The Mind of a Chef (2012) s01e02 Episode Script
Squeal Like a Pig
In the life of nearly every great chef comes a deep and heartfelt relationship with that most generous and versatile of animals the pig.
Today Dave Chang makes a bushi out of pork.
This will never go bad.
Travels to Harvard Rachel and Ben, could you come down? Without your guys' help, we'd be totally lost.
San Sebastian, Spain You brought some pâté from Bar Boulud? That's my demo.
Oh, yeah.
Cooks tonkotsu, his version of dashi, and furthers his investigations into what homer Simpson has rightly referred to as a magical animal.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Ever since he opened his Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2003, Chef David Chang has been making waves throughout the culinary world.
Domo arigato.
That's crazy, right? He's undeniably one of the most popular and oftentimes polarizing chefs in the world today.
And people don't understand, don't mess with how we do things.
If you don't like it, get the hell out.
My mouth is lined with asbestos.
But to know the man, we must explore the foundation.
The pig, and a magical beast that birthed an empire.
The pork bun.
A combination of slow cooked pork belly, pickles, scallions, and hoisin sauce, all embraced by a steamed bun.
Ask anyone who has tried it and they will tell you it may be the greatest thing they have ever put in their mouth.
At Momofuku, the pork belly starts its trip through the kitchen with a sprinkle of salt and sugar and a dusting of freshly ground black pepper.
After a quick bronzing at 450 degrees, it luxuriates in a 250- degree oven until decadently tender.
An overnight stay in the refrigerator firms up the belly so it's ready to slice into slabs and head for the steamy buns.
But the bun was just the beginning.
These days, Chang is taking pork where it's never been before.
Katsuobushi is a petrified piece of fish.
The Japanese have been producing this for hundreds of years and it's almost omnipresent in Japanese cuisine to make soup.
It's very difficult to get high- quality katsuobushi in America.
That's why we were just toying around with the idea of making our own type of katsuobushi.
And, if it can work on a protein like fish, maybe it could work on pork.
So we've been taking the Japanese katsuobushi, which is traditionally used with bonito, and we've been using the cooking process of steaming, smoking, dehydrating, and then basically letting it rot and applying that to the pork tenderloin.
This is ground tenderloin that we've added meat glue.
After it's been treated as katsuobushi, we buried it in rice.
It's sort of amazing to me that it's as hard as petrified wood.
That's another type of preserving and storing.
This will never go bad, not in my lifetime at least, and you can make a nice, beautiful broth with this.
We're gonna demo this at Gastronomika in San Sebastian.
I feel that it's a first time that we've actually created something new.
I'm curious to see what people feel about it.
I'm dead serious about this because I think that it has serious repercussions.
'Cause if we can do this with pork, we can do this with chicken, beef, vegetables, all sorts of stuff.
But we just barely scratched the surface in terms of our understanding of it because we have no idea what happened.
That's what we're trying to figure out, and the question is, why?" To get some insight into what we're talking about here, Chang took his pork bushi to the labs and lecture halls of Harvard university.
We went up to Harvard to (Bleep) Up some smart kids.
Rachel and Ben, could you come down? Without your guys' help, we would be totally lost.
At Harvard there were two microbiologists, Ben Wolfe and Rachel Dutton, who helped us out tremendously in learning about what happens when the pork becomes a bushi.
The bushi we're making basically is a petrified pork product.
It has been inoculated with a rice mold so there's all these microbiocide things going on.
The mold is where I had a big problem.
We didn't even know if it was edible.
We didn't know if it was safe.
So, I called around people and everyone's like, "oh, that's a great idea, Dave, but you sure that it's okay to eat? You sure it's okay to serve people?" Bacteria live everywhere.
Even though we can't see them, they're all over our skin, inside our bodies they're everywhere.
And they're important for food, so a lot of the fermented foods that we love, wine and beer and bread and cheese, and things like the bushi all rely on action of these helpful microbes.
I love bacteria.
Yeah, they're just cute.
And these are probably fungal cells.
Fungal cells are much bigger than bacteria.
After about a week, we looked at our plates.
