6

EAT IN OFTEN

I’M SITTING IN Tom Colicchio’s office reading a menu upside down on his desk. On it is the lineup for that night’s Tom Tuesday Dinner, a weekly private dining room experience at which the Top Chef head judge himself prepares a frequently changing tasting menu for about thirty-two people lucky enough to score a reservation (and with more than $200 to drop on a meal). This evening’s diners will be treated to the following: butter-poached oyster; Jerusalem artichoke velouté; turbot with truffle butter; roasted lobster cacciucco (a seafood stew); Columbia River sturgeon; poached capon; black-truffle-stuffed porchetta; venison with mushrooms, lady apple, and honeyed turnips; grapefruit-Aperol sorbet; and a chocolate caramel tart.

Two nights earlier, Colicchio was cooking for an even more elite gathering: his family. On the menu? Pasta and broccoli, boiled in the same pot. This is shockingly close to how I make pasta and vegetables.

Cooking at home is (sorry, restaurant folk) better for you than eating out. It’s cheaper, and you are unlikely to hide duck fat, sugar, or butter from yourself. “I don’t go out as much these days, because I want to control what I eat,” says Michelle Bernstein. “If I do go out, it’s for food I don’t know how to make, like sushi.” Mark Bittman has noticed, “My caloric intake is probably double on the days I go out to dinner. You might have another course; the portions are bigger; you end up eating dessert; you have an extra glass or two of wine. At home, not so much.”

Still, cooking for yourself or a family can be a challenge when it must be wedged in between work and sleep. I see the stress of home-cooking written on the faces of my coworkers. A meeting scheduled for five thirty can mean the difference between preparing a meal to be enjoyed on real plates, or coming home ravenous with enough energy only to order dinner over the phone. Cooking needs to be easy or you’re apt to fall back on takeout or less healthy “convenience” foods. But it shouldn’t be as easy as unwrapping a package and popping it into the microwave. Michael Psilakis knows from experience that eating better “involves, at some point, having to cook food.”

I’m on board with that directive: I want to cook food. For me, the biggest obstacles are inertia, lack of preparation, and unresolved issues of timing, which I blame on having watched too many cooking scenes in movies, beginning with the bowl of spaghetti carbonara that Meryl Streep produces effortlessly during a sleepover date with Jack Nicholson in Heartburn. But as I proved to myself, they are not insurmountable. So, with the end goal to eat better and more healthfully, several chefs offered ways to eat at home more easily and affordably, drawn on their own experience in both their restaurant and home kitchens.

“Most of the meals I eat away from work are at home,” says Colicchio, whose New York City apartment kitchen isn’t any bigger than my own. Before he was a dad of three, he used to go out to eat quite a bit. “Now, if I’m not at my own restaurant, one of the last places I want to be is at a restaurant.” Several chefs felt the same way. Their chief complaint about staying in? They hate doing dishes. No one has figured out an acceptable solution to this yet.

Lesson 35: Smart chefs don’t mistake home cooking for restaurant cooking

What do chefs eat at home? They have access to the best ingredients, and know how to do amazing things with them. “If people think we’re home eating foie gras sandwiches, we’re not,” says Alex Guarnaschelli. “I make a lot of the food that I make on my cooking show.” That includes homey American classics like roast chicken, green salads, pork chops with apples. Nothing that requires a blowtorch.

Says Sang Yoon, “My whole life has been spent in fine dining, so people think, ‘You must scramble copious amounts of caviar into your eggs every day.’” Not so much, he assures me.

Yoon is an avowed bachelor (“I haven’t bit on any of the five marriage ultimatums I’ve received,” he tells me with a little laugh) whose home kitchen is stocked like a college kid’s. Instant oatmeal. Soft tofu, which he heats and eats frequently, because he knows it is healthy and because it is an effective Sriracha delivery system. (Sriracha is that pepper sauce in the bottle with the rooster on it, ubiquitous in Vietnamese and Thai restaurants.)

“It’s false to think that every single chef—save Alice Waters—on a day off, goes through the steps that they go through in their restaurants to prepare certain dishes,” says Nancy Silverton. “We are very spoiled by having a brigade of prep cooks, dishwashers, and people to help us to create the layers of flavor that we do at our restaurants.”

