The Mind of a Chef (2012) s01e11 Episode Script

This episode is all New York.
Chef David Chang goes shopping in Chinatown You put this in whole foods, people are going to complain.
Visits a farm upstate They're cute as a button.
Shucks oysters We asked a oyster farmer to grow us the largest oyster shells possible.
Hangs with his pals, Chef Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone Do you have any rolling pins? We use bottles around here.
So sweaty.
It's going to be a long morning.
And travels all the way to Tokyo for a taste of New York.
It almost tastes like I'm at the old second Avenue deli, but if it opened up in Tokyo.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
New York.
Possibly the toughest, most competitive, brutally critical environment to open a restaurant anywhere.
We chew you up, we spit you out because we can, because it's what we do.
It's also David Chang's home.
It's a real trip.
I opened up the restaurant in I didn't think that anybody would care.
It's where he made, in the space of just a few years, his success and his reputation, backing brilliantly into greatness.
It's almost like when you see Conan, and you watch him and he's, like, king.
You go, like, "how did that happen?" He was a slave boy.
I've always wondered what Conan would have thought.
While he's pondering on the beginning of the movie, like this, it's, like, "how did this happen? By crom, how did this happen?" So, that's sort of what I feel like.
Not that I'm king or (Bleep) Conan.
For both visitors and New Yorkers, Chinatown is one of the best neighborhoods to be lost in.
Because at the very least, chances are good you will stumble upon a restaurant with amazing food or wander into a market with wiggly things you never knew existed.
For Chef Chang, wandering the markets in Chinatown is equal parts nostalgia and inspiration.
We're at Hong Kong supermarket.
It would be great if there was one in every town because where are you going to find duck tails, duck feet? You put this in whole foods, they are going to die.
People are going to complain and you're going to have to tell them pigs have hearts, too.
Great stocking stuffer.
Dried mussels.
Asians love tubed fish cake.
It's weird.
That's a bet.
Can you eat this entire thing in an hour? Either way, you win, you lose.
Oh, my God.
A whole wall of dried seafood.
This is like a childhood memory.
I grew up eating this stuff.
Dried squid.
When you bring this to school in your lunchbox, as like a second-grader, because your mom doesn't know any better, you're going to get picked on.
That's not fair, man.
And then you have friends, friends would come over and they'd go to school the next day and they're, like, "Dave's house smells like crap.
" Mentally scarred.
Pure sliced grapes advertised.
Sliced ginger.
God, I wish the FDA would work like that.
This was the genesis of our ramen soup.
We bought this as a joke and then we tasted it and we were knocked on our ass.
Ah, wait, here we go.
This is my favorite.
Favorite thing in the whole There's no questioning what's in here.
Monosodium glutamate.
Sometimes you can use totally ridiculous products, and they give you inspiration.
Trying new stuff, it just triggers something in your brain.
Why is it that the moment you hear msg, you know that the context is going to be that there's a problem of some kind? And it turns out to go back to a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine back in the late '60, early '70s.
The letter came from a doctor who didn't have any particular expertise in msg chemistry, but the doctor had noticed that friends of his would go to Chinese restaurants and sometimes have a similar cluster of symptoms a headache, a feeling of being flushed, of being feverish, just general discomfort.
And he called the set of symptoms the Chinese restaurant syndrome.
So what happened was that the media picked up on this.
It went overnight from being a question to being, if not a fact, then at least very likely.
In fact, msg is a natural food ingredient that's found in many of the foods that we love that are seldom if ever found in Chinese restaurants.
So if you love tomatoes, one of the reasons you love tomatoes is that they contain much more msg in them naturally than many other vegetables.
If you love aged parmesan cheese, or if you love an aged steak, the reason you love those foods is that the aging process breaks the proteins down into amino acids, msg included.
So aged parmesan cheese, aged beef have some of the highest levels of msg of any food we're going to eat, and that's part of what makes them delicious.
Eating is a very complicated subject.
Diet is a very complicated subject.
In the case of msg, the record is clear.
There is no evidence that msg causes the symptoms that were initially suggested as being part of the Chinese restaurant syndrome.
Neighborhood boundaries in New York are in constant flux.
Take little Italy.
Once completely Italian, it's now slowly being swallowed by Chinatown.
But here at Torrisi Italian specialties, Chef Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi embrace this change and create something completely their own.
We've known each other a long time.
Welcome.
Buongiorno.
Like Chang, they embody what's so amazing about the New York food scene today young chefs drawing inspiration from their backgrounds and infusing that with the ingredients and flavors they find around them.
We're here today to make a couple dishes.
They're going to do their Italian stuff, and I'm going to do what I do, which is Which is what? American.
Maybe more Italian American than what you guys do.
Ah, here we go.
It's going to be a long morning.
We're making fresh cavatelli.
This dish is called cavatelli p.
S.
46, it's where I went to school.
A public school in New York city where you got beef patties twice a week, and it was because there was a lot of the workers back there were Jamaican.
It was a cheap thing for the schools to make for you.
The recipe is six egg yolks, a cup of flour and this one's got curry in it.
