The Mind of a Chef (2012) s01e09 Episode Script
Chef
In this episode, David Chang and a few of his chef friends discuss technique and philosophy through the preparation of the humble egg.
This is the bane of so many cooks in the world.
Chef Wylie Dufresne makes eggs Benedict.
This is one of the best things I've ever had to eat.
Chef Daniel Patterson makes a whirlpool egg.
It's cooked but it's super light.
Really interesting texture.
Chef Rene Redzepi makes a gull egg.
Rene asked me to cook a gull's egg, 'cause I've never cooked one before.
And Chang makes his ko egg.
We took the caviar, placed it inside so it's like egg within an egg.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
To try and understand any chef, much less David Chang, it's best to read their menus, spend some time with them in the kitchen.
But as important, see which chefs they respect, enjoy cooking with, and the dishes that inspire them.
How a cook handles eggs has always been a test of sorts.
Old school chefs would ask a job applicant to make an omelet.
And how says, the thinking goes, everything you need to know.
We're here with a special guest, Mr.
Wylie Dufresne.
How are you my friend? Nice to see you.
Very good, very good.
Whenever I think of eggs, I think of Wylie because he's the only person I know that loves eggs more than I do.
And over the years, he's created some ingenious, delicious egg dishes.
When I first had this dish, and it's his play on eggs Benedict, it was the first time where I did I was angry.
I was like going over the 12 steps of loss, 'cause I was like, "wow, I'm never gonna create this dish," and I have no idea what the (Bleep) You did.
And it was delicious.
And then I was happy, and then I was angry again.
And you ordered another one.
And I ordered another one.
And then I told you this was one of the best things I've ever had to eat.
This is obviously a nod to, for me, childhood memories.
Eggs Benedict, it's a stroke of genius.
I mean, who takes eggs and then puts a sauce made from eggs on top of it? It's perfect, it's delicious, it's all that's right in the world when there's eggs with eggs and butter.
So we've been playing around with yolks trying to understand the different time temperature relation to how eggs cook.
How yolks specifically cook and thicken.
And we started playing around with taking yolks and putting them in sleeves like this, putting the sleeves in a bath for different times and lengths of temperature and time and checking their results.
And we came up with 19 minutes at 70 degrees celsius in a sleeve yields a texture that's somewhere between a cheese and a fudge.
Both of which you love.
Both of which are good.
So we've got our yolks, we cut them open very quickly and you'll see that inside is a delicious egg yolk.
So we just take a couple of these, and we pop this guy in the oven ever so briefly.
And then we have we have our hollandaise, which, again, was the tricky bit.
We took a traditional hollandaise, and we added a little bit of gelatin to it so that we could pour it out and cut it into cubes.
We realized that a little bit of added starch kind of gave it a jacket, a buffer to withstand the frying environment.
So we put some starch in there, mixed it with out gelatin gum, and because eggs Benedict has to have English muffins, we went with a traditional breading: Flour, egg wash, breadcrumbs.
But instead of breadcrumbs, we use English muffins.
Again, going to go into the oven briefly.
And we'll go ahead and assemble our plate, 'cause the rest of the components are fairly straightforward.
It's all the ingredients that you would see in an eggs Benedict.
I don't want to mess with anybody's actual memory of eggs Benedict.
I don't think that that's a good idea.
Little bit of black salt.
Couple of chives for a little bit of flavor and color.
Just going to lay it out.
Finish with a little bit of dried ham.
So good.
Eggs Benedict.
Very few people could do this, or made it as delicious.
Thanks, man, thanks for having me.
This egg dish we came up with at ko.
Most restaurants had a signature egg dish and we needed to create our own and it was a real struggle 'cause, like, you knew we had an egg, how the hell do we do this? Do we serve it in the shell? How do we make it ours? And we wanted to come up with a way of plating where we wouldn't have to sort of crack every egg open and make it, you know, so precious.
