Resting is nearly as important as roasting. You cannot hurry roasting, nor can you be in a rush to serve the roast. Meat must rest after roasting to maintain juiciness, and it is a cardinal rule of cuisine that holding the juices in the meat is the hallmark of properly roasted and served meat. How long should it rest? It depends on the meat. A thick cut of beef might rest for half an hour or more, allowing the juices to be reabsorbed into the flesh (although in the delicious, juicy, churrascaria style, the meat is sliced fresh from the fire). Venison, a different story, is not very fatty—it does not have space in its fibers to absorb and hold moisture. If you leave it to rest for too long, the juices will evacuate the meat, and you will be left with a bland, uninteresting taste. My chestnut-crusted loin of venison is served very pink, because overcooked venison is unsalvageably tough and dry. I rest it for just a few minutes then slice it so that the juice and blood pearl on top of the slice. Then I add some sea salt and pepper, and it is perfect.
It takes a very good cook to be a rôtisseur. As I mentioned before, all cooks want to work on the line—they think they are going to earn more respect if they are flipping pans. But roasting teaches you an understanding of main ingredients (meat, fowl, fish) that is deeper and that will make you a better chef on the line. Of course these days, the old-fashioned way of roasting and feeling the cuisson under your fingers is supported by use of a tester (a small needle), which helps you gauge the internal temperature for doneness. You insert the tool into the roast and then place it below your lips to judge the temperature. For a big roast use a probe thermometer. If your prep is all sous vide, then you don’t have to be too much of an expert rôtisseur to accomplish the job.
Next in importance to roasting is braising. Quite literally, to braise means to cook on a braisier—that is, over embers. Practically speaking, it involves cooking food that is barely immersed in liquid to slowly draw out the fat and juice from meats as well as the juices and flavors from herbs and vegetables. It is all about slow cooking and basting often. The braising pot is the cook’s magic cauldron where flavors swirl, combine, concentrate, transform.
Braising—a rustic form of cooking used in nearly every cuisine—is not without art or the demand of the chef’s constant attention, though less so than with roasting. One thing it is not is simply putting some liquid and some meat in a pot, covering it, and letting it bubble away for a few hours. Braising is not stewing, because it is only half immersed in liquid. It is sort of half stewing and half wet roasting. That is why basting is important. As the flavors in the braising liquid concentrate, you keep basting, building up a glacé on the meat that is both concentrated and flavorful. At the same time, you are reducing the liquid—not only the liquid that you start braising with, but also the juices extracted by heat from the vegetables and meat. The reducing and glazing return these flavors to the meat.
If you end up with a lot of braising liquid, you have not concentrated the flavors enough. A properly braised piece of meat or fowl or fish has just enough liquid for that serving and no more. Do not shortchange your recipe. Give back to the plate every iota of flavor that the ingredients started with.
To me, braising is the deep soul of French cooking. When I think of the classic French braises, it takes me on a culinary tour of France—for example, a lamb shank. If I think of Provence, I think of braising the lamb in garlic, herbs, orange zest, olives, tomatoes, and a floral white wine. For the same piece of lamb in Burgundy, I taste a braising liquid of red wine, roasted onions, celery root, lard de campagne, wild mushrooms. Lamb shank in the southwest is going to be braised with a more Spanish and mountain feel—lots of onions, peppers with some heat to them, tomatoes. At the other corner of France, it will be Alsatian Baeckeoffe style—lamb shoulder braised with pork shoulder, Riesling, onions, and potatoes.
Braising reveals the beauty and depth—both historical and cultural—of French cooking. Not only does gastronomic cooking embrace all these regions, refining their traditions, but it also draws on bistro cooking and cuisine bourgeoise (think of the normal Sunday meal for a French family). In all French cuisine, braising is a major element. I’m also a big fan of every country’s tradition of braising and wrote a book on the topic, Braise: A Journey Through International Cuisine.
Okay, I know you want to get to the line, so let’s do it. The main activity on the meat and fish lines is sautéing. The textbook definition of sautéing is to cook something in a little bit of fat at high heat. But in this simple definition there is a whole range of variations.
