Letters to a Young Chef

by Daniel Boulud

  When a cook makes a simple piece of fish meunière, the heat of the lightly toasted butter spooned over the flesh gently warms the inside and imparts a light color to the outside. The result is a combination of the flavor punch that fat in the form of foamy browned butter, called beurre noisette, gives when properly used, a complex yet subtle transformation of the fish from a potentially bland filet to something spectacular and simple. By the way, have you ever had a lobster poached in butter by Thomas Keller at the French Laundry? It may not be on the menu anymore, but it is unforgettable. The lobster has a delicate, firm, and naturally sweet texture that is enhanced by poaching it in butter at a low temperature so the flavor is from-the-ocean fresh. The curve of heating is not aggressive; rather, it is gradual, primarily because butter is well suited to this method of cooking: firming the lobster yet maintaining moisture.

  Do not be influenced by the faddish idea that butter does not belong in the kitchen. It’s all about a very good quality butter used in moderation. Without it, you will never be able to cook many of the recipes in the classique repertoire. From simple croissants, pastry, and cookies to melted butter to beurre blanc to beurre noisette to beurre noir, there is a wide spectrum to this versatile and delicious ingredient. So, no, it is not something to resort to in order to add flavor when your culinary technique should have developed it in other ways, but yes, it is the pièce de résistance of so many recipes. Bear in mind that with popular modern techniques such as foaming (making a bubbly emulsion), butter does not have to equate with heaviness. It works on much the same principle that allows just a little bit of milk to produce a rich, frothy head on cappuccino, amplifying the coffee flavor. Often now in a restaurant you will find creative butters on the table with the bread—butters that incorporate smoked herbs, seaweed, citrus, and many more flavors.

  Now to the spice rack and herb garden. These elements can be subtle or overpowering. Their character and strength vary with the ingredients they accompany. Slide a sprig of tarragon between the skin and breast meat of a chicken, and you will produce a slightly anise and minty bouquet that will dominate the more delicate flesh. In a béarnaise, however, pickled tarragon becomes an accent.

  In my cooking—which, as I have said, is basically French—I tend to rely on the same dozen or so herbs. Each draws out the deeper layers of flavor in a dish, either by itself or in combination with others. Some, such as basil and tarragon, have a certain licorice quality that dramatizes a dish’s sweetness. Somewhat different in effect, oregano, thyme, and sage help to frame and define more robust flavors. Take the example of a roast suckling pig. Its crisp, fatty skin and succulent meat create a chorus of aroma and flavor that will completely fill up every taste bud. To keep its flavor in proportion with others, adding oregano, thyme, and sage gives shape and definition and draws out the most savory aspects.

  Parsley, and to an even greater degree watercress, have two separate but complementary aspects. One accents freshness, while the other—somewhere between bitterness and peppery sharpness—helps to contain a flavor and punctuate it (the way beer, for example, completely cleans off the palate and readies it for the next bite as if it were the first). In other words, rather than allowing flavor to accumulate and overwhelm, these herbs preserve the balance that otherwise could be tipped by a strong ingredient such as garlic. This is why in classical cooking parsley is often wedded to garlic.

  When I first wrote these letters, the herbs mentioned above pretty much rounded out what was available in most restaurant kitchens, but the globalization that has occurred in recent years has not been confined to economics. Ingredients have been globalized as well: yuzu, cilantro, shiso, curry leaf, black garlic, and vadouvan reflect the contributions of other culinary cultures to the most basic European herbs available to contemporary chefs.

  You must feel your way into these ingredients if you do not have a lifetime of tasting experience with them going all the way back to childhood. I think of the brilliant former chef of Lespinasse, Gray Kunz, who dazzled New York diners all through the 1990s. Kunz grew up in Singapore, trained under Michelin-starred Frédy Girardet in Lausanne, then worked in Hong Kong for five years. Kunz had French technique and an intimate knowledge of the Eastern palate. His walleye pike with lavender-honey sauce and his rope mussels with lemongrass broth were examples of the finesse that comes from intimacy with ingredients, rather than the throw-it-all-in-the-pot-and-call-it-exotic approach of some chefs who like the idea of fusion cooking but have not rigorously studied it.

