EAT WITH YOUR EYES OPEN
CHEFS SPEND A lot of time putting food in their mouths without really eating. By which I don’t mean that they are spitting out the food. (Ew. Don’t do that.) But for pros, there’s a difference between “tasting” and “eating.” If eating is for pleasure or sustenance, tasting is for work. They are making sure the meat is seasoned and seared properly. They are dipping into sauces and stocks to monitor salt levels. Throughout an evening, as a sauce reduces it becomes saltier, so chefs check, adjust, and check again. What’s this new creation the pastry chef is sending out? Bite. Bite. Bite. Before you notice, we’re talking real quantities. Cleveland’s Michael Symon echoed many of his colleagues when he told me, “Because of what I do for a living, I consume a giant amount of calories—I would say four to six thousand on a heavy day. I gotta taste.”
We layfolk don’t have that same professional obligation to taste food throughout the day or night. But think of all the other opportunities we have to nosh, graze, or sample and not count it as eating, because it was “just a bite” (or twenty) or eaten standing up (or while driving), or a taste of someone else’s meal (or two-thirds of your kid’s unfinished sandwich), or any other number of rationalizations that all those extra bites somehow don’t make a difference. They do. Often we don’t even notice that we’re taking them in. I’m not a big calorie counter, because if there’s anything that makes eating less fun, it is math. But just becoming aware of everything that hits your mouth—and of why you’re putting it in there—can be a meaningful change.
Lesson 5: Smart chefs are awake when they eat
“I try very hard to pay attention to what I put in my mouth all day long,” says Melissa Perello of Frances in San Francisco. (The name honors her Texas grandmother, who taught Melissa to cook.) Her menu, which changes almost daily, is heavily market-driven, so she isn’t doing dishes by rote—she has to taste to create. “Sometimes I get off track, so I have to be careful. Whenever I feel like my weight’s getting out of control, I really try to focus on what I’m eating, keep a mental diary. If I know I already ate x, y, and z, I can say, ‘I do not need to eat this piece of cake right now.’”
Michelle Bernstein agrees. “It’s something that you have to be cognizant of all day long.” Before she was a chef, Bernstein studied with Alvin Ailey in New York and aspired to be a professional dancer. The rigors of the two professions are comparable, but that may be where the similarities end. “As soon as I quit and got into cooking, I immediately felt that I started to gain weight. I wanted to look the same, but it didn’t work,” says Bernstein, who remains lithe and graceful in the kitchen. “If the pastry chef comes up with three new desserts, you have to taste them—but then you have to remember that you tasted them. So later when you drink coffee that day, you shouldn’t put sugar in your coffee. Or maybe you shouldn’t have that cup of coffee if you have to have sugar in it. Or you don’t eat bread later. If my husband says, ‘Come have a sandwich with me,’ I’ll have the inside, not the outside. It’s something that you have to think about. Some people use their phones to write down what they’re eating. I just try to keep a mental note.”
During dinner service, she adds, “You can be tasting and feel like you haven’t eaten anything and think, ‘I need to sit down and eat something.’ Meanwhile, you’ve already ingested eight hundred to a thousand calories in sauces alone, and enough fat for probably a third of the day.”
Her solution: Put down the spoon and pick up a vegetable. “Now I’m dipping lettuce or a carrot so my body doesn’t trick my mind into thinking I haven’t eaten anything.” This is good advice—I tend to pick at whatever is handy when I’m cooking dinner, because most nights, by the time I get to the stove I’m already pretty hungry. Switching to some raw vegetables from bread or cheese was easy, and doing so means I’ve had something nutritious (but not highly caloric) even before the meal. This also works in other fraught situations, like cocktail parties with sliders circulating on trays and a dessert bar. It’s easier to lose track of what you’ve eaten and overindulge at a party with a buffet or passed hors d’oeuvres than when you sit down to a meal. A few raw vegetables can get you through those grazing situations unscathed, or at least help you feel satisfied with only one slider instead of four.