This is what the colonies look like.
The samples that we got from the pork, when we put them on the protein-based media, which is what this is, they grew really well.
But when we tried to put them on the starched-based media, they didn't grow as well.
The organisms that are found on the pork are maybe adapted to growing in environments that have lots of protein and they can use the protein as a source of food really easily.
So, they're breaking down the protein, creating lots of glutamic acid, which will give it that nice umami flavor.
So, you may not really need to control it because you've already created these conditions to sort of select out of the environment just the right types of organisms that can give you the flavors that you're interested in.
We found two different groups of fungi.
One that were associated primarily with the rice that is involved in the making of the pork product, and then another group of fungi that are specifically associated with the final pork.
The first kind of fungus that we found is a fungus that's commonly associated with rice.
And the name of those fungi is pichia burtonii.
It's a group of fungi that are closely related to yeasts.
And then on the meat we found a set of fungi that are very common in the environment.
The main fungi we found were called aspergillus species.
It's the fungus that I'm breathing in now as I'm speaking.
It's everywhere in the environment.
Mold, bacteria, enzymes.
These are scary words.
People need to be educated that injecting katsuobushi with mold is not a bad thing.
You don't get cheese without mold.
You don't get yogurt without cultures.
Here I was actually able to use those tools and make an evolutionary tree of the Momofuku fungus.
Which, this is, like, this is the highlight of my phd.
I'm telling you, seriously.
In just one week we've been able to make katsuobushi much more efficient than we have before through the help of Rachel and Ben.
With some answers in hand, Chang was ready to hit the road.
I've seen you in a magazine from Momofuku.
Can I take a photo with you? Yeah.
Gastronomika conference, San Sebastian, Spain.
It's where the luminaries of the culinary world come to present new ideas.
It's like comic-con.
Being on your a-game is a must because the world's best chefs will be critiquing your every move.
We'll be literally when you walk Top right.
Top right corner.
Seven years ago if you told me I was going to be at a gastronomic conference, Wylie Dufresne, Dave Bouley, Thomas Keller, I'd be like, "(Bleep) You.
" Everyone else has round eyes, mine go sideways.
I'm just upset that my eyes are not more slanted.
You don't just go there and wave hands and kiss babies, you demo.
It's like a fashion show.
You show the world, you show the conference what you're working on, what is on your culinary map right now.
That's crazy, right? So, for Gastronomika we wanted to do katsuobushi, but our version of it, which is the pork bushi.
Dude, change.
It's like a fruit roll up now, dude.
Oh, my God.
It was one conference that I hadn't been invited to and I was really nervous because they invited me this year, so I didn't want to (Bleep) It up.
We're getting our mise en place ready for our demo today in a couple hours.
Mise en place, that's cooking.
That is everything.
That's organization, everything in its place, what it means.
How often do I cook for an audience like this? I would say not very often.
Daniel burns is the head of our culinary lab.
Burns is great but there was a problem.
We're just not prepared.
I didn't know that we didn't have everything ready.
I just don't understand why he didn't bring all this (Bleep).
We're doing (Bleep) Pork.
(Bleep).
Like, "oh, we just have chicken.
" We forgot the pork and at home.
This doesn't taste very (Bleep) Good.
You're not on your (Bleep) Game, man.
It's like, you've been to these (Bleep) Events, you know it's a (Bleep) Show.
I didn't know we were doing the egg, I didn't know that.
It happens.
Mistakes happen and it wasn't necessarily burns' fault, it was both our faults that I didn't double check.
I'm trying very hard not to (Bleep) Freak the (Bleep) Out.
I wanted to destroy something.
Time to breathe in, breathe out in the kitchen with Chang.
I want to show you the principle of what makes tonkotsu broth and that's really just fat.
We have beef shanks, marrow, and these are roasted chicken and pork bones.
We're gonna add fat.
There's debate now whether fat is a taste, a sixth taste.
I'm sure it is.
Actually, I'm not sure.
It just sounds good.
In terms of ramen, tonkotsu broth is like deep dish pizza in Chicago.
