03.10.08
Posted in The Story, Greatest Hits, Recipes, Teaching Classes at 11:28 am by Chef Matt
A fabulous film, and of course it doesn’t hurt that it’s about Italians… |
For those of you who don’t understand, “Big Night” is simply the best film ever made about what it is to be a chef. (Yes, even better than “Ratatouille”) Perhaps I am slightly biased in that it has to deal with Italian chefs, but regardless, it is still amazing. (Definitely better than “No Reservations”.) If you haven’t seen it yet, and have any interest in the culinary world, you must go rent it now. It is exactly what all chefs have to go through several times in their career.
To briefly explain for the poor souls out there who have not seen this film, it is about two brothers, one who is a fantastic chef who is unwilling to alter his cooking styles to match public tastes, and the other who wants to be a success with the public - even if it means making compromises on the food to sell people what they want. Simply put, it is about artistic integrity vs. selling out - from a culinary point of view.
At least I had been presented with the reality that this dichotomy existed before I was recently presented with it. I guess it helped me prepare for it on some level, but still it was amazing how it tore me in two directions so strongly.
Another cooking class up in Bedford, PA was coming up at LifeStyle and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. With the approach of spring, I wanted to teach a class on “Springtime in Tuscany”. It was going to feature lamb chops and grilled asparagus and a whole host of wonderful dishes prepared with the simple, straightforward style of Tuscan cooking. But the owners wrote back to me saying that while the class sounded great, they didn’t like how it used so few products from their store. Simply put, if they were going to pay me to teach a class in their store, I had to involve (read: “sell”) more of their merchandise.
So here it was, the integrity of my recipes and vision versus the need to follow the requests of those footing the bill. I was torn. On the one hand, it hurts to have a menu rejected like that. On the other hand, they had every right to make such a reasonable request of me since it is, after all, their store. I was not sure what I was going to do. Give up and tell them to find some trained monkey to hock their wares? Or maybe I should be more flexible in my menu seeing as how this is a great gig, and I don’t want to lose it just for the sake of my stubborn pride.
Cooking in the class with generous amounts of vinegar. As you can see, it makes me happy.
Photo by Ken Sepeda |
Suddenly it hit me. I have always been a big fan of their selection of olive oils and vinegars, so I decided to alter my menu just a little bit, and turn the class into a lesson on how to cook with different vinegars. My menu was changed only slightly in the long run (lamb chops and asparagus remained) but now the owners were very happy that I was showing the class how to use so many of their products. Compromise wins again!
The class was an enormous success as the food was awesome and my students loved it all. It was such a hit, we have decided to re-run the class again later next month. Here is the menu of dishes I presented (and the vinegars I used):
- Marinated Artichoke Hearts with Hazelnut Gastrique (white wine vinegar with cinnamon and nutmeg)
- Italian Bean and Tuna Salad with White Balsamic Vinegar (white balsamic vinegar obviously)
- Asparagus Vinaigrette (orange balsamic)
- Candied Cranberries (red wine vinegar) (These were placed on the asparagus vinaigrette)
- Lamb Chops Aceto (marinated in white wine vinegar with mint and lime, drizzled with fig balsamic after cooking)
- Strawberries in Balsamic (chocolate balsamic vinegar)
It all turned out fabulously, and every dish had at least one person decree as the best on the list, which to me is the sign of a successful class. (And to tell the truth, I was more than a bit worried about the first one since it was my most avant-garde attempt by a long shot.) But because it turned out so well, I will share the recipe with you here:
Artichokes with Hazelnut Gastrique
What may at first seem like an odd combination, this dish works well as an appetizer to surprise your friends and family with. The sweetness of the gastrique plays well with the tartness of the artichokes and the vinegar flavors blend in with the naturally good flavor pairing of hazelnut and artichokes.
- 2 Tbsp water
- 2 Tbsp sugar
- ½ cup sherry
- ½ cup sherry or flavored wine vinegar
- ½ cup halved hazelnuts
- ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1 can marinated artichoke hearts - drained
- 1 loaf Italian bread - optional
- Combine water and sugar, and boil until sugar begins to take on an amber hue.
- Add sherry, reduce until almost all liquid has evaporated.
- Add vinegar, reduce by a little more than half
- Pour mixture over hazelnuts, stir to cool.
- Whisk in olive oil to form emulsion with liquid in bowl.
- Pour mixture over artichoke hearts, serve on thinly sliced bread if you like.
Chef Matt
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08.13.07
Posted in The Story, Recipes at 1:07 pm by Chef Matt
Sorry I have been away for so long, but this past week - the “six” I had to pull - was more like an “eight” as I had two double shifts in there as well. It was an incredibly long week, and my reward for it is that I now get to pull together and teach my class tonight. I hope I can stay awake through the whole thing!
So enough whining, on with the story.
