A CARROT IS A CARROT until you top it with a lemon-drenched miso bagna cauda - then it's pure magic. Same goes for a strawberry and it's mystical transformation via this fennel and salt sofrito.
L.A.'s Michelin-starred Chef Jeremy Fox, also known as the veggie whisperer, is a master of this kind of veggie-based magic and this city loves him for it. From the acclaimed Rustic Canyon to the fairly new Ester's Wine Shop in Santa Monica, Fox's ingredient-first food philosophy comes to life in the most crave-worthy way.
In his first cookbook, On Vegetables, you'll find all the sauces, condiments and recipes necessary to make the most ordinary fruits and veggies sing. We picked a few incredible condiments from Fox's section on his own personal larder and we're thrilled at the thought of readers making them. Try the recipes below and enter to win your own copy of On Vegetables for yourself...
Building a larder from scratch may be the most important thing you ever do in your kitchen.
When I started working at Manresa, the kitchen team was already fairly experienced. Chef Kinch would let us work on a lot of personal cooking projects, hoping that our experiments might eventually wind up on the menu. I was ordering ingredients just for my own experiments, messing around with them, and trying to accomplish something new and different. But really, I was just trying to impress Kinch. Whenever I did manage to impress him, my heart bounced with pride.
So when I took over Rustic Canyon I wanted to bring that same process to my own kitchen. It didn’t take long, though, before I realized that everything was off track. Nobody had the necessary experience. Cooks were just throwing ingredients together and seeing what would stick. It was, basically, young kids working on elaborate, conceptualized dishes and directing their focus on the wrong things. So I scrapped it. We got back to basics. We started making sauerkraut, our own pickles and mustard. Then we started making cheese, and suddenly we had whey lying around. What could we do with whey?
The team wasn’t ready to be creative yet. Instead, I was teaching them how to put together building blocks, and cultivate a repertoire so that the next time they got the opportunity to be creative, they would be ready. There’s just no substitute for knowing how to make a really good mayo. It’s not about learning a recipe — it’s about learning how to taste. Making good mayonnaise requires you to understand the balance of fat, salt, lemon, garlic, and mustard. You will identify flavors better. You will acquire context.
Ultimately, the most basic goal in building your larder is to turn your kitchen into a grocery store. Rather than just grabbing a package of fresh ricotta from the supermarket, you can now use ricotta that you’ve made yourself. Does it taste better than the finest ricotta money can buy? Perhaps. But it is better anyway, because you made it. There is now narrative and personal appreciation built into your food. As it turns out, work tastes good sometimes.
In the end, creating your larder is not about some theoretical idea of a “better” meal, but to make the hours you spend in the kitchen more efficient rather than less. When you have the luxury of free time — say on a lazy Sunday afternoon — you can work on some of the slower, more meditative cooking processes. When you have the freedom to spend your energy on things like Calabrian Chili Butter, Shallot Confit, and Labneh, it will pay you back on all those nights when you’re just hungry, and too damned tired to build slow, meticulous flavor. You don’t need to chop raw garlic when you already have a container of the stuff confited. A quick weeknight dinner tastes a whole lot better when you can pull homemade Preserved Lemons and Miso Bagna Caudaright out of the refrigerator. You invest in flavor when you have the time so that you can reap the benefits when you do not.[olists num=1][olists num=2][olists num=3]
The post In the Kitchen with the Vegetable Whisperer Chef Jeremy Fox appeared first on The Chalkboard.
from The Chalkboard http://ift.tt/2sCt2fw
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment