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

Have you ever wonder how to revamp a cocktail program or how to go about reinventing a classic cocktail?  Well, in today’s episode, this is exactly what you will find out with my guest, the award-winning bar director, Beau Du Bois. You recently moved to the south of California as the new bar and spear with the creative director at Puesto in San Diego. He built is 16 years career in L.A. at the Corner Door and in Napa Valley at the three Michelin star restaurant, Meadowood.

So for a twist on an Old Fashioned, I would say head to the decent liquor store in your town or down the street from your house and grab some apple brandy and grab a bottle of cognac. And let’s just do one ounce of each. Let’s get a little bit of apple cider and we’re gonna use the cider instead of water to make this simple syrup. So just equal parts there. Then just a little bit of cherry and orange bitters in there. And you’ve got a Thanksgiving Day in a glass right there.

Take your time and you want to come at it the right way.

First, you look at some of their the sales reports. Then, you look at Instagram and you start correlating the things that are already working, the flavors that are already working, the types and formats that are already working. This isn’t about ripping the rug out from underneath the program. It’s about just taking quarter turns on the things that are already doing so well and just elevating them ever so slightly so that you don’t leave those guests in the dark just because they don’t like Aloe Vera or Tamarin. It’s about this quarter turning that recipe and turning the volume up a little. So the customers will be like, “I like the old one, but this one is getting better”. And this is the trust. The trust that you earn from guests so that maybe they will come back in a month or two months and try that crazy cocktail at the bottom of the menu.

The other side of that is looking at things that really don’t work, or haven’t worked historically. And in offering something new that, again, listening to the neighborhood, you feel is going to be a success or is going to start to tell a story.

In terms of reinventing the classic cocktail, let’s just go for the low hanging fruit. Let’s talk about old fashioned.

An old fashioned is just a combination of a base spirit, bitters, and sugar.

Obviously it was historically usually made with whiskey. And at a time, when bars were just beginning to have creative menus, people would come back and say, can I have the whiskey cocktail, the old fashioned way? That’s when the name was born.

When you look at those building blocks of that cocktail, whiskey, sugar, bitters, and any base spirit, there’s a lot of room to play there.

Let’s take the bourbon out. Let’s put in cognac. Or let’s take the bourbon out or the rye out, and let’s put in tequila or let’s do a split of cognac and rye.

Now for the sugar. It is just a just a vehicle for some richness, some softness of the cocktail. But that sugar is made with water, which is flavorless. It doesn’t need to be flavorless. Why don’t we just use tea or put, some fruit in that water, or infuse the sugar with some fruits and peels of various citrus.

So now you’ve already greatly changed that cocktail to something that’s a little close to a fingerprint of flavor that you were going for. But it still scratches the itch of someone who’s looking for that old fashioned.

Of course, you can play with the bitters. I mean, we live in a time where I’d be shocked if you could find the flavor that isn’t in a bitter right now. I’m sure somebody got a peanut butter bitters out there.

If you are interested in mixology check out these two additional episodes by clicking on the respective pictures:   Jesse Vida (Episode #1)  when he was at BlackTail, NYC and Angel Teta (Episode #4) Whiskey Guardian at Angel’s Envy.

It starts with the base spirit. Then it becomes more about the overarching flavor that I’m going for. And then it moves into the visual presentation that will elevates the guest experience.

When it comes to building cocktails and creating cocktails, make sure that you’re listening to your neighborhood and to your guests. Your neighborhood helps you keep the bills paid. Make sure that you’re not leaving the neighborhood behind!

Themed cocktail menus give the opportunity and the challenge of creativity. But you always have to stay one foot in the “is this viable for this business or for this neighborhood”? First, you earn the trust of your community and your demographic. And then once you have that, it’s time to innovate.

In cocktail-food pairing, overly complimentary is where you’re using the same ingredients or similar flavors in the cocktail, in the dish. For me, that’s just too much. It’s more important to offer a little bit of contrast so that we’re helping to reset the palate.

We live in the world of Instagram, we live in a world of pictures, and people taste with their eyes. And if you can’t evolve as a chef or a bartender and understand how to use that to your advantage, then you’re sleeping at the wheel.

Beau du Bois

Puesto

Corner Door in LA

Meadowood in Nappa Valley

Ted Lee from the Lee Brothers: “we grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s a very particular region of the south. So we didn’t know a lot about eastern Kentucky or the panhandle of Florida. And so then this other phase of our lives, with magazines paying us to go to different regions of the south that we didn’t know. To write about them was so exciting. We learned so much because remember, we don’t have a southern grandmother. We grew up in Charleston, but neither of our parents grew up there. So we had to learn everything about southern food from somebody else’s mother or grandmother.”

The cheese in a pimento cheese is usually typically an orange-colored sharp cheddar cheese. I use a white cheddar, really aged with some age on it with seems almost crystalline structure which makes it  so delicious. I also used Poblano. The Poblano peppers are roasted and then pickled. And it is just a completely different but familiar flavor. It is like green chili pimento cheese. I use cream cheese and mayonnaise in it, which is sort of controversial. Some people only think it’s only mayonnaise, but I like the combination. There are so many different spins you can do on pimento cheese, but that one with the extra sharp cheddar and roasted pickled planters is extraordinary.

There’s a lot in common between the cuisines. You mentioned Gullah Geechee cooking, low country cooking and soul food. I would say they all have their origins in the migration of enslaved Africans to North America. That’s the origin of those things. And you can see this in a dish that’s sort of a classic low country dish like red rice. You can see the sort of connections to the West African joloff rice. It’s a huge influence.
I would say that what’s important is to get away from defining them or defining them as sort of oppositional. But finding the proximity, and especially finding a chef who can guide you through that, through their personal experience, either through a book or by meeting them.

It’s so different. Very rarely are you cooking things to order. So if you are doing a gala with six hundred people who get served filet tenderloin or lamb chops, those proteins should be seared in a deep fryer the day before. Just to get the color on them and then killed down in the walk in. And then it would be moved to the venue in a transport cabinet which, once on site, is turned into a hot box, all the food pulled from it and transformed using sterno and sheet pans into a warming oven. And so it’s a completely different practice than what restaurant chefs are used to. It’s always most plated dinners at simultaneous service. So you’re really building a kitchen that’s meant to serve out the first course. The second course and the third course, all the same plate within 15 minutes, instead of having the bell curve that a restaurant has over the course of the evening where the orders come in.

The great thing about cookbooks is there can be all kinds of them and as long as they are of quality, and the recipes tested, they will find an audience.

You can make money. Usually the book sort of breaks even, but it serves every other aspect of your business.

The most exciting books that are being done today are the most personal book. The ones that really are from an accomplished cook who’s telling about how who they became resulted in the food they serve and why people love it.

The Chefs today are more in tune with telling stories about themselves and their ancestors, where they’ve come from, where they’re going, and really situating their own kitchen practice between the past and the present and the future.

There is no visibility because they’re working in special events catering. It’s all designed to focus attention on whoever is being celebrated. The people behind the scenes are not the story.

The Lee Brothers

The Lee Bros.

The Lee Brothers Boiled Peanuts Catalog

The Cookbook Boot Camp