A few weeks back I received my latest issue of Saveur magazine, and as always I ran through it cover to cover as soon as it arrived. One of the articles that seized my rapt attention was an article on root beer - it’s history and recent resurgence in America. I have always been a huge fan of root beer since I love the flavor, and since I gave up drinking caffeine, it is one of the few soft drinks I can still enjoy. Therefore, learning more about the drink, and perhaps learning how to make it as well, was naturally a subject I took great interest in.
When I got to the recipe part of the article though, I couldn’t help but be disappointed as it called for ingredients like dried sassafras root and so forth that would just be more effort than they were worth for me to track down just to brew my own root beer. I figured I’d just have to continue sticking with Hires.
A few days later, chef came up to me with a series of magazine pages that had given him ideas for changes he wanted to make to certain dishes (some of them were flights of fancy, others were put into action immediately). Imagine my joy though when I found amidst the pile of clippings the root beer recipe from Saveur! He wanted to try brewing his own for the restaurant. What a great excuse to learn how to make root beer on somebody else’s dime! The tracking down of these hard-to-find ingredients had just gone from “unnecessarily tedious” to “inspired adventure.”
Because procuring obscure items was a specialty of mine back in the days of my cubicle lifestyle, it only took me about half an hour of calls to secure a delivery of these special herbs to our store. I bought a few ounces of each so we could experiment with different flavor balances so as to get our own unique recipe just right.
Since nobody in the restaurant had ever done this before, we had to start at the beginning. Earlier this week I made my first batch of root beer following the Saveur recipe to the letter. Yesterday was day 5 of the aging process, where they say the root beer should be ready to go with all kinds of great flavors and so forth.
The recipe calls for 2 cups of molasses. Perhaps substituting some honey as a sweetener might be a good idea?… |
No such luck as of yet. Our daily tastings so far have shown that day by day it is increasing in carbonation, and the flavor is coming about, but it still tastes strongly of molasses and is not really “fizzy” per se. Maybe our walk-in is just too darn cold, and this will take a little longer than the recipe suggests.
But the really exciting part of all this is the experimentation and learning involved in such an endeavor. When you boil it all down, I’m being paid to learn how to make root beer! Many people look at me strangely when I tell them just how much of a pay cut I took to leave the web world behind to become a chef, but it’s adventures like this that reassure me that I made the right decision!
Chef Matt
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07.16.07
Posted in The Story, Recipes at 10:31 am by Chef Matt
When people ask me what I do these days, it is hard for me to explain in a simple “elevator description” since I seem to be doing so much at Rustico. (An “elevator description” is what you use as a prepared speech to describe something to someone in the time it takes to make an average elevator ride. It was an important for us to have one at the ready when I was working at WWF. We wanted to be able to give someone a quick, informative answer if anyone asked us “Oh, what does WWF do?” The fact that nobody ever did is beside the point…)
“Well since it seems we have a little more time in here, allow me to read you all my latest inventory spreadsheets. Butter: $76 per case, Eggs…” |
But as I think more on it, the two main things that seem to jump out at me are:
- purchasing/receiving/food cost control
- making soup
I’ve described that first part of my job, and I have to say I am making good progress in getting the food costs to where I want them - which happens to be where my boss wants them as well. (Funny how that works out, huh?…)
The second part of the job is one that is more fun for me, as it is the one area where I seem to have creative license. When I first came aboard, we had two standard soups (Cream of Asparagus and Cheddar Ale) and one “seasonal” soup, which was kind of a dealer’s choice. In that position, as we came into summer, I made my recipe for gazpacho, which is pretty darn good if I do say so myself. The cold soup for summer (with the corresponding fresh summer vegetables) was a huge hit.
A few weeks later the price of asparagus increased drastically as it suddenly was “out of season”. (This is total bullshit as most produce vendors are getting their asparagus from Peru anyway…) Well, with that huge cost increase, we decided to take asparagus soup off the menu and add the gazpacho (now called “summer tomato”) to the menu full time since its main ingredients (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers) are all “in season”.
Gazpacho: Like salsa you can eat with a spoon. Yum! |
Shortly thereafter, Tim suggested that we have all three soups be cold soups. But I was stuck with the Cheddar Ale soup on hand, which has to be served hot. (It simply has no flavor when it is cold.) For my seasonal soup that day though, I made a wonderful cantaloupe/ginger soup (which was cold) so now we had 2/3 soups as cold soups. With the one hot soup, the trio that we had on hand was just plain odd. I needed to go all or nothing as two cold soups and one hot soup were just not working together.
So I took the remaining cheddar ale soup, packed it away in the walk-in and came up with one more cold soup. Knowing that the cost of cucumbers was now low for the summer, I decided on a cold cucumber soup. I made it into a cucumber-mint soup that was really great - a total hit with the staff. But even better, the next day I added some ripe mangoes into the pureed cold soup (from a hint I heard somewhere) and the resulting soup was actually described by some as “magical”.