Lesson 6: They dine with a strategy
Naturally there are situations, family holiday gatherings for one, that demand more than just chomping on carrot sticks and red pepper strips. Some planning is helpful in those cases. Donatella Arpaia says that in advance of a big food event, she thinks about what and how much she intends to eat. “I make a mental plan when it’s Christmas, and my mom has a twenty-course feast with the meatballs and the chicken cutlets. I say, ‘Okay, what are my most favorite things? I’m going to eat that, and that, and that.’” And that’s all. The rest, she says, “is a feast for the eyes.”
You will—hopefully, inevitably—go to parties with phenomenal food that you want to enjoy, and sometimes your better judgment will abandon you and you’ll eat too much. It happens. If you’re paying attention, you can simply remember to go light the next day. That is just what Rick Moonen was doing when we spoke—trying to balance out the excesses of the previous day. Moonen had been judging an up-and-coming-chefs competition in Napa. “Ten dishes of one pork preparation. Horrible. I wanted to die.” He groaned, less about the food itself than the quantity and heft of it all. “Then I went to the French Laundry because I’m in Yountville—I have to bring my girlfriend to the best restaurant in the world.”
It’s a good bet that he didn’t eat anything bad at Thomas Keller’s landmark restaurant. Moonen, who knows Keller, says they were treated to an all-out feast. “We got pummeled. I’m done. Done! So today I’m eating raw.” There’s nothing to suggest that a full-time diet of uncooked food is especially beneficial, despite what raw foodists would have us believe. But an occasional day of fresh fruits and vegetables, and maybe some nuts for protein, is a reasonable way to get back on track after overindulgence.
Lesson 7: They know you never enjoy those last bites as much as the first
This seems a good time to hear from Thomas Keller, the culinary bard behind those extraordinary experiences at the French Laundry and its New York City counterpart, Per Se. He really isn’t trying to topple guests with too much food. In fact, to his way of thinking, it’s best if you stop eating a dish when you still want more of it. “Our whole menu is based on the law of diminishing returns,” Keller explains to me. “It’s our philosophy about our food: The most compelling portion of a dish is the first three or four bites. With the first bite you’re getting into it, by the second you start to realize it, and it is at the third or fourth bites you get the maximum appreciation and pleasure from that dish—you think, ‘This is amazing!’ and you keep eating it because of that memory of it being really extraordinary. But by the time you’re done with it, okay, that was really good, but was it as good [at the end] as it was at that second, third or fourth bite? No.”
His solution—smaller portions. If you have a big bunch of something that good, the temptation is to just keep eating and eating, trying in vain to recapture the thrill of that early pleasure. To Keller, the perfect time to part ways from a plate of food is when you are still wishing for one more bite, not when you’ve had so much that you’re tired of it. “People will ask, ‘Can I have another cornet?’” he says of a signature canapé (salmon tartare and sweet red onion crème fraîche in a tiny cone studded with black sesame seeds). “They’ll say, ‘The first one was so good, I want another.’ No. It’s a matter of finishing a dish at the height of that flavor impact.”
At his restaurants, when that moment occurs another small course is right behind—some new experience to captivate the diner. But the philosophy is worth taking home, and applying to those treats that wow you initially, but diminish with the more you have of them. The tenth spoonful of ice cream. The fourteenth twirl of fettuccine Alfredo. The umpteenth tortilla chip with guacamole. None are as great as that first (or second or third or fourth) time. Have less, savor more.
Lesson 8: They consider why they are eating
“I’m a little bit of a nervous eater,” confesses Andrea Reusing. “In the kitchen at night I have to find that line between tasting and stress eating because it’s busy. Otherwise I find that I’ve eaten my day’s calories in croutons.” Reusing has a warm mushroom salad recipe that I followed at home one night. The croutons, which you make fresh from country bread, olive oil, and salt, were addictively crunchy. As I was assembling the rest of the dinner I found myself snacking away on the croutons, trying to see how many I could pick off before the dish would cease to be something that could be described as “a salad with croutons.” (Quite a lot, as it turns out.)