It's a food group of its own and they literally cook the (Bleep) Out of it.
The point where actually in some places in Okinawa you can actually eat the bone.
They take the pork bone, deep fry it, roll it in mayonnaise, and then put it in, like, a panko crust.
Yeah, it's weird.
You boil this and reduce it down to this.
I don't know if anyone's ever done nutritional data on tonkotsu broth, but it's not pretty.
So, we're gonna strain this out.
A crazy, milky color.
It's almost like gravy.
We're gonna season this, we're gonna shave the noodles.
At some places in China you see how they actually have a board to go like this and they have a blade and they just go like I am not a Jedi master.
We're gonna slice it on a mandolin, and we've frozen the dough.
Am I scared that I'm gonna cut the (Bleep) Out of myself right now? Absolutely.
Take this into this angry cauldron of boiling fat.
And that's another thing they don't tell you in Japan.
This doesn't look like it's ripping hot cause there's a half an inch of fat on top.
It's like a volcano.
It's trying to erupt out of the oil.
You have no idea.
That is a massive hazard.
Burn your face off.
That's the only safety rule I can give is if you're in Japan and you happen to be eating tonkotsu-style ramen, be very careful.
That's 72 celsius.
That's hot.
It's the biggest mistake of your life to go in there and just go full blast because underneath is a volcano.
Back at the conference, pressure builds.
Hey, how are you buddy? Papa Boulud, Daniel Boulud, who I worked for briefly, he was also there doing a demo.
You brought some pâté from Bar Boulud? That's my demo.
What are you making? He was like, "David, what are you doing? What are you making?" Katsuobushi, but it's pork.
So we're making a dashi out of it.
I tried to explain to him what the pork bushi was.
Basically a fancy beef jerky.
I know what he way saying, "crazy kids.
Whole generation's going down the tubes.
" So, can you make some Turkey powder so for Thanksgiving I can just If you don't have time to buy your Turkey you just make a little cup out of it.
I can't tell if he cares or not.
I worked for the man, he's my dad.
David is on his best behavior and then when you remove the camera you really see the man.
I learned it from watching you, Chef.
Oh, yeah.
I guess this is my lot in life.
I'm always gonna get (Bleep) On.
Till they die, I'm gonna get (Bleep) On.
It's okay, I deserve it.
Montreal, Canada, home of Wilensky's World famous fried bologna sandwich, a totally different take on pork.
This is the mecca.
Wilensky's light lunch, 1932.
Comedian Aziz Ansari and Montreal's veracious, dangerous chefs Fred Marant and Dave McMillan of Joe Beef.
They join Chang in learning the ways of this porky national treasure.
There are rules here very strict rules.
When I was here I saw that sign and it says, "if you don't want mustard we're gonna charge you ten cents" or something like that? Well that was, it was five cents, it went up to ten cents and then we decided not to do it.
And I thought that was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen in any restaurant menu ever.
Yes, thank you.
Well, it's a production line here.
I know, and people don't understand, don't mess with how we do things.
If you don't like it, get the hell out.
It's a small climate of fear, that's what we work towards.
Now it's you admit to it.
It's a little self- deprecating.
I was like, "I can't believe they're gonna charge me if I don't want something.
" That's genius.
Yes.
I tell everyone about Wilensky's.
But you haven't ordered yet.
No.
See, again, chop, chop.
Okay, sorry.
I'll have the two specials.
One with Swiss and one with regular kraft.
I'll have the same.
Two specials with kraft, a cherry cola, and a sour.
One special with Swiss.
Yeah, yeah.
You know you only get one at a time.
Yes.
I love these rules.
Mmm.
Good.
This is my favorite place in the world.
I don't know why I go to your restaurant.
Have you heard of the kid in New York that makes a sandwich like yours? Yes.
What do you think of that? Whoa, did you hear the waitress said yes? All I can say is, you know, we're trademarked here.
So I'm opening up a place in LA that does the same style sandwich, is that all right? Is LA far away enough? No comment.
Where do you get this bread? Yeah, yeah I can tell you but then I'd have to kill you.
Nope.
What am I saying, no, you're someone else.
