The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e13 Episode Script
Balance
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
For chef David Kinch, balance means occasionally stepping out from behind the line.
Even the things you are most passionate about can wear you out if you don't take a break.
Let's go, let's go! What's missing? Growth comes from exploration, collaboration and experimentation, both inside and outside of the kitchen.
Doesn't look bad.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
The sun is an ingredient.
Mmm this is the fun part in cooking.
Cheers.
Finding some sort of balance between your personal and professional life, that's really hard to do in our industry, because it's so relentless.
Let's go, let's go! What a lot of chefs talk about at some point in time in their career, they say, "I've been doing this, I work till 1:00 in the morning.
"My feet hurt, I don't have a personal life What can I do to get out?" And they're leaving something that they've been very passionate about for the majority of their young life.
I guess I understand to learn your craft, sometimes you have to go through these systems.
It's like military, you know, a level of discipline, and working long, long, long hours.
But to get away and to unwind and to relax is very important.
It's funny how you take a break and you get really isolated and you end up cooking.
There's something very appealing about that.
I used to have chefs ask me to make them omelettes to see if I could get a job or not.
I don't think it happens anymore.
It doesn't happen anymore.
I mean, what would you do for a cook? What would you have them make, you know, if you want to see if they can walk the walk? I make them open oysters.
Oh, no punctured bellies? Oysters and clams.
Carlo Mirarchi is the chef and owner of Blanca and Roberta's in Brooklyn.
He's a very good friend of mine.
I wanted him to come out to California and show him a little bit about where I've been, where I'm from.
I had a humbling experience about five, six years ago.
Visiting chef I had Alain Passard come and cook at my restaurant.
And every night at the end of the service, he'd be, like, "Make me dinner," and I'd have to cook him dinner.
And one night he says, "Make me an omelette.
" I made him an omelette and I was about ready to go out and his sous-chef was, like, "Oh, no-no-no-no-no.
" They proceeded to show me how to do it.
And it's really, really brilliant and it kind of flies in the face, I think, that you and I were always shown how to make an omelette.
And omelettes were always one of those things where there was a way to do it, and this is how it's done, and Mm-hmm.
You know, if you do it other ways, like a frittata or you fold it over to the side, then it's something different.
But an omelette is an omelette is an omelette.
It's a perfect representation of what can happen to eggs when they're cooked perfectly.
Eggs at room temperature, not cold out of the fridge.
I'm going to do three whole eggs Because I like to do three whole eggs and then one yolk.
Okay, let's do that.
We don't have to do that.
Let's do that.
All right, okay.
Just a touch of water.
I use a fork instead of a whisk, because you don't want to incorporate air into it.
Essentially you just want to homogenize it.
You want to bring it together.
It starts to lighten up a little bit in color Now, to me, this is ready to go.
And I have not added any salt into this at all.
There we go.
You want it to all come together, no color on the bottom.
They're not runny on the inside.
Really kind of the beauty of the whole thing is it's just eggs and butter, but by technique, it kind of really elevates it to a really beautiful texture.
This is key.
So it's shaped Just give it a little bath in homemade salted butter, just enough to make it shine.
The only salt that's been added to it we're adding to it right now.
To me, that's a good omelette.
This is delicious.
Would you hire me? I would.
You can be the junior breakfast cook.
The omelette bar.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
This is raw goat's milk here.
I'm going to try and make a real simple fresh farmer's cheese.
The cheese picks up a bit of a smoky flavor.
I'm going to really dig it.
As fresh as you can get right there.
Some fresh cream, not a lot.
And I'm going to put a little cow's milk in just to enrich it a little bit.
Some sea salt.
Going to warm this up.
This is the first time I've ever done it on a wood fire, but I think it's going to work.
Starting to form a skin, so it's ready.
Throw me the knife.
Knife? Thank you, chef.
What an amazing pot.
Something very goth about it.
It's getting really close to a boil.