Call me old-school but I still think copper is best. Aluminum is fine for boiling and baking but not for pan roasting. Copper, though, can get very hot, and you can smoothly control every temperature. When we make a chicken jus in a copper roasting pan, we heat the pan until it is super hot before we put the bones in to roast, which lets us begin with a good sear and caramelization. Cast iron is also a great heat carrier: like copper, it gets very hot and distributes heat evenly. It is very good for coloring bones and meat before you deglaze. A word about meat caramelization: you want it brown, not a light tan. The surface of well-seared meat develops sweetness and nuttiness and a crust with flavor and texture elements without which meat can be bland and uninteresting.
In the modern kitchen we use induction stoves that employ magnetic resonance; cast iron works very well with this high-tech method. For pan roasting, I like a black steel pan well-seasoned from the constant use of the same application (just like the Chinese do with their woks). Stainless- steel pans are ubiquitous because they are easy to cook with and maintain, but certain jobs require other materials. Ideally you have the whole range in your kitchen.
With root vegetables I like to let the flavor develop slowly and concentrate before I caramelize the outside. Many cooks will blanch their vegetables, then throw them into a hot pan with oil or butter. I feel that one preserves pristine flavor more fully when you put the vegetables in a pan, add a little bit of butter, some herbs and aromatics, and slowly heat them, rolling them over and over in the butter (adding a few drops of water as needed). At this gentle heat, they will be slightly steamed in their own moisture; sweating and glazing are terms we often use for this process. In a simple carrot preparation, I start with a little butter (or olive oil) and chicken stock and fresh sage, then simmer until they are firm but getting tender. By this time, they have reabsorbed all their juices and released their sugars, which then glaze up beautifully. Covering the pan (for the initial wet cooking) with a lid or parchment paper aids this process enormously, allowing evaporation but at a rate that is, say, 20 percent, as opposed to 100 percent for an uncovered pan.
We also arroser—that is, baste with butter. Here, for example, a fish filet is cooked in a hot pan. You keep spooning butter over the fish so that while it cooks and roasts on the bottom, hot butter seeps in and slowly cooks the flesh on top. The butter has to be hot, foamy, seasoned, and plentiful enough to really shower the fish. Be careful, though, that you don’t use butter as a cure-all to mask less-than-perfect technique.
These methods of heating have changed very little since Roze de Chantoiseau opened the first modern restaurant in Paris in 1766. Actually they’ve changed very little since the days of Charlemagne, but in the last twenty years restaurants everywhere have adopted the nearly fail-proof method known as sous vide. Once an expensive luxury, it is now at least somewhat familiar to any serious chef. By sealing food in an air-tight bag and immersing it in a low-temperature water bath, almost any chef can create juicy, deeply flavored meats and vegetables. Sometimes sous vide is an intermediate cooking step. For example, a beautiful strip steak can be cooked sous vide to a perfect medium-rareness all the way through, but then you need to finish it over high heat to create the all-important crust that is the hallmark of a good steak. At other times, however—for example, with chicken—you seal the meat in a bag with a bit of fat, and some herbs, spices, and other seasonings, and you will have succulent white meat… every time! But remember, sous vide u
ses a machine and is based on technology, not cooking. Playing with it may give you great, consistent results, but it doesn’t give you the knowledge, the instinct, and the pleasure of cooking in the traditional methods.
In so much of what we have touched on in this letter—whether it is extracting and reabsorbing juice in roasting, or braising and reducing, or sautéing then caramelizing—you are working the moisture in the food, and then concentrating it and reintegrating it back into the ingredient. Heat, concentrate, reintegrate. No matter how you apply heat, this is the transformational aspect of cuisine. How good your food is depends on how well you control this force of nature.
