Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, guys. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit
about our appetite for knowledge and how that helps us define ourselves at the restaurant.
Typically at these types of symposiums, we would come up here and show a video of what
we've been up to over the last year, our latest and greatest hits. But this is clearly a
different type of event, and it required a different approach. So we decided that rather
than show you this or that technique, what I thought would be useful is to talk about
why we do what we do at the restaurant. More specifically, what I want to talk about is
the how and why of our cooking. And the relationship between this how and why of cooking, coupled
with the individuals doing the cooking at our restaurant, has shaped, ostensibly, our
culinary knowledge and our creative process at the restaurant. And the crux of all this
happened, actually, as Dave referenced. The crux of this approach happened at WD-50, had
its roots in the late 1990s when I was beginning to have the opportunity to do that restaurant
on Clinton Street, and something terrifying happened. Basically, it dawned on me right
before the restaurant opened that I had no idea what I was doing. And of course, that's
not completely true, but it's true to say that in many ways, I realized I knew nothing.
In reality, what I had realized was that my culinary knowledge, my culinary education,
was woefully incomplete. So I set about trying to categorize what little I did know in an
effort to slowly whittle away at my ignorance. And what I realized was that my culinary knowledge
– oh, geez – my culinary knowledge, our culinary knowledge, thus far, could be broken
down in more or less two main periods. And the first phase of my career, like many of
us in this room, was spent learning how to cook. While the second phase of my career,
the last eight or nine years, have been spent more understanding or trying to understand,
focusing on why I cooked the way I cook. And so when I talk about the how, I'm talking
about maybe something that may seem a little obvious to a lot of us. How do we cook? Well,
let's talk about what's involved in cooking. Well, these are some of the things that sort
of exemplify how we cook. We have ingredients, and where are the ingredients from? How are
they grown? How are they raised? What's the provenance? What's the story behind the
ingredient? Just learning. It's a cook's job when he or she is young. The main part
of our job involves ingredients. So we have to understand these ingredients, familiarize
ourselves with these ingredients, learn about them, how to handle them, how to care for them,
just really become more aware of them. There are so many ingredients I didn't know when
I first started cooking versus how many I know now. The equipment of a kitchen, the knives,
the mixers, the whisks, the spatulas, they make up the vernacular of the kitchen. The
equipment is what we do. And nowadays, we have some more modern equipment, but we can
also talk about the more traditional or classic pieces of equipment. The stove, learning how
to use these things is a vital part of a young cook's career. The history of our industry
is also very important, and I think very relevant. The stories behind the dishes, what, you know,
Peach Melba, who was Melba? Hollandaise, how do you make a Hollandaise? Stocks, this and
that, the people that are doing these things, understanding the chefs that have come before
me and their stories and their histories, all of that, I think, is also part of the
early education of a cook, of existing work. So what else has happened? What other things
have people done? Who's done what in an effort to make sure that you don't necessarily
ultimately repeat something that someone else has done? And then, of course, we have technique,
how to cook, learning actually how to cook, how to saute, how to roast, how to chop, how
to braise, how to make sauces, how to work in the kitchen, how to physically behave with
the people around you, how to do this wonderful ballet that we all do every day, every night.
All of those things make up sort of the early part of the education of a cook. And then,
there's the second phase, and the second phase is the why. Not just how do we do these things,
but why do we do these things? Dan Barber asked, why are we growing this type of wheat
when possibly we should be growing a different type of wheat that has a better nutritive
value? Dave Chang said, why are we afraid of using MSG if maybe MSG isn't so bad for
us? These questions are important. The asking why is important. We had questions. We had
questions ourselves about why we were cooking a certain way. And might there be a better
way? And I believe that the answer is yes, a more informed way of cooking. But it turned
out that a lot of these answers are likely not to be found only in the kitchen. We realized
we were going to have to go elsewhere for answers, because the traditional answers from
the kitchen about why we're cooking the way we were were not always satisfactory. Well,
chef, why are we doing it that way? Because I said so. Or because that's how we've always
done it. Or because it works. But those are useful, I think, answers for a young cook
who sort of is in the heat of the moment and needs to just sort of focus. But as you get
older and start to wonder, I think it's important to round out the education. I think it's important
to fill in the blanks. So our search has brought us out of the kitchen, two events like this,
to meet equally curious people. It's also forced us to think a bit about what's really
involved in cooking, what's happening while you're cooking, all these things. What's
happening while you're cutting and roasting and boiling and braising and poaching? What
are you actually doing? Well, it turns out that it involves a fair bit of science, specifically
some physics, some biology, and some chemistry. And so we really realized that we were going
to have to develop relationships with other people from other disciplines. We were going
to have to not only talk to our fellow chefs who were like-minded and curious, but we were
going to have to go outside of our industry, talk to food scientists, talk to commercial
food manufacturers, commercial food processors. We realized we'd have to talk to authors.
Of course, there's Harold McGee, but then there's Chris Young, the brilliant scientist
behind the Modernist Cuisine book, who's been involved in helping chefs for years and years
and years. Cesar Vega, some of you here may know Cesar. Cesar knows more about eggs than
anybody I've ever met. And the beauty of all this information is that while it's completely
objective, meaning it's hard and fast data, it turns out that the information, what's
happening to an egg when you poach it? Well, an egg poaches like this at X number of degrees,
the whites begin to cook, or the proteins begin to coagulate, the same thing is true
of the yolk. And it goes on and on and on. And we can sort of begin to understand a little
bit more deeply the processes of cooking in a good way. But again, this information is
all purely objective. But what any one of us chooses to do with that information will
always be subjective, meaning there will never be a universal way of cooking, but the information
is always going to be universally useful. And that's an important thing to realize that
everybody is going to benefit in this way from this information. And understanding why
you're doing something is an important aspect of doing it well. If you can know the reasons
that you're doing something, you can make really sound decisions. But the individual
still plays the most important role in the cooking process. There will never be a right
way to poach an egg, but there will always be a more or less informed way to poach an
egg. The chef still plays the most important role in the puzzle, though. And that's where
the individual comes in. We have all of this objective data, and I want to couple that
and stress the value of bringing the individual onto into this. The chef is still the most
important piece of the puzzle. Personal experience, the personal experience of the person preparing
the food or thinking about the food. Where have you been? Who have you worked for? What
are you reading? What's stimulating you? What are your personal preferences? What do
you like? What don't you like? What are the goals of the individual or what are the goals
of the restaurant? Are you trying to be a little tiny bistro on the corner? Are you
trying to be the next Noma? And these things are important. What do you want? What are
your hopes? What are your hopes for a given dish? What are your hopes for the restaurant?
Do you want something simple? Do you want something complex? And how the individual
interacts with this information, I think, is very, very important and very interesting
because you have objective data mixed with subjective data. And I think when you do that,
once you have an understanding of the how and the why and you couple that with the individuals
or the individual doing the cooking, you really have a tremendous opportunity for creativity.
And I think that is relevant. And at WD50, our creativity tends to show up in basically
two forms. The first is we take things that are familiar and we present them in an unfamiliar
way. This is a dish that some of you might have had. It's sort of the one dish I can't
shake. It follows me around. This is an eggs Benedict. Now, when I say the familiar and
in an unfamiliar way, I mean eggs Benedict is a familiar dish. Many of you out there
know what eggs Benedict is and it means something to you. And you have emotional ties. You have
personal experiences, whether it means Sunday brunch with the family yesterday or having
it in your house, your mom made for you or whatever it means, you as an individual bring
something to the table with eggs Benedict. But what we want to do is we want to take
that familiar and serve it to you in a way that's unfamiliar. We want to take it and
upend it, but we don't want to mess with the spirit, with the essential nature of eggs
Benedict. But I do want to have a little bit of fun with the way you interact with it.
And so that's where some of this information, some of this science, some of this knowledge
comes to bear. And in this case, we have built a dish basically around the notion of deep
frying hollandaise, which might seem simple, but it's actually not simple at all because
emulsions are very complex and very complicated and fascinating. And it's something I wish
I knew a lot more about. But one thing I do know is you can't take hollandaise and deep
fry it on its own. It needs some help. And so with the work of some scientists, we've
actually figured out how to create an emulsion, a stable emulsion, a classic hollandaise that
can withstand the violent environment of the fryer. And again, that highlights I think
sort of how you can take this data and use it in a very useful, significant way. And
we started to think, what are some other egg-based sauces, classically, historically, emulsions
that can withstand the rigors of the fryer? And what immediately came to mind was pastry
cream. Pastry cream is eggs, butter, sugar, and classically cornstarch. And how can you
bring eggs to a boil without them curdling? And that has a lot to do with the way the
starch that's in the emulsion acts as a jacket, sort of buffers the emulsion from the heat,
the thermal, sort of the negative heat, and how that would scramble your eggs. And they
don't scramble. And so we were able to look backwards and look forwards in a way and come
up with something that we feel was very interesting. And so this is one of the two sort of forms
that we play with a lot in the restaurant, a familiar and an unfamiliar way. And then
the other one we do is we take the familiar, I mean, I'm sorry, we take the unfamiliar
and we serve it to you in a familiar way. And what I mean by unfamiliar, I'm talking
about in this case, unfamiliar flavors, things that might not seem like they would taste
good together, might not be commensurate with each other, flavor-wise. And then also dish-wise,
we have a peel-peel here, meeting a fried green tomato. So we have two very different
cultures colliding on the same plate, but they're doing so in a familiar way, meaning
you have on this plate, you have a fish, a piece of soul, you have a starch in the form
of a fried green tomato, you have a veg, some pickled vegetables, and a sauce, a peel-peel.
So it's very, in the American sense, it's like a TV dinner. There's your protein, your
starch, your veg, and your sauce. However, it's not, you're not, it's familiar in terms
of how it's presented in a way that maybe you're not even conscious of, but we're still
hitting some, we're not taking you totally out of your comfort zone because we are asking
you to try a licorice-flavored peel-peel with a piece of fried green tomato and some vegetables
that we've vacuum-pickled these vegetables, this fennel, every day, so it's very crisp
and very different than a traditional fennel. And then there's also the fact that we've
made this fried green tomato using some very interesting techniques that we've, we've come
across over the years in the restaurant of taking an enzyme that typically binds with
meat proteins, or fish proteins, poultry proteins, and actually gotten it to work on vegetables
using sort of a funny trick. We confused the enzyme in a way. And, and so, again, we're
using some old things, classic peel-peel, the notion, the historical context, the, the
mysouchef, Sam Henderson came up with this dish. He's from Atlanta, Georgia, where fried
green tomatoes are very popular. So, again, the individual is meeting a lot of hard data
here to create a very interesting and ultimately delicious, delicious dish, I think. So, again,
you have this, you have this objective information, meeting this subjective information, and the
individual coming in to bear, and you have a really a creative opportunity that is very
exciting for us, for us at the restaurant. And it's very important to understand. I want
to stress that this is just an approach. This is not the approach. There will never be one
way to cook. And my hope is to only be a small part of the conversation of this event in
particular. There are roughly 20 of us up here talking about our philosophies, our styles,
but there are hundreds more of you out there. And we are simply the conversation starters
up here to get the ball rolling. The real value of mad, I believe, lies in the dialogues
that take place once we all leave the stage. We've seen several people mention how knowledge
can drive the cooking process, as well as hints at the value of bringing science back
into the kitchen these last couple of days. And I certainly couldn't agree more with any
of that. So, with that, I would say, let's keep learning and let's keep making great
food. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