And I'm going to let it continue to drain.
I'm fascinated by pizza.
I think the relationship between the person who's making the pizza and the oven is really important.
The best pizza I ever had are people who are really fanatical about their ovens.
There's people who make it, who just chase it their whole life and they still don't feel that they got it down.
Mother Teresa said that she felt the presence of God once for five minutes.
Was she eating pizza? And then she spent the whole rest of her life dedicated to what that moment meant.
Maybe all it takes is one good slice.
Evan Shively is a legendary character in Northern California, original gangster at Chez Panisse, one of the greatest cooks I know.
I knew that Carlo and Evan would get along really well.
Do you want to give me a little chili flake? Do you grow these chilis here? Do you dry these here? No, I have a day job.
Some of that pecorino.
Ooh, pecorino.
Tell me about this guanciale; it's amazing.
So this guanciale my dad and I make, we dry in the basement of the house on Long Island.
Onion petals.
That's the sweet spot.
Hot dough.
That looks pretty good.
Hurry up and slice it.
The dough is like another planet.
The guanciale is delicious.
I don't know how we're going to top that one.
How about some fava beans? Fava beans? On a pizza pie? Che pazzo! I'm going to take a look at my cheese.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
What is that, goat? It's goat.
This should be pretty good.
We have just a real quick farmer's-style ricotta made with goat's milk.
And these roasted fava beans with the cheese I think will be great.
Just walking around here, saw the savory.
Wasn't even thinking about putting savory on a pizza.
Yet here we are.
And here we are.
- Here we find ourselves.
Do you put the savory right on it? Mm-hmm.
- Okay.
Good.
Little bit too much.
Perfect, sorry, chef.
Please don't send me home.
I think the mint would go really nice too, though mint on a pizza sounds kind of odd.
I guess we're going to find out.
Oh, you have flowers? It's going to be a flower pizza.
Ohh Mamma mia! Do not laugh.
Apply the "gahnish.
" Okay.
Sounding pretty good.
See how it tastes.
Mmm.
That's just really beautiful.
That tastes pretty, too.
Sold.
Oh, it's not starting.
I think it needs a jump.
Do you want to bump-start it? Yeah.
Are you in neutral? It's in neutral.
Faster, Carlo! I can't get it any more up that hill.
By myself.
Okay.
Stop.
All right, so what's the plan? You going to go down this way? Yeah, down this way.
All right, ready? Never turned.
All right, we need to jump it.
We're getting what we deserve right now.
All right, you're hooked up! Rev the engine! Got it? So we're going to do this seaweed-sunchoke dish.
Where did this dish come from? It's vegan it's a vegan dish.
Yeah, it ended up being.
We didn't really think about it but we just finished it and we're like, "Oh, it's vegan, by the way.
" So you didn't create a dish for a vegan scenario at the restaurant? Yeah, it worked out that way.
We had bees on the roof so we had a lot of honeycomb, and we had sea lettuces in from our Maine guy.
We wanted to do something with the honeycomb and the seaweed in a fun way.
And we just started fooling around.
It took, like, six months to figure this dish out.
Even though it's really simple, there was a lot of trial and error to find the right seaweed that balances well with the honey.
It was the balance of flavors that was the hardest thing? Yeah, and the mouth feel, too, is really important for this dish because there's a lot of texture.
Sunchokes I like a lot because they have a ton of inulin, which, when they're stored, turns into sugar, which makes them really sweet, but not being too starchy, which is nice.
What am I doing, am I laying this out? Lay those out flat because we're going to dehydrate that.
You're on the "de-hy" duty, chef.
I know how to do this.
This is ulva, our sea lettuce.
It's harvested from Maine.
We get it in, we rinse it, and then dehydrate it overnight.
It also has a lot of clinging salinity.
It does, it sure does.
Then the green almonds.
It's a fresh almond.
An almond is actually the kernel of the almond fruit.
