The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e07 Episode Script

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So much of cooking, writing, art and music is based on what came before.
My grandmother taught me the rhythms of the kitchen.
First, there was meat.
Then there was fire.
Then came sous-vide.
Traditions are meant to change, and legacy is meant to continue on, but not without evolving.
If you want to change it at the last minute you can.
Chef Ed Lee explores this scene as he ruminates on his life and career and food at large.
It's now accepted to do something out of the box.
Try as we might to fight the passing of time, the world just keeps on spinning.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
All curious chefs, they're just fascinated by their surroundings.
That is intense.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
There's something that affects your psyche when you know that every single day you are going to create something which will be consumed, destroyed.
I've always sort of struggled with the fact that we spend days, hours, all this time making this food and it just goes away in the course of minutes.
And that's it, it's gone.
And the moment the food goes out, it's lost forever.
And there is a beauty to that.
That we never can hold on or hang on to that purity no matter how much we try.
Rather than avoiding it, why not just embrace it wholeheartedly? It puts it in a very special place for me.
I have a friend, he's a pretty avid hunter.
He's go down to Florida and hunts gator.
Whenever he gets an animal, we get the meat.
I love surprising people with a meat that maybe they wouldn't typically think of eating.
And we say, "You know, let's just imagine a world "where there's no scallops, lobster and shrimp or clams or oysters.
" "What would we do? How would we survive?" We actually would be fine.
We'd adapt.
I go to the grocery and it makes me sad when I look at the meat counter and all I see is a huge row of chicken, a huge row of beef and usually a small row of pork and that's it.
Those animals don't exist in the way that we once knew them as factory animals.
So most of these meats are really not the ones that we started with anyway.
There's a whole panoramic vision of what we can eat that I just think we're not exploring well enough.
Gator meat's not the most flavorful meat in the world.
So we're going to give it a little bit of help by adding country ham.
Now it goes through the breading stage.
When we think about what lasts and what stays, I used to go to the public library in New York.
I would just go randomly walk up and down the library stacks and I'd look for books of poetry.
There was a book that hadn't been checked out in 50 years.
I would check it out and read it.
It's crazy to think that there was a book in the library that no one had read, no one had touched for 50 years and it was just sitting there.
And a lot of people that I know, you know, we collect old cookbooks and look at them.
There's constantly things to be discovered in old cookbooks.
You don't have to cook this long because obviously it's super thin.
I'm going to make a quick pan sauce.
I love Facebook and Instagram, but there was a time before all that when the stuff that you cooked was really just hardcore here this day and gone tomorrow and no one remembered it.
Back then people didn't take pictures of food.
If you really liked it, they maybe, you know, talked about it or remembered it.
Food has this kind of pseudo-permanence now.
Or at least we think it does because we document it.
Just go to the restaurant, experience it whole and completely new and being surprised versus seeing the entire 12-course menu already laid out before you and so you have this preconceived notion of what you're going to eat.
That's not doing the food justice, that's not doing the chef justice.
So Mmm Delicious.
Gator schnitzel down.
Love this pickled cauliflower.
More black pepper.
That's gator schnitzel.
Very simple.
Anywhere where you have a set of values and a set of rituals by one group of people that want to hold fast to them, they usually will end up using the word "tradition.
" Tradition isn't stagnant, it's not meant to be.
We have to change, we have to adapt.
Traditions are there as a signpost, as a guide.
But it's not for us to preserve it.
That is a very challenging thing because you're talking about history, you're talking about generation.
To the Blue Angels.
To the Blue Angels.
Cheers.
All right.
We're here on this beautiful sunny day making ravioli with my buddies Andy and Michael from Hog & Hominy.
In Korean "grandmother" is halmoni, but a lot of times when you're a little kid when you say it you can't pronounce the L.
So when little kids call their grandmothers they literally say "hominy, hominy, hominy.
" And it's like which is funny because your restaurant in Korean means "Hogs & Grandmothers.
" I like it.
This is like your ravioli tradition.
Yeah, man.
