03.26.07

The Freshest Fare

Posted in Greatest Hits, Rants and Raves at 6:45 pm by Chef Matt

I have done a lot of traveling in my days, and of course the thing I focus on most when I am visiting a new place is the local cuisine. It is from the observations I make of how people cook and combine flavors in different parts of the world that I feel I am able to become a better chef. And just to make this whole issue into a “chicken or egg” dilemma, it is perhaps these observations and experiences that led me to become a chef in the first place…

But I can’t help but think about how much better so many foods are in other countries I have been to. I know it is cliché and I may be beating a very dead horse here when I say this, but we Americans really just don’t do ourselves right by the food we eat. While I think the concept of the Great American Melting Pot is one that makes this country great, it leaves us with a sort-of garbled culinary tradition of our own. The result is often a lack of depth in the flavors that we are presented with, and an almost inarticulate sense of what constitutes a fine dining experience. So much of what we eat is shipped to us or grown in factory farms that the real joys of fresh meat and produce completely escape us, while our desire for fast and easy preparations don’t allow us the opportunities to see what cooking can really give to us if we just give it a little more time and effort.

Fresh off your own raspberry bush, there is almost nothing better.

In fact it was just today my mom swung by my house, and I was showing her how my raspberry canes were flourishing nicely in my backyard. Since that means I am expecting a very large crop this year, she of course begged me for any “overflow” that I may have because the raspberries in the stores these days are devoid of flavor. They have been cross-bred so as to make mold-resistant varieties, but at the cost of flavor. Personally, this is not a trade-off that I think is worth it. Paying $3.99 for a pint of fresh, flavorless raspberries makes as little sense as paying the same amount for a pint of rich, rotten ones, so we might as well just take our chances, right?

How to cook a Caribbean lobster. Step 1: Go out and catch it…

When I was on a sailing voyage in the British Virgin Islands a few years ago, my uncle said that we had to swing by a place called “Sidney’s Peace and Love” for dinner one night. While I loved the name, I wasn’t sold on the concept until my uncle ordered dinner for us. On the radio from our ship. He radioed in the kinds of fish and lobster we wanted, and they were ready for us when we arrived later that night. They had gone out and caught the fish we ordered that morning, so it is hard to dispute the freshness of our meals! It was like this all over the islands, and the fish were truly some of the best I have ever had.

Being Italian, I have been to Italy several times, and I don’t think I need to convince anyone here of the freshness of Italian foods. Basil that was clipped seconds before being added to the pot and tomatoes so red that you’d think they were artificially colored were staple ingredients of the cooking I have both done and received in the land of my ancestors. And cheeses made from unpasteurized milk have a body and flavor that just cannot be matched by anything we have here in America with our pasteurization laws. There is a reason Italians grate fresh parmesan on almost all their pastas: Because they can.

The jamon in Jabugo was so good, we ordered another plate of it for dessert. No lie.

When my family all got together to rent a villa in southern Spain one year, we weren’t only treated to the great culinary marvels of the area like jamon from Jabugo, amazingly light Manchego cheese and the best olives I have ever had in my life, but we were also treated to a collection of lemon, lime and orange trees on the property of the villa. Every morning we drank copious amounts of fresh orange juice and lemonade with breakfast, and every night we enjoyed salads and grilled vegetables with citrus vinaigrettes that just exploded with flavor. It was there that I came up with my first rough concepts of my lemon-lime vinaigrette that we now use frequently at Restaurant Vero.

All of these stories show a facet of what is wrong with food today in America.

• We place more emphasis on making sure the food can get to market rather than on the quality of the product that arrives there. So the fruit may be fresh, free of bugs, and every year is a bumper crop, but who wants a bumper crop of mediocrity?
  
• We have to make sure we have plenty of everything in stock so that we can get exactly what we want when we want it. The concept of the “catch of the day” is long in our past as we instead deplete the oceans to make sure we have too much of everything on hand so that any order can be fulfilled.
  
• Our collective fears of any sort of germ or bacteria ever coming in contact with our body has forced us to pass ridiculously extreme laws about how sterile our food must be, which destroys any strong flavor characteristics, and yet does little to address the real causes of food-borne illnesses. (Peter Pan peanut butter anyone?…)
  
• And lastly, why doesn’t anyone grow their own fruits, vegetables and herbs anymore? If sunlight is touching your property, you can grow your own fresh food! Yes, it is more work, but so is good cooking. I firmly believe that in order to truly call yourself a “foodie”, you must also work to flex your own green thumb.

How can this photo be a surprise to anyone?…

I am certainly not the first to raise these issues and voice these complaints, nor do I hope I will be the last. This needs saying by as many people as possible who agree that we can do so much better with the food options we present ourselves with in this country. If we truly want to consider ourselves as the greatest nation, I think we have to first prove it by not being complacent when we are fed total garbage. If we work for, and demand the best, I think we will all be pleased with the collective culinary results.

In the meantime though, I think I am going to have to get myself a villa in Andalucía, Spain. You know, something near Jabugo of course…

Matt

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