And, ultimately, we're just lazy guys, too, so we came up with sort of a philosophy at ko was plate it as it lies, you know? Make it look natural.
What we knew we wanted was a soft-boiled egg.
We did that, so we have a five minute, ten second egg, sort of a pain in the ass to peel, which is why we put it in boiling water and then peel it.
So basically, we take these eggs, shock 'em in an ice bath, and we peel 'em.
And what we have here is the soft-boiled egg we were hoping for.
But we really wanted to add a smoke flavor, so we were smoking the eggs and they were turning brown.
So what we wound up doing is smoking water.
So basically adding gelatin, freezing it and whatever drip off you get this clear water.
So this water tastes like smoked water, but it's clear.
So we store them in a smoked water solution for about 24 hours.
The next thing was just a really old school things is soubise.
The only reason we came up with this was how do we serve the egg? I didn't want to just serve it on here, and then how do I put the caviar on? And the soubise was going to be there just to hold the egg.
That was it.
It's delicious; It's salt, butter, onions.
That's it.
Next idea was fingerling potato chips, and we just deep-fry them.
We did all sorts of variations of potato chip, like pomme soufflés everything.
But, for us, it just made more sense to have potato chips this way.
So we wanted to make just basically an herb salad.
Chervil, parsley, chives.
Do something like that.
So next thing was, how do we serve caviar? It was, again, a mistake.
As you can see right here, there's a crack in it.
So, why don't I just follow that line? To me there's nothing more sexy than egg drizzling out.
And then we took the caviar and sort of placed it inside the egg so it's like egg within an egg.
Season with smoked salt, to sort of accentuate the smokiness, and then it needed something else.
It was one of those things where I was just like, "oh, it needs vinegar.
" I thought it would balance out with all the creamy richness and the caviar, it just pairs well.
That was the ko egg.
Chef Daniel Owner of the two Michelin starred Coi in San Francisco, and part-time Nemesis of David Chang.
This is a recipe from 2005.
It involves eggs and water.
I did it at home, I did it out of not wanting to wash the pots, and something super easy.
And when I did it and hadn't seen it before, I talked to Harold McGee.
Who said never been published.
How is it possible you could do something new? It's complicated, there's a lot of steps.
I'm gonna go slow here.
There's an egg involved.
This is breakfast by the way, you hungry? Yeah.
Okay.
So you just took the egg, whisking it.
And this is gonna be, like it's not gonna set up perfect.
It should be a little bit thicker than this.
They say don't beat eggs a lot, that's the worst thing to do is beat the eggs a lot.
Second thing is we got this simmering water, kind of hard to control on here but just a little bit of salt in it.
Make a whirlpool.
And that's basically if you don't do this, it just shoots straight to the bottom and sticks.
Ready, now we got to count.
One.
Two.
Three Uno.
Dos.
Tres.
Cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho.
Nine.
Nueve.
Ten.
And I think, I kind of lose it after that.
Oh, look at that, it's cooked.
So it's best to do it with super fresh eggs and not your pastry chef's meringue eggs.
But here we go, first thing is just dump out the excess water.
And so we're going to let it just kind of drain off for a minute.
We got about 15 seconds to tell dirty jokes.
Normally we do it a little fancier than that.
We do it onto a plate and then return it, but I'm not feeling fancy this morning.
Uh, olive oil.
Pepper.
Salt.
I love it.
Couldn't be more simple.
Now, breakfast.
It's-it's cooked, but it's super light.
And it's a really interesting texture.
What happens is the egg albumin is just a little bit firmer.
It's got a little bit more resiliency to it but that looks like it's pretty okay.
That's delicious.
Clean, it's a it's an egg.
Yeah.
It's an egg.
While this is modern, there's always, almost always, ways to make something lighter.
Yep.
And more refreshing and more straightforward to what the ingredient is about.
So, Sergio, who helped organize and-and do all the logistics of the food for San Sebastian, the gastronomic conference, showed us how to do this really cool egg trick.