At home, you need to be your own prep cook. When you have time on a weekend, make some stock, a tomato sauce, or a versatile vinaigrette; precut your vegetables for tonight’s dinner while you’re waiting for your oatmeal to cook. She goes further: Not everything needs to be prepared from scratch. In fact, Silverton wrote a cookbook devoted entirely to cooking at home with familiar jarred, boxed, and canned ingredients. “There are a lot of things out there that are time-saving, or products from cans and jars and boxes that we use anyway, like anchovies, or capers. They have such concentrated flavors that they will add complexity to a dish.”

To be sure, she’s as concerned as anyone about avoiding additives like high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives, and MSG, and uses only products that don’t contain them. This is not Nancy Silverton’s take on Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee; she makes a clear distinction between convenience products that fake a dish (like macaroni and cheese from powder in a box) and smart substitutions that simplify a dish (like a can of all-natural lentil soup in place of cooking lentils from scratch). She got the notion after reading an interview with Thomas Keller, in which he said he came home after work and often warmed up a can of Progresso lentil soup. Below, she shares a recipe in which she strains the soup to make a lentil base for quickly cooked salmon. Once the can is open, you can practically make it with one hand.

It’s true that, like Silverton, Thomas Keller isn’t a snob about store-bought shortcuts. The youngest of five boys raised in Palm Beach, Florida, by his mother, Betty, after their parents divorced, Keller grew up on eating things like chili dogs cooked by his older brothers while mom worked nights managing a continental restaurant. “You remember surf and turf? Fettuccine Alfredo? We didn’t have specialized restaurants. Steak house and continental were the top-shelf restaurants,” he recalls. These days, Keller could whip up his own ketchup without breaking a sweat. But he has often remarked that no gourmet or all-natural version pushes the same flavor button in most Americans, himself included, as an ordinary bottle of Heinz.

That’s not an unimportant reason for turning to some time-tested staples—food memories are among our most indelible, and should be respected. Keller has recounted in detail a dinner he prepared in 2008 that he and his father enjoyed out on his porch. The centerpiece was one of Ed Keller’s favorites: barbecue chicken, sauced from a bottle. The meal, rounded out by mashed potatoes, braised collard greens and strawberry shortcake, turned out to be his father’s last; the senior Keller died at the age of eighty-six the following day. “It was a good dinner,” Thomas writes in Ad Hoc at Home. “And now I am unspeakably grateful to have made it.” He then shares all the recipes to re-create that dinner, gently instructing those of us who do to buy a bottled barbecue sauce “with some integrity, preferably from a small producer.” I think about this instruction in particular when I’m cooking for my son. I would love if the flavors for which he is someday nostalgic come from foods with some integrity, and that will happen only if those are the products stocked in our pantry.

Lesson 36: They cook and eat simply at home

When I catch up with him, after meeting at Per Se, Keller tells me that he eats a lot of meals, dinner mainly, in his Napa Valley restaurants. He might have “family meal” with his staff before service, or once a week he’ll go out to eat. But lunch, fit in around work and regular workouts, is most often put together in his white-cabineted Yountville home kitchen. What he makes for himself is easy, healthy, and, he allows, fairly repetitive. “I’ll have a bowl of quinoa with some hummus, and I’ll braise off some kale or broccoli—some vegetable—mixed together with some olive oil and vinegar. Sometimes I’ll add a can of good Italian tuna fish. I eat that probably four to five times a week,” he tells me. “If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll put a pot of beans on.”

When he is home in the evening, he sometimes might have the same thing for dinner. The food for which he is known is almost surreally labor-intensive and relies on a sumptuous array of ingredients from caviar to venison to young ginger; the food that keeps his body humming is accessible, nearly vegetarian, and simple to throw together.

Another illustrious, high-wire chef, Laurent Gras, is best-known for the sophisticated seafood fare he created at Chicago’s L2O. After earning three Michelin stars for the restaurant, he departed for New York with plans to open a less formal spot. At work his tools included tweezers for precision placement of delicate elements, and a Gastrovac, a $6,000 vacuum device that allows one food to take on the flavor of another through “cold impregnation.” (The terminology comes from the Gastrovac catalog; I couldn’t make it up.) At home it’s another story. First off, he’s happy to let his wife, Jennifer, do a lot of the cooking. But when he does cook for the two of them, you wouldn’t mistake it for the food that made his reputation at L2O. “What I cook [at a restaurant] is really what I love. What I eat is for me to be healthy.” As for his tools? Knives and pots and that’s about it.

