José Andrés' fridge, the Restaurant of the Future and what to cook for Bastille Day

Brenner Report #2

Happy Monday!

One of the benefits of continuing to work at home is having my coffee in the living room, in front of our big windows, which I always open, even in summer (yikes!) in Dallas. Usually there’s a lovely waft of cool-enough air till at least 11, sometimes lunchtime. On Friday morning, instead I was hit by a hot blast of steam — unusual for Dallas; usually it’s dryish here. I slammed the window shut, resumed AC and had my coffee iced.

I don’t like to feel closed in, and self-protection from Covid can so easily make our worlds smaller and smaller. I practically live within the confines of my fridge, at least psychically. What it contains has become a daily preoccupation.

That’s probably why I clicked on a story in Heated on Medium I might have ignored in normal times: What’s in José Andrés' fridge. The excerpt, from a new book, Chefs’ Fridges: More than 35 World-Renown Cooks Reveal What they Eat at Home, includes Carrie Solomon and Adrian Moore’s Q & A with Andrés.

José Andrés’ fridge, annotated

The lede photo, the superhero chef’s open fridge, completely drew me in. I want to live in that fridge, instead of mine!

Let’s see, what can I take away. I’m going to stop trying to cram as much produce as possible into the crisper drawers — chef Andrés’ frilly bulbs of fennel, bunches of carrots and white asparagus, orange beets and fractally fabulous romanesco all looked so invitingly happy — sprawling, yet organized, their fronds and leaves all pointed to the back. Maybe I could lay down with those veg and cool off in there.

I had a hard time puzzling what season it was when the photo was shot. There’s a bag of fresh cranberry beans — in season in late summer and fall. A small thingy of pomegranate seeds, which would put us in at least October. Tangerines would seem to indicate November at earliest, but the two bunches of fat white asparagus look like April or May. Andrés doesn’t strike me as the type to harbor out-of-season produce from Chile, but maybe he was developing recipes for an upcoming book when the photo was shot?

Eureka! I was sure I had the answer when I found a recipe for Esparragos Blancos a la Crema de Manchego — white asparagus with Manchego cream — in his most recent book, Vegetables Unleashed.

But no, it turns out that recipe uses canned white asparagus — and the canning liquid marries grated Manchego to make the sauce. Brilliant, right?!

Upending conventional fridge wisdom

How curious, I thought, that Andrés keeps garlic in the fridge — three heads, next to the tangerines on the second-highest shelf, which also holds a jar of Hellman’s mayo and a round box of Laughing Cow cheese. But what was that next to the tangerines, a tomato??? Aren’t we supposed to not fridge that, ever? Or is it a red bell pepper? Doesn’t seem to be shaped like one.

The top shelf holds a box of my preferred brand of all-butter frozen puff pastry (Dufour), a tub of burrata and also a jar of tahini, which will add new fuel to an ongoing argument in my family about whether the sesame paste should be refrigerated. (I say not, but I’m probably wrong.)

A giant box of bottarga caught my interest: Trikalinos Premium Gray Dried Mullet Bottarga from Greece. 7.4 ounces goes for $89.95 on Amazon. That’s a lot of bottarga to have at home, even for a chef, as it’s intensely flavored and a little goes a long way.

If you’re not familiar with bottarga, it is the cured roe sac of either grey mullet or tuna, a specialty of the southeastern Mediterranean, as well as Japan, where it’s called karasumi. I’d venture to guess that’s a great label, if Andrés wanted to show it.

That fridge is a rabbit hole!

Other interesting tidbits came from the interview proper. Andrés loves frozen peas (“the best frozen vegetable imaginable!) and makes a point of stocking that frozen puff pastry (“you never know when you might need it”). Indeed.

I also loved to hear about the chef’s favorite food when he comes home from a long day at work: zucchini cooked in water till al dente, then dosed with miso and sesame oil and topped with furikake (a Japanese seasoning mix). “You eat the savory, tender zucchini first, and then the broth is amazing — it makes the best soup.” Something delicious-sounding to play with in zucchini season! 

