hearts of Palm, I either shave them, and fry them to make these little crisps or either I shave them and use them for a salad or whether I shave them and use them as a topping or whether I puree them and use them instead of a creamy potatoes or risotto. You may use a creamy Hearts of Palm as a bed to plate other ingredients.

If you are interested in discovering more about the restaurant scene in Hawaii, check out this previous episode by clicking on the picture on the left:   Chef Jean-Marie Josselin from JO2 in Kapaa, Kauai.

The most important thing is to build that [cooking] foundation because that foundation is actually the brick that you’re going to be able to stand on and continue to build your career on.

In 1987 I moved to Hawaii because I wanted a restaurant in Hawaii because I felt that that’s my upbringing. There is a lot of Asian cultures here.

I wanted a restaurant that not only served the flavors of my past, which was French and Japanese but I wanted to add the local ingredients from Hawaii.

I started to add a lot more of the Filipino, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese flavors into what I was currently doing with the Japanese-French cooking. So I really had a global kind of flair but yet utilizing the ingredients from Hawaii.

Not everything has to be conceptually crazy, you know, with 4 steps or anything. Something simple is what I really enjoy.

Chef Roy Yamaguchi

Roy’s Restaurants

Hawaii Food & Wine Festival

COVID-19 is impacting the US economy and has a devastating effect on Chefs and the restaurant industry.

The restaurant business, it’s a family. We are spending more time with the people who work with us than with our own family. And It’s really heartbreaking to see the way everything went down and with no end in sight.

The chain of distribution for restaurants is long. And we have really committed relationships with these people. And I don’t want to see some small farmers not able to survive.

If there is no government intervention, the fall out will be huge.

People believe that because you are a Chef you must be rolling in the dough. The truth is that no matter how big or small your operation is, nobody is getting rich.

If a business-minded person looked at our [restaurant] business models, they would all say, hey, you should shut down. This is not good business.

We’re trying to educate people in Washington, educate the general public that if you want to have these unique and special restaurants around, we have to have a bailout.

These closings that we have not by choice, they are mandated. And I believe that when the government comes and mandates you to close, they have to have a plan to make you survive.

Restaurants are the DNA, the social fabric of a neighborhood, of society.

You don’t prepare for anything like this [COVID-19] as an industry. You prepare for this as a country.

Restaurants are made for going out and having a good time and doing celebrations. Meeting people. It’s the social fabric. I believe that there is a place for us in the future to do what we do.

Chef Naomi Pomeroy

Chef Gabriel Kreuther

Chef Ian Boden

Beast restaurant in Portland, OR

The Shack restaurant in Staunton, VA

Gabriel Kreuther restaurant in Manhattan

Independent Restaurant Coalition

City Harvest

Chef Drake Leonards: “Wherever I went I learned how to cook. And I learned a little bit more about myself as well. I meet new people and was exposed to new things. This journey is not just about cooking. You take inspiration from all over. Just being exposed to new things and being around people with different backgrounds, it starts to rub off on you. And you never know where it’s going to come in to play in your life.”

Chef Chris Shepherd – UB Preserv

Baker Matthieu Cabon – Magnol French Baking

That was something that I grew up with. And it’s found in little pockets in Louisiana. I think gumbo is something that is different from home to home, from region to region, from parish to parish. And so every gumbo a little bit different. Every gumbo is unique. The cook makes it unique. By the way they do it. But we serve ours with a little bit of potato salad. I like mine with a nice dark brew. And I like it a little thicker. I like to add a little smoked meat sausage, and Tasso, and a little chicken. I love a chicken and sausage gumbo. It’s what I grew up with. I love a great seafood gumbo as well. Serve it with just a little bit of potato salad right inside. It is something unique. At the restaurant, we take the skin of our chicken and make little chicken cracklings and serve that with a little side of chicken cracklings and potato salad. In your home you can make the potato salad. I like just a little touch of horseradish on the potato salad. And you can crush up little pork crackling, like chicharrones from these great markets throughout the country. It just gives you a little crunch. With saltine crackers is the way that we eat it as well, growing up at home with potato salad and our rice.