This is our Sundays at Maw Maw's house.
It'd be like the scene in Godfather, but instead of the dudes, it was a bunch of old ladies.
A task that can literally be done in an hour and we stretch it out over about five.
This is absolutely what got us into cooking.
We'd watch them do this for hours.
So when we first started it was me, Andy and one other guy.
We were only closed on Sunday, then we'd come up and make raviolis.
Both dads had a job already.
They'd come into the restaurant at 5:00.
As long as we had them a glass of bourbon or a glass of wine.
Or beer.
Or beer, they would work.
More than anything it's one of those traditions that was taught to us when we were young and it's one that we want to teach to our kids.
It reminds me in my house it was like making kimchi.
It's an all-day task.
I don't know if it's something I actually liked doing.
It stunk and it was just but I liked spending time with my grandma.
I was fascinated by the whole process.
Process.
But now, like I crave those moments, you know.
Yeah.
So we got some filling.
What's the filling? Chicken thighs, pork loin and chuck roast.
Nice.
There's something really meditative about rolling.
Sure, it's great.
This dough is great, man.
Thank you.
So we'll just boil them up and then we'll toss it with some gravy.
But it's pasta sauce.
It's tomato gravy.
It's gravy.
You're the only ones that call this gravy or? Italians it's either gravy or it's Bolognese.
Some people say Bolognese, or tomato sauce or pasta sauce.
We call it gravy.
It's our Sunday gravy.
It's good, gravy's a great word.
I've always been drawn to how they use their grandmother's, you know, Calabrian influence, bring it to Memphis and then reinterpret that through this lens of Southern cuisine.
It's not an easy thing to do.
So the meat that's in the filling is also in your gravy? Yeah, there's some similarities between the two, but there's some things that are different too.
This gravy, it's pretty similar to the one that your grandmother does as well.
Yeah.
It came from my grandma, and like any grandmother they don't measure anything.
She would taste it, she'd look at it, she could tell by the consistency, by the way it smells if it needs more rosemary.
She actually, sitting at the kitchen table, ten feet away from the sauce and she could smell and tell us what it needed.
Like if we'd taste it, she'd say, "It needs salt.
" And I'm like, "Damn, it does need salt.
" It's amazing.
It was cool to see the passing down from my grandmother to my dad.
And he fought for that.
So when she started to get older, my dad made the dough.
That was the first thing.
And then it was the filling and then the last thing was the gravy.
When we first started the restaurant we made the gravy in-house.
We were like, "We're going to do it ourselves.
" It was good, but it wasn't this.
It wasn't as good as he could do it.
And so we called my dad up, and we're like "We need about 32 quarts of gravy every week.
Can you make that happen?" And so every Sunday or Monday my dad would take the whole day and make gravy.
Dad, you should be getting a higher cut off these guys.
That's funny and in my family too, it's always the woman that sort of takes over the role of getting the recipes and then passing them down.
My parents and my grandma too was like, "This isn't for you.
" Like just like your dad, I had to fight for it and say, "No, I'm not leaving this kitchen until you show me how to make that kimchi.
" It makes sense.
My grandma was always very nurturing, and it translates directly to chefs because we want to cook for people.
We want them to have that comforting feeling like we would go to her house and that welcoming feeling and have that food that just hits your soul.
Like we want them to have that same experience in our restaurant.
And then you have the fun, creative process of making it your own.
Yeah.
And you'll never be the best.
No, especially if you're Italian.
Every Italian chef I ever meet is, "I'm the best.
" Every Italian household.
And not even by a little, but like by a mile.
And they give you the eyebrow.
There's always that one thing that she would always just kind of She would like look around and then just kind of drop it in there when no one's seeing.
What was that? MSG.
You want to plate some of these up? Yeah, let's do it, man.
My grandma, she would go with a little bit of sauce and then finish it off just kind of douse it down with gravy at the end.
It smells so good, you guys.
It's one of those things, I mean, it looks super simple, but like Andy says, it hits home.
