The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e12 Episode Script
Strawberry
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
The mission at Chef David Kinch's restaurant Manresa is simple showcase the highest quality ingredients of not only the season, but of that day.
Whatever the garden provides on any given day is what goes on the menu that night.
I'll need some greens.
Is the broccoli better today? Oh, yeah.
And as seasons cycle through, ingredients come and go.
Spring is a particularly special time in Manresa's kitchen.
The garden is in full bloom, the weather is perfect, and the smell of strawberries is in the air.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
You can actually taste the sun.
I don't know how we're going to top that one.
It's the fun part in cooking.
Cheers.
There are more days than not in California where you walk outside, and it just feels good.
It's not just nice day.
It's, like, it feels good.
Temperature's perfect, the humidity is perfect, the sun is perfect.
Just smelling strawberries in the air.
Wonderful sun-kissed aroma.
Hand cranked vanilla ice cream with crushed strawberries over the top, mmm.
Trying to wax poetic on strawberries here.
I'm digging deep.
A lot of strawberries, they almost just burst.
Intensely sweet sugar bombs.
But strawberries in Northern California, there's a bite.
That acidic pop, probably coupled with a little bit more of a firm texture.
And probably why I like to cook them.
If you had a puree of strawberries and a puree of ripe tomatoes in a bowl, could you really tell the difference? Not always.
Simply just replace tomatoes with strawberries, and it still worked.
It was still savory.
Something isn't quite right, but in a good way.
Super-rich raw tomato puree on steroids.
I'm going to have the onion and fennel ready in a moment.
Perfect diced onions.
Nothing's ever perfect.
Ah.
Wabi-sabi.
Wabi-sabi.
Beauty is in the imperfections.
We have a little bit of a reunion here in the Manresa kitchen.
Jeremy Fox, the great Jeremy Fox, longtime chef de cuisine here at Manresa.
These are some good looking strawberries.
Yeah, they are.
Sofrito, since it is cooked down for so long, I want it to be, like, a really intense tomato sauce.
This recipe's great.
Really innovative.
Just my kind of wheelhouse.
Traditional, familiar, yet something tweaked just a little bit that takes it into new territory.
So why don't you start what do we do? Olive oil.
Onion and fennel.
Feel like these should be diced nicer, though.
I'll do better next time.
It's pretty perfect.
And pine nuts, untoasted.
They're going to comfit in this oil.
When the pine nuts are toasted, you know that the rest of the ingredients are where you want them to be.
Then you put the strawberries in.
That cooks out until it's jammy and nice and savory.
It's a long process.
It's not instant gratification by any means.
Good cooking waits for no one.
Slow and low.
Slow and low, let yourself go.
Not it almost looks like a fresh fruit compote.
But that's going to change.
I suppose you could just put that on some ice cream right now.
Well, maybe not ice cream with the onions, but Three hours later, boom! Letting time do its magic.
Check out the pine nuts.
Almost seems like the color of the berry itself.
Separated oil in it, which is what you want.
In a fancy French kitchen, this would be incorrect.
Yes.
Because it would be broken.
But that's the beauty of it.
Polenta time.
Whey polenta.
No "whey.
" "Whey!" A byproduct of making the ricotta.
Goat's milk whey good for the liver.
Two to one, whey to polenta.
Then I'll add another one part cream.
Then the cheese and butter gets folded in afterward, like risotto.
Butter make it taste more better.
How did you come up with the idea of serving the polenta with the strawberry sofrito? I have this fascination with peasant food.
At its heart, polenta is peasant food, and sofrito is peasant food.
It's all these classic, traditional things that aren't fancy.
It's mush.
I like strawberries because the first, like, really luscious fruit of the year.
You can't wait for them to come in season, then you cook like crazy with them.
Sometimes you're still sad when it ends.
As soon as you're, like, figuring it out, how it works, then it's gone.
It smells amazing.
Mmm.
Mmm.
Tastes good.
It's good.
Breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
Or dessert.
The strawberries grow almost on the surface of the ground.
It's one of those rare fruit where the seeds are on the outside and not on the inside.
So the seeds have a tendency to pick up a lot of dirt.
The leaves are very distinctive.
It's fairly harmless.
It's not going to sting you.
The plant acts as a canopy, so there's not a real direct contact with the sun, which would sunburn them, causing them to ripen too rapidly.
It's pretty magical.
You can almost taste as if the sun is still in the fruit.
The sun is an ingredient.
Strawberries in their unripe state, when they are green, are really, really hard, like a rock.
They don't have much of an aroma.
It's more of a tang.
Really, really tart.
What is the process for making these palatable and making it work? We're going to do an experiment.
I'm going to make it exactly as I would if I was making umeboshi.
Umeboshi is usually made with what is thought to be plums, when in actuality, they are unripe apricots.
I use sea salt and shiso, otherwise known as perilla.
These are very fragrant right away.
The predominant flavor is going to be a naturally salty flavor, just like umeboshi.
And I'm hoping that they will soften up and their real true character will come out.
Trying to coat it as much as possible.
I'm just superstitious.
We're going to put it away in a jar at room temperature so the fermentation can start.
30 days.
Time and patience.
It's going to bear little resemblance to its current state.
If given umeboshi, I immediately think about doing a sashimi-style dish.
An iconic and legendary ingredient of the coast of California.
Spiny lobster.
Used to be all over the place.
Now protected with a very tight season.
It looks prehistoric, almost.
Strong.
God, he's muscular.
He's in great shape.
Hard shell.
Yeah, this is going to be a fight.
Plunge this alive in the ice water, it would slowly expire and go to sleep.
The meat would contract away from the shell because of the intense cold.
Sometimes people give it a very quick steam, but to me that cooks the outside.
Here I want to have it as raw as possible.
I use a towel to protect my hands.
He still got me.
See what he did to a cutting board? What do you think he's going to do to someone's hands? I am going to use predominantly the tail.
The meat looks amazing.
Very different from an Atlantic lobster.
The meat is much more meaty, a lot less fatty.
Mmm.
It's sweet, oof! This is some clean ice water.
I'll tighten the meat even more, make it easier to slice.
I waited a year for this knife.
It's a Hattori Hanzo.
Blue steel.
Now it's firmed up already.
You can see where the edges are starting to curl.
See how the light plays off of it? It's what you see in really great sushi.
I want to cut it against the grain, so the fibers of the meat are as short as they can possibly be.
This is the final dressing here.
Very simple.
Equal parts of shiro dashi and extra virgin olive oil.
We take this decidedly Eastern ingredient and we combine it with one of the most Western elements of all.
Kind of blurs the line.
Green strawberry boshi.
They're salty.
There is a hint of fruit.
We didn't know exactly what was going to happen.
But I would be hard pressed to know that this was a strawberry if I tasted it blind.
After it's been pureed and tamis-ed, it's the same consistency as umeboshi.
The other five elements that complete the dish stays with the raw theme.
The radish, really nice for crunch.
The shallot for a little bit of bite.
The scallion for color.
Toasted nori for its umami-esque qualities and its natural affinity for creatures from the sea.
And last, some beautiful little flowers to bring it all home.
Spiny lobster, sashimi style, and strawberry boshi.
All right.
The wild strawberry has been around since ancient times.
It was a symbol for Venus, the goddess of love, because of its heart shape and red color.
The ancient Romans believed that the berries Ugh.
The ancient Romans believed the berries alleviated symptoms of melancholy, fainting, and diseases of the blood, liver, and spleen.
The wild strawberry would be tamed by the 1300s, when the French began cultivating the wood strawberry.
By the 1500s, the musky strawberry made its way to European gardens.
Then in 1714, the Chilean strawberry was smuggled from Chile to France by a French spy.
All right, let's try this Frenchy phrase here.
Give me some Spanish, I say.
Then, in the year 1834, the first American strawberry variety was born.
Named after its father, Charles Hovey, the Hovey ushered in the start of a strawberry industry.