Crack a shell on top and not just a magic trick but That to me is the coolest trick I've seen all year, and thank you, Sergio, for showing me how to save time doing an egg.
This is a dish that I wasn't quite sure about.
And whenever things aren't I'm not quite sure about, they seem to be embraced.
The idea was based on dashimaki tamago, which is kuzu, a starch, eggs, traditional dashi, soy, mirin, and it's rolled into an omelet.
The idea was to make an egg noodle, transform it into something completely different.
And it was an accident, and it's still the same components that you would get in a Japanese egg.
But the dish itself couldn't be more easy.
We have bacon dashi here, and it's important that it's at a rolling boil.
You know what we have in here, basically 710 grams of egg and 1.
5 percent of that weight in methylcellulose at 50, which gels at around 60, 63 celsius.
Those are the same temperature around the egg cooks, too.
We're gonna do that and put it on, let it sit for 30 seconds.
So what we want to do is we want it to steam, to sort of encapsulate the egg, but more importantly we want the gel to set.
If we didn't add that, it would just deflate and we would have this limp, flaccid crap inside.
We're going to take the broth that it has been cooking in, the bacon dashi.
We're gonna garnish it with some chives, and this is some seasoned kombu that use to make dashi.
When it's truffle season, we put truffles on it, black truffles, season with some salt, drizzle with a little olive oil, and that is a puffed egg.
It's the best one I think I've ever done in my life.
Wylie's been kind enough to do another dish.
What was the one dish you wanted to work on? Well, today we have our carrot coconut sunny-side up.
It doesn't really have any eggs in it, but it looks like very much like a sunny-side up egg.
Some people were like not happy with having fun with that.
We literally have had some people get angry about this dish.
You know get up and say, "I can't believe, what do you mean this isn't a real egg?" And literally walk out.
So here we got our mixture, and we're just going to melt it.
This is, is coconut milk infused with cardamom, some sugar, and then there's some locus bean gum, some guar gum and some xanthan gum.
So, we're just going to take a scoop here, we're going to go right in here, just kind of make it look like an egg white.
That's phase one.
In the meantime, we can get the yolk ready.
All right.
So what we've done here is we've just taken some carrot juice, blended it with a little bit of smoked maple syrup, some salt, little bit of glucose, so that it doesn't freeze solid like an ice cube and some xanthan gum to give it the viscosity of a proper egg yolk.
So we're just going to stick it with the skewer, dip it in here, twist it around.
This is just water with a little bit of kappa carrageenan and locus bean gum to make it gel.
So what we've done is we just made a membrane, we're going to drop it on top of our egg, and we're just going to let it sit here, and what's going to happen is, is it's going to defrost and kind of settle and it's going to look just like a sunny side up egg.
Little bit of salt, a crack of pepper and a drizzle of olive oil, we're going to have our carrot coconut sunny-side.
It's not an egg, it's something that's delicious.
It's a vehicle for the flavors that he's talking about, coconut and carrot.
At the end of the day, it has to taste good, and I think it does.
And one of the reasons it tastes good is because we're not messing with crazy, new, outlandish flavors.
We're taking old friends and just presenting them in a new way.
So Rene asked me to cook a gull's egg.
I'm going to cook a gull's egg 'cause I've never cooked one before.
And I have no idea what I'm doing other than cooking an egg.
It's just weird 'cause it reminds me of an ostrich egg in terms of the egg white.
It's just it's just more water content it seems.
Yeah.
Although it's a bigger egg, it seems like it's a lighter a lighter egg.
It can vary, some of the eggs are like insanely ocean-like.
Eggs are one of the few ingredients, when cooked, that talks to you.
Yeah.
This is true.
They actually had some Korean nori.
So I roasted it.
It's already roasted but I roasted it a bit harder in a pan with some oil, and I just pureed it with a little squid ink and mussel juice.
He's basting it with gull's butter.
But a gull doesn't have milk, no.
What do you think it's made of then? I'm going to season it now with Danish salt.