“If I want vegetables, I peel them, cut them, cook them, eat them. Simple,” Gras explains, adding that he uses only olive oil to dress them, never butter, which I found surprising from a Frenchman who used pounds of melted butter at his restaurant as a poaching medium. What else? If he’s in training on the bicycle—Gras is also a competitive distance cyclist—dinner might be pasta with vegetables, shellfish, or beef ragù. Otherwise, it’s “fish baked with lemon juice, maybe rice, or a steak and a potato. Always a salad. Then we have fruits, yogurt.” He doesn’t bother much with spices, except maybe cayenne or black pepper and salt. Imagine the minimalist appeal of your refrigerator and pantry if this were the way you ate. Then imagine how good you would feel if this were the way you ate. Let your meals out be complicated; home can be a refuge of ease and good eating.

A few words about cooking from recipes. Chefs don’t, really; they write them only because they need to give instructions to their restaurant crews or want to publish a cookbook. I love cookbooks, I read and use recipes, and it never occurred to me to not include them in this book. But I feel at my most competent and relaxed in the kitchen when I cook without one. If you’re cooking simply, you may not need a recipe either.

Another way to lessen your reliance on recipes, says David Waltuck, of New York’s storied Chanterelle restaurant, is to find a couple of dishes you like to eat, “and do them over and over and over again.” From his perspective the most significant difference between home cooks and restaurant cooks is that the latter group prepares food over and over again, all the time. “So you learn, even if you’re not brilliantly talented. You learn to put something in the pan, and wait a certain amount of time, and you smell, hear, look at it, and see when it’s time to turn it.”

Another reason to ditch recipes? “To write a recipe, you have to quantify everything,” says Waltuck. “But everything is not quantifiable—it’s what you like. There’s not an exact amount, unless it’s a baking thing, where there is chemistry. Use a little more garlic, or a little less garlic; it doesn’t make any difference. Just boom, there’s some garlic. Boom, it sizzles.” Not having to measure an exact half tablespoon of a recipe’s called-for uniformly minced garlic should free you up to cook more quickly, and hopefully more often. For his dinners, he says, “I just kind of improvise.” After he made the career change from chef-owner of his own acclaimed restaurant to consulting for a restaurant group, he eats in quite often. “I’m busy during the day, and free at night. But by the time I get home there’s not a lot of time to go shopping and cook. It’s usually a sauté or some pasta. If I somehow have a moment, I’ll make stock, but usually I don’t. It’s just that fifteen-minute dinner.”

Lesson 37: Smart chefs don’t mess up the whole kitchen

You probably don’t even need a recipe for this, but here it is, courtesy of Chef Colicchio. Pasta and Broccoli in One Pot: “Boil the water, chop broccoli and garlic, throw in the pasta, throw in the broccoli and sliced garlic, drain it, put it back in the pot, add olive oil, lots of black pepper, Parmesan cheese, serve it. One pot. One of my favorite things to make at home.” Sang Yoon cooks at home rarely, but when he does he’s also a big fan of the one-pot meal: soups, stews, casseroles, or curries. “In restaurants it takes so much equipment; at home I literally try to figure out what will take the least amount of effort and the fewest objects to wash, because I don’t have my crew picking up after me. But I also think that one-pot meals are incredibly soul-satisfying, comforting.”

Ever since his wife, Sandra, turned him on to this trick, Eric Ripert will cook fish or chicken in the toaster oven. “Amazing,” says Ripert. “A piece of halibut in three minutes—you cannot mess it up!” Like any New Yorker, Ripert has friends with small apartments who use their real ovens for storage. So he’s become a bit of an evangelist for toaster oven cooking, in life and on his Web site, AvecEric.com. (His recipe for Toaster-oven Chicken Paillard follows.)

Lesson 38: They get someone to cook for them

Perhaps you are reading this and thinking: But I don’t cook much! Even if you are not the person in your home who handles the meals, it helps to think about the food that’s coming in and how it’s prepared. “To become interested in what you eat is the first step to healthy eating,” says Masaharu Morimoto, who lost the forty pounds he put on due to absentmindedly ending his nights with big bowls of ramen. “Be knowledgeable about food ingredients,” he advises. “Know which ones are low in calories and how to make those low-calorie foods tasty.”

