When a person meets a chef the usual questions asked are: do you cook at home and what is your favorite thing to eat?
Let me start by first letting you know that chefs are no different than anyone else. Although we all have our day jobs, it doesn’t exclude us from familial duties. In fact, the assumption of cooking duties at home and being responsible for party and holiday feasts is common, but not mandatory. Chefs have no problem after a long night in the kitchen of kicking back with a bag of fast food instead of prepping something from scratch. Being a chef with “normal” business hours allows me to do more cooking at home for my own enjoyment.
My usual weekday routine is to “finish” cooking the dinner for tonight and “start” the next day’s dinner. What does that mean? Am I pulling it from a package or reheating in the microwave? First, there is nothing wrong with leveraging frozen or prepackaged foods to help shortcut the meal prep. For years I worked for companies making sure that the culinary integrity of food was maintained while being produced and either frozen or refrigerated for the masses. While I don’t routinely use prepackaged food or the microwave often, what I mean by “starting” is the night before I do the prep and/or initial cooking of the main components of the meal. This may be marinating a protein overnight, searing/braising/stewing/sous viding a piece of meat until near completion, or marinating, pickling or roasting vegetables to creating a sauce or finishing glaze for use the next day. “Finishing” a dish is cooking the components of the dish to the desired doneness, assembling the side dishes and associated sauces/garnishes to ensure the completed meal is composed and served all at the same time at the appropriate temperatures required by me.
This may sound over complicated and time consuming, but in reality it is just the opposite. What takes 20-30 minutes each day to complete a meal with this methodology would take up to three times that amount of time to accomplish in a single day. I don’t have the time or patience after a long day at work to be cooking for two hours and eating at 8pm.
Breaking down the process into more manageable timing allows for better flavor development and ease of final execution on the back end. Not everything has to be a fine dining plate either, but the less time you spend composing the dish means the more time you have to start knocking out the next day’s dinner and ultimately settling into your evening.
The second most commonly asked question ― what do I like to eat? Generally, I like to eat pretty random and diverse things. While I do enjoy the staples dishes like meatloaf, spaghetti Bolognese and taco’s al carbon, I do tend to skew my cooking to simple classical French cooking and Eastern Asian cuisine. But as soon as I say that, I am mixing it up ― cooking Hispanic, Regional American, Southern Indian or the often over looked peasant cuisines of the world.
What is my favorite dish to eat? Bacon fried rice. What’s not to like about bacon, rice and spring onions topped with a medium fried egg and a side of Portuguese sausage?!?! I’ve made this dish in every state I’ve worked in and have converted many to the Asian side of the bacon. Interestingly enough, I first experienced this dish in a bowling alley in my home city of Los Angeles. This bowling alley is very popular amongst Japanese and Hawaiian natives coming to visit the mainland who miss their homeland food and want to feast on deliciousness like bacon fried rice, spam musubi, loco moco, saimin, tempura or soba w/teriyaki grilled fish.
At the end of the day, having dined in many countries around the world, I find it extremely difficult to have a truly favorite food. Comparing them is not possible as each country and region has something they do better and differently than anywhere else. This is what drives me to continually to learn and search out new foods both in restaurants and on store shelves. The day when chefs stop creating and stores stop introducing new flavors will be the day I stop my culinary journey.
See Chef Nakata in action as he prepares dishes using our coffee and tea extracts in these Tasteful Twist videos.
The post What’s on your plate? appeared first on S+D Coffee.