While I don’t think it was magic, I have to admit, this was a darn good third soup for the mix, so as a result, we now have a “summer soup trio”. Three cold soups, all vegetarian (one vegan), and all a wonderful display of contrasting colors and flavors.
I got into the world of cheffing so as to express my own creativity with food. I’m thrilled that even if my job only has me making soup as an outlet for that creativity, at least I can say I am proud of the results.
And of course, dear readers, I’m happy to provide you all with a recipe. I’m going to give you the cucumber-mint soup since that one is all my own doing, and it truly is both seasonal and special.
Cucumber-Mint Soup
serves 2-4
4 cucumbers - seeded, peeled and sliced
1 - 1.5 cups buttermilk
2 heaping Tbsp crème fraiche
4-5 springs of mint - leaves only
salt to taste
optional: white pepper to taste
optional: 3 ripe mangoes, flesh removed from seed and peeled
Quite simply you just puree it all together. You may have to do it in batches if your mixer can’t hold it all in one go. Adjust taste with salt, add pepper if you want, but I personally don’t. Serve chilled of course.
I’ve found that this soup doesn’t keep very long, so it is best to make it the day you plan on consuming it. The next day it’s OK, but the day after that, forget about it. Also, if you’re having a dinner party, this makes a great “between course palette cleanser” - or maybe a nice “amuse bouche” to get things started.
Hope you enjoy, and of course you can have all three soups if you swing by Rustico and order the soup trio. That is assuming they are making the same selection there on my days off…
Chef Matt
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06.29.07
Posted in Recipes, Other Fun at 9:30 pm by Chef Matt
My God, she has been away a long time, hasn’t she?…
As I mentioned in my last post about food experimentation at home, I mentioned that I wanted to try a turkey burger recipe that I had a modification for that I first read about on Avocado Green Oven.
The idea was simple, make a turkey burger, top it with caramelized onions and apples mixed with reduced balsamic vinegar and topped with fresh arugula and toasted almonds. All in all, I thought I had an idea that surpassed the original recipe which called for just incorporating the caramelized onions and apples (no balsamic) into the burgers themselves, and then topping them like regular burgers.
Don’t laugh, the bread tasted fine. |
Well, I gave it a shot, and to my dismay, I discovered only after the burgers were on the grill that I did not have any hamburger buns. So I had to put them on some nice whole wheat bread instead. So yeah, they may look a but odd, but I can still judge the result of my experiment.
Again, I was not thrilled with my results. The burgers were not greatly improved by having bread-soaked milk added to them (as I thought they might be when I first read the recipe). I did “juice up” the flavor of the burgers a little by making sure I seasoned it appropriately with salt and pepper, and I love the taste of a touch of Dijon mustard in my turkey burgers as well. But all in all, the topping just didn’t make me want to get up and shout. The sweetness of the topping did nothing especially grand with the otherwise uninteresting burgers. They were good, but I have a better turkey burger recipe.
And so that you all don’t walk away feeling ripped off, here it is:
Turkey Burgers with Mint/Yogurt Sauce
(adapted from a recipe in Cooking Pleasures Magazine - June/July 2005)
Makes 2 burgers
Burgers:
2 cloves garlic - minced
1 green onion - minced
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp fresh thyme
salt and pepper to taste
8 oz ground turkey
Mix all ingredients for burger, except turkey, in a bowl. Add turkey to combine - but only just combine. Don’t over mix. Form into patties and cook through thoroughly.
Sauce:
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 clove garlic - minced
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp fresh mint - chiffonade
salt and pepper to taste
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until burgers are done.
To serve, of course you will want to have hamburger buns (not wheat bread if you can avoid it) and top with fresh lettuce and a few slices of fresh cucumber.
I have never had a better turkey burger than this, so I am sure this is the one I will be going back to now. But hey, it was worth a shot!
Chef Matt
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06.19.07
Posted in Recipes, Other Fun at 10:30 pm by Chef Matt
My first niece: Myriam Catherine Hoehn
What a cutie! |
I’m now an uncle! My lovely wife’s sister just recently gave birth to a lovely little girl, and thus I am now an uncle. But I haven’t met my niece yet though as she (and her parents) live in Albuquerque, NM - and that is where my wife is for the next two weeks. Alas I couldn’t get away to meet the little sweetie, seeing as how you all know I only just started a new job. So I’m stuck here alone to work on the house and enjoy another bachelor week. (Or in this case - two…)
So as part of living alone, this means I need to feed myself. A trip to the supermarket for the staples - bread, fruit, vegetables, antiperspirant - had me pass by the seafood counter which is normally not all that interesting to me. I like to eat seafood that is more sustainable in nature, and the seafood counter at my local market is usually full of farm-raised Atlantic salmon and the like, so I usually pass it by. But tonight there was a lone wild-caught Alaskan salmon fillet hanging out on ice. And it was on sale to boot. Who was I to refuse such a wonderfully rich, red fillet?