FLAVOR
FLAVOR, THE INTERPLAY of taste and aroma, is very personal. Developing your sense of flavor is one of the most important aspects of becoming a chef. True, there are people who have fantastic palates who are not chefs. There are no chefs, however—or at least none of any note—who do not have a highly developed sense of flavor. That sense will vary from chef to chef. Peppery, smoky, salty, raw, cooked, sweet, tangy, spicy, etc.—flavors can come from a range of a single ingredient to many ingredients. An ingredient’s applications, combinations, and transformations create a unique taste and texture, the two of which together impart flavor. One may express undercurrents of brininess, another may accent the herbal style of a region of mountain grasses and wildflowers, another the hot and spicy kick given to tamer ingredients by the endless variety of chilies. These accents, part personal and part cultural, make for the diversity and delightful surprises in restaurant cuisine.
Flavor is always present, but its composition is not always perceptible. When you listen to a symphony, you may hear the trumpets ring out, but unless you are a trained musician you probably will not be able to distinguish between the violas and cellos, for example. Nonetheless, they are there and they are important. Remove one or the other and most of us may not be able to tell what exactly is missing, but we will know that the sound is somehow unbalanced, less than full.
It is the same with flavor. In some recipes there is a dominating overall flavor that may mask or at least mute the underlying levels of flavor. In a pâté of guinea hen and smoked pork belly, for example, the pleasantly gamey flavor of cured and smoky pork will rise over the hen, foie gras, and spices. Only after you bite and chew and breathe through your nose does the palate “round out” and the full flavor come through: a delicious mélange of liver, mushroom, chestnut, sweet onion, and garlic, the clarity of allspice and clove, the novel fragrance of pink peppercorn. All these are nearly as important as the delicate piece of fowl that supports everything.
One thing that influences flavor but has nothing to do with taste buds is texture. With many dishes, your mouth seeks out texture first before it “decides” to experience taste. That is one of the fascinating things about taste: you prepare yourself mentally beforehand. Texture is a critical messenger in alerting you to what is coming. The satiny smoothness then brittleness of chocolate; the chewy, sinewy unctuousness of a well-marbled porterhouse steak; the crackle of a crispy rice-flour crust on shrimp tempura—all these elements set up the actual palate experience that follows. Without texture, without touching and feeling, the most exquisite flavors are reduced to boring uniformity. Creating and controlling texture is yet another reason for the importance of mastering heat when you roast, sauté, braise, grill, or sous vide. With control of heat, you can determine the way your tongue first experiences the texture of the food you are preparing.
I should also mention something that often precedes texture: aroma. Sit in a dining room when the waiters shave a bulbous white truffle over a steaming risotto: the funky, almost sexy, aroma will reach you, quite powerfully, from fifty feet away. Up close it is as if you are wrapped in a truffle aura, a distillation of all the aromas of an autumn hillside in Alba—fermented wild berries, decaying oak leaves, musk of wild boar, smoky pine balsam.
Or to take a less rarefied (and less costly) example, think about a soup. What do you do when a hot bowl of soup is put in front of you? A chef will always “grab steam,” directing the wafts of vapor coming off, say, a prawn broth with accents of lemongrass, lime, and holy basil. You are wrapped up in a haze of anticipation and appetite even before anything hits your tongue.
So, flavor is not a static thing. There is no simple, official “Flavor of Pike Quenelles in Nantua Sauce” or “Flavor of Roasted Grouse in a Foamy Brown Butter with Juniper, Sage, and Orange Peel.” There is not even a simple “Flavor of Carrot.” Throw some almond shells in the garden bed—as Dan Barber did—and you will have carrots that carry a pleasing echo of almond. Harvest a certain strain of young carrot from mineral-rich topsoil, and you will add sweetness from the first crunchy bite. Furthermore, you need to think of flavor the way you experience a performance. Just as there is a beginning, middle, and end to a play, there is a similar narrative to tasting. Usually flavor starts with aroma, then moves to texture, then to the actual experience on the tongue, and finally, as you chew, swallow, and breathe out, there is another waft of aroma that rises from your palate into your nostrils.