In 1851, James Wilson crossed the Hovey with other varieties and created a firmer and heartier variety that could be grown on nearly any soil.
Today, over half of the nearly three billion pounds of berries grown each year in the U.
S.
come from California.
That's all I got, yo.
We've got seascapes for you today.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Oh, they look great.
Berry-wise, strawberries are my favorite.
Really? I thought it was going to be cherries.
Cherry is a stone fruit.
It's still a fruit.
Stephanie Prida is a pastry chef at Manresa restaurant.
She's really inspired by fruit.
What exactly is the idea behind the dessert? There's three prominent flavors, which are sesame, strawberry, and burnt honey.
Kind of an ode to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Do you think the strawberries taste different at the beginning of the season and at the end of the season? The beginning, they're sweeter.
Yeah.
And towards the end they get a little back flavor.
For this dish, they're more of the focus.
Strawberry jam with some sesame paste instead of peanut butter.
Looks like peanut butter.
It reminds you of peanut butter, but you know it's not peanut butter.
But you know it's not.
We make sesame cream.
We toast sesame seeds super hard, and infuse it overnight.
A little bit of bitterness, too.
And so when you add the white chocolate, it rounds the whole thing out.
Take an ice cream scoop, and we cast these individual ring molds.
And then we take this sesame cake and insert it into the sesame paste.
So it's sesame-sesame.
Sesame squared.
Is there a top and a bottom on this? This is the top, and I usually just drop it, and then you set it in like this.
I can do that.
You can do that? I can do that.
So in other words, this is going to be the bottom of the dessert.
This is the bottom of the dessert.
I need to center this so that when you flip it out, people will not see the cake.
You don't see the cake.
Got it.
Yeah.
I can do that.
How's that, okay? That looks great.
What's next? It's strawberries with 50% weight sugar.
And we're going to cover it with plastic wrap to create isolated environment.
So no liquid.
It starts out dry.
And then with the head and the steam, all the juices are going to get released.
Next we're doing another strawberry layer with freeze-dried strawberries.
They're light, almost like a marshmallow.
We have this almond crumb.
And I add the strawberries until I get the color that I want.
It's like a rosé.
Yeah.
So that's why that freeze-dried works so well, is because there's no moisture content in here, and it's not going to clump it up.
Torching.
Oh, and you push out with the cake, oh, nice.
So this is what we spray them with.
It's an at-home paint gun.
Inside of this is white chocolate, cocoa butter, and a red cocoa butter color.
That's a triple word score, because you get to use the torch and a paint gun in the same dessert.
Even though it's not strawberry, it has the Strawberry color.
- The strawberry color.
Untouched by human hands, really pristine.
The berries have shrunk down in size.
And it's amazing we didn't add any liquid to this at all.
And see how clear.
It's beautiful.
Mmm.
Sweetness.
Oh, yeah.
I know that you like not uniform.
No uniform abstract cuts and different shapes.
Dress the strawberries, just like dressing a salad.
It's almost like cherry cough syrup.
That's so fragrant.
Strawberries that are tossed in strawberry syrup.
That really highlights what the strawberry is.
An amplification of an exceptional product.
So we start out with the mousse.
Some strawberry gel.
Strawberries that were tossed in the syrup.
This strawberry crumb baked element.
This is nasturtium oil.
Gives the dish this herbal element to it that's really nice.
Little sesame cookies.
And then just to tie everything in together, we have the burnt honey ice cream.
It's beautiful.
I like, personally, eating with the seasons, because I learn a lot.
Things show signs of coming in.
You see them grow a little bit more and more.
They lead up to a peak, and then there's a slow waning.
And a lot of different flavors and possibilities can come out.
The thing is, you start to get bored.
Things are around for two months, and you're using it as much as you can, and then you slowly see them start to wane, and you know what? Maybe your interest does, too.
You're moving on to something else that's coming into season.
Until March of next year, right when you're starting to obsess about strawberries.
The love affair will continue with the strawberries.