At the risk of falling down a rabbit hole, I thought I’d mention that I’m in process of reviewing André’s cookbook for Cooks Without Borders, and have fallen in love with one of his zucchini creations in its pages — “Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs.” You don’t even need a recipe to make it, just toss 1/2 slabs of the summer squash with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, grill them (outside or on a grill pan) 2 or 3 minutes on each side, till nicely grilled, put on a plate, sprinkle with za’atar and pile a big handful of mixed herbs on top.

Finally, Andrés mentions that he has an indoor greenhouse called a Farmshelf, where he grows lettuces and herbs. It’s an impressive looking structure, with models for home that start at (gulp!) $4,950. They’re now taking pre-orders, in case you’re feeling flush. 

As it happens, I’d been pondering a purchase of something related, but a wee bit less expensive (at less than a fortieth of the price): an AeroGarden — a kitchen-countertop hydroponic garden with built-in fluorescent grow lights. My friend CarloMaria Ciampoli, a brilliant architect in Boulder, Colorado, who’s also a passionate home cook, has been raving about his 6-pod model, in which he’s been growing heirloom lettuces for “counter-to-table” salad for three months. I had such a hard time deciding between that lettuce garden and herb garden (I go through a lot of herbs) that the “elite” model I wanted had sold out by the time I got around to ordering.

Inspired by (and jealous of Andrés’ Farmshelf, I pulled the trigger on a basic 6-pod herb garden for $119.95 (they’re having a summer sale). If I love it as much as Carlo loves his, I’ll probably spring for a lettuce garden, too. (We have a small patio patio at our townhouse, but critters eat everything edible I try to plant there, so my kitchen windowsills are lined with potted herbs.)

Back to bottarga

In the scary recesses of my own fridge lives a small, dessicated piece of mullet bottarga from the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf bottarga is an excellent product, but Thierry and Wylie aren’t crazy about bottarga, so it has taken me forever to use it all, and now I’m afraid I’ve left it too long. It’s hard as a rock, but it’s so hard to say goodbye. I wish it were fresh, because my friend S. Irene Virbila, the long-time restaurant critic at the L.A. Times, posted this on Instagram on Saturday:

sirene_virbila

What to do with the bottarga I just found languishing in a drawer in the refrigerator? I adore spaghetti with bottarga, but wanted to try something different. Then I remembered a note Turkish chef Semsa Denizsel had sent me after she read an article on the dried mullet roe I'd written for @latimesfood. She wanted to tell me how one night with friends over for dinner she took some baked potatoes and heaped them with butter flavored with garlic, lemon zest, salt, and freshly ground black pepper. That sounds plenty good on its own, but her genius idea was to grate "tons" of bottarga over the top. "The whole potato experience was so elevated that even langoustines faded in their shade," she wrote.
The first time we tried the bottarga-topped baked potato, I swore that next time it should be the main course. That time was last night--and actually, I could easily have eaten another whole potato.
Since I've been back to Istanbul, Semsa has closed her famous restaurant, Kantin after 18 years, and opened a cooking school on an olive grove in Turkey's northern Aegean. At Cooks Grove (https://cooksgroveturkey.com) the flame-haired chef gives cooking workshops and classes in English. Look it up. She is a wonderful, soulful cook with a great sense of fun. (She's also on @YouTube but only in Turkish.) @cooksgrove
#bakedpotato #bordierbutter #bottarga #Corsica
#homecooking #summersupper #summercooking
#semsadenizsel www.theguideistanbul.com › semsa-denizsel-cooks-grove 📷 Fred Seidman

July 11, 2020

Sounds so irresistible, I’ll need to save up for a new piece of bottarga. And unless anyone out there knows a use for my rock-hard remnant, I’ll kiss that one goodbye. 🤦‍♀️

The restaurant of the future?

There’s a lot of talk in the food world of how restaurants will be reimagined for a post-COVID world.