I took some of the onion shoots and I just quickly roasted them off.
I quickly roasted off this asparagus as well.
It doesn't look pretty.
Obviously you have asparagus and eggs.
It may seem totally disparate elements.
Weirdly, seaweed and eggs is a classic Japanese combination as well, so it's not totally farfetched.
Asparagus, originally, it is a coastal plant.
It grows in sand.
There is a connection at least.
Ooh, that's delicious.
That's it.
Finish it with a little butter.
Gull's egg.
Who wouldn't want that for breakfast? One of the most famous egg dishes in terms of being copied and influencing other chefs was the Passard egg at l'Arpège.
This is the bane of so many cooks in the world, I can't even imagine.
There's so many ways you can actually take the egg shell off, like using a bottle cap and just like sort of pressing it.
I've seen chefs in Japan just literally do this.
I can't do it as well as they can.
Saving the yolk, and separating it.
You gotta take all the (Bleep) Out, the membrane inside and you know, this is a pain in the ass, basically.
But I'm happy to eat it.
Really happy to eat it.
The dish is really simple, basically you open the shell up and put the egg back in, little salt, seasoning in there.
We're going to cook it very gentle in a water bath for about three, four minutes at, like, say 300 degrees.
Basically we're just warming the egg yolk through.
And you pipe in the cream, heavy whipping cream with some maple syrup and Sherry vinegar.
Garnish with some chives.
And you get this as a sort of a first course, it's a really elegant way to eat an egg.
Go in with a little demitasse spoon and you get the maple syrup and you get the vinegar, it's sort of just as a perfect balance of flavors.
That's what makes passard such a genius, is that it was so simple.
This one takes work, but it's very approachable, very easy to do and it's had a wide influence in terms of how people eat today.
And now a conversation with three friends.
We're talking about mediocrity.
I've been aiming solidly for middle my whole life.
In fact, as Clint Eastwood says, you know, a man should know his limitations.
But that's me.
Sure as hell not you, not you.
Why give a (Bleep)? My definition of mediocrity's maybe a little bit more (Bleep) Up.
I think people are scared to take a chance.
I think that's why America is the king of mediocrity.
People don't take risks like they used to.
But that's what we're supposed to be really good at.
Yeah, it's a misnomer.
But what encapsulates mediocrity for you? If you look at the restaurants that are opening up now, everything's Italian.
It's mediocre Italian.
Yeah, so noodles are okay, but pasta not.
That's racist, man.
It is racist 'cause why can't I be racist? There you go.
Okay, what about the burger? I'll tell you what.
I'll take a good burger from anybody over farm to table.
Plucking an apple off the tree? Come on.
Wow.
Come on, do something to it.
We're talking about cooking, we are cooks, we should have a responsibility.
What's more mediocre than maybe more farm to table is in fact the vanguard of vast tidal wave of soul- crushing mediocrity.
My problem is what I think where the mediocritizing is going on is in the discussion about the ingredient over the food.
Did you just make up a word or is that really a word? I think I made it up.
It is now.
It sounded really good.
Wow, what turned you against this I mean, why are you so angry? I mean, that's my job to be Hate all these market freaks and the hippies.
So what turned you against your brethren? I don't have a powder blue sweater, though.
My mom bought me that sweater.
If I was going to be mediocre, I would be a middle relief inning pitcher in baseball, no pressure.
And you could pitch 'til you're like 45 years old.
And make like $3 million a year.
I see you know a thing about this.
I'd rather hit the ball out of the park.
See, where's Joe DiMaggio? You really hate this sweater, don't you? I'm just waiting for you to change your shoes like Mr.
Rogers.
You know, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, mother (Bleep), okay? To mediocrity.
To mediocrity.
And all of its evil and maligned forms.
Mr.
Rogers.
Powder blue.
For all of the folks out there thinking about starting a career in the kitchen Very few people could do this.
Who wants to become a chef I think people are scared to take a chance.