Support your PBS station.
The mission at Chef David Kinch's restaurant Manresa is simple showcase the highest quality ingredients of not only the season, but of that day.
Whatever the garden provides on any given day is what goes on the menu that night.
I'll need some greens.
Is the broccoli better today? Oh, yeah.
And as seasons cycle through, ingredients come and go.
Spring is a particularly special time in Manresa's kitchen.
The garden is in full bloom, the weather is perfect, and the smell of strawberries is in the air.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
You can actually taste the sun.
I don't know how we're going to top that one.
It's the fun part in cooking.
Cheers.
There are more days than not in California where you walk outside, and it just feels good.
It's not just nice day.
It's, like, it feels good.
Temperature's perfect, the humidity is perfect, the sun is perfect.
Just smelling strawberries in the air.
Wonderful sun-kissed aroma.
Hand cranked vanilla ice cream with crushed strawberries over the top, mmm.
Trying to wax poetic on strawberries here.
I'm digging deep.
A lot of strawberries, they almost just burst.
Intensely sweet sugar bombs.
But strawberries in Northern California, there's a bite.
That acidic pop, probably coupled with a little bit more of a firm texture.
And probably why I like to cook them.
If you had a puree of strawberries and a puree of ripe tomatoes in a bowl, could you really tell the difference? Not always.
Simply just replace tomatoes with strawberries, and it still worked.
It was still savory.
Something isn't quite right, but in a good way.
Super-rich raw tomato puree on steroids.
I'm going to have the onion and fennel ready in a moment.
Perfect diced onions.
Nothing's ever perfect.
Ah.
Wabi-sabi.
Wabi-sabi.
Beauty is in the imperfections.
We have a little bit of a reunion here in the Manresa kitchen.
Jeremy Fox, the great Jeremy Fox, longtime chef de cuisine here at Manresa.
These are some good looking strawberries.
Yeah, they are.
Sofrito, since it is cooked down for so long, I want it to be, like, a really intense tomato sauce.
This recipe's great.
Really innovative.
Just my kind of wheelhouse.
Traditional, familiar, yet something tweaked just a little bit that takes it into new territory.
So why don't you start what do we do? Olive oil.
Onion and fennel.
Feel like these should be diced nicer, though.
I'll do better next time.
It's pretty perfect.
And pine nuts, untoasted.
They're going to comfit in this oil.
When the pine nuts are toasted, you know that the rest of the ingredients are where you want them to be.
Then you put the strawberries in.
That cooks out until it's jammy and nice and savory.
It's a long process.
It's not instant gratification by any means.
Good cooking waits for no one.
Slow and low.
Slow and low, let yourself go.
Not it almost looks like a fresh fruit compote.
But that's going to change.
I suppose you could just put that on some ice cream right now.
Well, maybe not ice cream with the onions, but Three hours later, boom! Letting time do its magic.
Check out the pine nuts.
Almost seems like the color of the berry itself.
Separated oil in it, which is what you want.
In a fancy French kitchen, this would be incorrect.
Yes.
Because it would be broken.
But that's the beauty of it.
Polenta time.
Whey polenta.
No "whey.
" "Whey!" A byproduct of making the ricotta.
Goat's milk whey good for the liver.
Two to one, whey to polenta.
Then I'll add another one part cream.
Then the cheese and butter gets folded in afterward, like risotto.
Butter make it taste more better.
How did you come up with the idea of serving the polenta with the strawberry sofrito? I have this fascination with peasant food.
At its heart, polenta is peasant food, and sofrito is peasant food.
It's all these classic, traditional things that aren't fancy.
It's mush.
I like strawberries because the first, like, really luscious fruit of the year.
You can't wait for them to come in season, then you cook like crazy with them.
Sometimes you're still sad when it ends.
As soon as you're, like, figuring it out, how it works, then it's gone.
It smells amazing.
Mmm.
Mmm.
Tastes good.
It's good.
Breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
Or dessert.
The strawberries grow almost on the surface of the ground.
It's one of those rare fruit where the seeds are on the outside and not on the inside.
So the seeds have a tendency to pick up a lot of dirt.
The leaves are very distinctive.
It's fairly harmless.
It's not going to sting you.
The plant acts as a canopy, so there's not a real direct contact with the sun, which would sunburn them, causing them to ripen too rapidly.
It's pretty magical.
You can almost taste as if the sun is still in the fruit.
The sun is an ingredient.
Strawberries in their unripe state, when they are green, are really, really hard, like a rock.
They don't have much of an aroma.
It's more of a tang.
Really, really tart.
What is the process for making these palatable and making it work? We're going to do an experiment.
I'm going to make it exactly as I would if I was making umeboshi.
Umeboshi is usually made with what is thought to be plums, when in actuality, they are unripe apricots.
I use sea salt and shiso, otherwise known as perilla.
These are very fragrant right away.
The predominant flavor is going to be a naturally salty flavor, just like umeboshi.
And I'm hoping that they will soften up and their real true character will come out.
Trying to coat it as much as possible.
I'm just superstitious.
We're going to put it away in a jar at room temperature so the fermentation can start.
30 days.
Time and patience.
It's going to bear little resemblance to its current state.
If given umeboshi, I immediately think about doing a sashimi-style dish.
An iconic and legendary ingredient of the coast of California.
Spiny lobster.
Used to be all over the place.
Now protected with a very tight season.
It looks prehistoric, almost.
Strong.
God, he's muscular.
He's in great shape.
Hard shell.
Yeah, this is going to be a fight.
Plunge this alive in the ice water, it would slowly expire and go to sleep.
The meat would contract away from the shell because of the intense cold.
Sometimes people give it a very quick steam, but to me that cooks the outside.
Here I want to have it as raw as possible.
I use a towel to protect my hands.
He still got me.
See what he did to a cutting board? What do you think he's going to do to someone's hands? I am going to use predominantly the tail.
The meat looks amazing.
Very different from an Atlantic lobster.
The meat is much more meaty, a lot less fatty.
Mmm.
It's sweet, oof! This is some clean ice water.
I'll tighten the meat even more, make it easier to slice.
I waited a year for this knife.
It's a Hattori Hanzo.
Blue steel.
Now it's firmed up already.
You can see where the edges are starting to curl.
See how the light plays off of it? It's what you see in really great sushi.
I want to cut it against the grain, so the fibers of the meat are as short as they can possibly be.
This is the final dressing here.
Very simple.
Equal parts of shiro dashi and extra virgin olive oil.
We take this decidedly Eastern ingredient and we combine it with one of the most Western elements of all.
Kind of blurs the line.
Green strawberry boshi.
They're salty.
There is a hint of fruit.
We didn't know exactly what was going to happen.
But I would be hard pressed to know that this was a strawberry if I tasted it blind.
After it's been pureed and tamis-ed, it's the same consistency as umeboshi.
The other five elements that complete the dish stays with the raw theme.
The radish, really nice for crunch.
The shallot for a little bit of bite.
The scallion for color.
Toasted nori for its umami-esque qualities and its natural affinity for creatures from the sea.
And last, some beautiful little flowers to bring it all home.
Spiny lobster, sashimi style, and strawberry boshi.
All right.
The wild strawberry has been around since ancient times.
It was a symbol for Venus, the goddess of love, because of its heart shape and red color.
The ancient Romans believed that the berries Ugh.
The ancient Romans believed the berries alleviated symptoms of melancholy, fainting, and diseases of the blood, liver, and spleen.
The wild strawberry would be tamed by the 1300s, when the French began cultivating the wood strawberry.
By the 1500s, the musky strawberry made its way to European gardens.
Then in 1714, the Chilean strawberry was smuggled from Chile to France by a French spy.
All right, let's try this Frenchy phrase here.
Give me some Spanish, I say.
Then, in the year 1834, the first American strawberry variety was born.
Named after its father, Charles Hovey, the Hovey ushered in the start of a strawberry industry.