Of course I had no idea what I was going to make out of this lovely piece of fish, but hey, I can improvise, right?…
And improvisation is something that always goes smoother when the wife is out of town. Don’t get me wrong, I love to cook for my wife, but she still has a fear of my improvising since she has lived through so many of my disasters. So if I am truly going to freestyle, I find it is better to do it on my own, so I can suffer my mistakes in silence. And before y’all think this is ungrateful of her, I think it is a good thing (protest though I do…). She keeps me trying harder to improve myself, and keeps me humble as well.
A raw filet of salmon. What to do, what to do?… |
So for all you who want to make up a fish dish on your own, here’s the steps of how you generally do it (and I’ve thrown in what I did as examples):
- Marinate the Fish - For my slab of salmon, I used some Spanish olive oil, garlic, fresh oregano and parsley and some salt and pepper.
- Sauté the Fish - I left the skin on since salmon is easy to peel after cooked anyway. Start presentation side down, then flip it onto the skin side. Finish the cooking on the skin side, since if it burns a little, who cares? You’re not gonna eat that skin anyway.
- Remove the Fish and Add the Mirepoix - I put the fish in a preheated 200 degree oven, tented it with foil to keep it warm and moist while I finished the sauce in the pan. If you want to clean out the pan of blackened bits (to keep the sauce looking cleaner), you can, but I choose not to. To the hot pan, I added a diced onion and one ear’s worth of fresh corn (cut from the cob of course).
- Deglaze - Of course that’s a step in this blog! I deglazed with a semi-dry Riesling and a fresh lemon’s worth of juice. I then reduced the sauce down to the desired thickness. This is hard to explain, but you know it when you see it. The wateriness of the wine and lemon juice are gone, and the natural thickness of the flavors begin to make the sauce syrupy.
- Season - I added some fresh capers, salt and pepper to brighten up the flavors.
- Thicken - There are lots of ways to do this - endless liaisons to choose from - but when it comes to fish, I love to thicken with some good old butter. (Off the heat of course to prevent separation.)
The end result. Drowning in sauce and bursting with color. Now if only it tasted a little better… |
That was all there is to it, just a garnish with some fresh chopped oregano for color and flavor.
The end result? Meh - a bit too much lemon, and the corn flavor really didn’t pop as much as I wanted it to. But then again I am always hard on my cooking.
Now it is time to work on a turkey burger recipe I saw on Avocado Green Oven. I commented with an idea of how to re-work the recipe, and she asked me to give it a shot and let them know how it came out. That will be my next experiment, and I’ll let you know how it goes!
I’m just glad my wife isn’t around to kick my butt for all these mistakes. 
Chef Matt
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06.12.07
Posted in Greatest Hits, Recipes at 8:53 am by Chef Matt
I am sure some of you are wondering about the title of this post, and let me assure you; all will be explained. And no, I have not performed any violence against my mom. (Hasn’t she suffered enough already?…)
A plate of fresh fried chicken. As much a sign of summer’s arrival as fireflies. |
In recognition of my need to provide y’all with more recipes, I’m offering up my fried chicken recipe since it is definitely that time of year. That and I think this recipe is really something special. Would you like to make fried chicken with super-crispy skin and a moist, juicy inside that is bursting with flavor? If so, today is your lucky day. (If you said “no,” then there is really something wrong with you…)
This is a recipe I developed back in culinary school actually. I was taking a food science course, and the practical part of the final exam was that each of us was given a chicken. Using what we knew of food science and how it related to cooking meat, we had to provide the chef instructor with a fully-cooked chicken that had a crispy outside and moist inside. Any cooking method was allowed – provided it ended up as requested.
Basically stuff moves in all directions across the cell membranes. For more information, visit the nice people who made this diagram: www.exploratorium.edu |
The answer to this style of cooking is brining. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of brining birds, allow me to give you a crash course. (The rest of you can skip this paragraph.) Brining involves placing a bird in a salt/sugar water solution for a few hours before cooking it. While you may initially think this would dry out the bird (salt water draws water out of the bird) the result is actually the opposite. To get scientific about it, water is initially drawn out of the bird, and then the salt (and water) in the brine solution comes back into the bird. The salt then denatures the proteins in the bird meat slightly. This denaturing means that when the proteins are cooked, they can’t coil up as tightly - the action which squeezes water out of meat. If not as much water can be squeezed out, more stays in the bird. And with the extra water that came back into the bird in the brining process, the result is a much juicier end product. OK, lesson over.
Brining was obviously part of what I had to do for this exam, and I decided that a brined fried chicken would probably give me a super-crispy skin as well. (The fact that we had a large deep fryer on hand helped me make that decision as well…) But for this chicken, I wanted to add more flavor with my brine, so I brined it in buttermilk, which up until now I had only ever used in the coating. The result was a brine that stuck to the outside of the chicken as well - adding another layer of flavor under the crispy fried coating.