Are those hard to find on the East Coast? Yeah, they don't exist on the East Coast.
They come from here.
- From California, yeah.
We're trying to get stuff from all over.
We have our own garden, we grow a lot of stuff that we use.
Probably 85% of what we use comes from the East Coast, but, you know, sometimes something just needs something that every once in a while you can't get.
I think that's okay.
It is okay.
This is the sunchokes that we just cut.
Just working hard at this.
They caramelize so fast.
Really, really nice and quick.
That looks great.
Looks nice, right? Like sunchoke cracklings.
I kind of want to eat it.
We're going to make the sauce now.
We add a little bit of soy milk here.
Then we'll add a little bit of the sunchoke stock.
So basically we'll just let this cook down for a little bit, and then we'll purée it, pass it through a coffee filter.
So it picks up the caramelized flavor.
Yeah, it does, yeah, but not too much.
Just enough to make it a little toasty, but nothing crazy.
It kind of just tastes like ice cream base at this point.
Sunchoke makes a great ice cream because of all those sugars.
Mm-hmm.
All right, so we're right there, pretty much.
We'll put it in the Vita-Prep, buzz it and then pass it through a coffee filter and that'll be our sauce.
Voilà ! The magic of television.
Pretty fancy for a vegan dish.
Yeah, I know, right? Oof, man.
What do you start with first? Sunchoke.
Then we'll do a little bit of the toasted seaweed.
The seaweed moves when you plate it it looks really cool.
National Geographic right there.
Then we just do a little bit of the honeycomb.
And then for the green almond, I like to actually open them up, squeeze the gel out.
Oh, nice.
A little messy, but it looks nice.
I bet it tastes good, too.
It's kind of aromatic.
How about some coriander flowers? Ooh, do you have some? Oh, boy.
It's done I think.
So, vegan surf-'n-turf.
For me, a true vacation is just recharging everything.
Nothing else matters for a while.
And then you come back and you're almost like a different person.
There is a good stretch of 1 before San Francisco where you become completely disconnected.
Phones don't work, you get no signal of any kind.
And nowadays, that's going off the radar, that's a big deal.
And I like that.
You know, to me, when I want to get away, it's really important that that happens.
I think as the restaurant has become more popular, it's become more important to find the ability to drop away.
Make no mistake.
It's a meat-off.
There are no rules.
I've always associated great steak cook with Carlo.
Carlo's one of the first people that I heard about who was aging meat past the norm to get more flavors and to get more nuance and character out of meat.
And always great sourcing.
I still don't know where he gets his beef from.
Your steak, definitely an animal with wagyu in it.
Yeah.
Just a really, really even pattern of marbling all along as opposed to being grouped in certain areas and not evenly distributed.
I have a West Coast source that I like very much, but I also think it's really incredibly different.
Hence, the purpose for a meat-off.
Yeah, we're going to celebrate the difference.
Right? Yeah.
They're both strip loins, they're both on the bone.
You're taking it off the bone, David? I'm just taking this one bone out because I'm going to cut it thick.
There's many different ways to cook meat.
You can cook 'em slow, you can cook it really, really fast.
For this particular cut, I like to go a really, really high heat but try and have as much control over it as possible.
On a grill this big, you want to have a really, really super hot spot and another place that's not so hot, so I can control the temperature by moving the meat on and off the heat.
Binchotan to me burns very, very clean, but it's tremendously hot.
It burns almost smokeless, but use the hard wood, because we're outdoors.
For beef I like it because it burns really, really hot but it burns really fast.
Yeah.
I'm getting really close.
Yeah, me too.
Looks like I'm using a lot of salt, but it's all going to cook right off.
Looks amazing.
I salt probably not as much as other people do, because I'm a big fan of salting it after it's cooked.
I don't put pepper on it at the beginning, either, because pepper burns.
When pepper burns, it gets really acrid and bitter.
So it's just meat and salt.