This doesn’t mean you have to be the one to cook them.

Maybe a family member or a friend is willing to support your efforts to eat better. (I have loads of single pals who say they love to cook but won’t do it for just themselves; is one of them your neighbor?) The first time I offered to make dinner for my husband (then boyfriend) in his apartment, he happily accepted, then said, “Oh, I suppose I’ll have to call and have the gas to the oven turned on.” In his refrigerator I found nothing but frozen lasagna, orange juice, and martini olives. He is really not a cook.

Morimoto, on the other hand, is certainly capable of preparing a meal for himself. But when cooking is how you make your living, it’s nice to come home and have someone else take over kitchen patrol. If you are fortunate enough to have that be a person who cares deeply about your well-being, all the better. His wife, Keiko, favors traditional Japanese dishes that are light and full of vegetables like kinpira gobo (braised burdock root), and gomae (blanched spinach with sesame paste). When Morimoto decided to lose some weight, he stopped eating ramen. Instead, his wife buys shirataki noodles, which are made from konnyaku, a tuber that is very high in fiber and has virtually no calories. But they don’t eat Japanese all the time. “She cooks shirataki pasta just like regular pasta—with fresh tomatoes, garlic, and basil—so you can still enjoy an Italian-style dish.”

Morimoto says that having a pretty strict diet at home—one that is monitored by his wife—frees him up to eat as he likes elsewhere. “When I go out, I like trying out interesting food as a chef. This way, I care less about calories.”

Lesson 39: Smart chefs keep the food they want to eat on hand

“I always eat pretty light,” says Wolfgang Puck. “In our restaurant we don’t really have heavy things sitting around. I eat a lot of fish. I love wild Alaskan salmon, which we get a lot here.”

You may be tempted to say: “Well, if my kitchen were stocked like the one at Spago, I’d eat well too.” But there’s no reason not to keep your freezer and pantry full of the sorts of foods you love and that fit into the way you want to eat. I know that the nights when I’m seriously out of everything are when I end up eating Chinese takeout or pizza. Keep the food you want to eat around you.

“Have a terrific pantry,” advises Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson. “Buy great dry goods. One bottle of olive oil that you really love, one red wine vinegar you think is great.” You will still have to do some shopping, but just for a couple of fresh items. “A head of Bibb lettuce, tossed with red wine vinegar and olive oil and a little salt and some chicken and you have a damn good salad that is fast and delicious and good for you.”

When you have the opportunity, shop for the week ahead all at once. Over drinks at a book party, I asked David Waltuck about his most recent shopping trip, playing “what’s in your basket?” with a renowned chef who cooks at home regularly. “We did a week of shopping at Fairway,” he says of the famous New York emporium. “I bought a piece of beef fillet that I roasted; I don’t love beef fillet, but it was cheap, so I bought it. I bought a lot of vegetables: broccoli, haricots verts, bok choy, tomatoes, and cheese.” For dinner that night he unpacked pork cutlets, which “I pounded out, and did a version of saltimbocca: prosciutto, sage, marsala, a little chicken stock and butter.”

One thing running a restaurant teaches you is that food that goes unused is money that is thrown out. You’ll want to use it all, and to get it to stick around until you do. Marcus Samuelsson is a fan of repurposing leftovers. “Plan out the week and buy things that make three days of meals,” he advises. “Roast chicken on Sunday, then chicken soup on Monday, and then a chicken pasta on Tuesday night.” For this to work, you have to buy and cook enough food to yield true leftovers—the most likely thing to be tossed out is a sliver of, say, cooked salmon that is too small to make a meal for even one person. It will sit in your refrigerator as a tiny monument to a dinner you cooked until it turns on you and you have to get rid of it.

Jacques Torres, who says he tends to nibble late at night on whatever is hanging around from dinner, portions out his leftovers for future meals and puts them immediately into the freezer, so he isn’t tempted to revisit them the same night. A tip about freezing leftover meats, from Mark McEwan: “With chicken, be careful not to overcook it, so it doesn’t dry out” during freezing and reheating. “You can also vacuum-pack and freeze steaks if you buy good-quality meat that isn’t too aged. Typically hormone-free products are not as aged.”