For the coating, my time in NC taught me that flour is the way to go. But there is no reason not to add some flavor in this step as well. I may not have a secret recipe of seven herbs and spices, but choosing flavors I like is not all that difficult, and of course you can adjust this to your preference as well.
In the class final exam, the recipe worked like a charm, and I presented my chicken to the chef instructor who agreed it was fabulous. (I received second place in the course behind what I personally thought was a horridly over-salted Guinness-brined chicken. But the guys who won were good friends of mine, so I was happy for them…) But after chef tried the chicken, there was another student from the class who took a bite as well. He loved it so much that after one bite he looked at me and said, “That’s so damn good, I gotta go home and slap my momma!”
The name of this chicken was immediately carved in stone for all eternity.
Slap My Momma Fried Chicken
Brine:
3 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup salt
2 Tbsp sugar
4 cloves garlic (chopped coarsely)
1 Tbsp paprika
2 bay leaves
1 tsp cayenne
1 Tbsp chopped fresh sage
1 chicken cut up into 8 pieces, or about 8 thighs and/or drumsticks
Coating:
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp baking powder
3 cups flour
1 Tbsp Old Bay seasoning
1 Tbsp chopped fresh thyme
1. Combine all the brine ingredients in a large non-reactive bowl, add the chicken pieces and allow chicken to soak in the brine for 3 hours in the fridge.
2. Take the chicken out of the brine, shake off excess brine (especially large pieces of garlic that may be sticking) and place on a rack on top of a sheet in the fridge, uncovered, for 2 more hours. (Don’t rinse or rub off the brine, you want that flavor to stick around.)
3. To coat, combine the egg, buttermilk and baking powder in one bowl, whisk well. Combine the flour, Old Bay and thyme in a large flat plate. Dredge the chicken in the liquid, coat with the flour and fry in a 350 degree deep fryer until done - about 3-5 minutes. (You can also fry it in a Dutch oven with about an inch or two of fat in there - you’ll just have to flip the chicken to cook both sides, and I would recommend a higher cooking temperature with this method - like 375 degrees.)
I doubt you will actually slap your momma as a result of eating this - in fact, I sincerely hope you don’t. But I’m sure you’ll want to call her to share this recipe. Because what good is a plate of fried chicken, if you can’t share it?
Chef Matt
(Cross-posted on EatFoo(d).)
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06.09.07
Posted in The Story, Recipes at 9:38 pm by Chef Matt
As the first person to arrive in the morning at the restaurant, I find myself as the de facto one in charge simply because I have the key to the door. It is a new experience for me to have to be the “go to guy” for all the problems that present themselves in the early morning hours. The first such problem is usually akin to something the people from the night before left for me. Either a pot of chicken stock that they meant to simmer on the stove the night before that was set too hot, so most of the pot is now empty, or it was set too cold, such that the stock has not really cooked itself. This morning was a “too cold” morning as one of the burners under the giant stock pot had gone out.
Duck confit - not the healthiest thing for you, but one of the tastiest! |
Inspecting the ovens, I also found that two pans of duck confit had been left in the oven overnight as well. Fortunately they were still warm, and the duck was not overdone seeing as how it was submerged in duck fat, so no loss there either. But it is just another thing for me to work on before I can begin to work on my own station.
I set into the usual prep work of getting soups together and making some dressings and blanching asparagus and so forth, but this week is harder than most others as my lunchtime sauté/salad worker is on vacation. So in addition to doing all my usual work, I also have to do her set up as well, and then run that station through the lunch hour as well. But I am getting ahead of myself…
The delivery vans are what arrive next as we take in the food for the weekend in hopes that we have enough to get us through the busy Saturday and Sunday night rushes. Saturday deliveries are always anxious moments for me since any mistakes (mine or theirs) usually can’t be rectified until Monday morning. This morning the only mistake was that one of my delivery guys forgot to bring our lamb tenderloins and duck legs. Well, with the confit that had spent the night in the oven I knew that we were OK on duck legs in general, and the lamb was a new product we were planning on trying out, so these mistakes were not the end of the world. But all the same, I gave the driver enough shit for the error that he was able to track down which truck these items actually had been put on, and was able to get them to us later that day. (I’m not trying to be a dick, it’s just always better to resolve these kinds of things quickly…)
As only half of the asparagus that needed to be cleaned had been trimmed so far, I returned to my station to set back to working on that once again, when Oscar, my morning grill cook, pokes his head around the door behind me and says, “Papa,” (he calls everyone that) “can I see you in here for a second?…”
With his calm demeanor and desire to talk privately, I was assuming all he wanted was to talk about some future days off. I gladly joined him around the corner. Oh, would that it were holiday time was all he wanted. In front of me were Oscar and Nicolas (the morning dishwasher) looking at the coffee machine as it was pouring massive amounts of coffee all over the floor.
“Do you know what’s wrong Papa?”
“No, but Jesus, I’d say the first thing to do is to shut it off!” I yelled as I ran across the puddle of coffee to hit the power button.
Nothing more sad in the morning than spilled coffee. |
I grabbed the filter out of the machine, handed it to Oscar and told him to dump it, as I tried to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. (It later turned out the urn the machine was “filling” was already full, but was not showing that on the front of the urn, so they had started brewing an entire batch of coffee into an already full urn…) With shoes soaked in coffee, I called for Alemo to come with a mop to get this mess cleaned up. Fortunately, we only lost about three pizza boxes and a few cake boxes to the spill. Oh, and most people had to forego their morning coffee seeing as how it was now in a mop bucket…
Back to my station, and now the pizza cook wants to know if we have any more tomme cheese for the weekend. “No,” I reply, “You’re just gonna have to stretch it for the weekend.” If I am going to make food cost, I have to run a few items tight. Heck, I have to run everything tight. It is a never-ending balance where I guess for each item if we can make it with the supply we have through the next day. This is especially hard on the weekend where I have to think three days in advance, and it is inevitable that we will run out of something. My goal is just to make sure it is nothing major - like hamburger meat or pizza cheese - and if that means annoying some of my cooks by making them work a little harder with their supplies, than so be it… All I knew was I had a soup that needed my attention now.
Creme Brulée - again, not too good for you, but damn tasty! |
With the soup soon in a state where I could turn my attention elsewhere for a few moments, I ran across the street to the bakery that we receive our desserts from in order to place my order for Monday morning. I was pretty much out of everything again, so in addition to setting myself up for next week, I asked if they had a dozen cupcakes to spare for tonight. They did thankfully, but they needed some of their brulée dishes returned to them. This was of course a fair trade, so I ran back to my station, and got one of the line cooks to make the exchange later in the day for me.
And so it goes through the day - I take one step forward in my station, and 17 other minor disasters/annoyances/obligations rear their ugly heads in an ongoing conspiracy to make sure I don’t get myself prepped in time for service. But that is part of the life, and a part that I really kind of enjoy in a sick way. By making decisions on the fly and cleaning up the accidents as they happen, I am shaping the restaurant in my own style in some small way every day. Sure, I am not re-writing the menu or changing the layout of the kitchen, but those things aren’t expected of me.
All I know is that when one of my cooks comes up to me in a panic because we are out of balsamic onions, I get a great feeling inside. Suddenly I’m the only chef in the world who knows what to do to make everything right. I’m the guy who is going to make sure that this one ingredient in our grilled cheese sandwiches is made properly, and finds its way into those sandwiches in time for our customers to enjoy them at lunch. It may be an awful burden for some to bear, but I’m thrilled to have the chance to face it so many times every day.
(Except when this means I have to run out to the grocery store at 6 pm because I didn’t order enough basil to make it through the weekend. Seriously - how was three pounds not a large enough order? Grrr…)
Chef Matt
P.S. In case you want to know how to make them too, here is how to make yourself some great balsamic onions:
Balsamic Onions
Thinly slice 4 onions - red or white, your preference.
Sweat them in a sauce pan with some butter until soft and translucent.
Add in 1/2 - 3/4 cup of brown sugar, and heat until the sugar melts all over the onions.
Cover with balsamic vinegar and simmer to reduce until the vinegar is thick and syrupy.
Use the onions in sandwiches, as a topping for pork chops or chicken breasts, or even serve as a before dinner hors d’oeuvre with cheese and crackers. They are just wonderful!
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02.21.07
Posted in The Story, Greatest Hits, Recipes at 2:01 pm by Chef Matt
This story requires us to go back to several previous posts, so please bear with me regular readers (all four of you) as I recap for the newly-initiated. Back in December, we were reviewed by the Washington Post, and it was a very favorable review. However, seeing as how this reviewer visited Vero before I was an employee, I could hardly take any credit for the praise we received. Quoting myself:
“I want to be clear about this review though. I claim absolutely ZERO credit for this glowing review. All of his visits occurred before I was an employee, so there is no way my additions for the past two and a half weeks had anything to do with what Mr. Nicholls experienced at Vero.”
The business at the restaurant really picked up as a result of that, and I was proud to be working in such a well-liked and busy restaurant.
As time has progressed on though, I have had more ability to flex my own “creative muscle” in the kitchen, and come up with some of my own dishes to serve to the public. The first addition to the Restaurant Vero menu I created was a trout and persimmon salad in Belgian endive that, while good, was ordered by exactly nobody. The road that must be climbed to reach culinary recognition is indeed a steep one…
Fast forward now to two weeks ago, and you may remember the incident where I was actually able to start a fire in the kitchen using only a stove, a pan and some cranberry juice. Well, further down in that post I mentioned that the redeeming moment of the day was how I invented a spinach and mushroom stuffed calamari braised in a tomato-basil sauce that was served to some local restaurant reviewers. Quoting myself once again:
“One of [the reviewers] ordered my recipe for stuffed calamari. I was nervous of course, but all the same, I wanted to know how it would be received. After that round of dishes came back, the server reported to me that this particular reviewer said that the stuffed calamari “exceeded all his expectations”…I [choose] to believe that this meant he felt that my creation was really something special.”
