flavors unknown podcast

To work in the business you have to work hard, want to go the extra mile. Be a good co-worker. Be a good team member. Stand up for yourself knowing that all of our voices and perspectives are really unique and powerful and we all deserve a seat at the table when it comes to coming up with dishes or coming up with ideas or just trying to foster the confidence to show up as your full self.

My starting point is usually a singular flavor or ingredient that I want to showcase which often ends up being a fruit or a vegetable, something nature based usually, or a flavor combination that I’m interested in trying out.

From there I kind of go into a number of directions.

I either think in terms of color. So I think of foods that have complementary colors or foods that are in the same color scheme that I think flavor wise would be a good match for the initial ingredients.

I also like the “if it grows together it goes together” method. And then I like to think about families. So for example quince is in the rose family and I really like using rose in desserts. In moderation I think it’s really lovely and it kind of tied together in my brain that both comes from Persian cuisine, so then that kind of leads me into a new direction of other flavors I can play with within Persian cuisine for example. Or like buckwheat and rhubarb are related. I am just trying to find find ways to connect ingredients in my brain that makes sense and have context. And then obviously trying it all together and making sure it tastes good.

Emily Spurlin – With pastry you have to be super careful at each step because each step affects the final product. These steps are also very time consuming and require a lot of attention.

I think in terms of color. Foods that have complementary colors or foods that are in the same color scheme would be a good match for the initial ingredients – Emily Spurlin

Emily Spurlin – I do prefer to be an empathetic leader and co-worker and I have those soft skills but I’m also not necessarily anyone’s therapist. So I’ve had to learn to set some boundaries [in the kitchen].

Be a good co-worker. Be a good team member. Stand up for yourself knowing that all of our voices and perspectives are really unique and powerful and we all deserve a seat at the table – Emily Spurlin

Chef Emily Spurlin

Bad Hunter

Bad Hunter

The Publican

Pastry Chef Anna Posey

Dana Cree Ice Cream Shop

Dorie Greenspan

Nancy Silverton

Lula Café

Chez Panisse Cookbook

Elements of Dessert Cookbook

“At one point I had a lot of restaurants. I had six or seven restaurants. When I sold everything I decided to go on a trip. When I came back two or three years later and decided to open another restaurant not much changes happened while I was away. It almost felt that the “Hawaiian Regional Cuisine”, the movement that we started 20 years ago stopped and really the progress that we made stopped and there was nothing else. So my first step was to meet with farmers and I met with some very young farmers. I did all the farmers market on Kauai. And every time I saw a new guy I approached him and invited him to the restaurant and I started to build a network of farmers that wanted to work with me to try new vegetables.”

Chef Roy Yamaguchi – Roy’s

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“I believe that chefs are going to be almost like doctors in the future . They will have to provide food to people that is nutritiously interesting so people can go to a restaurant and experience vegetable like they experience meat or fish today.

How can I evolve into a vegetarian restaurant or a restaurant that is much more vegetable focused without killing my business because I still have to survive.  People still don’t want 100% vegetarian dishes. How can I mix the two to start building clientele that one day I can become just a vegetarian restaurant”

JM Josselin – At the end of the day, it’s a commitment, it’s love for the work, and for the job. And if you don’t have that, then you cannot succeed in this business.

Everybody should remember to stay open-minded and not be afraid to try different cuisines and establish a library of ideas where you can build up new dishes from and keep your mind creative – JM Josselin

JM Josselin – I am working on Indian spices now. Nobody uses spices like they do. Garam masala, Cumin and Mustard Seed. Indian food will come up in the next few years

JO2

JO2 website

“What I usually do, I’ll order a lot of seasonal ingredients and I’ll just order them without any dish in mind. And we just get them in, just so we can start that creative process and I know that I’m not going to waste an ingredient. Because you know we’re not going to throw anything away, so it kind of forces our hand to use it and that’s we try and stay creative. And I go into farmer’s markets every single weekend. And as far as steaks go, it’s very straightforward. One of the things we learned that when people come here, they want to eat steak

Chef Johnny Spero – Reverie

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I started doing it [foraging] five, six years ago. The first thing I found were ramps in the spring and I just got excited about it. I like it because it gives me a lot more appreciation for the product that I’m working with. Really enjoy that part of it. Obviously you want to do everything you can to make sure you really showcase the product. Especially when you find it outside and you find it yourself. That’s incredible. The more I learned about it, the more I never realized how much edible things were out there. I find something new each year and nature very fascinating to me.