McEwan also likes making a big portion of a flexible dish that tastes just as good a day or two after it’s prepared. One of his favorites is lentils, “cooked tender so they don’t break apart. Throw in a little feta, onions, a fresh herb, and a nice Italian vinaigrette. It’s a universal side dish.”

Lesson 40: They eat only treats they make themselves

Consider the potato chip. A good one can be amazing, a perfect sweater set of salt and grease. But when you’re avoiding processed foods, empty calories, and generally foods that come in plastic packaging, potato chips are not something you eat too often. I hadn’t had any in years, I think. Then I decided to make them at home. (Sliced thin on a mandoline, fried in canola oil, drained on paper towels, and sprinkled with sea salt—very easy.) They were better than any I remember.

Andrea Reusing tells me she likes the idea of “reclaiming foods that you think of as ‘purchased’ foods, and bringing them back into the kitchen.” This includes what a lot of people might consider junk food, but that can be a fine indulgence when it comes from your stove instead of a vending machine. Her treats are French fries (“you can have a lot of fun eating French fries if you make them yourself”) and homemade mayonnaise (“what’s better on grilled fish or a French fry than that?”). She doesn’t prepare French fries or mayonnaise every day. That’s the point—these aren’t foods that should be eaten every day. Making them should be a little bit of a production, and the payoff should be worth it. If you’re going to eat fries or mayo or other treats only rarely, why not have them be phenomenal? Another plus? “When it’s flavorful, you don’t need as much,” says Reusing of her mayo, which she makes with a stick blender.

I part ways with Reusing in one respect. She says, “I wouldn’t make homemade mayonnaise just for myself, but I would if I were having even just two people over.” I am the opposite: I don’t yet trust my mayonnaise-making skills to attempt it when guests are expected. Instead, I’ll try my hand at mayonnaise (which involves tossing out failures that look more like egg smoothies) when I’m alone.

Lesson 41: They get the right balance on their plates

How to decide what to put on a plate? When putting together a dinner for herself at home, Reusing goes for “a protein-centered meal, but not too much protein. I think a mistake a lot of people make is overproteining; four to five ounces is enough. I try to make a very flavorful sauce, and I don’t worry about the fat in the sauce, because I’m not using that much.”

Michelle Bernstein has a similar take: “I try to make the protein the third-largest item on the plate. Protein used to be number one. Now the vegetable is number one, a grain is number two, and protein is number three.”

Susur Lee also eats more vegetables than meat. “If you are going to eat a lot of meat,” he advises, “you should eat at least the same amount of vegetables.”

Chefs also think of balance in terms of hitting a lot of different notes: soft/crisp, creamy/crunchy, rich/light. “A dish that is heavy with too much cream and fat and cheese is just a bad dish, even if it is palatable and rich,” says Matt Lee. “It’s missing all these other pleasure points, like color, vibrancy, freshness, and textural contrast—there’s a million things a dish like that ignores.” Adds Ted Lee: “There’s a tendency in a lot of Southern restaurant cooking to go big and decadent. But if you’ve got a beautiful piece of pork belly and you’re going to serve it with a butter-bean ragout, please don’t put pork stock in that butter-bean treatment, because I’ve already got richness on my plate. Bring a sour element or some fire to it.”

A typical Michael Symon home dinner will have some meat in it, but it will start with a salad of raw, shaved vegetables dressed in citrus juice or red wine vinegar and olive oil. “Because I cook with so much protein and animal fats, I’ll always balance it with something crisp and acidic. To me the most tragic dish ever is meat loaf and mashed potatoes—soft on soft.” Marcus Samuelsson put it another way: “Why does everything have to be soft? We have the best teeth in the world! We do! Some stuff should be chewy.”

Though he occasionally puts together a meat-free meal, Symon can’t help but come up with meat-veg pairings. Recently, he says, “I made some slow-roasted beets and a quinoa-almond salad with feta, which my wife said was delicious. I said, ‘I know—it would be great with some duck breast on top of it!’ She’s like, ‘Why can’t you just enjoy this?’ I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about it with duck.”