When people taste this, I tell them it tastes like the steaks that your fathers and your grandfathers used to have.
You know, before animals were bred for efficiency.
Do you do those crosshatches? Yeah.
Whoo! Still got it.
That's right.
When those flames hit the beef, a little bit's okay, but a lot is not okay.
I think it starts making it taste like the charcoal.
How important is the char to you? I like a nice one, but nothing crazy.
You don't like that super crusty, like that 1400 It doesn't work well.
You lose a lot of the nuance.
It dries out.
- Yeah.
The thing is, the loins are so big, you can age it for a really long time.
And how long was that? Three or four months.
30 days on this, you know, it's nothing.
You lose a little bit of water weight, but that's it.
Look at that amazing, huh? It can get mesmerizing, can't it? Just watching the fire.
Cooking outdoors, there's something relaxing about it.
Especially if you're working with an open fire.
It immediately becomes more rustic, can put you much more attached to the act of cooking.
Usually it's not for an event.
You're cooking for yourself or friends, so it's much more intimate, and it's much more personal.
You also don't feel a lot of pressure to analyze things.
It's more about eating well and having a good time.
Which is very important on a day off.
We're moving away from the period where it's just heads down, work, work, work, work all the time, because it beats people up.
You have better longevity, you have more creative powers, I think you live a more healthy life if you find that balance.
I've only had one restaurant.
And that is because I always like going to work.
I like working at night, cooking food, making people happy.
It's kind of what drives me.
And I've learned to accept that.
But how long is that going to happen? It's just learning when to take time off, learning when to recharge my batteries, learning to delegate, which is really the last thing chefs learn to do.
"I can do it better than anybody that works for me, so I'm going to do it," as opposed to just like taking a deep breath and realizing that you've trained people and you trust them and you're paying them to do the job and to actually take a step back and let them do it.
To make that happen, you have to accept, "I'm going to step away.
" And you know what you're going to find out? Sometimes it runs even better.
Because that's part of balance, that's the part about how it happens.
Support your PBS station.
For chef David Kinch, balance means occasionally stepping out from behind the line.
Even the things you are most passionate about can wear you out if you don't take a break.
Let's go, let's go! What's missing? Growth comes from exploration, collaboration and experimentation, both inside and outside of the kitchen.
Doesn't look bad.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
The sun is an ingredient.
Mmm this is the fun part in cooking.
Cheers.
Finding some sort of balance between your personal and professional life, that's really hard to do in our industry, because it's so relentless.
Let's go, let's go! What a lot of chefs talk about at some point in time in their career, they say, "I've been doing this, I work till 1:00 in the morning.
"My feet hurt, I don't have a personal life What can I do to get out?" And they're leaving something that they've been very passionate about for the majority of their young life.
I guess I understand to learn your craft, sometimes you have to go through these systems.
It's like military, you know, a level of discipline, and working long, long, long hours.
But to get away and to unwind and to relax is very important.
It's funny how you take a break and you get really isolated and you end up cooking.
There's something very appealing about that.
I used to have chefs ask me to make them omelettes to see if I could get a job or not.
I don't think it happens anymore.
It doesn't happen anymore.
I mean, what would you do for a cook? What would you have them make, you know, if you want to see if they can walk the walk? I make them open oysters.
Oh, no punctured bellies? Oysters and clams.
Carlo Mirarchi is the chef and owner of Blanca and Roberta's in Brooklyn.
He's a very good friend of mine.
I wanted him to come out to California and show him a little bit about where I've been, where I'm from.
I had a humbling experience about five, six years ago.
Visiting chef I had Alain Passard come and cook at my restaurant.
And every night at the end of the service, he'd be, like, "Make me dinner," and I'd have to cook him dinner.
And one night he says, "Make me an omelette.
" I made him an omelette and I was about ready to go out and his sous-chef was, like, "Oh, no-no-no-no-no.
" They proceeded to show me how to do it.
