Lessons From a Chef & Culinary Instructor

I recently had the great pleasure of attending a talk and tasting given by Chef Dan Brophy.  His commitment to seasonal, local, homegrown food was very apparent, as was his dry wit and acerbic humor.  And while I would have made my Summer Succotash differently, I definitely learned a bunch and had a great laugh. 

As he has a half-acre urban farm, he is passionate about eating from the seasonal bounty, and then putting up the harvest to enjoy later in the year.  As it is currently tomato season (finally!) he shared a dead-easy technique for oven-dried tomatoes that can then be frozen for later use.  I promptly went home and made a batch with a bunch of our tomatoes that had all ripened with we were away.  Check it out here

And after all these tomatoes are used up, he warned against falling for the one that are brought in from hothouses all over the continent in the middle of winter.  

"It is tomato shaped…maybe even tomato colored…but definitely not a tomato."

Followed by the following advice on how to survive through this period of tomato impostors:

"Eat your bodyweight in tomatoes while they are in season and you won’t need to eat another one until the seed catalogues come and you start dreaming of tomatoes."

And presumably by then you will still have one or two jars of tomato jam, roasted tomatoes, homemade tomato sauce or tomato chutney to indulge in while waiting for the tomato plants to grow.

Chef Dan also had a wealth of information on how to be a better cook, be it either in he home or in a professional kichen.  One little gem he said that is often heard repeated in various forms is:

"If you are not making mistakes, you’re not trying very hard."

And I would add that you are not learning very much either.  He says that the average American home has a meal rotation of 10 items.  T-e-n.  He himself grew up in a 10-meal-rotation household in North Dakota, where the Salmon Loaf was the Meatloaf recipe but you opened a can of salmon instead.  He also pointed out that most of his culinary students came from similar such households.  I’m pretty sure that growing up I was exposed to more than 10 dishes on a regular basis, but with kids and work and activities I'm sure that my mom, like mothers everywhere, took a certain comfort in knowing you can get spaghetti on the table in 20 minutes.  So lets say I grew up in a 20-meal-rotation house - whooo hooo.

So if you feel as though you’ve fallen into a bit of a ‘Taco Tuesday’ rut, lash out and try some new ingredient or dishes and see how that revitalizes your culinary world.  (By the way, he advocates to his students that they get into a 100-dish rotation!)  Along those lines he also said:

"Be a committed member of the herb of the month club."

Pick an herb, preferably one that you are seeing in abundance in your garden or the market stands, and commit to using it 12 times in the next month – sauces, soups, stirfries… add it to rice or potatoes or a dessert, make a tea or put it in a smoothie.  Not all of your attempts will be good, some might even be awful (refer to the comment about making mistakes above), but you’ll have a much more intimate understanding of that herb and will undoubtedly stumble on some fantastic flavor combinations in the process.

Here are Chef Dan’s simple steps to being a great cook:

1. Know what you are doing

The other half of which is …then you know when you are done.  So what is the goal, the technique, the dish?  Then you know how to measure 'doneness'... is it by the color, texture, internal temperature?  And by all means STOP when you’re done.  He said that he often witnesses “death by boiling” in the kitchen… veggies should be simmered, and definitely not for long.  This also goes for knife skills – so you can stop at ‘chopped’, or go all the way to ‘fine dice’.  All these things do make a difference... so practice, practice, practice.  Make small batches and screw with it until you’ve got something great – which, presumably, is what you a going for. And for goodness sake take notes!  Get out the stickies and jot down what works and what really doesn't - both are valuable to remember for next time.

2. Seasoning

Specifically – salt.  Unless you are on pills for hypertension, don’t be afraid of salt.  As Chef Dan says, “salt is magic – it makes food freaking delicious”.  Too much salt and you may as well be a cow licking one of those pink blocks out in the pasture, too little and you’ve got “Marlon Blando”.  

I think the key to the right amount of salt is the right salt.  Don’t use that iodized, free-flowing, tiny-grained table salt.  That is the sure way to the salt lick.  If you must, then at least measure it out into your hand before adding it to anything.  You only need ½ a teaspoon of this stuff to meet the daily requirement for iodine.  Other sources are seafood & vegetables, bread (usually due to the amount of salt added), dairy, and plants grown in iodine-rich soils[1].  Even VGF diets usually have enough - and if you're worried about developing a goiter put nori or another seaweed on the list for your 'herb of the month club' and you'll have a great relationship with a natural source of iodine.  

So turf the ‘traditional’ stuff in favor of kosher salt, or one of the wondrous variety of seas salts.  We have Alaea sea salt from Hawai’i that we put in a salt grinder.  Not only do you use less salt overall, but you also gain trace minerals in proportions that are more similar to your own body chemistry – after all, we arose from the sea in the first place (well, more like wriggled, but you get the picture). 

Another way to use less salt is to eat less processed food.  Your palate gets accustomed to the insane amount of sodium in these products and then you need more to taste more.  I used to drastically over-salt my food until I ate a couple of “bland” meals and then a whole world of flavor opened up to me.  Compensate by amping up the herbs and spices, and you can wean yourself off salt while still enjoying food. 

Which leads us to the fact that salt is only one of the flavors that you need to concentrate on – sour, sweet, bitter, and umami (a Japanese word roughly translated as savory) are just as important.  And what’s more is that your brain interprets taste by comparing the responses from the different taste buds[2].  So meals that incorporate all of these flavors really do dance on your tongue.

3. Aroma

Herbs and spices make food sing!  Most of what we taste comes from our sense of smell – you realized that in grade school when they made you plug your nose and eat a piece of apple, which you couldn’t distinguish from the piece of onion.  And this is precisely the problem with most packaged foods, in that they are totally lacking in aroma – even VGF organic soups in a can need a healthy shot of pepper, red chili flake, basil, garlic or something to make it from the pan to my bowl.  That’s just the nature of making soup from a can versus making it from scratch.  That’s where the herb of the month club comes in!  I for one am looking forward to this exercise in aromatics.  And you don’t have to stop with herbs – heck, do a spice of the month club too.  That sumac in the Mediterranean food store looks interesting?  Figure out how to make it work in soups, stews, breads, dips…and I know it does because that’s exactly what I did.  You just have to dive in and chalk it all up to experience.

4. Presentation

Finally, don’t go to all this effort to just blob something on the plate.  We eat with our eyes first, that is what draws us a little closer, then the aroma makes it enticing and we dig into that lovely, well seasoned, well executed meal!  So keep in mind color, shape, height and texture.  Use the natural color of your ingredients to your advantage, shape the components such that you cover only about 60% of the plate, put the most beautiful or intriguing thing on top, and a play of textures on the plate will undoubtedly be a play of textures on the tongue. 

So I hoped you were inspired to greater culinary invention and creativity like I was – thanks Chef Dan!

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[1] Whitney & Rolfes. Understanding Nutrition, 10^th Ed.  Thompson Wadsworth. 2005.

[2] Kalat. Biological Psychology, 8^th Ed. Thompson Wadsworth. 2004.