Lesson 42: They eat roast chicken

I briefly entertained the notion of titling this book When They’re Not Cooking for You, Chefs Are Home Roasting Chicken. Because whether the chefs grew up in Jersey or Texas, it didn’t matter. Whether they were raised by parents from France or Haiti, it didn’t matter. Whether they made their reputation in Latin fusion or rustic Italian cuisine, it just didn’t matter. Whenever I asked a chef what he or she likes to cook at home, almost invariably the first response was, “Roast chicken.” Believe me when I tell you that I did not solicit roast chicken stories; they simply poured forth.

Ironically, the only person who didn’t offer a roast-chicken-at-home story was Thomas Keller, whose recipe for same is among the most searched on the Internet. When I ask him about it, he reminds me that he eats it frequently as part of the staff meals at his restaurants, or when dining as a customer at Bouchon. He did have this piece of advice, however: Temper your chicken before roasting—that is, bring it up to room temperature, to ensure even cooking. Home cooks “just don’t temper their food,” he says. “They are afraid to take the chicken out of their refrigerator and leave it out for two and half hours—they think they’re going to die. But at every great restaurant, that’s exactly what we do.”

You may already have a trusted roast chicken method. Enjoy your favorite in the knowledge that, if you make one on a Sunday night when most chefs take off, there’s a good chance that you and, say, Tom Colicchio are enjoying the same dinner.

Here, thoughts on roast chicken from . . .

  Michelle Bernstein: “If you wanted to roast a simple chicken and then take the skin off to eat it—which I think is a travesty, but some people like to do that—I would throw the chicken into a brine, and that would be a combination of four gallons water, a half cup salt, a little bit of agave for sweetness, and then peppercorns, fennel seeds, celery seeds, lemon or orange zest, all my favorite stuff. Then you throw that whole chicken in there, and weigh it down with a couple small plates, and leave it [refrigerated] at least five hours, or put it in before you go to sleep, which I love to do. Then wash off the chicken; stuff it with a couple of lemons or oranges or herbs. Rub it with a little olive oil, roast it nice and low at three twenty-five, then go up to four hundred to get it golden. [It’s done when the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165ºF.] Then you’ve got the most delicious chicken. You don’t need sauce. You can roast it on top of some chopped vegetables. Add some favorite grains, like Kamut or farro or Jerusalem artichoke pasta, with some toasted garlic, and some salad. It’s the perfect meal.”

  Melissa Perello: “I try to salt the chicken ahead of time, like a dry brine, season it really heavily, wrap it back up, and let it sit in the refrigerator. Roast the chicken, and I’ll serve the whole Dutch oven on the table, with a salad. I’m also a huge fan of Judy Rodgers’s Zuni Café’s roasted chicken dish with the bread salad. She takes all the schmaltz and chicken liquor, tosses the bread in it, and roasts the bread until it gets really nice and crispy. That’s tossed with hearty greens, like frisée and chicory. So I always throw in chunks of bread, quartered Meyer lemons, and potatoes.”

  Cat Cora: “I do a really great saffron-honey roasted chicken. Warm the honey up and blossom the saffron in a little water and add it to the honey, and you just glaze the chicken three-quarters of the way through cooking, so it doesn’t burn. My wife taught me how to make fantastic fennel chicken—lots of ground fennel on it, and salt and pepper.”

  Marc Murphy: “Simple roast chicken. Potatoes. Whole roasted shallots. Rosemary. What else do you need?”

  Tom Colicchio: “I don’t do fussy. Roast chicken with vegetables.”

  Nancy Silverton: “There’s a Peruvian chicken place near my house, where they roast their chicken in front of a wood fire. I think it’s fantastic. So if I come home from work and I’m starving, I can do something with that roast chicken.”

So be as fancy—or not—as you want, with this chefs’ staple.

 

Eric Ripert’s Chicken Paillard with Tomatoes, Fennel, and Olives

Though he is known for fish professionally, at home Ripert rarely makes it. This is an unexpected preparation, and a neat trick for making dinner without heating the oven. (If you don’t have a toaster oven, you can use a conventional oven at the same temperature and time, though it will take a big oven longer to preheat.)

serves 2

2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, butterflied and lightly pounded flat

1 shallot, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

½ cup cherry tomatoes, cut in half

1 small fennel, sliced thin

¼ cup green olives, pitted and sliced

1 tablespoon capers

2 sprigs thyme

3 tablespoons olive oil

¼ cup torn basil leaves

Fine sea salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Preheat toaster oven to 400°F.