  For myself, I like to imagine the flavor of a new ingredient, then build from there. For example, I wanted to make a chilled velouté of oyster that would be creamy and briny, with subtle, unexpected, almost unidentifiable undertones. So I combined cream, oyster water, and heat to infuse the mixture with coriander seeds, lime peel, ginger, kaffir lime leaves, Thai basil, and lemongrass. Next, strain and chill. It’s so floral and fragrant. Set an oyster afloat in it and you have an ensemble of the lightest, subtly complex flavors. I pick up the scent of the seacoast of Brittany alongside the mystery and sensuality of the Thai coast.

  Aromatic spices such as cloves, cumin, anise, and curry (which is actually a mix of spices) also frame flavors beautifully as well as helping them punch through. Certain meats accept aromatics very well: pork, for example, and chicken (especially white meat). Aromatics give an instant identity to recipes, but as with everything, they should be used only in proportion. They can overwhelm with their strong perfume and slightly acrid flavor. The East and Middle East are justly famous for their aromatic spice mixes. They are as foundational to those cuisines as wine is to French, Spanish, or Italian gastronomy.

  As I mentioned earlier, my global tour as a young chef pretty much began and ended in Denmark when Vergé sent me there to work at the Plaza Hotel in Copenhagen. Still, even this limited travel broadened me. I was captivated by Danish butter, bacon, and hams. Also aromatic cumin, caraway, rye seed, and dill seed. These are extremely good in marinades. What struck me while I was there was my love of cumin, an aromatic that really hits you with the first bite. But then its impact grows less noticeable until finally it recedes into the overall flavor of a recipe. In Mexico or Kerala I would also have come across cumin, but in those cornucopias of spices I might not have developed the more complete understanding of cumin that I got in Denmark.

  Although it would be many years before the New Nordic movement would introduce the unique and enticing flavors of the fields, forests, and waters of Northern Europe to chefs all over the world, it is no doubt true that my background as a young chef in Denmark prepared me for the arrival of the subtleties of the Scandinavian palate in serious kitchens everywhere.

  How you season—how you use butter or oil, herbs, and spices—is the signature of a chef, but it is of little use without the best ingredients. Finding the best and coaxing all the flavor out of them are subjects explored in my next letter.

  SOURCES AND SEASONS

  IN OUR GLOBALIZED world there are no more culinary backwaters, and any place you may find yourself working—from Manchuria to Madagascar—may one day contribute to the range of ingredients, tastes, and flavors at your command. Alex Atala, the Brazilian master, would go fly-fishing for golden dorado in the remote headwaters of the Bolivian Amazon because he liked to fish, but as a chef he could not help but be interested in the wild ingredients that the Tsimané Indians gathered in the rainforest. Those Amazonian ingredients have made him one of the most celebrated of modern chefs. Of course, he needed the foundation in technique that every chef must acquire through long years of study and practice, just as René Redzepi did before he stormed the world’s Best Restaurant lists with the ingredients foraged in the Far North. But the success of these two contemporary masters has inspired a whole new generation to remain open to the boundless—and delicious—opportunities that lie in expanding one’s knowledge of ingredients.

  There can never be—has never been—a great restaurant with second-class ingredients. Whethe
r it is as common as lettuce or as rarefied as white truffles or sushi-quality tuna, you must seek out the best. If you find yourself working for a chef who uses second-class ingredients, get out of there.

  Of course, like everything else, pride in one’s ingredients can be taken to extremes. In France, when I was young, there was a chef by the name of Thuilier. He was famous for his pride and for his volcanic temper. One day, the story goes, he was making the rounds in his dining room, and a patron complimented him on a wonderful dish but added, cluelessly, “It’s too bad you couldn’t find fresh green beans.”