The journey begins with an egg.
So please take a deep breath and go make an omelet.
This is the bane of so many cooks in the world.
Chef Wylie Dufresne makes eggs Benedict.
This is one of the best things I've ever had to eat.
Chef Daniel Patterson makes a whirlpool egg.
It's cooked but it's super light.
Really interesting texture.
Chef Rene Redzepi makes a gull egg.
Rene asked me to cook a gull's egg, 'cause I've never cooked one before.
And Chang makes his ko egg.
We took the caviar, placed it inside so it's like egg within an egg.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
To try and understand any chef, much less David Chang, it's best to read their menus, spend some time with them in the kitchen.
But as important, see which chefs they respect, enjoy cooking with, and the dishes that inspire them.
How a cook handles eggs has always been a test of sorts.
Old school chefs would ask a job applicant to make an omelet.
And how says, the thinking goes, everything you need to know.
We're here with a special guest, Mr.
Wylie Dufresne.
How are you my friend? Nice to see you.
Very good, very good.
Whenever I think of eggs, I think of Wylie because he's the only person I know that loves eggs more than I do.
And over the years, he's created some ingenious, delicious egg dishes.
When I first had this dish, and it's his play on eggs Benedict, it was the first time where I did I was angry.
I was like going over the 12 steps of loss, 'cause I was like, "wow, I'm never gonna create this dish," and I have no idea what the (Bleep) You did.
And it was delicious.
And then I was happy, and then I was angry again.
And you ordered another one.
And I ordered another one.
And then I told you this was one of the best things I've ever had to eat.
This is obviously a nod to, for me, childhood memories.
Eggs Benedict, it's a stroke of genius.
I mean, who takes eggs and then puts a sauce made from eggs on top of it? It's perfect, it's delicious, it's all that's right in the world when there's eggs with eggs and butter.
So we've been playing around with yolks trying to understand the different time temperature relation to how eggs cook.
How yolks specifically cook and thicken.
And we started playing around with taking yolks and putting them in sleeves like this, putting the sleeves in a bath for different times and lengths of temperature and time and checking their results.
And we came up with 19 minutes at 70 degrees celsius in a sleeve yields a texture that's somewhere between a cheese and a fudge.
Both of which you love.
Both of which are good.
So we've got our yolks, we cut them open very quickly and you'll see that inside is a delicious egg yolk.
So we just take a couple of these, and we pop this guy in the oven ever so briefly.
And then we have we have our hollandaise, which, again, was the tricky bit.
We took a traditional hollandaise, and we added a little bit of gelatin to it so that we could pour it out and cut it into cubes.
We realized that a little bit of added starch kind of gave it a jacket, a buffer to withstand the frying environment.
So we put some starch in there, mixed it with out gelatin gum, and because eggs Benedict has to have English muffins, we went with a traditional breading: Flour, egg wash, breadcrumbs.
But instead of breadcrumbs, we use English muffins.
Again, going to go into the oven briefly.
And we'll go ahead and assemble our plate, 'cause the rest of the components are fairly straightforward.
It's all the ingredients that you would see in an eggs Benedict.
I don't want to mess with anybody's actual memory of eggs Benedict.
I don't think that that's a good idea.
Little bit of black salt.
Couple of chives for a little bit of flavor and color.
Just going to lay it out.
Finish with a little bit of dried ham.
So good.
Eggs Benedict.
Very few people could do this, or made it as delicious.
Thanks, man, thanks for having me.
This egg dish we came up with at ko.
Most restaurants had a signature egg dish and we needed to create our own and it was a real struggle 'cause, like, you knew we had an egg, how the hell do we do this? Do we serve it in the shell? How do we make it ours? And we wanted to come up with a way of plating where we wouldn't have to sort of crack every egg open and make it, you know, so precious.
And, ultimately, we're just lazy guys, too, so we came up with sort of a philosophy at ko was plate it as it lies, you know? Make it look natural.