And it's really, really brilliant and it kind of flies in the face, I think, that you and I were always shown how to make an omelette.
And omelettes were always one of those things where there was a way to do it, and this is how it's done, and Mm-hmm.
You know, if you do it other ways, like a frittata or you fold it over to the side, then it's something different.
But an omelette is an omelette is an omelette.
It's a perfect representation of what can happen to eggs when they're cooked perfectly.
Eggs at room temperature, not cold out of the fridge.
I'm going to do three whole eggs Because I like to do three whole eggs and then one yolk.
Okay, let's do that.
We don't have to do that.
Let's do that.
All right, okay.
Just a touch of water.
I use a fork instead of a whisk, because you don't want to incorporate air into it.
Essentially you just want to homogenize it.
You want to bring it together.
It starts to lighten up a little bit in color Now, to me, this is ready to go.
And I have not added any salt into this at all.
There we go.
You want it to all come together, no color on the bottom.
They're not runny on the inside.
Really kind of the beauty of the whole thing is it's just eggs and butter, but by technique, it kind of really elevates it to a really beautiful texture.
This is key.
So it's shaped Just give it a little bath in homemade salted butter, just enough to make it shine.
The only salt that's been added to it we're adding to it right now.
To me, that's a good omelette.
This is delicious.
Would you hire me? I would.
You can be the junior breakfast cook.
The omelette bar.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
This is raw goat's milk here.
I'm going to try and make a real simple fresh farmer's cheese.
The cheese picks up a bit of a smoky flavor.
I'm going to really dig it.
As fresh as you can get right there.
Some fresh cream, not a lot.
And I'm going to put a little cow's milk in just to enrich it a little bit.
Some sea salt.
Going to warm this up.
This is the first time I've ever done it on a wood fire, but I think it's going to work.
Starting to form a skin, so it's ready.
Throw me the knife.
Knife? Thank you, chef.
What an amazing pot.
Something very goth about it.
It's getting really close to a boil.
And I'm going to let it continue to drain.
I'm fascinated by pizza.
I think the relationship between the person who's making the pizza and the oven is really important.
The best pizza I ever had are people who are really fanatical about their ovens.
There's people who make it, who just chase it their whole life and they still don't feel that they got it down.
Mother Teresa said that she felt the presence of God once for five minutes.
Was she eating pizza? And then she spent the whole rest of her life dedicated to what that moment meant.
Maybe all it takes is one good slice.
Evan Shively is a legendary character in Northern California, original gangster at Chez Panisse, one of the greatest cooks I know.
I knew that Carlo and Evan would get along really well.
Do you want to give me a little chili flake? Do you grow these chilis here? Do you dry these here? No, I have a day job.
Some of that pecorino.
Ooh, pecorino.
Tell me about this guanciale; it's amazing.
So this guanciale my dad and I make, we dry in the basement of the house on Long Island.
Onion petals.
That's the sweet spot.
Hot dough.
That looks pretty good.
Hurry up and slice it.
The dough is like another planet.
The guanciale is delicious.
I don't know how we're going to top that one.
How about some fava beans? Fava beans? On a pizza pie? Che pazzo! I'm going to take a look at my cheese.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
What is that, goat? It's goat.
This should be pretty good.
We have just a real quick farmer's-style ricotta made with goat's milk.
And these roasted fava beans with the cheese I think will be great.
Just walking around here, saw the savory.
Wasn't even thinking about putting savory on a pizza.
Yet here we are.
And here we are.
- Here we find ourselves.
Do you put the savory right on it? Mm-hmm.
- Okay.
Good.
Little bit too much.
Perfect, sorry, chef.
Please don't send me home.
I think the mint would go really nice too, though mint on a pizza sounds kind of odd.
I guess we're going to find out.
Oh, you have flowers? It's going to be a flower pizza.
Ohh Mamma mia! Do not laugh.
Apply the "gahnish.
" Okay.
Sounding pretty good.