Then there is the problem of what I call “batting cleanup,” when there’s just a little left in a dish so you finish it off. For a week before heading to Miami, I was eating very carefully and working out—the prospect of putting on a swimsuit in the middle of winter will do that. Then, the night before getting on the plane, I was making a spinach and mushroom lasagna for my son and husband to heat up while I was gone. After I’d made enough layers to fill the pan to the top, there were still a few broken lasagna noodles left in the colander. Although I’d had a satisfying dinner two hours earlier, I snatched those noodles up, mopped them through the puddle of béchamel left in the pot, and ate them standing at the stove. Creamy, lush, slightly springy and . . . totally unnecessary. The béchamel, I am ashamed to report, needed more salt and pepper. But as the bulk of it was already mortaring the layers of pasta, spinach, cheese, and mushrooms, this cannot be described as effective tasting, as I could not go back and reseason the sauce. It was mindless Hoovering. The moral of the story: Taste the food you’re preparing only when the dish still stands to benefit from some adjustments.
The only way Reusing says she is able to thwart those Hoovering episodes “is just being aware.” Once she tuned in to how much she was eating, she realized she should just call all those bites at night what they are: dinner. Rather than try to keep her grazing in check, she stopped sitting down to a meal after a shift of checking her sauces and meats—and saw that she wasn’t missing anything. So if you find yourself snacking, just remember that you’ve done it, and don’t eat just as much at the dinner table. If you’ve had a particularly heavy afternoon of noshing, maybe you skip dinner. Who says we need three squares a day, every day?
Marcus Samuelsson tells me he’d been talking over this very idea with his wife, Maya Haile, a fashion model who is from Ethiopia. “My wife says in Africa, ‘We eat one big meal a day. We have tea in the morning, maybe with a hint of bread. Maybe a little bit of coffee. A lot of water during the day, then this one big meal that becomes a celebration.’ You know, that’s not a bad way,” says Samuelsson, who was also born in Ethiopia, but raised in Sweden.
It’s not that we should necessarily be skipping meals, he adds, just that we should be making a conscious choice to eat out of hunger, not just habit. “Breakfast-lunch-dinner-breakfast-lunch-dinner-breakfast-lunch-dinner is not the way to go,” he says, stringing the words together like a train of boxcars stretching to the horizon. “I don’t think I’ve arrived at the answer yet, but I can tell you that’s not it. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t eat breakfast-lunch-dinner and they’re in great shape.” We agree that the first step is observing one’s habits, then making adjustments. “Your body can get used to anything: If you have a snack at two p.m. every day, you’ll get used to a snack at two p.m. every day,” says Samuelsson. “If you change that snack from a muffin to an apple, you’ll get used to that too. Bodies become very much accustomed.”
Case in point: Thomas Keller says he routinely has a morning and an afternoon snack, and that invariably they are one of the following: an apple, a banana, some almonds or walnuts, or crackers with peanut butter. If you get hungry between meals, better to have an arsenal of reliable, nutritious favorites. And keeping a piece of fruit and some nuts close at hand is no more difficult than hitting a vending machine.
Lesson 9: Smart chefs don’t snack mindlessly
A divide across the Atlantic: Americans are all-day noshers, Europeans not so much. “I was an adult before I learned the word ‘snack,’” says Marcus Samuelsson. In Sweden, he says, “Our parents counted on the meal that the kids got in school. You got a fantastic lunch: always a rye bread, water or milk, fish or meat or a vegetarian dish. It could be seared cod with broccoli and mashed potato. The next day split-pea soup, with a grilled piece of ham and mustard.” The meals were hearty, and carried the kids through until the evening. “If you can trust the school to provide that for you, then you can eat as a family at a certain time.”