What we knew we wanted was a soft-boiled egg.
We did that, so we have a five minute, ten second egg, sort of a pain in the ass to peel, which is why we put it in boiling water and then peel it.
So basically, we take these eggs, shock 'em in an ice bath, and we peel 'em.
And what we have here is the soft-boiled egg we were hoping for.
But we really wanted to add a smoke flavor, so we were smoking the eggs and they were turning brown.
So what we wound up doing is smoking water.
So basically adding gelatin, freezing it and whatever drip off you get this clear water.
So this water tastes like smoked water, but it's clear.
So we store them in a smoked water solution for about 24 hours.
The next thing was just a really old school things is soubise.
The only reason we came up with this was how do we serve the egg? I didn't want to just serve it on here, and then how do I put the caviar on? And the soubise was going to be there just to hold the egg.
That was it.
It's delicious; It's salt, butter, onions.
That's it.
Next idea was fingerling potato chips, and we just deep-fry them.
We did all sorts of variations of potato chip, like pomme soufflés everything.
But, for us, it just made more sense to have potato chips this way.
So we wanted to make just basically an herb salad.
Chervil, parsley, chives.
Do something like that.
So next thing was, how do we serve caviar? It was, again, a mistake.
As you can see right here, there's a crack in it.
So, why don't I just follow that line? To me there's nothing more sexy than egg drizzling out.
And then we took the caviar and sort of placed it inside the egg so it's like egg within an egg.
Season with smoked salt, to sort of accentuate the smokiness, and then it needed something else.
It was one of those things where I was just like, "oh, it needs vinegar.
" I thought it would balance out with all the creamy richness and the caviar, it just pairs well.
That was the ko egg.
Chef Daniel Owner of the two Michelin starred Coi in San Francisco, and part-time Nemesis of David Chang.
This is a recipe from 2005.
It involves eggs and water.
I did it at home, I did it out of not wanting to wash the pots, and something super easy.
And when I did it and hadn't seen it before, I talked to Harold McGee.
Who said never been published.
How is it possible you could do something new? It's complicated, there's a lot of steps.
I'm gonna go slow here.
There's an egg involved.
This is breakfast by the way, you hungry? Yeah.
Okay.
So you just took the egg, whisking it.
And this is gonna be, like it's not gonna set up perfect.
It should be a little bit thicker than this.
They say don't beat eggs a lot, that's the worst thing to do is beat the eggs a lot.
Second thing is we got this simmering water, kind of hard to control on here but just a little bit of salt in it.
Make a whirlpool.
And that's basically if you don't do this, it just shoots straight to the bottom and sticks.
Ready, now we got to count.
One.
Two.
Three Uno.
Dos.
Tres.
Cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho.
Nine.
Nueve.
Ten.
And I think, I kind of lose it after that.
Oh, look at that, it's cooked.
So it's best to do it with super fresh eggs and not your pastry chef's meringue eggs.
But here we go, first thing is just dump out the excess water.
And so we're going to let it just kind of drain off for a minute.
We got about 15 seconds to tell dirty jokes.
Normally we do it a little fancier than that.
We do it onto a plate and then return it, but I'm not feeling fancy this morning.
Uh, olive oil.
Pepper.
Salt.
I love it.
Couldn't be more simple.
Now, breakfast.
It's-it's cooked, but it's super light.
And it's a really interesting texture.
What happens is the egg albumin is just a little bit firmer.
It's got a little bit more resiliency to it but that looks like it's pretty okay.
That's delicious.
Clean, it's a it's an egg.
Yeah.
It's an egg.
While this is modern, there's always, almost always, ways to make something lighter.
Yep.
And more refreshing and more straightforward to what the ingredient is about.
So, Sergio, who helped organize and-and do all the logistics of the food for San Sebastian, the gastronomic conference, showed us how to do this really cool egg trick.
Crack a shell on top and not just a magic trick but That to me is the coolest trick I've seen all year, and thank you, Sergio, for showing me how to save time doing an egg.