So it's a little funky, kind of what we do.
Some of what we do here is the dishes are based on classic New York influences in dishes, most often street food.
So this is almost like making dry pasta.
You know, it can't be too wet, otherwise it will get clogged up in the machine.
So it's kind of crumbly and it gets forced through this machine so that it can dry really easily.
It just kind of needs to be pressed, so it needs to be a real kind of thin strip of pasta, because as it goes through, it presses it out.
So, curry cavatelli.
All right, so this is the ragout.
What's in the ragout? This one's a beef ragout, because it's a Jamaican beef Patty.
Lots of onion, some fresh tomato, kind of Indian flavors, sofrito, like Caribbean, scotch bonnets, ginger, garlic.
Sofrito is just a foundation of the recipe, you know.
It's that building of flavor.
It's that first thing that hits the pan.
So pasta, it's about five, six minutes, which seems like a long cook for these fresh noodles, but like I said, they're really thick and they're compressed, they're dense now.
But that's part of the game.
That's part of the action, is the chew of the pasta.
The beautiful yellow color emulates the golden shell of a proper Jamaican beef Patty.
It's paying homage to your childhood.
It's paying homage to New York city.
But at the same time, it's paying homage to all the flavor profiles.
And you're doing something that's very Italian, it's being respectful to Indian food, curry.
So this is New York state goat ricotta.
And then aged goat cheese from the same goats.
Now a little bit of scotch bonnet.
And that's the dish.
This dish looks amazing.
And now Dave is going to teach us about Asian noodles.
We're going to make alkaline noodles.
You have your flour, you've got a little bit of sodium, a little bit of calcium bicarbonate.
So basically this is kansui.
And all of Asia uses kansui.
They add it to the water and it lowers the ph in the water.
And it's sort of a magical thing.
When we first opened up, we weren't using alkaline noodles.
We were using fresh Chinese pasta.
But after a while we started to incorporate alkaline noodles and our ramen got much better because they weren't falling apart.
It was literally because of the ph change in the water.
That's it.
So keep on kneading this for about ten minutes by hand.
Do you have any rolling pins? No, we use bottles around here.
Really? Seriously? Seriously.
Okay.
You guys are (Bleep).
He's so sweaty.
It's going to be a long morning.
How you doing over there? I tried to cut it like an Italian would, which is very irregular, and then you're allowed to say, "hey, it's rustico.
It's okay to be imperfect.
That's life.
" Oh, nice job.
Hey, Chang! With the Pinot grigio bottle.
So sweaty! We had made our own ragout.
But I figure that the flavors in their ragout might pair better.
Just like how they transported us to Italy and India, we're going to use the same ingredients and transport us to, hopefully, to Kuala Lumpur and Italian America.
Just chopped chilis, there's some dried beef, pork.
That's a lot of chili.
Now these are dried anchovies and some chopped scallions.
The pasta.
You know what's crazy is you actually added the most Italian ingredients to that dish than we did.
As I said, I'm just trying to channel my inner Italiano.
I'm going to steal again their mise en place.
Nice.
And a poached egg.
And we're going to go slow poached.
We've now taken Asian ingredients and made a dish that I think is homage to the chili pan mee I had in Kuala Lumpur, but also to Southern Italy.
It's a beautiful thing.
Torrisi wants first dibs on that.
But if this is new York today, what did it used to be? Long before pizza, pretzels, bagels or bialys, the original New York food was the oyster.
They were ubiquitous, everywhere.
Cheap and available all along the waterfront, in the streets.
At one point New York's Hudson bay area contained more than half the world's oysters.
We exported them across the globe.
We ate them by the scores.
We were oyster town.
And it was glorious.
So we wanted to do a dish that was based on what Indians would have been eating before 1492.
So we know that New York, the island of New York, had berries, had lots and lots of shellfish, tons of fish, game, all this stuff.
But what they did love and what was a delicacy was oysters.
We asked an oyster farmer in long island to grow us the largest oyster shells possible.
So, we're going to roast these giant oysters from long island.
You don't want to hammer the oyster.
You want it just so the juices are still in there.
It's all the natural oyster liquor.
Do not throw that away.
We're going to transfer it from here onto a salt bed.
We smoked cherrystone clams to preserve them, and we just boil these clams with water.
What we get is this clam essence.
Very smoky, very clammy.
Clammy in a good way.
We took burnt onion powder and we mixed it with some chestnuts and acorn flour, which is going to add just a little bit of bitterness because there's a lot of sweet and fruity elements in this dish.
We're going to add to the liquor blueberries and freeze-dried strawberries.
Here we have some chickweed and you have wood sorrel.
So, that's the dish.
Very simple.
When you live on an island slammed together with 1.
6 million people, it's easy to forget that the food you're eating comes from places like this.
I think that people need to be much more cognizant of where their food comes from.
It doesn't come in a plastic wrap.
People don't want to even think about that something died.
Let's keep it sterile and fake.
About a hundred Miles outside of the city in Jeffersonville, New York, the Hahn family raises many of the animals that are served in Chang's restaurants.
