"Springer" Wild Alaskan Salmon, Best Salmon in the World

I am currently obsessed with the Columbia River King "Springer" salmon.  "Springers" refer to the very first Salmon to enter the river.  Once they enter the fresh water of the river, they no longer eat and wait until the fall to spawn.  In order to survive this prolonged spawning process they stay in the ocean and fatten up to the last minute before entering the river.  They reach up to twenty two percent body fat. This is twice as high as farm raised salmon.  The "Springer" is often compared as an equivalent of a Kobe beef in the fish world.  The season for this highest quality fish is fleeting, but the filets do freeze amazingly well.  The taste is super pure and clean and while I've been enjoying eating it raw, it is also incredible roasted with crispy skin.  Roasted and served with a side of mushrooms it pairs amazingly well with Burgundy or Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. My favorite source for this superb fish is a wild foods purveyor out of Washington called Foods in Season

Respect

 

January 8, 2012 

My passion and specialty is in a product driven, classic technique preparation of dishes which I have spent years researching and perfecting.  What I would love to share with my guests, for example, is how to make the perfect coq au vin or just a simple roast chicken.  This would begin with a search for the proper chicken and perhaps a short lecture on animal husbandry and how the breed and treatment of the animal affects the flavor and texture of the finished product.  It could even include a visit to a chicken farm, if people were interested.  What I am trying to do is convey to people the importance of the source of the food and how it not just affects the taste but also, more importantly, how it affects the health of the consumer.  I believe that it is paramount that a connection is reestablish between the people and the food they choose to consume.  I think it is the fact that this connection has been lost that we have such surge in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on.  Unfortunately, this problem extends further than just our health issues.  It goes all the way to respect and morality.  How we treat the animals we eat, how we treat the dirt in which we grow our vegetables, how we treat our planet, it all connects to how we treat each other and who we are as human beings.  It is a very sad state of affairs right now and it needs to be addressed and changed.  I am a chef, and in my search for optimal flavor I came to understand that to obtain the best flavor it all starts with the quality of the dirt where the grass grows, the worms live, the vegetables grow: produce which will either be consumed directly by humans, or fed to animals, which then in turn will be consumed by humans.

So, how to make a perfect roast chicken, we have to first find an excellent chicken; conveniently, I happen to have a great source.  Only then can we focus on cooking the bird.  While there are probably a hundred plus different ways one can roast a chicken, there is one best way to do it for each particular bird.  This will take into account the breed of the chicken, the sex, the weight, the time of the year the chicken was harvested and so on.  The whole point is to make people think about the bird as something more than just a hunk of meat.  It was a living, hopefully happy and healthy, bird that was slaughtered, hopefully painlessly, and which we should be very grateful to be able to enjoy, hopefully expertly prepared.  I believe this is the single most important thing I can do as a chef right now: to make people feel respectful and grateful for their food because they truly understand and feel good about eating it.  The fact that there is such a disconnect between most of the Americans and the food they consume is clearly a coping mechanism.  Whatif people actually understood where most of the food in this country comes from?  I imagine they wouldn’t be grateful or respectful of the process.  Personally, I am ashamed of it.  Fortunately, more and more attention is being paid to our food system and hopefully, increasing number of people will make a choice to do better.

Cooking for Babaji at Sonoma Ashram

 

April 28, 2010 

Last Saturday my friend Brynna and I cooked a wonderful dinner for fourteen people at the Sonoma Ashram. It was a very special experience that will probably remain forever in our hearts as neither of us can imagine cooking again for a more appreciative crowd.

Sonoma Ashram boasts a spectacular garden that is maintained by a handful of hardworking volunteers.  We picked salad greens, herbs and edible flowers which Brynna dressed with California olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I used rainbow Swiss chard from the garden for a stuffing for fresh hand made torteloni.  We also picked from the garden beets and carrots, which were slowly roasted and topped with local goat cheese.  In the end many of the Ashram guests enjoyed assisting us in the cooking process.

Brynna, who is a pastry student at the Culinary Institute of America, baked fresh olive oil and rosemary focaccia,  raw honey and walnut baklava, local strawberry and rhubarb tarts, and cookies made with thyme and Mayer lemon, picked from her front yard.  The only ingredient that wasn’t local was imported from Italy sheep’s milk ricotta cheese, that was used as a stuffing in the torteloni and strawberry tarts.  Also, there was a bit of prosciutto that I furtively added into the torteloni filling, after Babaji’s approval of course.

The drink of choice for our guests was a mint infusion made with freshly picked leaves from the garden.  For the chefs, the day started early with a tasting of California sparkling wines at Domaine Carneros, where we picked up few bottles for the road.  There is nothing like making fresh bread and pasta in a beautiful garden while sipping on refreshing bubbly wine and snacking on sweet strawberries.  We are looking forward to going back to the ashram this summer.  Brynna is very excited to make dessert with the cherries and peaches that are growing in the garden.  I understand that we were added onto the garden update newsletter and are looking forward to an abundant crop season.