2. Season the chicken breasts on both sides with salt and pepper. Place the chicken in a baking dish.

3. Combine in a mixing bowl the shallots, garlic, tomatoes, fennel, green olives, capers, and thyme leaves. Drizzle the olive oil over the vegetables and season to taste with salt and pepper.

4. Cover the chicken with the tomato, fennel, and olive mixture and add a little more olive oil over and around. Bake the chicken paillard for 10 to 15 minutes until cooked through. Sprinkle the basil over the chicken and serve immediately.

Adapted from Avec Eric: A Culinary Journey with Eric Ripert, by Eric Ripert. JohnWiley & Sons, 2010.

Tom Colicchio’s Sturgeon Wrapped in Prosciutto

I joined Tom during a walk-through of the Craft kitchen as some of his staff was starting to prep dinner. On the menu that night was this dish, which we agreed could be easily replicated at home. If sturgeon is unavailable, another sturdy white fish such as cod or black cod (also known as sablefish) can be used. Cooking time will vary based on the thickness of the fillet.

serves 4

4 7-ounce, 1½-inch-thick sturgeon fillets

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

About ¼ pound prosciutto, thinly sliced

3 tablespoons peanut oil (or other vegetable oil)

3 tablespoons butter

2 sprigs thyme

1. Season each of the fillets with salt and pepper. Wrap two pieces of prosciutto, slightly overlapping, around the center of each fillet (the prosciutto will not cover the ends of fish).

2. Warm the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the fillets to the pan and cook until the pans are once again hot, 1 minute or so. Reduce the heat to medium and cook the fillets until the first sides are crisp, about 1 minute. Turn the fillet over and cook the second sides until they too are lightly browned, 1 to 2 minutes.

3. Turn each fillet onto a third side. Add the butter and thyme to the pan. Cook, basting the fish with butter until the third sides are also caramelized, another 1½ minutes or so. Rotate the fish once more and cook the final sides, basting frequently. (Cooked for a total of 6 minutes, the fish will be a little translucent at the center—reduce the heat and cook the fish longer for more well-done.) Slice and serve.

Adapted from Craft of Cooking by Tom Colicchio. Clarkson Potter, 2003.

Nancy Silverton’s Seared Salmon with Lentils and Salsa Rustica

Besides the convenience of canned lentil soup, this recipe utilizes basil paste, which can be found in small jars or tubes. It’s basically basil whirred with oil. Salsa rustica has nothing to do with the tomato-based condiment most people think of as “salsa.” In fact, it’s an unexpectedly satisfying mix of hard-cooked eggs, mint, and almonds.

serves 4

FOR THE SALSA:

¼ cup whole raw almonds, with their skins on

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more to toss with the almonds

Kosher salt

2 large eggs

3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh mint leaves

1 heaping tablespoon basil paste

FOR THE LENTILS:

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 large garlic cloves, grated or minced (about 2 teaspoons)

Kosher salt

Two 15-ounce cans of lentils, or two 19-ounce cans of lentil soup, rinsed and drained (about 3 cups)

4 6-ounce salmon fillets, about 1½ inches thick (preferably wild king salmon)

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup canola oil (or other neutral-flavored oil)

Lemon, for squeezing over the fish

Sea salt

1. Adjust the oven rack to the middle position and preheat to 325º. Spread the almonds on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven, shaking the pan occasionally for even toasting, for 15 to 20 minutes, until they are lightly browned and fragrant. Remove the almonds from the oven, drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt, and toss to coat. Let them cool, then coarsely chop.

2. To hard-cook the eggs, place them in a medium saucepan with enough water to cover, salt the water generously, and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer the eggs for about 5 to 8 minutes, until the yolks are cooked but bright yellow. (Nancy sometimes puts an extra “tester” egg in the pot.) While they are cooking, fill a large bowl with ice water. When the eggs are done, drain and plunge into ice water to prevent further cooking. When they are cool, peel the eggs and separate the whites and yolks.

3. To make the salsa: Coarsely chop the egg whites and yolks, separately. Place both in a medium bowl. Add the almonds, olive oil, mint, and basil paste and toss gently to combine. Add salt if necessary.