Houston reminds me very much of what New Orleans and I think Louisiana were a couple of hundred years ago, with a huge number of people who come in and bring their cuisine, culture and way of life. And it just kind of blends here in Houston beautifully.

I love the hospitality of a restaurant and being around people. And so having a passion for food and having a passion for people, and being a Chef it’s kind of fits naturally together.

My colleagues at Café Boulud were young, hungry, ambitious cooks that made me be better because they expected more out of me than I expected out of myself.

I always think that in our restaurant, if we can surround ourselves with great people, it’s gonna make us all become a little bit better. It’s going to make our team better. It’s gonna make myself better. And it just kind of we push each other.

I learned was that Chefs have taken, what they knew and grew up with and just refined it a little bit.

France and Germany were great place to go to understand the origins of what we’re doing now and how it became Cajun or how it became Creole. I felt like I had to get to the source.

New York really gave me the confidence to know that the world was so much bigger than I could ever imagine. It just fueled that desire to really be able to see what was out there.

There’s never a perfect time for anything. There’s never enough money. There’s never enough of anything. You just have to do it.

If you liked the current episode with Chef Drake Leonards, you might like these two previous episodes:

Chef Drake Leonards

Eunice restaurant

Chef Brad Miller is currently the Chef and Co-Owner at Inn of the Seventh Ray restaurant. He is also the corporate chef and tastemaker for Five Star Senior Living, one of the country’s most prestigious retirement companies. Brad is a much sought-after television personality, appearing on such channels as VH1, NBC, FOX, Food Network, Cooking Channel, PBS, Tasted Channel and Hallmark Channel. Brad currently stars in Food Truck Nation on Cooking Channel, airing now.

Chef Alison Trent – Ysabel

Conversation with Chef Brad Miller in episode #40 – Amazing Food Trucks!

Episode #64 with Chef Silvia Barban – Her Lifelong Italian Culinary Influences

Conversation with Chef Elizabeth Falkner in episode #63 – Elizabeth Falkner Continues to Challenge the Status Quo

Episode #56 with Chef Lamar Moore – Striving for Greatness

Conversation with Chef Tim Hollingsworth in episode #51 – Celebrating Luxury and Mundane Food

Episode #52 with Chef Brian Duffy – A Gigantic Appetite for Casual Restaurants

Conversation with Chef Edward Lee in episode #21 – The Marco Polo of American Cuisine

It’s not something that you’re going to do all the time, but it’s definitely a mix that’s like really great and makes it like, very umami, it makes your burger kind of taste meatier and kind of things of that nature has like a it’s basically a couple of ingredients. It’s take your burger meat. I would do a chuck steak and short rib. I do a 50 50 chuck and short rib grind, cut into cubes. Don’t freeze it, but I get really cold and then grind it and then mix in smoked paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, and here’s the kicker, a little bit of miso powder. Like when you’re gonna make miso soup with these little packets, just a little bit of each. Not too much. You don’t want to overpower the flavor. And salt, of course. But these little ingredients really bring out the flavor of the piece. It tastes really beefy. The smokiness of the paprika almost makes it taste aged a little bit. For a pound of burger meat, I would say, a sprinkle of smoked paprika, a sprinkling of all these things, you know, like more than a sprinkle, I’d say like two sprinkles. But it really brings out the beefiness of your meat and it makes you have so much flavor and also have the salt in there. It will make a juicy, really juicy burger. You get a really good bite and it doesn’t matter what you put on top of that. You can just put cheese in a bun and it’s gonna be delicious. I would say Kewpie mayonnaise, Japanese mayo. That is the best mayonnaise in the world. I consider that and Duke’s. Duke’s mayonnaise and Kewpie Mayo. I would say just that burger, medium-rare, two pieces of American cheese. Not cheddar, American cheese. Just because for me, even though cheddar has more flavor, American cheese just gives you that gooeyness, that old school memory of cheese. So I would do two pieces of American cheese, the burger, just brioche buns if you want, just mayonnaise, and about three pickles.