It’s like when you’re younger, everyone wants to be that kid on the block who has that new toy. I want to be that kid! I like to use things that not many other people use. But there are very few people that use pawpaws in the city. And come spring, everyone uses ramps in the city but there’s other things out there like ground nettles and different types of flowers that you can pick. There is this field that I go to in the spring that’s covered in violets. I make violet syrups and candied violets. We use them as garnishes. So for me it’s the smaller things in life that you really start to appreciate, the little things.

Drew Adams – [You have to] hold yourself accountable and if you’re not happy with it then fix it! Don’t just settle for anything less and less than perfect.

I learned a long time ago that in order to be good in this industry, you have to really enjoy what you do. And to enjoy what you do, you need to be able to have fun. – Drew Adams

Chef Drew Adams – I think cooking TV shows sometimes gives a false impression of what this job entails. It’s not always like everyone wants to be a celebrity chef. It’s a lot of hard work.

Chef Drew Adams

Bourbon Steak

Bourbon Steak

Restaurant The Dabney

Chef Jeremiah Langhorne

Restaurant Plume

Chef Damon Gordon

7X

Olive mash fed beef

What is pawpaw?

Chef Cedric Grolet

Chef Brad Deboy and restaurant Elle

Fermentation cookbook

Sam Mason from Odd Fellows: “We knew {at WD-50} what we wanted to do. We knew the kind of stuff we wanted to produce, that type of aesthetics and the type of techniques but we just didn’t know how to do it. So we had to teach ourselves. It was before anyone else was doing it. So you couldn’t really ask people questions because no one knew what we were trying to get across in our mind’s eye. We had these ideas. We had to come up with the techniques. And thankfully Wylie (Dufresne) was able to develop the relationships with the companies that produce the stuff and they were very helpful and, even them, they couldn’t quite grasp what we were trying to do because the stuff we were trying to do was a little bit new to them too.”

Chef David Burke – Restaurateur

Pastry Chef Mark Welker – Eleven Madison Park

Executive Chef Gabriel Kreuther

Chef Trigg Brown – Win Son

The Brandy Library with Flavien Desoblin

I made today a new formulation. I’ve been trying to come up with an ice cream that’s not sweet. And I think I found it. To get that texture without sugar is almost impossible because sugar is a very fundamental ingredient in ice cream. It keeps ice cream from freezing rock hard. So this is my interpretation of what it can eventually be. This has obviously no flavor. It just tastes like salt and cream. I want to take this as a texture experiment but this can also be now a base for foie gras ice cream.

I just did a dinner in Pittsburgh at a friend’s restaurant where we did the entire entire menu had an ice cream component. So with six courses of ice cream the first ice creams obviously were very savory because they were with like squab or foie gras with squab Edamame, and Green Apple Bonito sorbet. So we started off very savory and then we ended up sweet. You know obviously we went through the transition of salty sweet but I hadn’t quite figured this out yet before the dinner and this new base would have obviously elevated some of the savory stuff.But I’m very excited about that texture.

Sam Mason – I’ve been in love with the combination of peanut butter and jelly since I was a child. It’s the perfect marriage of flavors to me.

I just don’t think people care about culinary school diplomas. Have some real-world experience in some of the finest kitchens. – Sam Mason

Sam Mason – You couldn’t you can put this kind of talent together again [WD-50] and it was not accidental but it just happened to be all these people were available in the same area. Like when the Beatles started.

Sam Mason

Odd Fellows nyc

Misi

Lady Jays Bar

I grew up really being pretty embarrassed of the food [Russian food} I grew up with. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I wanted to eat what my friends were eating at home. Everything my mom made was obviously from scratch because it was cheaper at the time. And as a kid, you think that it’s not as good. When we were dating, I brought my (now) husband over to my parents house, just you know the normal sort of stuff and, whenever I had any friends or a boyfriend or anyone coming over to my parents house I always gave them a warning about the food. So I gave him all those same sorts of warnings and then afterwards he thought it was amazing. He loved everything so much. He thought it was delicious and he loved the way everyone were together and the camaraderie. The first few times that he would say stuff like that I just assumed he was saying it to make nice. And it just kept happening and my mom caught wind of this and she started inviting us over for dinner just because she was whipping up some dish that she hadn’t made since before they immigrated. He basically sort of lit this fire in her and then in me too, to sort of re-evaluate and rediscover what I just took for granted for so long.