This is a dish that I wasn't quite sure about.
And whenever things aren't I'm not quite sure about, they seem to be embraced.
The idea was based on dashimaki tamago, which is kuzu, a starch, eggs, traditional dashi, soy, mirin, and it's rolled into an omelet.
The idea was to make an egg noodle, transform it into something completely different.
And it was an accident, and it's still the same components that you would get in a Japanese egg.
But the dish itself couldn't be more easy.
We have bacon dashi here, and it's important that it's at a rolling boil.
You know what we have in here, basically 710 grams of egg and 1.
5 percent of that weight in methylcellulose at 50, which gels at around 60, 63 celsius.
Those are the same temperature around the egg cooks, too.
We're gonna do that and put it on, let it sit for 30 seconds.
So what we want to do is we want it to steam, to sort of encapsulate the egg, but more importantly we want the gel to set.
If we didn't add that, it would just deflate and we would have this limp, flaccid crap inside.
We're going to take the broth that it has been cooking in, the bacon dashi.
We're gonna garnish it with some chives, and this is some seasoned kombu that use to make dashi.
When it's truffle season, we put truffles on it, black truffles, season with some salt, drizzle with a little olive oil, and that is a puffed egg.
It's the best one I think I've ever done in my life.
Wylie's been kind enough to do another dish.
What was the one dish you wanted to work on? Well, today we have our carrot coconut sunny-side up.
It doesn't really have any eggs in it, but it looks like very much like a sunny-side up egg.
Some people were like not happy with having fun with that.
We literally have had some people get angry about this dish.
You know get up and say, "I can't believe, what do you mean this isn't a real egg?" And literally walk out.
So here we got our mixture, and we're just going to melt it.
This is, is coconut milk infused with cardamom, some sugar, and then there's some locus bean gum, some guar gum and some xanthan gum.
So, we're just going to take a scoop here, we're going to go right in here, just kind of make it look like an egg white.
That's phase one.
In the meantime, we can get the yolk ready.
All right.
So what we've done here is we've just taken some carrot juice, blended it with a little bit of smoked maple syrup, some salt, little bit of glucose, so that it doesn't freeze solid like an ice cube and some xanthan gum to give it the viscosity of a proper egg yolk.
So we're just going to stick it with the skewer, dip it in here, twist it around.
This is just water with a little bit of kappa carrageenan and locus bean gum to make it gel.
So what we've done is we just made a membrane, we're going to drop it on top of our egg, and we're just going to let it sit here, and what's going to happen is, is it's going to defrost and kind of settle and it's going to look just like a sunny side up egg.
Little bit of salt, a crack of pepper and a drizzle of olive oil, we're going to have our carrot coconut sunny-side.
It's not an egg, it's something that's delicious.
It's a vehicle for the flavors that he's talking about, coconut and carrot.
At the end of the day, it has to taste good, and I think it does.
And one of the reasons it tastes good is because we're not messing with crazy, new, outlandish flavors.
We're taking old friends and just presenting them in a new way.
So Rene asked me to cook a gull's egg.
I'm going to cook a gull's egg 'cause I've never cooked one before.
And I have no idea what I'm doing other than cooking an egg.
It's just weird 'cause it reminds me of an ostrich egg in terms of the egg white.
It's just it's just more water content it seems.
Yeah.
Although it's a bigger egg, it seems like it's a lighter a lighter egg.
It can vary, some of the eggs are like insanely ocean-like.
Eggs are one of the few ingredients, when cooked, that talks to you.
Yeah.
This is true.
They actually had some Korean nori.
So I roasted it.
It's already roasted but I roasted it a bit harder in a pan with some oil, and I just pureed it with a little squid ink and mussel juice.
He's basting it with gull's butter.
But a gull doesn't have milk, no.
What do you think it's made of then? I'm going to season it now with Danish salt.
I took some of the onion shoots and I just quickly roasted them off.