Another sugar Sammy spotting.
That is hilarious.
Sugar Sammy, good to meet you.
It's a thing I do.
I'm sugar Sammy, yeah.
Why do you think I'm drinking this? I love sweet stuff, sugar Sammy.
Cherry pineapple, sugar Sammy's favorite.
I'm embarrassed to say I'm not sure what your name is even though I know you.
Aziz, that's Aziz.
I'm sorry.
Different Indian comedian.
That guy, that Aziz Ansari is not funny.
He just rips off sugar Sammy.
Should I walk in? I can do it again.
No, it's for my new show.
People sometimes think I'm sugar Sammy, starring Aziz Ansari.
This is the first segment.
We just got it.
Who's better, me or sugar Sammy? You are, for sure, for sure.
You heard it.
Thank you so much, it was delicious.
So good.
Sugar Sammy rules.
We should just get, we should just stage that at every place we go and have a different guy come up, "sugar Sammy, right?" See you guys, thank you so much.
Do people ever mistake you guys for other chefs? No one is like, "Morimoto, right?" Dashi is one of the foundations of Japanese cuisine.
It's been made for centuries in Japan.
It's an incredible simple way of making fish broth.
Bacon dashi is the base of Momofuku ramen.
All forms of Japanese cuisine, to me, have some element of smokiness.
And when I first smelled Alan Betton's bacon seven years ago I was like, "oh, my God, that's the most amazing aroma.
" My brain sort of instantaneously thought of katsuobushi.
Well, it's not katsuobushi at all.
But it's affordable and this is what you have.
We're not even buying bacon, we're buying the bacon ends.
I mean, this is cured and cooked.
It's really (Bleep) Smoky.
It's almost, not in a bad way, medicinal in flavor.
I wanted to see how we could use that.
So now we're making a bacon dashi.
We're taking kombu, cook your kombu at 60 celsius for about, like, 30 minutes.
And, what we're doing is building, basically, the blocks to getting not only to dashi but this full umami flavor.
We're gonna bring this not to a boil but just before it reaches 212 and we're gonna take it off the heat and let it steep like a tea.
What we're trying to do is create something light and very, very subtle.
And, it sounds sort of like you can't do that with bacon but I believe you can.
We've steeped this now for about 30 minutes and the aroma is really intense.
You want to chill it down so you can skim all the fat that comes out of it.
So, we're adding soy, sake, and mirin, and I'm also going to season it with some salt.
So, now we have a finished dashi.
Anything that would require chicken stock you can use this.
Pour it over clams, you could just serve this with tofu.
It's so versatile.
This was sort of, like, the genesis of many, many different things.
Back in San Sebastian, Chang's presentation is starting to take shape.
No matter how many times I do this, I freak out.
We need this to get to a ripping boil pretty fast.
When we put it in we'll go over it.
When I first did a demo, nobody tells you, like, "oh, this is going to be like this and you're going to have an audience.
" Wish me luck.
David Chang! I just wanted to say thank you so much for having us.
I'm honored to be here, this is Daniel burns.
Just want to show you today a couple things that we're working on.
A ramen stock takes 16 hours.
It becomes very expensive because we try to use the best ingredients.
How can we make this soup that we make in 16 hours, can we make it in three hours, can we make it in less, can we use less ingredients? I think it's an interesting technique that we stumble upon.
We've been trying to figure out different ways of making katsuobushi but making it American and using American ingredients.
We really just scratched the tip of the iceberg with making bushi out of everything.
You know? This is pork but we're doing it with chicken, we're doing it with shiitake, we're doing it with vegetables.
And, as you can see, it has many of the same characteristics of the Japanese katsuobushi but obviously it's made out of pork and that's something we've been really excited about.
It wasn't a disaster when I look back on it, but I really was shooting to be that overachiever and get that a-plus but I think we passed, we got a b.
Thank you, guys.
Never content, never satisfied, Chang strives to always improve upon his last achievement.
It's this drive and passion and discontent that's vaulted him to the upper Echelon of the culinary world.