I take the persimmons that I quarter them and I take the middle out and then I put them in a sous-vide bag with really good olive oil and a little bit of salt. And then I compress them and I let them sit overnight. They go on a plate with whipped ricotta. More really nice olive oil. We have a pomegranate gel. Fresh pomegranate seeds. And then a little bit of shiso. So we’ve got a little shiso all over it. Toasted Marcana almonds. A couple drops of lemon oil and then Maldon salt. And it’s one of those things that when you serve it, you will, think it’s gonna be a dessert. But it’s like a starter and it’s just so tasty. And when you bite into those persimmons, they melt in your mouth and you got that pomegranate gel with them. And it just really is an amazing dish.

By nature, cooks and chefs are just curious. I am just curious what other chefs are doing and why they’re doing it, and what is their purpose for doing it

Being a chef is putting the guests first and really putting something out there that you’re really proud of. And it’s going to go and nurture people’s children.

I’ve learned one thing trying to produce TV is that every idea has already been thought of. There are no original ideas.

The great thing about food trucks is that it’s a great soundboard to trial your food before you open a brick and mortar restaurant.

You don’t have to be a classically trained chef to have a food truck.

In 50 years from now, cooking is going to be so different because all the health laws.

Nobody wants to be a Chef anymore. Cooks don’t want to be Chefs and kids don’t want to be cooks. Everybody kind of just wants to have the fame of it and the funny thing is they absolutely can do that nowadays.

Chef Brad Miller

Bradley Miller Website

Inn of the Seventh Ray

Brown Butter Production

Food Truck Nation Show

Jamie Bissonnette is the James Beard Award—winning chef and partner of Boston favorites Coppa, an Italian enoteca, Toro, the Barcelona-style tapas bar, and Little Donkey, Cambridge’s eclectic neighborhood restaurant.  In fall 2013, Bissonnette and co-chef and partner Ken Oringer brought Toro to New York City, and received rave reviews from outlets like The New York Times and New York Magazine. The Little Donkey concept was expanded to Bangkok, Thailand during 2019.

You’re going to find your inspiration from a lot of different places. It can be from a song. It could be from an article that you’re reading, a cookbook that you’re looking at, a dinner that you’ve had and opening up your mind to realize when something strikes you to try to remember it and do something with it is important. But for me, I find that the best creative outlet is to just start cooking. Don’t overthink it. Sitting in front of a notebook and writing things down is great, but I will have more impact with things you just put me in the kitchen, give me a bunch of ingredients, and say start cooking! I become way more creative than I would be if I was just looking for recipes and reading books and looking at pictures and my notes from travel.

I always have eggs in the house that one of my favorite foods. I don’t always have potato chips in the house because I eat them too much. But you can get potato chips if you live in the city. You can get potato chips within three blocks, pretty much anywhere in any city you live in. Whether it’s a bodega store. Guess what? So my one of my favorite tortillas to make is I make tortillas española. But instead of using potatoes cooked in olive oil and onions, I use some sort of either just regular straight-up salted potato chips, sometimes salt and vinegar, potato chips, barbecue potato chips do not work. Don’t try that at home. They taste terrible. And I make a tortilla where I add they add to the eggs some potato chips at the beginning. Before I do my first flip, I add more potato chips so it gets the bottom side on the first flip gets a nice like very, very like golden-brown crust from the chips that you can slide it right if you use an individual pack of potato chips and you only use three or four eggs. You can slide it right back into the potato chip bag and you’ve got tortilla española on the go.

When we travel, we leave no stone unturned. We go down every alley, we go into every store, we look at everything, we get inspired by everything that we see.

Spain is such an innovative culinary capital of the world, but it also excels at its simplicity.