We do a lot of habitual eating in this country. Taking a coffee break? Have a doughnut. Going to a movie? Get popcorn. Watching the Super Bowl? Bring on the nachos. Eric Ripert says he never really saw that type of hand-to-mouth viewing until he moved to the States. “In France you don’t go to the movie theater and pick on popcorn,” says Ripert, who met with me the morning after the Packers beat the Steelers. “I love the Super Bowl party, but in France it doesn’t happen like that. You don’t stuff yourself with chicken wings. Maybe the younger generation has a tendency to. But as a tradition, no.”
Marc Murphy, an American chef who spent time in France with his mother’s family, agrees with Ripert: “People who eat too much are just snacking all the time. I like to sit down and have my meal. I don’t like to eat on the subway. I don’t even like to have a cup of tea while walking—and I drink a lot of tea.”
He’s got me beat on that—I do like having a take-out cup of tea when I’m walking around the city in winter. I consider it as much a part of my cold-weather gear as mittens or a scarf. In the summer I tote around an iced coffee with milk, no sugar. Perhaps this is a lesson I still need to learn: Snacks are not accessories. But, after talking with Ripert and Murphy, I did try in earnest to ignore the call to eat between meals. When I first tried cutting out snacks, I noticed I wanted to eat more at breakfast or lunch. I suppose I was worried that I might feel hungry afterward. Well, so what if I did get hungry? Food was never more than a short walk away. Besides, feeling a little hungry—not to the point where you’re snapping at coworkers, but so that there is an awareness—can be part of the pleasure before eating. It’s okay to not snack and thus to not walk around half-full all the time, I discovered. I really didn’t miss snacking as long as I made sure to have a little protein in each meal and not falsely fill up on fluffy foods without depth.
The effect of eating this way was to make my meals more memorable—at the end of the day I actually knew what I ate, and I didn’t have to consult a food journal to tell you that today I had two eggs and green tea for breakfast, a piece of (slightly underseasoned) leftover spinach and mushroom lasagna for lunch, and salmon croquettes with broccoli rabe and an arugula/avocado salad for dinner, followed by two squares of dark chocolate. Meals stand out in starker relief if they aren’t indistinguishable bumps in an all-day food graph.
Lesson 10: They pull back if they are eating on autopilot
Iron Chef star Cat Cora likes to linger over a great meal as much as the next person. But she figures after about twenty minutes, she’s finished with the eating aspect. “Sit down to a meal and savor it and eat for twenty minutes,” she says. “If you’re still eating after that, you’re no longer hungry. It’s really about other things. Maybe your palate wants more, or you think you’ve got to finish, or other people are still eating.”
Not to take away from the importance of those elements that can cause us to eat more: Good company, conversation, a long meal with a lot of delicious courses—these are essential in life. But if you pay close attention to your hunger, you’ll realize that it gets satisfied much sooner than you think. Says Cora: “Sit back, take a breath, and consider. You’ll either say, ‘Okay, I’m going to take a couple more bites,’ or, ‘Wow, I’m not hungry. I’m done.’”
She’s right, of course. I rarely need all the food in front of me at most meals, but I don’t like to be finished eating too soon. I like being at the table, whether talking with friends or reading the paper by myself. So occasionally I give myself something else to do. For lingerers like me, some great foods are a whole artichoke, in-shell pistachios, or a tangerine that needs to be peeled and each piece depithed—foods that take more work to consume.
Sometimes the opposite can be true: You aren’t aware of being sated because you are eating too fast. Slowing down did not come naturally to Cora, who found that between her restaurants, TV shows, and expanding family she was often, she says, “gobbling food down because I’d have only ten minutes to eat.” When she actually did have time to sit and linger over a great meal, she would wolf it down in the same record time as she did when she was eating on the run. “I’m as guilty as anyone,” she admits. “It took me a while to learn to stop and enjoy my food.”