After the conference I felt really bad, but I'm usually hard on myself anyway and we definitely weren't the worst ever, which is always my goal not to be the worst.
Today Dave Chang makes a bushi out of pork.
This will never go bad.
Travels to Harvard Rachel and Ben, could you come down? Without your guys' help, we'd be totally lost.
San Sebastian, Spain You brought some pâté from Bar Boulud? That's my demo.
Oh, yeah.
Cooks tonkotsu, his version of dashi, and furthers his investigations into what homer Simpson has rightly referred to as a magical animal.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Ever since he opened his Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2003, Chef David Chang has been making waves throughout the culinary world.
Domo arigato.
That's crazy, right? He's undeniably one of the most popular and oftentimes polarizing chefs in the world today.
And people don't understand, don't mess with how we do things.
If you don't like it, get the hell out.
My mouth is lined with asbestos.
But to know the man, we must explore the foundation.
The pig, and a magical beast that birthed an empire.
The pork bun.
A combination of slow cooked pork belly, pickles, scallions, and hoisin sauce, all embraced by a steamed bun.
Ask anyone who has tried it and they will tell you it may be the greatest thing they have ever put in their mouth.
At Momofuku, the pork belly starts its trip through the kitchen with a sprinkle of salt and sugar and a dusting of freshly ground black pepper.
After a quick bronzing at 450 degrees, it luxuriates in a 250- degree oven until decadently tender.
An overnight stay in the refrigerator firms up the belly so it's ready to slice into slabs and head for the steamy buns.
But the bun was just the beginning.
These days, Chang is taking pork where it's never been before.
Katsuobushi is a petrified piece of fish.
The Japanese have been producing this for hundreds of years and it's almost omnipresent in Japanese cuisine to make soup.
It's very difficult to get high- quality katsuobushi in America.
That's why we were just toying around with the idea of making our own type of katsuobushi.
And, if it can work on a protein like fish, maybe it could work on pork.
So we've been taking the Japanese katsuobushi, which is traditionally used with bonito, and we've been using the cooking process of steaming, smoking, dehydrating, and then basically letting it rot and applying that to the pork tenderloin.
This is ground tenderloin that we've added meat glue.
After it's been treated as katsuobushi, we buried it in rice.
It's sort of amazing to me that it's as hard as petrified wood.
That's another type of preserving and storing.
This will never go bad, not in my lifetime at least, and you can make a nice, beautiful broth with this.
We're gonna demo this at Gastronomika in San Sebastian.
I feel that it's a first time that we've actually created something new.
I'm curious to see what people feel about it.
I'm dead serious about this because I think that it has serious repercussions.
'Cause if we can do this with pork, we can do this with chicken, beef, vegetables, all sorts of stuff.
But we just barely scratched the surface in terms of our understanding of it because we have no idea what happened.
That's what we're trying to figure out, and the question is, why?" To get some insight into what we're talking about here, Chang took his pork bushi to the labs and lecture halls of Harvard university.
We went up to Harvard to (Bleep) Up some smart kids.
Rachel and Ben, could you come down? Without your guys' help, we would be totally lost.
At Harvard there were two microbiologists, Ben Wolfe and Rachel Dutton, who helped us out tremendously in learning about what happens when the pork becomes a bushi.
The bushi we're making basically is a petrified pork product.
It has been inoculated with a rice mold so there's all these microbiocide things going on.
The mold is where I had a big problem.
We didn't even know if it was edible.
We didn't know if it was safe.
So, I called around people and everyone's like, "oh, that's a great idea, Dave, but you sure that it's okay to eat? You sure it's okay to serve people?" Bacteria live everywhere.
Even though we can't see them, they're all over our skin, inside our bodies they're everywhere.
And they're important for food, so a lot of the fermented foods that we love, wine and beer and bread and cheese, and things like the bushi all rely on action of these helpful microbes.
I love bacteria.
Yeah, they're just cute.
And these are probably fungal cells.
Fungal cells are much bigger than bacteria.
After about a week, we looked at our plates.
This is what the colonies look like.
The samples that we got from the pork, when we put them on the protein-based media, which is what this is, they grew really well.