A lot of times young cooks, when they don’t understand intrinsically that culture of food, they think that they need to have too many ingredients to make something more interesting.

I always say don’t cook the recipe like you have to follow it exactly. It’s like music. The first time you want to play somebody else’s song, you follow the sheet music and then you figure it out.

The thing that I love about Spanish culture is, because it’s so innovative, that you can really mix any kind of flavors together and you can still have that same spirit of delicious, impactful bites like tapas and pinchos.

Ken and I are like little kids when we start talking about food. So as long as we can get the business stuff out of the way in the morning, by the afternoon, all we wanted to do is taste food, eat food and make people happy.

We know what and how we do something. But knowing why we do is what makes it authentic.

You don’t have to be traditional and authentic all the time. You can be innovative if you can. Use your own whimsy. But as long as you do it in a way that is educated and that you’re not just throwing things together.

The best creative outlet for me is to just start cooking. Don’t overthink it. Just put me in the kitchen, give me a bunch of ingredients, and say start cooking.

Chef Jamie Bissonnette

JK Food group

Chef Jamie Bissonnette

Toro

Coppa

Little Donkey

Tony Messina at Uni

Colin Lynch at Black Lamb

David Bazirgan at Bambara

Contra NYC

Mark Welker is the executive pastry chef at “Make it Nice” group which includes Eleven Madison Park and NoMad (New York, L.A., Las Vegas, and London). He was raised in Indiana, went to culinary school in Kentucky, and attended the former French Culinary Institute in NYC. Then you went to France “because you wanted to understand where pastry making was born”. Talking about his position today, Executive Pastry Chef Mark Welker says “It’s a very collaborative team. When we talk about things we want to accomplish, everyone’s voice counts and everyone’s voice matters. I want people to be the best versions of themselves and I have to help them to get there, help them make good decisions”.

Chef David Burke – Restaurateur

Executive Chef Gabriel Kreuther

The Brandy Library with owner Flavien Desoblin

Pastry Chef Sam Mason – Odd Fellows

Chef Trigg Brown – Win Son

I think there are so many locations, especially with the 50 best restaurants list out there, they highlight so many different restaurants from all over the world and so many of these restaurants have different philosophies. So if you want to focus on fermentation and foraging and things like that, there are restaurants out there that specialize in that, like, you know, a lot of the Nordic restaurants. I think some of the restaurants in Brazil and South America really do well with fermentation. If you’re interested in Mexican cuisine and Mexican spices, then you should probably travel south of the border. I think that there are restaurants all over the world at this point time, and it doesn’t need to be a Michelin star restaurant. If you’re passionate about Thai food and you want to learn about Thai ingredients, then just go travel through Thailand. Go eat on the streets. Go to the markets, go to the wet markets, have an Airbnb, get the ingredients and cook. As long as you’re setting yourself goals. timelines, and pushing to meet those goals with a mindset of coming back and actually using what you’ve learned to better yourself and to further your career.

In the realm of things being fermented, different koji inoculating with different things, using different homemade vinegars is a big one that really can help desserts a lot, like using kombucha techniques to make a tea. Kind of like make a fermented tea and then use that to season things.I kind of think that’s like the best. I’m not into using bacon, you know, or different meat products. I’m not really into even vegetables outside of squash or carrot. Like, I really don’t want to. I’m not I’m just not a big fan of that kind of stuff. We use a lot of vinegar for brightness. And again, it kind of lower the sweetness of the dessert.

I would look at the apples first that I chose to make the pie and when I make an apple pie, I think of the different textures inside of apple pie. And I don’t like it to all be one texture. So I think that I would choose maybe three different varieties of apples. That’s where I would start, I would pick my favorite apples. And you’d want an apple that’s going to be very firm and hold up the cooking while one that’s going to have different make sweetness or acidity notes as well. You want one that kind of falls apart, they can kind of like bind it all together. But again, not having like too much moisture. And I think then there are different ways to deal with that if an apple has too much moisture. What I would do is give it a little sugar in my Calvados treatment or pick the core of your choice, rum or it could be bourbon, it could be anything you really want it to be. But I would add a little bit to the apples and I would let them soak and macerate overnight and then I would drain them, and then really kind of like get all that liquid out of it and then maybe even make a caramel with all that juice and sugar that’s leftover and then kind of just lay it on the inside.