4. To make the lentils, heat ½ cup of the olive oil with the garlic and a pinch of salt in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat and sauté for about 90 seconds, until the garlic is soft and fragrant, stirring constantly so the garlic doesn’t brown. Add the lentils and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally until they’re warmed through. Remove the pan from the heat and season with salt to taste.

5. Rinse the salmon fillets under cool water and pat dry with paper towels, and season both sides with kosher salt and ground pepper.

6. Heat the canola oil in a large skillet over high heat for 2 to 3 minutes (you will be able to smell the oil, but it should not be smoking). Put the fillets in the pan, skin-side down. Place a flat lid or plate smaller than the diameter of the pan on top of the fish and press down gently for about 4 minutes (this helps render a crispy skin). Remove the lid or plate and reduce the heat to medium. Slide a thin spatula under the salmon to release any sticking spots and turn them on their sides; cook for 1 minute on each of the two sides. Turn and cook the salmon on the fourth side for 1 minute. Turn off the heat and let the salmon cook from the residual heat of the pan for 1 minute more.

7. Spoon the lentils onto four plates, evenly, and place the salmon skin-side up on top of the lentils. Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice and sprinkle sea salt over each fillet. Spoon the salsa rustica on top.

Adapted from A Twist of the Wrist: Quick Flavorful Meals with Ingredients from Jars, Cans, Bags, and Boxes by Nancy Silverton. Knopf, 2007.

 

BEHIND THE LESSONS:

Nate Appleman’s Career Change

For a few months in 2010 food bloggers and the generally curious were stopping by the Chelsea location of the Chipotle Mexican casual chain to confirm for themselves: Was a past winner of a James Beard Rising Star Chef award and Food & Wine Best New Chef really slinging shredded beef and tortillas? He was.

Nate Appleman’s unusual path began with a formal education at the Culinary Institute of America, followed by travels through Italy, where he learned to butcher meat and cure his own salumi, and became one of the few Americans recognized as an authentic pizzaiolo. (Italians don’t mess around with their pizza chefs; they give certificates and everything.) Later, in San Francisco, Appleman was the chef at two acclaimed Italian restaurants, SPQR and A16. Devastated Bay Area foodies declared it “Nateaggedon” when he left for New York in 2009 to be a chef-partner at the downtown upscale pizzeria Pulino’s, where he hushed critics with goat meatballs, and fed scenesters with burgers available only after midnight. But even with his success, he soon lobbed another curveball: He left Pulino’s and reemerged behind the counter at a Chipotle. The response in the blogosphere was a collective “Wha . . . ?”

Why did he do it? “I realized I’d lost touch with what I loved about cooking. Being a chef now, you expedite tickets all night long. My life’s ambition is not ripping tickets off a machine and reading them to cooks. You know, it’s actually cooking and training people,” says Nate. “I realized I like to develop people; that’s the best aspect of what I do.”

While he can be found behind the counter, he isn’t a typical counter worker, of course. He’s a culinary manager, developing recipes that will be used by the restaurants nationwide, and figuring out how to bring his nose-to-tail cooking to a chain of that size. “My mission is to use the whole animal.” The day I visited him in his development kitchen, we did a chorizo tasting together: seven variations on pork and chicken sausage blends. With another company chef, we debated using skin (“it adds an unctuous quality”), fresh oregano, more vinegar or less. (When they said one sample “eats really well,” I realized that, among other things, what distinguishes me from a professional chef is the comfortable use of “eat” as an intransitive verb.)

It is a fairly limited menu: tacos, burritos, salads. But if anyone suspected that he had checked his creativity at the door, Appleman reemerged publicly to compete for charity on Chopped All-Stars, and—with a crazy dish of honey and grapefruit semifreddo with chickpea-and-sesame caramel and a chayote salad—won the top prize of $50,000 for the Kawasaki Disease Foundation. It was a personal victory as his son, Oliver, had been diagnosed with the syndrome, which caused him heart problems. Oliver is doing well today, and Appleman points to another benefit of his new gig: most nights off.

Asked whether there is anything he misses about fine dining, he thinks for a few moments and then can come up with only one: He liked it when other chefs came to his restaurant and he could cook for them. “I still see them, but Daniel [Boulud] is not coming into Chipotle.”

Stranger things have happened.