See how it tastes.
Mmm.
That's just really beautiful.
That tastes pretty, too.
Sold.
Oh, it's not starting.
I think it needs a jump.
Do you want to bump-start it? Yeah.
Are you in neutral? It's in neutral.
Faster, Carlo! I can't get it any more up that hill.
By myself.
Okay.
Stop.
All right, so what's the plan? You going to go down this way? Yeah, down this way.
All right, ready? Never turned.
All right, we need to jump it.
We're getting what we deserve right now.
All right, you're hooked up! Rev the engine! Got it? So we're going to do this seaweed-sunchoke dish.
Where did this dish come from? It's vegan it's a vegan dish.
Yeah, it ended up being.
We didn't really think about it but we just finished it and we're like, "Oh, it's vegan, by the way.
" So you didn't create a dish for a vegan scenario at the restaurant? Yeah, it worked out that way.
We had bees on the roof so we had a lot of honeycomb, and we had sea lettuces in from our Maine guy.
We wanted to do something with the honeycomb and the seaweed in a fun way.
And we just started fooling around.
It took, like, six months to figure this dish out.
Even though it's really simple, there was a lot of trial and error to find the right seaweed that balances well with the honey.
It was the balance of flavors that was the hardest thing? Yeah, and the mouth feel, too, is really important for this dish because there's a lot of texture.
Sunchokes I like a lot because they have a ton of inulin, which, when they're stored, turns into sugar, which makes them really sweet, but not being too starchy, which is nice.
What am I doing, am I laying this out? Lay those out flat because we're going to dehydrate that.
You're on the "de-hy" duty, chef.
I know how to do this.
This is ulva, our sea lettuce.
It's harvested from Maine.
We get it in, we rinse it, and then dehydrate it overnight.
It also has a lot of clinging salinity.
It does, it sure does.
Then the green almonds.
It's a fresh almond.
An almond is actually the kernel of the almond fruit.
Are those hard to find on the East Coast? Yeah, they don't exist on the East Coast.
They come from here.
- From California, yeah.
We're trying to get stuff from all over.
We have our own garden, we grow a lot of stuff that we use.
Probably 85% of what we use comes from the East Coast, but, you know, sometimes something just needs something that every once in a while you can't get.
I think that's okay.
It is okay.
This is the sunchokes that we just cut.
Just working hard at this.
They caramelize so fast.
Really, really nice and quick.
That looks great.
Looks nice, right? Like sunchoke cracklings.
I kind of want to eat it.
We're going to make the sauce now.
We add a little bit of soy milk here.
Then we'll add a little bit of the sunchoke stock.
So basically we'll just let this cook down for a little bit, and then we'll purée it, pass it through a coffee filter.
So it picks up the caramelized flavor.
Yeah, it does, yeah, but not too much.
Just enough to make it a little toasty, but nothing crazy.
It kind of just tastes like ice cream base at this point.
Sunchoke makes a great ice cream because of all those sugars.
Mm-hmm.
All right, so we're right there, pretty much.
We'll put it in the Vita-Prep, buzz it and then pass it through a coffee filter and that'll be our sauce.
Voilà ! The magic of television.
Pretty fancy for a vegan dish.
Yeah, I know, right? Oof, man.
What do you start with first? Sunchoke.
Then we'll do a little bit of the toasted seaweed.
The seaweed moves when you plate it it looks really cool.
National Geographic right there.
Then we just do a little bit of the honeycomb.
And then for the green almond, I like to actually open them up, squeeze the gel out.
Oh, nice.
A little messy, but it looks nice.
I bet it tastes good, too.
It's kind of aromatic.
How about some coriander flowers? Ooh, do you have some? Oh, boy.
It's done I think.
So, vegan surf-'n-turf.
For me, a true vacation is just recharging everything.
Nothing else matters for a while.
And then you come back and you're almost like a different person.
There is a good stretch of 1 before San Francisco where you become completely disconnected.