People should travel. It’s good to get out of the country and see how small the world is, and how small life is. It makes you think differently.

Young people today want to learn things much faster. They want to move to the stations a lot quicker. And it’s more about resumé building to them.

Long term goals change as you change and grow but short term goals should be very realistic. People should have a lot of them. And they should be checking them off.

I want to hire people who want my job. We want people that are ambitious.

Every single day we show up to work. We need to think of it like a championship game. And as a leader, you have to show up every day like you’re ready for the championship game. It starts at the top.

We want things to look effortless on the plate. But once you eat it, you realize that the flavors, the textures, and the technique are much deeper than what you think.

You should use sugar to season something not to like just make it sweet, not just for like an end result.

Chef Mark Welker

Eleven Madison Park

Nomad

Make It Nice

I am really pleased to have Chef Chris Shepherd of Houston, TX on the show. Chef Chris Shepherd is a James Beard Award winner and was recently named by the Robbery Report magazine as the best chef in the world. He has helped change the landscape of the Houston culinary scene since opening Underbelly in 2012.

Chef Drake Leonards – Eunice

Baker Matthieu Cabon – Magnol French Baking

What I learned is that there should be two ingredients in fish sauces. There should be anchovies and there should be salt. And that’s it. For a home consumer to use fish sauce make sure you are buying quality. And that’s pretty easy to do at this point. Then it’s like how do you balance something so super funky that you need something sweet, that you need something spicy, that you need something to tone it back. You need some acidic. And it’s just learning about balance.  I think fish sauce is the perfect day to inspire you to learn balance in a dish because most cooks cook with salt, pepper and maybe a little bit of lemon juice or lime juice or something on a dish. But it’s more about understanding the balance of sweetness, sour, the spice, the funk. Fish sauce is a perfect ingredient for young cooks, especially to understand their palate and to understand balance and flavors.

If you are going to brines a chicken. I think for use it in a little bit of fish sauce into it gives it that “you’ll never know it is there” spice or flavor profile. It is perfect in Bolognaise sauce. You had a little bit in your Bolognaise and it just gives it that umami richness. If you aren’t looking to do predominantly a Vietnamese or Thai influenced flavor, that you’re adding just a little bit of sodium and more of that richness of fermentation and that richness of umami, that flavor contrast that you can’t find, that you can’t buy, that it’s there and you have to use these ingredients then I think for fish sauce is the absolutely perfect way to put those things in there. A little bit in a vinaigrette, a little bit in a braising.

Caramelized fish sauce, chicken wings. Greatest thing ever. Roast the chicken wings in the oven or grill them.Then have a little sauté pan, toast a little bit of garlic, shaved garlic, add some honey or white sugar, caramelized that fish sauce, add lime juice. Toss the wings and you’re good. A few chilies in there like Sereno or Jalapeño.

The best way to start to have a conversation is through food on the table. Then you can establish friendship conversations and learning from each other and not just talking about food all the time, but talking about life.

Learning from people is one of the greatest things that we could possibly do. Just share stories and have conversations. It’s the easiest thing to do.

You need to quit cooking for yourself and start cooking for the culture. You could cook free at that point.

People love challenges. Status quo is one of the worst things for people that is trying to just sit there and do the same things over and over and over again.

I tell people all the time that the only thing that holds you back is yourself. And that’s the honest truth. Because you have to try and push to try to learn and you’ll find inspirations anywhere and everywhere.

Creativity is probably the most important thing, it’s about seeing things and using things and touching things. Technique is cool. But at the end of the day, it’s got to taste good.

Chef Chris Shepherd

UB Preserv

Georgia James

Hay Merchant