But when we tried to put them on the starched-based media, they didn't grow as well.
The organisms that are found on the pork are maybe adapted to growing in environments that have lots of protein and they can use the protein as a source of food really easily.
So, they're breaking down the protein, creating lots of glutamic acid, which will give it that nice umami flavor.
So, you may not really need to control it because you've already created these conditions to sort of select out of the environment just the right types of organisms that can give you the flavors that you're interested in.
We found two different groups of fungi.
One that were associated primarily with the rice that is involved in the making of the pork product, and then another group of fungi that are specifically associated with the final pork.
The first kind of fungus that we found is a fungus that's commonly associated with rice.
And the name of those fungi is pichia burtonii.
It's a group of fungi that are closely related to yeasts.
And then on the meat we found a set of fungi that are very common in the environment.
The main fungi we found were called aspergillus species.
It's the fungus that I'm breathing in now as I'm speaking.
It's everywhere in the environment.
Mold, bacteria, enzymes.
These are scary words.
People need to be educated that injecting katsuobushi with mold is not a bad thing.
You don't get cheese without mold.
You don't get yogurt without cultures.
Here I was actually able to use those tools and make an evolutionary tree of the Momofuku fungus.
Which, this is, like, this is the highlight of my phd.
I'm telling you, seriously.
In just one week we've been able to make katsuobushi much more efficient than we have before through the help of Rachel and Ben.
With some answers in hand, Chang was ready to hit the road.
I've seen you in a magazine from Momofuku.
Can I take a photo with you? Yeah.
Gastronomika conference, San Sebastian, Spain.
It's where the luminaries of the culinary world come to present new ideas.
It's like comic-con.
Being on your a-game is a must because the world's best chefs will be critiquing your every move.
We'll be literally when you walk Top right.
Top right corner.
Seven years ago if you told me I was going to be at a gastronomic conference, Wylie Dufresne, Dave Bouley, Thomas Keller, I'd be like, "(Bleep) You.
" Everyone else has round eyes, mine go sideways.
I'm just upset that my eyes are not more slanted.
You don't just go there and wave hands and kiss babies, you demo.
It's like a fashion show.
You show the world, you show the conference what you're working on, what is on your culinary map right now.
That's crazy, right? So, for Gastronomika we wanted to do katsuobushi, but our version of it, which is the pork bushi.
Dude, change.
It's like a fruit roll up now, dude.
Oh, my God.
It was one conference that I hadn't been invited to and I was really nervous because they invited me this year, so I didn't want to (Bleep) It up.
We're getting our mise en place ready for our demo today in a couple hours.
Mise en place, that's cooking.
That is everything.
That's organization, everything in its place, what it means.
How often do I cook for an audience like this? I would say not very often.
Daniel burns is the head of our culinary lab.
Burns is great but there was a problem.
We're just not prepared.
I didn't know that we didn't have everything ready.
I just don't understand why he didn't bring all this (Bleep).
We're doing (Bleep) Pork.
(Bleep).
Like, "oh, we just have chicken.
" We forgot the pork and at home.
This doesn't taste very (Bleep) Good.
You're not on your (Bleep) Game, man.
It's like, you've been to these (Bleep) Events, you know it's a (Bleep) Show.
I didn't know we were doing the egg, I didn't know that.
It happens.
Mistakes happen and it wasn't necessarily burns' fault, it was both our faults that I didn't double check.
I'm trying very hard not to (Bleep) Freak the (Bleep) Out.
I wanted to destroy something.
Time to breathe in, breathe out in the kitchen with Chang.
I want to show you the principle of what makes tonkotsu broth and that's really just fat.
We have beef shanks, marrow, and these are roasted chicken and pork bones.
We're gonna add fat.
There's debate now whether fat is a taste, a sixth taste.
I'm sure it is.
Actually, I'm not sure.
It just sounds good.
In terms of ramen, tonkotsu broth is like deep dish pizza in Chicago.
It's a food group of its own and they literally cook the (Bleep) Out of it.
The point where actually in some places in Okinawa you can actually eat the bone.