You know, when you look at a farm, it seems like it would be so relaxing.
Romantic and glamorous.
It's not even it's hard work, it's stressful.
Come on, Daisy.
But it's satisfying when it's done.
They've been teaching myself, and the guys from the restaurant, all the hard things that go into making food happen.
It's shaped the philosophy of how we do our restaurants and I just wanted to be here and show people where, sort of, at least I learned a lot about farming.
Heifers! And this is one thing I love about the Hahns.
They love their animals.
Hi, honey.
And they know every name.
This one here is Daisy.
Daisy's his favorite.
Janice's got a lot of history here with us.
Her name is Sasha.
She's a great mother, she's got a great disposition.
I don't think people realize each pig has a different temperament and a different taste in terms of muscular and fat content.
And it's really not quantity that we're after, but we want the quality in the animals.
We're very careful of what's in the feed.
We wouldn't feed it if we wouldn't eat it.
It's a huge difference if you see a commodity farm, confined pigs, it's stressed.
If it's stressed, it's not going to taste delicious.
But this is hog heaven.
They only have one bad day.
I love 'em.
Across the globe.
Tokyo, Japan.
Even here, the influence of new York can be found.
Ramen fanaticism in Japan rivals barbecue in the U.
S.
, with glossy magazines profiling new styles and techniques and treating chefs like rock stars.
One such chef is native new Yorker Ivan Orkin.
He's bringing the flavors of new York city into the heart of Tokyo at his popular shop Ivan ramen.
So we're here at Ivan ramen.
You opened this place in what year? I had come back to Tokyo in 2003 after a ten- or 15-year hiatus and it was at the beginning of the ramen boom and I started eating ramen a lot, obviously, and I was really impressed with the double soup shio ramen.
The double soup or, as I call it, the double dip, or Take two completely separate soups and put them together.
And, so, because I was so intrigued by the double soup shio ramen, I decided that was the one I wanted to lead with.
In my case, I do a whole chicken soup.
No vegetables, nothing, just nice chickens from a special chicken region.
And I blend it with a katsuokonbu miboshi dashi.
Ivan is a special character.
And Ivan, in Japan, has become sort of this culinary Japanese ramen renegade.
I decided to come up with a sofrito and it's basically an onion, garlic, ginger and apple.
And you cook it like a sofrito, like a blond sofrito? Yes, I cooked it for about seven hours.
That's interesting that you're using sofrito, a staple of tuscan cuisine, as your base for a Japanese soup.
Right.
Right now he's captured the minds and imaginations of the dining public because what he's doing is flashy in the ramen world.
Is it going to be amazingly epic? I don't know.
Now, the hardest thing, also, is sort of measuring out all the stuff and coming out with the right portions.
Ivan is adding something very non-kosher, which is a lot of pork fat, but then he's adding something that is very Jewish in cuisine, and that is schmaltz, which is chicken fat.
The schmaltz here yields out of my chicken soup.
I love that you're just you're cooking with schmaltz.
Yes.
I mean, nobody knows.
All these people have no idea that I'm secretly sort of feeding them Jewish food.
But, uh, you know.
For me, I know.
I love it.
So, we do I add a sprinkling of this stuff in here.
Katsuobushi, and I got it in the powdered form that I also blend with another kind of salt.
This is a technique that was not available when I was in Japan.
Ivan's broth is unique in that it's majority chicken based.
His is sort of like a Japanese pork, kosher chicken soup without the matzo balls.
I heat my meat just in water, you know? And I'll tell you why.
With all the other stuff going on, I think it really works to have the noodles and the soup really be the main attraction.
And then I have the noodles here, which we make upstairs.
This is actually a 58% bread flour.
Which is a hard, hard wheat.
Yes.
And then you're mixing it in with the local udon flour, which is traditionally a very soft flour.
The whole idea of mixing the flours is to get the right texture with the noodle mixed with the kansui.
Right.
And I also wanted a noodle that cooked very quickly.
34-second noodle And then we have these hosaki menma.
Those look amazing.
Yeah, they taste like a bamboo shoot.
And the egg, which I'll show you, which I really obsessed over.
When I was a kid eating ramen in Tokyo, my favorite thing was putting that egg on your little and, you know, slurping some of the yolk.
So I think we're long-lost brothers.
Yeah.
So that is, uh, my hanjyukutamago shio ramen.
These noodles are really perfect for the broth because every bite's perfectly seasoned.
It literally picks up the flavors.
For me I only have one real ramen rule here.
The noodles have to slurp and the soup has to stick to the noodles.
When you eat a bowl of ramen that's really unsatisfying, I think it's when you get naked noodles in your mouth.
This is delicious.
It almost tastes like I'm at the old second Avenue deli, but if it opened up in Tokyo.
No naked noodles here, just a kick-ass bowl of ramen.
New York City.
Everything and everybody comes here.
And a lot of times we turn right around and sell it back to the rest of the world.
It's easy when you live here for a while to think you live in the center of the universe.
You don't, of course.
Not by a long shot.
But looking around, it's a forgivable delusion.