We can’t talk about vodka in an intellectual way but I would just like to mention that it has a lot of characteristics to it. You can taste differences. You know I think that is the biggest misconception. And then with caviar man there’s so many it’s hard to pick just one. But I think probably my biggest one is that it has to be served ice cold. It drives me crazy when I see it served on crushed ice. Everything tastes better closer to room temperature and if you’re spending that much money why would you want it to be numbingly cold. So serve it at room temperature. I mean obviously you want to store in the refrigerator but when you’re serving it you should actually spend some time letting it come to room temperature so you can taste it more.

Chef Bonnie Morales – People have a very negative connotation of Russian food they think of the food shortages and lots of spoilage and they think of canned vegetables.

There aren’t any other restaurants that do what we do in Portland. I would say that at this at this time I have yet to see anybody doing what we do in this country. – Chef Bonnie Morales

Chef Bonnie Morales – I have this dish that I know and I grew up with and I liked it but there were problems with it. I view this as a design problem. I identify what those problems are and I fix them.

Chef Bonnie Morales

Kachka

Coquine

The Joy of Cooking

It all starts with the cannabis Sommelier breaking down the cannabis strain and then share the tasting notes with the Chef who is able to design a menu that harmonize well with the tasting description that you give them. The cannabis Sommelier contact the farm and will identify strains that will be harvested about three weeks prior. That’s about how much time it needs to go through a proper curing process and be at a good moisture level to serve. And then from there we will go through the journey that we want to instill into people with the effects of the strains that they will give you. So typically you want to start off being energizing and then working into some groundings more sedative strains as you get through dessert but you can take that journey wherever you want to go.

Recently we’ve had some we had a confit duck leg with some plantain gnocchis, English blue cream and daikon sprouts and that was with Lemon Wheel strain. That was the pairing that really stood out to me by chef Edwin Sandoval out of Denver Colorado. Recently we also had this braised short rib with polenta and a chili negro sauce and with Ghost Plane Haze. A very spicy dish but a very spicy strain. The mouthfeel on the end  would just leave the mouth kind of buzzing and kind of allow you to be a little thirsty.  It’s kind of mouth quenching.  That was a really good pairing that they did although typically I’m not a huge braised short rib guy. It all depends on really appreciating the art of pairing the cannabis because you can think of it in so many different ways because you do have the mouthfeel aspects of it. There is such a variety of flavors that people can play with. And it really gives you layers. There are layers of terpenes as we were discussing. There’s different levels of them. And so it really gives people the ability to layer food.

Philip Wolf – We are pairing terpene profiles of cannabis with flavor profiles of food to harmonize and enhance.

It really takes a trained nose to be able to identify the different levels of terpenes within cannabis strains – Philip Wolf

Philip Wolf – The matureness of the cannabis plant depends on when you harvest it. It can change the terpene profile.

Cultivating Spirits

When we look at the Bocuse d’Or competition from a distance it is chefs and white jackets doing maybe French style cuisine to some degree and a lot of people don’t resonate with that especially in today’s world where casual food is the craze.  But when we went to compete in 2015, the best we’d ever done was sixth place and for years nobody expected anything of the US.  In fact we are kind of seen as the burger and hotdog country to a lot of people. And so when we came in and took silver everything changed. The level of respect for the country changed.  And winning gold in 2017 just kind of cemented the US as a key player in the world of high level cuisine.

There’s a lot of technology out there that’s really exciting but it actually doesn’t deliver anything better. We’re in the game to really help people get better food and partner with people who are going to help us give people better access to ingredients and connect that to the cooking experience and give them all the information they need. So you’re not on YouTube or on some recipe site and somewhere else. Everything is right there in front of you and you’re literally learning how to cook by putting food on the table as opposed to trying to download a bunch of information and then try to execute on your own

“A lot of people just aren’t cooking anymore. They don’t know how to cook. They didn’t grow up cooking” – Chef Philip Tessier

Chef Philip Tessier – “As a coach, my goal is to create a vibrant culture of collaboration and idea sharing.”

“Winning the Bocuse d’Or in 2017 just cemented the US as a key player in the world of high-level cuisine – Chef Philip Tessier

Chef Philip Tessier

The French Laundry

Thomas Keller

Martin Kastner

Crucial Detail

Chef Matthew Kirkley

Chef Matt Peters

Book: “Chasing Bocuse”

Ment’or

Hestan Culinary