As a chef, you must be in control of all these elements and determine how strong and long-lasting each of them will be. For example, adding rosemary to the olive oil–crisped skin of a freshly caught sea bass will wake up your palate right away, first from the flavoring on the outside, which will fade as the deeper yet subtle, pristine flavor of the bass comes through. Yet I might want to lengthen that herbal flavor on the palate, as I do with velvety pea soup topped with smooth rosemary-infused cream. Here the richness of the cream “spreads out” the pungent herb and extends the flavor so that the relatively mild sweet pea picks up dimension and character. Any fat in food, light or rich, will expand and carry the flavor profile.
Once you understand that there are many facets to the flavor of each ingredient, you may overcome a common (usually fatal) tendency to achieve more flavor by complicating the recipe. Believe me, less is more when it comes to flavor. Consider the endless possibilities in the final product in winemaking. Although a great wine may combine a number of varieties in its “recipe,” wine still has only one major ingredient: the grape. But through the winemaker’s labors, it expresses an infinite series of variations in the complex preparation of the vineyard, the soil, and the fermentation to make every vintage a new wine, a new taste in nuance.
Similarly, for each ingredient included in a recipe, you must have an intimate knowledge of its flavor profile. For example, we make a carrot coulis by sweating, steaming, or slow-baking very fresh, crisp carrots to concentrate their sweet flavor. Then we make a juice of raw carrots to preserve a pristine, fresh flavor. We blend the two and may add a pinch of acidity to liven up the mix—such as lime, which accents the fresh-from-the-garden flavors of the carrot. Very simple. Just one extra clean but sharp ingredient—lime—affects a happy marriage of the cooked and uncooked flavors, of sweet and tart. Of course, this is just a simple base; spices and seasoning complete the process.
Same case with fruit. You might want to expand flavors from one ingredient, such as apricots, and make an apricot-custard tart with vanilla-poached apricot. We top the tart with fresh apricot coulis and serve it with a roasted-apricot and almond ice cream. Voila! Different textures and flavors of the apricot in one dish. Think of the cubist paintings of Picasso or Braque, which simultaneously present different aspects of the same form from different angles to compose a still-life portrait or landscape with depth and artistic taste—just like cooking. We are coaxing layers of flavor and surprises from one ingredient.
In considering specific flavors, I start with salt, the most fundamental of seasonings. As I explained, you may salt before you cook, while you cook, and as you plate. In each instance the salt does something a little different. Added at the beginning, it helps fix the tastes, such as when making a simple soup; if you forget the salt it is very difficult to obtain a good taste. To concentrate the flavors during roasting, salt helps to form a better seas
oning, which in part depends on the thickeners used. Then, after the meat is rested and sliced, a sprinkling of coarse salt on top will help pull the deep flavors out of the meat while leaving a brittle fleur de sel texture that is even more concentrated.
A good chef’s primary concern for a successful dish, you will have noticed by now, starts with the perfect touch of salt to slowly adjust the balance of flavor. For quite a while most chefs banned salt and pepper from the dining table, the implication being that the dish came from the kitchen perfectly seasoned. I’m in total agreement, but in fact all of us have different thresholds of flavor, and what is undersalted to me might be just right for you. So, if asked to, we offer the finest crystals of natural sea salt at the table so that diners can make a personal adjustment. Whatever you do, however, remember that not seasoning is not an option. While there may be people who need to restrict salt intake, restaurants that cook with little or no seasoning cannot turn out great cuisine. Much better to go light on the salt on request than to subject all your diners to the listless flavor of unseasoned food.
And now to that bête noire of the High Priests of Lightness: butter. This wonderful ingredient has gotten a bum rap in my opinion, largely because some French chefs of the mid-twentieth century would add butter and cream to everything—hoping to accomplish through richness what they may have lacked in ingredients, technique, or simply the time required for developing proper flavor. I have been gratified to note in recent years that scientists seem to have turned around on the questions of fat and butter. It seems that organically raised, grass-fed cows produce cream that is nutritious and not a recipe for a heart attack. The paradox for me, a French chef, is that the Italians use an enormous amount of butter, cream, and cheese in their pasta recipes and yet haven’t been called out on the health hazards of those ingredients.
Letters to a Young Chef Page 4