They take the pork bone, deep fry it, roll it in mayonnaise, and then put it in, like, a panko crust.
Yeah, it's weird.
You boil this and reduce it down to this.
I don't know if anyone's ever done nutritional data on tonkotsu broth, but it's not pretty.
So, we're gonna strain this out.
A crazy, milky color.
It's almost like gravy.
We're gonna season this, we're gonna shave the noodles.
At some places in China you see how they actually have a board to go like this and they have a blade and they just go like I am not a Jedi master.
We're gonna slice it on a mandolin, and we've frozen the dough.
Am I scared that I'm gonna cut the (Bleep) Out of myself right now? Absolutely.
Take this into this angry cauldron of boiling fat.
And that's another thing they don't tell you in Japan.
This doesn't look like it's ripping hot cause there's a half an inch of fat on top.
It's like a volcano.
It's trying to erupt out of the oil.
You have no idea.
That is a massive hazard.
Burn your face off.
That's the only safety rule I can give is if you're in Japan and you happen to be eating tonkotsu-style ramen, be very careful.
That's 72 celsius.
That's hot.
It's the biggest mistake of your life to go in there and just go full blast because underneath is a volcano.
Back at the conference, pressure builds.
Hey, how are you buddy? Papa Boulud, Daniel Boulud, who I worked for briefly, he was also there doing a demo.
You brought some pâté from Bar Boulud? That's my demo.
What are you making? He was like, "David, what are you doing? What are you making?" Katsuobushi, but it's pork.
So we're making a dashi out of it.
I tried to explain to him what the pork bushi was.
Basically a fancy beef jerky.
I know what he way saying, "crazy kids.
Whole generation's going down the tubes.
" So, can you make some Turkey powder so for Thanksgiving I can just If you don't have time to buy your Turkey you just make a little cup out of it.
I can't tell if he cares or not.
I worked for the man, he's my dad.
David is on his best behavior and then when you remove the camera you really see the man.
I learned it from watching you, Chef.
Oh, yeah.
I guess this is my lot in life.
I'm always gonna get (Bleep) On.
Till they die, I'm gonna get (Bleep) On.
It's okay, I deserve it.
Montreal, Canada, home of Wilensky's World famous fried bologna sandwich, a totally different take on pork.
This is the mecca.
Wilensky's light lunch, 1932.
Comedian Aziz Ansari and Montreal's veracious, dangerous chefs Fred Marant and Dave McMillan of Joe Beef.
They join Chang in learning the ways of this porky national treasure.
There are rules here very strict rules.
When I was here I saw that sign and it says, "if you don't want mustard we're gonna charge you ten cents" or something like that? Well that was, it was five cents, it went up to ten cents and then we decided not to do it.
And I thought that was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen in any restaurant menu ever.
Yes, thank you.
Well, it's a production line here.
I know, and people don't understand, don't mess with how we do things.
If you don't like it, get the hell out.
It's a small climate of fear, that's what we work towards.
Now it's you admit to it.
It's a little self- deprecating.
I was like, "I can't believe they're gonna charge me if I don't want something.
" That's genius.
Yes.
I tell everyone about Wilensky's.
But you haven't ordered yet.
No.
See, again, chop, chop.
Okay, sorry.
I'll have the two specials.
One with Swiss and one with regular kraft.
I'll have the same.
Two specials with kraft, a cherry cola, and a sour.
One special with Swiss.
Yeah, yeah.
You know you only get one at a time.
Yes.
I love these rules.
Mmm.
Good.
This is my favorite place in the world.
I don't know why I go to your restaurant.
Have you heard of the kid in New York that makes a sandwich like yours? Yes.
What do you think of that? Whoa, did you hear the waitress said yes? All I can say is, you know, we're trademarked here.
So I'm opening up a place in LA that does the same style sandwich, is that all right? Is LA far away enough? No comment.
Where do you get this bread? Yeah, yeah I can tell you but then I'd have to kill you.
Nope.
What am I saying, no, you're someone else.
Another sugar Sammy spotting.
That is hilarious.
Sugar Sammy, good to meet you.