Phones don't work, you get no signal of any kind.
And nowadays, that's going off the radar, that's a big deal.
And I like that.
You know, to me, when I want to get away, it's really important that that happens.
I think as the restaurant has become more popular, it's become more important to find the ability to drop away.
Make no mistake.
It's a meat-off.
There are no rules.
I've always associated great steak cook with Carlo.
Carlo's one of the first people that I heard about who was aging meat past the norm to get more flavors and to get more nuance and character out of meat.
And always great sourcing.
I still don't know where he gets his beef from.
Your steak, definitely an animal with wagyu in it.
Yeah.
Just a really, really even pattern of marbling all along as opposed to being grouped in certain areas and not evenly distributed.
I have a West Coast source that I like very much, but I also think it's really incredibly different.
Hence, the purpose for a meat-off.
Yeah, we're going to celebrate the difference.
Right? Yeah.
They're both strip loins, they're both on the bone.
You're taking it off the bone, David? I'm just taking this one bone out because I'm going to cut it thick.
There's many different ways to cook meat.
You can cook 'em slow, you can cook it really, really fast.
For this particular cut, I like to go a really, really high heat but try and have as much control over it as possible.
On a grill this big, you want to have a really, really super hot spot and another place that's not so hot, so I can control the temperature by moving the meat on and off the heat.
Binchotan to me burns very, very clean, but it's tremendously hot.
It burns almost smokeless, but use the hard wood, because we're outdoors.
For beef I like it because it burns really, really hot but it burns really fast.
Yeah.
I'm getting really close.
Yeah, me too.
Looks like I'm using a lot of salt, but it's all going to cook right off.
Looks amazing.
I salt probably not as much as other people do, because I'm a big fan of salting it after it's cooked.
I don't put pepper on it at the beginning, either, because pepper burns.
When pepper burns, it gets really acrid and bitter.
So it's just meat and salt.
When people taste this, I tell them it tastes like the steaks that your fathers and your grandfathers used to have.
You know, before animals were bred for efficiency.
Do you do those crosshatches? Yeah.
Whoo! Still got it.
That's right.
When those flames hit the beef, a little bit's okay, but a lot is not okay.
I think it starts making it taste like the charcoal.
How important is the char to you? I like a nice one, but nothing crazy.
You don't like that super crusty, like that 1400 It doesn't work well.
You lose a lot of the nuance.
It dries out.
- Yeah.
The thing is, the loins are so big, you can age it for a really long time.
And how long was that? Three or four months.
30 days on this, you know, it's nothing.
You lose a little bit of water weight, but that's it.
Look at that amazing, huh? It can get mesmerizing, can't it? Just watching the fire.
Cooking outdoors, there's something relaxing about it.
Especially if you're working with an open fire.
It immediately becomes more rustic, can put you much more attached to the act of cooking.
Usually it's not for an event.
You're cooking for yourself or friends, so it's much more intimate, and it's much more personal.
You also don't feel a lot of pressure to analyze things.
It's more about eating well and having a good time.
Which is very important on a day off.
We're moving away from the period where it's just heads down, work, work, work, work all the time, because it beats people up.
You have better longevity, you have more creative powers, I think you live a more healthy life if you find that balance.
I've only had one restaurant.
And that is because I always like going to work.
I like working at night, cooking food, making people happy.
It's kind of what drives me.
And I've learned to accept that.
But how long is that going to happen? It's just learning when to take time off, learning when to recharge my batteries, learning to delegate, which is really the last thing chefs learn to do.
"I can do it better than anybody that works for me, so I'm going to do it," as opposed to just like taking a deep breath and realizing that you've trained people and you trust them and you're paying them to do the job and to actually take a step back and let them do it.
To make that happen, you have to accept, "I'm going to step away.
" And you know what you're going to find out? Sometimes it runs even better.
Because that's part of balance, that's the part about how it happens.