  Incensed, Thuilier stormed into the kitchen, grabbed a crate of beautiful, fresh green beans, went back into the dining room, and emptied the entire contents on the table of the complaining diner. “Get out of my restaurant!” the chef ordered. “And do not ever come here again.”

  Thuilier was over the top, but his point is well taken. A great chef will not serve inferior ingredients. It follows, then, that a great chef will always seek out the best ingredients. Even if you have your own farm, a fishing boat, a platoon of hunters, and a personal forager, you won’t be able to grow fruits in winter or find truffles in spring, catch shad in the summer or pick ramps in the fall. In other words, any chef is dependent on the seasons and his suppliers. A great supplier is as driven in his or her pursuit of the best as any great chef is. Purveyors, to use the term more common among chefs, are our connection to quality. Find these people and treat them like family. Feed them when they come to you. Send some cakes and cookies home for their kids. Spend time with them discussing their passion (that is, your ingredients).

  A number of the top restaurants in New York get their poultry from a tiny dynamo of a woman named Sylvia Pryzant and her husband, Steve, a native of Manhattan’s Yorkville. Though Sylvia’s story is unusual, it is typical of many suppliers in that it is about arriving at a calling in life. She is a Tunisian Jew who was forced to leave her homeland in 1963. After passing her youth in Paris, she went to Israel, where she met her husband on a kibbutz. It proved difficult for her and Steve to get their own farm in Israel, so they came to the States and bought a farm in Pennsylvania, about three hours from Midtown Manhattan. They went into the business raising snow-white milk-fed veal. But they had absolutely no connections in the restaurant business.

  That was no obstacle to Sylvia. She picked up the phone and called every top chef in town, until one of them (Tom Colicchio, who was the chef at Gramercy Tavern at the time) returned her call, tried her veal, and became a customer. With veal, Sylvia and Steve soon found that it is a long time between paychecks (it takes three months to raise a calf), so they decided to go into the milk-fed poultry business. There was only one problem. Nobody in America raised milk-fed poultry (which meant, in turn, that we chefs could never serve those wonderful poulets de Bresse that were available in France). But Sylvia was obsessed and would not stop until she learned the secret of the Bresse chicken, so she called Georges Blanc (my former mentor) in France and said, “Chef, what is the secret to raising these chickens?” Guess what? Blanc told her how to gradually change the chicken’s diet from grain to milk pellets. Within a year, the top New York restaurants were serving milk-fed capon and their younger versions, the poularde and poussin.

  Moral of the story: one Sylvia and one Steve Pryzant are worth two thousand everyday chicken farmers. So if you meet people who talk about the ingredients they offer with the same fond smile that others save for anecdotes about their children, get to know them. Try their product, and if it is good, treasure the people as you treasure the ingredients.

  Another example is my friend Rod Mitchell. He comes from generations of Maine fishermen. His first career, though, was in the wine business, where he met Jean-Louis Palladin, the super-cool French chef who brought me to America. It was Jean-Louis who convinced Rod that there was a market for hand-harvested diver scallops. Rod was the first person I heard of to offer these succulent, super-fresh, and sweet morsels. On a visit to Maine, Jean-Louis, acting on a hunch, took a net down to the river and hauled in some small eels (piballes), one of the favorite fish ingredients of the southwest of France. With no bones to speak of, they are an unforgettable delicacy when served with nothing more than Espelette peppers, olive oil, and garlic. Jean-Louis urged Rod to begin supplying French restaurants with these baby American eels, and Rod took up the challenge. As a result, we have access to an ingredient we might never have had were it not for a friendship between chef and supplier.

  Of course, Rod’s seafood sometimes costs more than regular fish from a local market. But it is not surprising. He gets me wild Copper River salmon in the summer, as deeply pink as lobster coral. Closer to home he finds fresh cod, halibut, skate… the best of the ocean. These things cost more, which brings me to another important point: buy the best ingredients you can afford.

  Basically, there have been two cuisines for which the price of ingredients has not been a controlling factor: French and Japanese. In Paris you can charge $450 for dinner and, if you are Alain Passard, you may have a full house every night. In Japan, Sukiyabashi Jiro has a tiny little sushi house at the entry to a subway station, and people wait months to snag a reservation for a $300 omakase (chef-selected) meal featuring the best toro, prized mackerel known as aji, and plump live shrimp.

  With those cuisines, as with yours, clientele and imagination determine what ingredients you should buy and can afford to buy. It does not all have to be truffles, foie gras, and caviar. It can be blood-red heirloom tomatoes, hand-foraged field greens, crisp October apples. Still, to develop a great restaurant you will occasionally have to shell out for the expensive stuff. Just find a way to be sure you can sell it and that you use every shaving of truffle, every last caviar egg, every slice of foie gras. Waste is always the restaurateur’s enemy, doubly so when the ingredients are as expensive as gold. As a growing movement among chefs has shown, often the stuff that we think of as waste can be the basis of nutritious meals. If you don’t want it for your restaurant, there are food kitchens that will be happy to convert your cast-offs into meals that sustain hungry people who don’t have the resources of your clientele.

  I grew up on a farm where we ate what we grew. It could not have been more seasonal, and ever since, I have carried with me that affection for seasonality as part of my culinary DNA. It is my ruling passion. For nine months of the year we never ate a zucchini, but when they were in season, we made something with them almost every day. In fall, we had crisp, tart apples and sweet, musky pears that we stored under the top couple of inches of barley in our silo. The fruits would slowly ripen and keep for three months, well into winter. So yes, we did eat them “out of season,” I suppose, but we preserved them at their peak of flavor.

  It is flavor peakness that makes seasonality so important to ingredients. Spring is the wakening earth, summer its sweet season, fall a time of ripeness. All of us, not just chefs, can’t help but think this way. Seen in this light, ingredients connect us in the most basic way to the rhythm of the planet.

  When a new season comes, I return to my favorite dishes for that time of year, but I find it is also a time to challenge oneself to create new dishes. That is one of the lovely mysteries of cuisine, how seeing an ingredient for the first time each year somehow spurs one to create. Listen to your inner chef; it will tell you that the fava beans before you need a baby-carrot coulis alongside some poached crayfish. Or it will tell you that a gnarly Hubbard squash you’ve found in the market is incomplete until filled with black walnuts, fennel sausage, Macoun apples, and a lacing of Calvados.

  There was a time when I believed that the best ingredients (and therefore the only ones worth using) were those that could be trucked in. In Lyon, in my boyhood, this was certainly true. Within driving distance, the fruit and vegetables would ripen in the fields and orchards and be at their absolute peak. The fish would be a few hours from the sea, the cheeses just a day’s drive from the aging caves in the mountains.

  For the most part,
I still like to cook that way. To be sure, I can get amazing cherries from Chile in December. By the same token, I can also go swimming in a heated pool in New York in December—but somehow neither the swimming nor the cherries seem connected with the season, and for that reason I find them out of place.

  As the child of a farm I know very well that there are times when there aren’t many fresh fruits and vegetables on the farm to bring to the table. In February, I’d have trouble making an interesting restaurant meal that clients would pay for with fresh, local products from our farm in St. Pierre! That’s a tall order. So while farm-to-table is often the mantra of modern food activists, and we chefs want to come down on the right side of environmental and food issues, it also bears reminding ourselves that wholesome, nutritious, and delicious fruits and vegetables always come from a farm somewhere in the world. Sometimes as important as the miles something travels are the answers to the questions “Is the farmer environmentally responsible, and is the food harvested or slaughtered in a responsible/humane way?” If the answers are yes, I don’t have a problem resorting to more remote suppliers when there is nothing local to be had. In other words, I am not above “pushing” the seasons: getting peaches from the Carolinas in June or sweet corn from Florida. The suppliers load them on an eighteen-wheeler—hot from the orchard or field—and we have them three days later, beautifully ripe. Or I can call my mushroom supplier from Oregon and have chanterelles picked one day and in my prep kitchen the next. Because of modern transportation, these foods are still seasonal—at their peak—and still have a relation to the season in New York.