Well, yesterday Veronica showed me the review they wrote about their visit to Restaurant Vero.
This is another great review for our restaurant - and I especially liked the jab they took at the Post reviewer’s “wimpy palate”, with which I took umbrage as well. However, nestled in this review - if you don’t want to read it all - is the following comment:
“The special of SPINACH & MUSHROOM STUFFED CALAMARI Braised in TOMATO BASIL SAUCE with Endive, Watercress & Daikon Salad was also a gem with tender whole squid stuffed to perfection.”
I did an image search for “gem” and surprisingly, the results included zero pictures of squid… |
Yes, this was my dish they were talking about, and I am still on cloud nine that the words “gem” and “perfection” were used in conjunction with a dish I invented, cooked and plated myself.
But again, I can hardly take all the credit for this. Look at all the other amazing dishes they mention, and the fantastic service as well! If you take no other point away from reading my blog, please take this one:
Working in a kitchen is a TEAM effort! Nobody can go it alone and expect to achieve any sort of success!
So while my one addition was well-received, and even achieved “gem” status, I give all thanks to my bosses for taking the chance to allow me to be creative, my fellow cooks for letting me - the salad chef - take up space on the stove and in the
bain marie for the creation of this dish, and to the servers for getting it to the right people at the right time. The seeming success of one in the kitchen is really the success of all - which may be yet another reason
why “celebrity chefs” annoy me so much.
The road to culinary recognition may be a steep one, but with the help of my great co-workers, I think I may have finally taken my first step!
Matt
P.S. Allow me to beat the rush of those of you who are going to ask me for the recipe and give you the recipe for these stuffed calamari here:
Again, these are not my calamari, since I didn’t have a camera on me in the kitchen, but this is what they should look like. |
Spinach and Mushroom Stuffed Calamari with Tomato Basil Ragu
- In one pan, sauté 2 cups of sliced mushrooms (a mix of them is nice) with olive oil, a clove or two of minced garlic and some chopped rosemary. Cook until most water is out of them, place in large bowl off heat.
- In another pan, sauté a bag of baby spinach with oil and some more garlic until wilted down. Press excess water out in a strainer, and place in bowl with mushrooms.
- To the spinach/mushroom mixture, add salt, pepper, lemon zest, parsley and finally some bread crumbs to give it a little “body”. You are not looking to turn this into a bread stuffing, but you want something there to bind it together.
- In a large pan - like a Dutch oven - heat a few tablespoons of oil, sauté a minced garlic clove until fragrant, then add one can of whole tomatoes and their sauce. Bring sauce to a boil, and crush the tomatoes with a potato ricer/masher in the pan. (Can use a metal spoon for this too…) Add about 10-20 leaves of roughly chopped basil, a pinch of sugar, and let simmer gently while stirring occasionally for about 30 min.
- While the sauce is cooking, stuff the calamari. This recipe should fill about 6-8 tubes of calamari, depending on their size. Make sure the “tip” of the tube is closed, and if it isn’t, close it off with a toothpick. Fill the tube only about 1/3 - 1/2 with the stuffing, and seal off the big end with another toothpick.
- Slip the calamari into the simmering sauce, cover pot, and cook for a total of 45 min to an hour, flipping the tubes every 15 minutes.
- When serving, please be sure to remove the toothpicks first - they could be a nasty surprise otherwise…
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02.11.07
Posted in The Story, Recipes at 2:01 pm by Chef Matt
So what happens when you discontinue a menu item, but you still have some of the key ingredient in stock? As I mentioned a little while back, we discontinued the beet salad from our menu - a decision that I was totally in favor of seeing as how I think beets smell, and taste, like dirt. But we noticed a short while later that we still had about 5-6 pounds of beets sitting around. In one of the great moments of collective realization we all suddenly came to the conclusion that one of two things could happen with these leftover beets:
1. We let the beets rot and then throw them out.
2. We cook the beets, and then make a special with them to use them up.
We of course chose the second option since throwing the beets away is the same as throwing money away, and that just never seems to make any sense.
So I had to come up with an idea for the final use of the beets. Our pastry chef, Amy, had made a wonderful beet terrine with some roasted beets before, but she has been busy as of late - especially with Valentine’s Day coming up - so the last thing I wanted to do was bother her for a quick special.
I had a few other ideas, but like all of my ideas, they involved way more work than they were worth. It was David who finally suggested: “Why not just run them on a beet salad?”
The look on my face was one of total dismay. The thought of returning the beet salad to the menu - even if only for a short while - was just such an unappealing thought to me. “No,” David said, “A special one that you can make up.”
This idea was much more palatable. It had the combined appealing characteristics that it would be my own creation, it would be short-lived, and it was a very simple way to use up the beets.