Authenticity

March 2, 2010 

As world cuisines continually evolve how do we determine what constitutes an authentic cuisine?  Authentic to what? Is tradition equivalent to authenticity? Is it fair to limit what is considered genuine cuisine to what has been traditionally prepared for consumption?  I would like to posit that the authenticity of any cuisine is inherent in two factors:  preservation of the quality of the food products, and the identity of the food products.

Just because a chef may be using more sophisticated cooking equipment, technique (e.g., mastering the control of temperature), and final presentation, it does not mean that the food loses its authenticity.  Native foods will preserve their integrity if the chef respects the quality of the product that he is working with.  This would translate to starting off with the freshest, highest quality indigenous product and preparing it in such a way that is in agreement with preserving its supreme quality in the finished dish.

Cuisine gets its identity from the land and sweat of people who bore it.  If a chef utilizes the same highest quality native heirloom plants and heritage breed animals that his grandmother used in her dishes, and if that chef preserves the quality of these products during cooking, then the authenticity is maintained.  The authenticity is preserved in the flavor.   Even if the dish looks very different from anything his grandmother used to make, when the chef eats it, his mind becomes inundated with the memories of tastes and smells of some dish assiduously prepared by his grandmother.

Nostalgia

March 2, 2010 

I enjoy cooking.  I find it meditative.  I love exercising for the same reason, plus for the oxygen rush.  But what I love most of all is eating.  Eating is what I am best trained at, and it took many years of training.  I began as a fastidious eater.  As a child I refused the bottle.  At the age of two and a half I supposedly switched from solely drinking breast milk to a diet of fried bacon and Hungarian salami.  My father, who was a soccer player and often traveled abroad for games, would smuggle the salami for me from Germany.  I recall it hanging on the kitchen radiator, fat slowly dripping down.  My mother doesn’t exactly recall the inception, but there was a year when all I would eat was steak tartare.  If I wasn’t served what I wanted I simply refused to eat.  Needles to say, I was an emaciated child that caused her mother much pain.  There is however a place where I have always been a crazy omnivore and that is the garden.  I grew up in a city in Northwestern Poland during the time when one had to stand in line for five hours to buy a kilo of sugar.  In order to obtain meat and produce, my family went to the countryside to get it directly from farmers.  I recall with fondness digging up and picking fresh vegetables and fruits in my aunt’s garden.  I would eat them all, sometimes still covered with dirt, sometimes washed only by the rain.  My all-time favorite things to eat in the countryside were potatoes cooked in the embers.  These were whole, just dug up, potatoes thrown into the embers and left there for couple of hours.  Essentially these potatoes were cooked by the smoke, but I never thought about this till I tasted that exact flavor again, fifteen years later, at L’Arpege in Paris.  Alain Passard decided to turn his menu vegetarian shortly after I made the reservation, so it was a surprising dinner on various levels, the schnitzel size foie gras on the vegetarian tasting menu being the least of the surprises.  I call this French logic.  The epiphany moment came to me with the course of smoked potato. It was a single, peeled, white, small potato presented by itself on a white plate.  At first glimpse I thought that the rumor was true and that the chef went mad.  Then I took a bite.  I was six years old, sitting in front of a fire at my aunt’s farmhouse, scrapping out the inside of a hard black shell, topping the white mush with salt and butter.  The chef is a genius!  How did he know?  Sadly, my dining companions did not share my enthusiasm and this memorable meal was forever decried as the two grand potato dinner.

Olive OIl

 

February 5, 2010 

I attended olive oil tasting and a lecture on olive tree history and olive oil production given by an Italian olive oil maker.  Apparently ancient olive trees are slowly becoming endangered due to changing landscape.  Some trees in Italy and Greece are being uprooted and transported to different countries in order to preserve them.  However, the change of soil and climate as of yet has an undetermined influence on the tree and its fruit, the olive.  Something must be done to prevent the destruction of this amazing tree.  I thought I would put a word out to see if anyone knows of or would be interested in starting an organization with an aim to defend the ancient olive trees in Europe.

On the other note,  I learned some interesting facts about quality of extra virgin olive oil.

Olive oil is alive with enzymic activity that pretty quickly decreases as the oil sits.  The enzymes and the antioxidants (made up of vitamin E)  appear in the highest concentration in the younger (immature) olive .  We can detect with taste whether the oil has high antioxidant level.  Simply swallow a little of the oil and feel for the burning sensation in your throat.  The stronger the burning the healthier the oil is for your body.  In Italian standards, olive oil is considered old six months after harvest.  Exposure to air, heat, and light accelerate the aging process even faster.  It can still be consumed, but the health benefits are much lower at this point.  Also, the milder olive oils made from more mature olives, although they may be preferred by some in flavor, are substantially lower in antioxidants.  So, when purchasing olive oil looks for not onlythat it is cold pressed, but check out when it was harvested.  In United States there are no laws requiring producers to put a harvest date on the bottle; however, the top quality producers would inevitable want us to know that it is a newly pressed oil.  Chefshop.com for one offers variety of olio nuovo, with the one pressed in December being currently available.  Another tip for purchasing olive oil is to make sure it comes in either a dark glass bottle or in a metal tin.  Apparently metal tin, although it may not be associated with high quality oil, does the job of short term oil storage just as well as dark glass bottle, maybe even better, because it completely prevents any light from reaching the oil.