To take an extreme example of long-term dining, a meal at Per Se or the French Laundry can take upward of three and a half hours, during which time customers will encounter nine to fifteen (sometimes eighteen!) tiny courses, adding up to about a pound of food. (With the extended menu, each course is smaller so the total stays about the same.) I ask the chef about serving so much over such a long a time.
“Eating a pound of food is a lot!” Thomas Keller acknowledges, with a laugh. It seems less preposterous as he talks me through the meal. “Maybe the lobster is an ounce and a half, and the fish is an ounce. The foie gras you don’t want to skimp on, so that course may be two and a half ounces.” Also adding to the bottom line: pre-canapés, canapés, salad, more protein courses and two or three desserts, each one no more than a few bites.
He knows this is not the way anyone eats under normal circumstances—going to his restaurants is, as it should be, a rarified experience that is primarily about delighting one’s senses. But even here it is possible to take away a lesson in eating wisely. Menus like this come out of the Japanese tradition, kaiseki, of “eating small portions over a long period of time,” Keller tells me. “It is a health benefit, to eat slowly and take your time.” By contrast, he notes that, “if you’re really hungry you could inhale a pound of pasta. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. Then you go, ‘Oh shit, why did I eat so much?’ Why? Because your mind and your body didn’t have a chance to sync up on how much you ate. Here, you eat over a long period of time and your mind is talking to your stomach, your stomach is talking to your mind, so everything should work out pretty well.”
I like this theory and I agree that it is important for your brain to have ample time to react to what your mouth and stomach are up to, whether you’re at home with a bowl of spaghetti or spending a long, enchanted evening in one of Keller’s dining rooms.
Thomas Keller’s Yountville Three Bean Salad
“Cooking is fairly simple when you think about it. Each technique is understandable and easily achievable if you really focus in on it,” says Keller. “The difficulty, for me, comes when you are trying to do multiple techniques at once, and bring it all together into a dinner.” So, while this recipe does have a lot of steps—Keller is nothing if not precise—none of them require special skill. And because it may be prepared a day ahead of serving, you can focus on following his meticulous instruction. To me, the most important is #21—taste and adjust seasoning and lemon juice. As with all of these chefs’ recipes, make sure it pleases your own palate.
serves 4 to 6
FOR THE BEANS:
½ pound (1¼ cup) small red beans (such as Rancho Gordo’s “sangre de toro”), rinsed
1 small carrot, peeled, stem removed
½ small red onion, peeled (reserve other half for the garnish)
1 large garlic clove, peeled, gently crushed
1 bouquet garni consisting of 1 fresh bay leaf, 6 parsley stems and 6 sprigs of thyme, tied together with kitchen twine
1 quart unsalted chicken stock (vegetable stock or water may be substituted)
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 large yellow bell pepper
¼ red onion, sliced into ⅛-inch thick half moons (about ½ cup)
3 red radishes about 1-inch diameter, stems removed, each cut into 8 wedges
1 large lemon, preferably a Meyer lemon
¼ pound yellow wax beans cut into 1½-inch pieces
¼ pound green beans cut into 1½-inch pieces
2-ounce piece ricotta salata cheese (Parmigiano Reggiano may be substituted but will have more fat)
FOR THE PARSLEY PESTO:
1 bunch flat-leaf parsley, large stems removed, rinsed and drained well, coarsely chopped
1 small clove of garlic, peeled
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Place beans, carrot, ½ red onion, garlic clove and bouquet garni in a small (2 qt) saucepan.
3. Add 1 quart of chicken stock, place over medium heat and bring to a simmer.
4. Once simmering, skim off any impurities that rise to the surface, cover with a tight-fitting lid and place in the center of the oven.
5. Cook the beans in the oven for 2½ hours or until tender and creamy.
6. Once the beans are cooked, season with 2 teaspoons kosher salt and allow the beans to cool in the liquid. (Note: these beans may be cooked a day ahead of time.)