In 1851, James Wilson crossed the Hovey with other varieties and created a firmer and heartier variety that could be grown on nearly any soil.
Today, over half of the nearly three billion pounds of berries grown each year in the U.
S.
come from California.
That's all I got, yo.
We've got seascapes for you today.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Oh, they look great.
Berry-wise, strawberries are my favorite.
Really? I thought it was going to be cherries.
Cherry is a stone fruit.
It's still a fruit.
Stephanie Prida is a pastry chef at Manresa restaurant.
She's really inspired by fruit.
What exactly is the idea behind the dessert? There's three prominent flavors, which are sesame, strawberry, and burnt honey.
Kind of an ode to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Do you think the strawberries taste different at the beginning of the season and at the end of the season? The beginning, they're sweeter.
Yeah.
And towards the end they get a little back flavor.
For this dish, they're more of the focus.
Strawberry jam with some sesame paste instead of peanut butter.
Looks like peanut butter.
It reminds you of peanut butter, but you know it's not peanut butter.
But you know it's not.
We make sesame cream.
We toast sesame seeds super hard, and infuse it overnight.
A little bit of bitterness, too.
And so when you add the white chocolate, it rounds the whole thing out.
Take an ice cream scoop, and we cast these individual ring molds.
And then we take this sesame cake and insert it into the sesame paste.
So it's sesame-sesame.
Sesame squared.
Is there a top and a bottom on this? This is the top, and I usually just drop it, and then you set it in like this.
I can do that.
You can do that? I can do that.
So in other words, this is going to be the bottom of the dessert.
This is the bottom of the dessert.
I need to center this so that when you flip it out, people will not see the cake.
You don't see the cake.
Got it.
Yeah.
I can do that.
How's that, okay? That looks great.
What's next? It's strawberries with 50% weight sugar.
And we're going to cover it with plastic wrap to create isolated environment.
So no liquid.
It starts out dry.
And then with the head and the steam, all the juices are going to get released.
Next we're doing another strawberry layer with freeze-dried strawberries.
They're light, almost like a marshmallow.
We have this almond crumb.
And I add the strawberries until I get the color that I want.
It's like a rosé.
Yeah.
So that's why that freeze-dried works so well, is because there's no moisture content in here, and it's not going to clump it up.
Torching.
Oh, and you push out with the cake, oh, nice.
So this is what we spray them with.
It's an at-home paint gun.
Inside of this is white chocolate, cocoa butter, and a red cocoa butter color.
That's a triple word score, because you get to use the torch and a paint gun in the same dessert.
Even though it's not strawberry, it has the Strawberry color.
- The strawberry color.
Untouched by human hands, really pristine.
The berries have shrunk down in size.
And it's amazing we didn't add any liquid to this at all.
And see how clear.
It's beautiful.
Mmm.
Sweetness.
Oh, yeah.
I know that you like not uniform.
No uniform abstract cuts and different shapes.
Dress the strawberries, just like dressing a salad.
It's almost like cherry cough syrup.
That's so fragrant.
Strawberries that are tossed in strawberry syrup.
That really highlights what the strawberry is.
An amplification of an exceptional product.
So we start out with the mousse.
Some strawberry gel.
Strawberries that were tossed in the syrup.
This strawberry crumb baked element.
This is nasturtium oil.
Gives the dish this herbal element to it that's really nice.
Little sesame cookies.
And then just to tie everything in together, we have the burnt honey ice cream.
It's beautiful.
I like, personally, eating with the seasons, because I learn a lot.
Things show signs of coming in.
You see them grow a little bit more and more.
They lead up to a peak, and then there's a slow waning.
And a lot of different flavors and possibilities can come out.
The thing is, you start to get bored.
Things are around for two months, and you're using it as much as you can, and then you slowly see them start to wane, and you know what? Maybe your interest does, too.
You're moving on to something else that's coming into season.
Until March of next year, right when you're starting to obsess about strawberries.
The love affair will continue with the strawberries.