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.