I quickly roasted off this asparagus as well.
It doesn't look pretty.
Obviously you have asparagus and eggs.
It may seem totally disparate elements.
Weirdly, seaweed and eggs is a classic Japanese combination as well, so it's not totally farfetched.
Asparagus, originally, it is a coastal plant.
It grows in sand.
There is a connection at least.
Ooh, that's delicious.
That's it.
Finish it with a little butter.
Gull's egg.
Who wouldn't want that for breakfast? One of the most famous egg dishes in terms of being copied and influencing other chefs was the Passard egg at l'Arpège.
This is the bane of so many cooks in the world, I can't even imagine.
There's so many ways you can actually take the egg shell off, like using a bottle cap and just like sort of pressing it.
I've seen chefs in Japan just literally do this.
I can't do it as well as they can.
Saving the yolk, and separating it.
You gotta take all the (Bleep) Out, the membrane inside and you know, this is a pain in the ass, basically.
But I'm happy to eat it.
Really happy to eat it.
The dish is really simple, basically you open the shell up and put the egg back in, little salt, seasoning in there.
We're going to cook it very gentle in a water bath for about three, four minutes at, like, say 300 degrees.
Basically we're just warming the egg yolk through.
And you pipe in the cream, heavy whipping cream with some maple syrup and Sherry vinegar.
Garnish with some chives.
And you get this as a sort of a first course, it's a really elegant way to eat an egg.
Go in with a little demitasse spoon and you get the maple syrup and you get the vinegar, it's sort of just as a perfect balance of flavors.
That's what makes passard such a genius, is that it was so simple.
This one takes work, but it's very approachable, very easy to do and it's had a wide influence in terms of how people eat today.
And now a conversation with three friends.
We're talking about mediocrity.
I've been aiming solidly for middle my whole life.
In fact, as Clint Eastwood says, you know, a man should know his limitations.
But that's me.
Sure as hell not you, not you.
Why give a (Bleep)? My definition of mediocrity's maybe a little bit more (Bleep) Up.
I think people are scared to take a chance.
I think that's why America is the king of mediocrity.
People don't take risks like they used to.
But that's what we're supposed to be really good at.
Yeah, it's a misnomer.
But what encapsulates mediocrity for you? If you look at the restaurants that are opening up now, everything's Italian.
It's mediocre Italian.
Yeah, so noodles are okay, but pasta not.
That's racist, man.
It is racist 'cause why can't I be racist? There you go.
Okay, what about the burger? I'll tell you what.
I'll take a good burger from anybody over farm to table.
Plucking an apple off the tree? Come on.
Wow.
Come on, do something to it.
We're talking about cooking, we are cooks, we should have a responsibility.
What's more mediocre than maybe more farm to table is in fact the vanguard of vast tidal wave of soul- crushing mediocrity.
My problem is what I think where the mediocritizing is going on is in the discussion about the ingredient over the food.
Did you just make up a word or is that really a word? I think I made it up.
It is now.
It sounded really good.
Wow, what turned you against this I mean, why are you so angry? I mean, that's my job to be Hate all these market freaks and the hippies.
So what turned you against your brethren? I don't have a powder blue sweater, though.
My mom bought me that sweater.
If I was going to be mediocre, I would be a middle relief inning pitcher in baseball, no pressure.
And you could pitch 'til you're like 45 years old.
And make like $3 million a year.
I see you know a thing about this.
I'd rather hit the ball out of the park.
See, where's Joe DiMaggio? You really hate this sweater, don't you? I'm just waiting for you to change your shoes like Mr.
Rogers.
You know, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, mother (Bleep), okay? To mediocrity.
To mediocrity.
And all of its evil and maligned forms.
Mr.
Rogers.
Powder blue.
For all of the folks out there thinking about starting a career in the kitchen Very few people could do this.
Who wants to become a chef I think people are scared to take a chance.
The journey begins with an egg.
So please take a deep breath and go make an omelet.