It's a thing I do.
I'm sugar Sammy, yeah.
Why do you think I'm drinking this? I love sweet stuff, sugar Sammy.
Cherry pineapple, sugar Sammy's favorite.
I'm embarrassed to say I'm not sure what your name is even though I know you.
Aziz, that's Aziz.
I'm sorry.
Different Indian comedian.
That guy, that Aziz Ansari is not funny.
He just rips off sugar Sammy.
Should I walk in? I can do it again.
No, it's for my new show.
People sometimes think I'm sugar Sammy, starring Aziz Ansari.
This is the first segment.
We just got it.
Who's better, me or sugar Sammy? You are, for sure, for sure.
You heard it.
Thank you so much, it was delicious.
So good.
Sugar Sammy rules.
We should just get, we should just stage that at every place we go and have a different guy come up, "sugar Sammy, right?" See you guys, thank you so much.
Do people ever mistake you guys for other chefs? No one is like, "Morimoto, right?" Dashi is one of the foundations of Japanese cuisine.
It's been made for centuries in Japan.
It's an incredible simple way of making fish broth.
Bacon dashi is the base of Momofuku ramen.
All forms of Japanese cuisine, to me, have some element of smokiness.
And when I first smelled Alan Betton's bacon seven years ago I was like, "oh, my God, that's the most amazing aroma.
" My brain sort of instantaneously thought of katsuobushi.
Well, it's not katsuobushi at all.
But it's affordable and this is what you have.
We're not even buying bacon, we're buying the bacon ends.
I mean, this is cured and cooked.
It's really (Bleep) Smoky.
It's almost, not in a bad way, medicinal in flavor.
I wanted to see how we could use that.
So now we're making a bacon dashi.
We're taking kombu, cook your kombu at 60 celsius for about, like, 30 minutes.
And, what we're doing is building, basically, the blocks to getting not only to dashi but this full umami flavor.
We're gonna bring this not to a boil but just before it reaches 212 and we're gonna take it off the heat and let it steep like a tea.
What we're trying to do is create something light and very, very subtle.
And, it sounds sort of like you can't do that with bacon but I believe you can.
We've steeped this now for about 30 minutes and the aroma is really intense.
You want to chill it down so you can skim all the fat that comes out of it.
So, we're adding soy, sake, and mirin, and I'm also going to season it with some salt.
So, now we have a finished dashi.
Anything that would require chicken stock you can use this.
Pour it over clams, you could just serve this with tofu.
It's so versatile.
This was sort of, like, the genesis of many, many different things.
Back in San Sebastian, Chang's presentation is starting to take shape.
No matter how many times I do this, I freak out.
We need this to get to a ripping boil pretty fast.
When we put it in we'll go over it.
When I first did a demo, nobody tells you, like, "oh, this is going to be like this and you're going to have an audience.
" Wish me luck.
David Chang! I just wanted to say thank you so much for having us.
I'm honored to be here, this is Daniel burns.
Just want to show you today a couple things that we're working on.
A ramen stock takes 16 hours.
It becomes very expensive because we try to use the best ingredients.
How can we make this soup that we make in 16 hours, can we make it in three hours, can we make it in less, can we use less ingredients? I think it's an interesting technique that we stumble upon.
We've been trying to figure out different ways of making katsuobushi but making it American and using American ingredients.
We really just scratched the tip of the iceberg with making bushi out of everything.
You know? This is pork but we're doing it with chicken, we're doing it with shiitake, we're doing it with vegetables.
And, as you can see, it has many of the same characteristics of the Japanese katsuobushi but obviously it's made out of pork and that's something we've been really excited about.
It wasn't a disaster when I look back on it, but I really was shooting to be that overachiever and get that a-plus but I think we passed, we got a b.
Thank you, guys.
Never content, never satisfied, Chang strives to always improve upon his last achievement.
It's this drive and passion and discontent that's vaulted him to the upper Echelon of the culinary world.
After the conference I felt really bad, but I'm usually hard on myself anyway and we definitely weren't the worst ever, which is always my goal not to be the worst.