The idea that tradition stands for one definition of anything to me is just ossification.
Like we've become fossils at that point.
And so for anything to be alive, to be vibrant, to be fresh and to be relevant we have to take those traditions and just mold them a little bit.
You know, shake them up, see what comes out of it.
As chefs we're always trying to push people to try new things.
It was always a treat for me to sneak eel onto a menu where it's now accepted to do something a little bit funky, a little bit weird.
When you have an idea or any of my chefs have a desire to do something, we do it by committee, but we also have a lot of liberty in allowing the progressions to take place.
We're never relegated or imprisoned by any style of food.
And that's what creativity is, right? Always changing.
Always changing, always looking ahead.
And hopefully the customers come with you in that journey.
A dish is always a work in progress until the day it goes off the menu.
This is something that I used to do a long this is before your time, when you were still in diapers.
Oh, got you.
This is an eel terrine, and it was one way for me to introduce eel.
We'd put things that were familiar in there and so it'd be like peppers, asparagus, obviously eel and then we'd make a green apple gelée, basically.
We'll get some asparagus going.
To be quite honest, I don't really remember this dish.
But this is close to what it was.
We're supposed to write down, aren't we? Not necessarily.
I do remember we did pistachio oil.
I used to plate everything in circles like this.
Everything had to be very symmetrical.
A lot of what I do now is just kind of a rejection of things that I was taught.
The most important thing I remember was consistency, consistency, consistency.
I just remembered the crème fraîche.
That when you create a dish, you're creating it for that customer to come in and have it the same every single time.
Green apple and caviar are a beautiful pairing.
Just that salt and the tart.
Finish it off with sea salt.
I think we added a little bit of sweet vinegar.
There's a beauty in that.
There's certain foods, there's certain restaurants, there's certain outposts that you always want to be the same, but I'm not one of them.
So that is an eel terrine.
That's my dish.
Now your turn.
All right, I was challenged with the evolution of a dish.
And so I decided to make a croquette.
Take eel, we added some egg, flour.
Mashed potatoes, made a little paste out of it.
We're going to flour, egg wash and panko this.
You don't want to be an old, curmudgeony restaurant that just goes, "Oh, I only do it the old school way.
" But you also don't want to be the guy that's chasing every new trend just because it's new.
That's a difficult balance to strike.
It helps having young people in your kitchen because they always are constantly throwing new ideas at you.
Here we have a little bit of celery root puree.
Celery root on that? Yup.
That's disgusting.
Really? That sort of butting heads will always happen and it's a good thing.
That's where some of the best things come out is that, you know, clash.
So the selling point here is really the lobster and peas.
Pea tendrils.
A little lemon, a little olive oil.
Finish with just a touch of the Maldon sea salt.
Eel croquettes.
The one thing we haven't done with eel is use the eel.
Yeah.
What we do changes because nature is not static either.
I've never put eel and octopus together.
I know it's going to work.
They come from the same nebulous place.
They're both kind of in the margins.
The farms, agriculture is always in motion.
Beets are ready, the corn isn't, it never just stops.
Can we get creative? Let's do this.
You know what'd be cool is to have ingredients coming off the top.
That's exactly what I had in mind too.
See, we do think alike sometimes.
It's crazy, isn't it? I started thinking about the motion and the movement that happens.
It's very natural to adjust the items on the menu in small ways as the harvest adjusts.
We take the florets off.
This is when I really like you.
I was literally doing the exact same thing with my hand that you were doing on the board.
Octopus.
I want to do some chili thread.
This reminds me of barbecue, yeah? Oh, yeah.
And I can't have barbecue without some kind of pickle.
I think that would be an excellent garnish.
Pickled green strawberries are really cool.
How about a little charred grilled eggplant? Just a touch.
We have some nice wood sorrel.
This will offer a really nice lemony kind of feel to it as well.
I'm with you.
That sense of movement, that sense of constant changing is something that I want to reflect on the menu.
People are starting to get it.
There is this incredible palate, this panoramic landscape of cuisine and we don't have to be relegated to just eating chicken, beef and fish.