7. While the beans are cooking, place the yellow pepper on a small cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes. Remove from oven and wrap the pepper loosely in a pouch of aluminum foil, seal and allow to steam for about 15 minutes or so.
8. While the pepper is steaming, combine the sliced red onions and radish wedges in a medium mixing bowl.
9. Finely grate the zest from the lemon (a microplane is perfect for this) and add to the bowl.
10. Squeeze the juice of the zested lemon through a strainer and combine in the bowl with a pinch of salt and allow to marinate.
11. Bring 2 quarts of water to a rapid boil in a saucepan and add 4 tablespoons of salt.
12. Fill a medium mixing bowl with about two parts cold water to one part ice.
13. Place the yellow wax beans and the green beans in the boiling salted water and cook for 2 minutes or until tender.
14. Once cooked, strain the green beans into a strainer and immediately plunge the beans in the ice water to stop the cooking process.
15. After the beans have been shocked, remove them from the ice water, drain well and add them to the marinating radishes and onions.
16. Remove the pepper from the foil pouch and carefully peel off the skin. Remove the stem and open the pepper up. Remove the seeds, rinsing if necessary.
17. Dice the roasted pepper into ½-inch pieces and combine with the marinating vegetables.
18. Combine the parsley, garlic clove, olive oil, water and 1 teaspoon of salt in a blender jar.
19. Blend until smooth and creamy.
20. Drain the cooled beans and combine with the marinating vegetables and the parsley pesto.
21. Adjust seasoning with salt and freshly cracked pepper. Acidity may be adjusted with more lemon juice if desired.
22. Transfer the bean salad to a serving bowl or platter.
23. Garnish the salad at the last minute with slivers of ricotta salata shaved on a mandoline or vegetable peeler.
24. Serve at room temperature.
Adapted from Thomas Keller.
Andrea Reusing’s Warm Asparagus Salad with Soft-boiled Eggs
This is another of Reusing’s wonderful salads that includes simple directions for homemade croutons. If you’re really a carbophobe, I suppose you could omit them. But I think the better challenge is to make them without snacking on them before the salad gets to the table.
serves 4
4 large eggs, room temperature
Kosher salt
1 small clove of garlic
⅓ cup plus 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
Zest of 1 lemon
2 thick slices of country bread, crust removed, torn into rough 1-inch pieces
1½ pounds of asparagus, tough ends snapped off, cut into 2- to 2½-inch pieces
Small bunch fresh chives, cut into 2-inch lengths (½ cup)
½ cup flat-leaf parsley leaves
Freshly ground black pepper
1. Preheat the oven to 400ºF. Fill a medium pot with water and bring it to a boil over high heat. Gently add the eggs with a spoon and simmer them over medium heat for 6 to 7 minutes—you want the yolks runny but without liquid whites. Transfer the eggs to an ice bath for 30 seconds; then remove.
2. Bring a fresh pot of generously salted water to a boil. Blanch the garlic clove for 30 seconds and remove with a slotted spoon. Reduce the heat to low until it is time to cook the asparagus.
3. Mince the garlic finely and transfer it to a small bowl. Stir in ⅓ cup of the olive oil and the lemon zest and set aside.
4. Toss the bread pieces with the remaining 2 teaspoons olive oil and a pinch of salt. Spread the bread out on a baking sheet and toast it for 5 minutes, until golden brown but still soft and chewy in the center. Peel the eggs and cut them crosswise into thick slices.
5. Bring the water back to a boil and blanch the asparagus for about 1 minute, until tender but still bright green. Drain the asparagus well, transfer it to a warm serving bowl and toss with 3 tablespoons of the garlic-lemon oil, the herbs, and salt and pepper to taste. Arrange the eggs and croutons on top. Drizzle with additional garlic-lemon oil and season it all, especially the eggs, with additional salt and pepper.
Adapted from Andrea Reusing.