Oranges - they go great with beets. Or at least that’s what they tell me… |
So my creation was as follows:
- Bed of fresh watercress and arugula
- Roasted red and gold beets that have marinated in fresh lemon vinaigrette
- Orange segments (membranes removed) and red onion
- Garnish with orange zest
Simple as can be, and it sold just fine to finish up the beet supply we had in house while they were still fresh.
The lesson here was quite a good one though. In a restaurant, you have to use up your supplies to their fullest so as to have as little waste as possible. And that is in fact a good thing simply because it allows you to be creative and think up new ideas, all in the name of making sure that no good beet goes un-served.
Though of course I can’t imagine what a “good” beet would taste like…
Matt
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01.27.07
Posted in The Story, Recipes at 2:34 pm by Chef Matt
Yesterday was one of the best days I have had yet at Vero. It is sometimes hard to tell a good day from a regular one - though the bad ones really stick out - since so many days are exactly the same. Restaurant work is about repetition. You have to create the same meals day after day, and that means doing all the same prep work before every shift, and getting into a rhythm so as to be able to do the same work quickly and efficiently. I think I touched on this sometime back, referring to the whole rhythm in a kitchen being like a carefully choreographed dance. With all this repetition and performing tasks in out of the sheer force of non-focused habit, the days can tend to bleed together in your mind. Ask me when the last time I worked on an 8-top was, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was last Wednesday, or last month. Those kinds of things - while hard at the time - are all blended together in my head as part of the whole “Vero experience”.
“All work and no play… All work and no play… Hmmm… must have been a chef who wrote this…” |
Mind you, this fact makes coming up with new and exciting material for the blog a little challenging at times. I hope you all appreciate the effort!
But yesterday had some elements that really stood out to make them better than other days.
First of all, there was the foie gras which I mentioned in my previous post. It held its illustrious place on the specials menu, mainly because we need to sell all that we have, but also because our customers really seemed to enjoy it. So much so that one of our servers came back to tell me that one of the gentlemen who had ordered it was simply raving about how good it was! When she came back the third time to tell me how much he enjoyed it, I simply had to go out and meet him to tell him how much I appreciated his kind words about my recipe.
I dusted myself off, took off my Philadelphia Eagles chef’s hat, and switched my jacket front around to head out front. (For those of you who don’t know, chef’s jackets are double-breasted in the front. This is for two reasons: 1. It makes a double-thick layer in your front to protect you from burning hot things coming off the stove at you. 2. If you keep a clean side underneath, all you need to do is switch it around, and you are suddenly clean enough to go outside and greet guests.) My eyes were still adjusting to the relative darkness of the dining room when I arrived at the table, but indeed this kind gentleman had a lot of very nice things to say about my foie gras preparation. In return, I told him how I came up with the flavor combinations, and how thrilled I was that he had enjoyed such a fine meal. He had come before, and he was definitely set on coming again.
Surely this was the reason I became a chef, and so it was good to actually meet one of my ever-growing legion of fans. Currently the count stands at 4. (My parents, my wife, and this guy.) Only a few thousand left to go…
The next great development came in the form of a menu change. I mentioned before how we were planning on making some changes to our regular menu, and yesterday several of them took effect. The one that effected me directly was the replacement of a beet salad with a spinach salad. Most people would look at this as zero-sum game: one salad gone, one added, little change. But to me, this was truly addition by subtraction.
Leave them underground I say… |
For the record (I believe I have mentioned this as well but I am too lazy to look it up to provide you with a link) I think beets are nasty. They are one of the two things I just can’t eat, the other being broccoli. But I know that many people like beets, and I had no problem in theory making a salad with beets on them for those people who do enjoy them. But the beet salad that we made was one that also had creamy goat cheese (which made my hands dirty) followed by gold and red beets carefully positioned on the bed of arugula in such a way that they were almost always destined to fall over (and make my hands dirty again from the red beet juice…) In short, this was a salad that was a pain to build, and forced me to clean my hands twice during its construction. I do not miss any element of this salad, and I am much more excited about the replacement salad anyway.
Pancetta - for all practical purposes, it is Italian bacon, which means it is delicious any way you slice it!
Image from pancetta.org |
A bed of fresh baby spinach leaves is tossed with my own sherry-champagne vinaigrette and accompanied by marinated grapes, toasted pumpkin seeds and crispy brown sugar-coated pancetta. This is all topped off with a few thin shavings of Manchego cheese, and I must say, the result is downright heavenly. I made a sample salad for the staff to see/taste, and after a few bites, I found myself eating the whole thing before anyone else could have any.
Replacing a salad topped with beets for one topped with bacon. Hmmm… I wonder why this was a move in the right direction?
A better menu item, and a new fan of my work. All in one day! Surely last night will be a Friday that will stand out in my mind for many months to come. Oh wait, or was yesterday a Thursday?… What day is this?…
Matt
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