This image, which accompanies a white paper from consultancy Kinetic 12 called “What Does the Restaurant of the Future Look Like,” crystallizes many of the ideas I’ve seen floating out there.

Source: Kinetic12 Consulting, a Chicago based Foodservice consulting firm, Kinetic12.com, Bruce@kinetic12com

In it, authors Bruce Reinstein and Tim Hand very neatly lay the way things would look in an optimally safe restaurant, their vision for the “new normal” that everyone’s chasing.

What’s striking is the sense of cleanliness and engineered efficiency. From the report:

Many concepts are simply set up to be congested in order to maximize revenue. This made total sense with costly rents and the high cost of build-out. Not only that, consumers in the pre- Kinetic12 Consulting 2020 2 COVID world embraced restaurants as a place to hang-out, to work and to socialize. That also may change. Now with social distancing and a general fear of infection, we will see significant behavioral changes from consumers, and operators will be adapting to a safety-first mantra. We can expect to see significant adjustments to dine-in floor plans, the addition of no-touch ordering and payment systems, queuing, new take-out options, menu simplification, SKU reduction, labor productivity and so much more.

At the heart of that paragraph, the idea that consumers used to, pre-COVID, embrace restaurants as a place to hang out, work and socialize and that that may change is worth examining — and key to whether such a model could ever achieve stickiness. Throwing "work” into the equation would seem to indicate that Reinstein and Hand are referring to Starbucks and other coffee places with internet, not what many of us generally consider a restaurant but technically is.

But the question is: If a restaurant feels this antiseptic, how many of us will enjoy going? Is there a way to imagine a restaurant that will feel safe enough, but where we’d actually want to hang out and socialize? Or will we have to rid ourselves of our desire to hang out and socialize as part of the restaurant experience in order to have restaurants at all?

Outside of a fast-food (or maybe fast-casual) setting, I don’t think that’s possible; it’s against human nature. One of the primary reasons people go to restaurants is to feel good, to feel connected, to feel part of something. To feel, in any case. And to eat and drink, of course, but it’s all about the setting, the vibe. Will being ushered into a world of stainless steel by a brand ambassador make them feel good? The word “restaurant” comes from the French word “restauration,” which is restoring. The original restaurant food in the 18th century was bouillon, a restorative broth. Restaurants aren’t only about feeding people, they’re also about restoring people’s sense of humanity.

Are there things in Reinstein and Hand’s exercise people in the restoration business can take away?

I’d say attention to airflow.

In any kind of setting in which we are trapped indoors — not just restaurants, but offices, retail shops, everywhere — airflow will be key. Hopefully some companies out there are aggressively figuring out how to move air around and purify it of viruses — not just for this pandemnic, but for the next one and the one after that.

What sounds most appealing to me is hanging out in a restaurant that’s completely outdoors, like a giant picnic party (not easy in my extreme-weather neck of the woods). The New York Times had a story 10 days ago about how Rhode Island’s McCoy Stadium, longtime home of the Pawtucket Red Sox, has turned into a summertime “Dining on the Diamond” pop-up, serving not just hot dogs and nachos, but also lobster rolls and barbecue platters.

Doesn’t that sound dreamy? As we reinvent restaurants, we can’t forget to address the requirements of the human soul.

⚾️

[As I was writing the above, my brother Johnny texted me: “Did you hear about the new restaurant on the moon? The food is great, but there’s no atmosphere.”]

Worth a read

• Speaking of innovation, it’s hard to imagine maki sushi that successfully substitutes cauliflower rice for actual rice, but chef Ei Hiroyoshi, a cauliflower rice skeptic, may have cracked the code. Haley Eber writes in Los Angeles magazine that the ersatz-rice toro rolls from the new delivery-only Skinny Fish are “nearly as satisfying as the genuine article.”

• At Eater, Dayna Evans writes about The Food Timeline, which she calls “the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet.”

• Following last week’s inaugural Brenner Report, pastry chef Annika De Paula Loureiro (recently furloughed from Chi Spacca in Los Angeles and on her way to relocate in Austin) posted a wonderful comment about what she learned from a presentation Kwame Onwuachi made in New York last year. Onwauchi, the executive chef at Kith and Kin in Washington, D.C., won a 2019 James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef. Onwauchi suggested at that presentation that we ask ourselves questions that stir the pot. “We all recognize how powerful it can be to tap into the nostalgic,” De Loureiro writes. “To serve food that speaks to people’s subconscious. African is the oldest of our food memories. It’s in our DNA. Without knowing African food we all have been missing out on food so nostalgic it can move our soul. It’s key in connecting everything — in making true American modern cuisine. In order to properly move forward we must look back.”

I found De Loureiro’s comment incredibly inspiring and immediately ordered a copy of Onwauchi’s Notes from a Young Black Chef, which she recommended.

The very same day Onwauchi announced he has left Kith and Kin. I’m so sorry I never got to dine there.

• Despite America’s newfound of cooking, Sur La Table has filed for bankruptcy and plans to close more than 50 stores — which speaks to the dire state of retail in COVID-era America.

What’s cooking?

• In a French household, Le Quatorze Juillet — Bastille Day — is a big deal. (I’m French only by marriage, with citizenship intentions long in the works and overdue.) A pissaladière would be a delicious thing for a celebratory pique-nique (maybe with a nice, cold Picpoul de Pinet). So would a classic niçoise salad. I’ll be making one of those tonight, and tomorrow, for the holiday, we’ll be grilling magret (duck breasts) and drinking Ricard. 🇫🇷

• David Lebovitz always has something delicious and French going on at his website, which would be great to mine for Bastille Day cooking inspiration. This week his little croutons smeared with sun-dried tomato pesto spoke to me loudly and demandingly. Since I saw it, I’ve been craving the flavor of sun-dried tomatoes. Prediction: The shrivelly red symbols of the ‘80s will make a comeback.

• If you like cooking videos, L.A. super chef Ludovic Lefebvre has fabulous ones covering oodles of French classics on his IGTV channel. Another excellent place to find Bastille Day deliciousness.

• Competing holiday: July 14 is also National Mac and Cheese Day. But wait — that comes just a week after National Macaroni Day? Who decides these things?! In any case, you could make this Classic Mac and Cheese, call it macaroni gratinée and cover all the bases. 🎉

• Last night I made Stir-fried shrimp with Dragon Well tea from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shanghai cookbook Land of Fish and Rice. It’s part of a broader effort to expand Cooks Without Borders’ Cookbooks section (a work in progress), as well as develop our woefully slim Chinese cooking section. Dunlop’s books are magnificent, and her Instagram feed is a delicious treat. Quick takeaway: I used a technique from the book for stir-frying Chinese greens. Heat oil in a wok till it’s smoking. Add greens (she suggests sliced bok choy; I used tiny bok choy, the tiniest ones left whole and the others cut in half). Toss them in, stir fry till they’re just done, and add only salt, and only after they’re done cooking. Wylie said it was the best bok choy he’s ever had.

On my plate

• I’ve been collecting ingredients to develop a Thai green curry paste for a Thai section for CWB that’s in the works. I’m grateful to Yuyee Sakpanichkul Kaiho, chef-owner of Ka-Tip Thai Street Food in Dallas, who is providing valuable insight on dishes and ingredients and sharing her curry technique. I’ll be excited to feature her on the site. To supply me for upcoming Thai dishes, I’ve got stalks of lemongrass growing on my windowsill — you can drop them in a glass of water and they’ll grow, just like scallions, which has become a pandemic fashion trend.

• Finally, I added Jessica B. Harris’ memoir, My Soul Looks Back, to the tall pile on books on my nightstand. Once I started reading The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent, I so fell in love with her voice I wanted to know her better. Hard to put this one down.

Have a great week. Drop me a line at leslie@lesliebrennerconcepts.com; I’d love your feedback. Or better yet, comment on this post. (Let’s talk to each other!)

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🐞

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