You get your two types of people.
The people that are just adventurous and say, "Oh, you know, anything weird I'm going to try.
" And then you get people that their husband or your son ordered it and, "Let me just take a bite," and they love it.
Those are the people that excite me the most, actually, the ones that are skeptical of you in the first place and then you see that click happen in their eyes.
Every once in a while you go to a restaurant and it's so different, so new.
And then you leave going, "Well, why didn't I think of that? And State Bird is one of those restaurants.
The way you do the stations as sort of dim sum style.
Yeah, my wife and I, we knew that we didn't want to cook a traditional menu anymore.
And to have as much freedom and flexibility in our cooking.
What if I wanted to do just a rabbit kidney dish and how many would I sell? Yeah, yeah.
Zero.
We eat first with our eyes, right? If I put it in front of your face, if I make it totally affordable, people would jump at that.
You know, there's four of us at this table, let's try this dish.
So it really creates a more experimental diner.
It sort of liberates everyone.
We can be just incredibly creative.
After the rabbits get broken down, we marinate the kidneys and the belly in a mixture of turmeric, ginger, garlic with oil.
And then we brown out the bones, puree it and we make this really killer rabbit curry sauce.
And it's modeled after the roti that you would have in Southeast Asia.
Sure.
We're going to do the same thing, but with a lot of spring, local ingredients, peas and asparagus.
Ginger? And of course a little fresh ginger.
Something like this would fall under this category where we just have like let's say six orders.
And when it's out, it's out.
You never have enough of them.
Sometimes we create it as we go.
It really allows for a spontaneous style of cooking.
I love that.
You know, we can use everything, and that's the key.
The global pantry, so to speak, and creating a food that is based on techniques versus regional, specific city.
You know, something like a curried rabbit and burrata on the same menu is really what a lot of American cooking is.
And that's the point.
We're all cooking American food.
The food of our identity.
As chefs we travel a lot.
And we bring back so much inspiration into our kitchen.
But I also grew up with a lot of flavors of, like, Vietnam and Malaysia growing up in California.
There's a huge melting pot.
That looks amazing, by the way.
Yeah, gorgeous.
We would basically Do a little tent.
Yeah, and then what I love is to grate that up kind of all over.
Long peppercorn? Really fragrant.
Just cut the rabbit belly into thin slices.
The ideas are really endless, you know.
So this is our spring rabbit kidney curry with grilled belly and roti.
It's beautiful, man.
There's that line of controlling chaos, that liminal space.
I've always been drawn to people who can navigate through life in that space.
Jim Harrison has lived to tell about it, to write about it in these beautiful words that just punch you in the chest.
It just kind of shakes you.
"Wake up.
"Live.
"Be adventurous.
See the world.
" Jim Harrison is an idol of mine.
I started reading his food writing first.
He's an incredible gourmand, but also a hilarious writer, someone who's not only written about life, but has lived it.
Gluttony without finesse is barbaric.
And Jim Harrison is one of the most refined people.
This dish is dedicated to him.
It is very excessive, but it is not without finesse.
I have oxtail crépinettes, escargot, some sweetbreads, and foie gras.
I thought, you know, why not just put all of that into one plate? Jim Harrison, his life is a work of art.
The way he lives, the way he inspires others to live.
There are very few people that come along in any generation that live like that.
There's even fewer people that can live like that and write about it.
You can be a wonderful chef your entire life and at the end of it you have absolutely nothing to show for it.
It's very Buddhist.
You go to the grave with no possessions, nothing.
Just a lifetime of making food that's really pretty and people enjoyed it and that's it.
At the end of the day, food is really just a metaphor for our own mortality.
Put it this way, this whole thing the restaurant, the chef thing you know, it's gone.
It can be gone tomorrow.
We know for sure that that will die one day.
That will end.
And so you just keep going.
My wife says to me all the time like, "Take a breath, relax.
" And I said, "You know, not yet, not just yet.
" Because I know it's coming.
It's just a question of when.
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