My Cookbook Hero: Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan's new cookbook, Baking Chez Moi, available here.

One of my cookbook heroes is Dorie Greenspan. I use her books all the time, figuring her excellent instructions will help keep me from failing. We tested her incredible new cookbook at Food & WIne, Baking Chez Moi, and I fell in love with her Brown Butter-Peach Tourte. So I asked her if she ever fails. 

Here's what Dorie said:

"Just this week, I bought a stack of silicone molds in fabulous shapes and then couldn't un-mold what I'd made.  The little cakes (a very simple recipe) stuck and tore and were useless to serve to anyone but dear, sweet Michael. I was just excited and wanted to use the molds right away and I didn't follow the advice I always give everyone else: Grease the pans even if they're silicone. "

Do you have any cookbook hero's? Leave a comment, I want to hear from you!

Jesse Schenker: When a Lie Became a Lesson

Chef Jesse Schenker and I have at least three things in common. We both have books being published this fall. We both are mistake-makers. And we've both come to embrace honesty as the best route to success. Of course we do diverge in many areas as well, including the fact that he's a chef with two terrific New York City restaurants (Recette and The Gander). I'm still learning to cook!

I reached out to Jesse to share a couple of mistakes with us: one personal, one culinary. His thoughts are below.

Jesse Schenker confronts his demons and comes out victorious.

Jesse's Personal Mistake: A Lesson from a Lie

After I got out of jail, I was living in a halfway house in Ft. Lauderdale. I was in a work-release program working at a local tavern and I had heard through the grapevine there was a chef position at a hotel across the street. I went over to the hotel, introduced myself to the General Manager and I did a tasting for the hotel owner and management staff. The next day, they offered me the job including great benefits, creative control, etc. and with the offer package came an employment form which asked if I had ever been convicted of a felony. Due to my inexperience, immaturity and fear of not getting the job, I put "no." A week later, the HR manager called me to rescind the offer since I had lied about my past on the application. Since that moment, I truly learned honesty is the best policy - personally and professionally. Also, that everything happens for a reason (if I had taken that job, I might not be in New York today). 

To buy Jesse's book, click here 

Jesse's Culinary Mistake:  The Perfect Sabayon Hack

I was hired to cater a 50 person prestigious wine dinner and the pressure was on. I had written an amazing tasting menu that I was so proud of. I had this great idea to make a savory sabayon with truffles and thyme for a squab dish. During the pickup of this course, hustling to make everything perfect, I foolishly put the finished thyme sabayon in a pot on the stove to warm up, forgetting about it.  Upon returning a couple of minutes later, I realized the whole thing completely scrambled and was unusable. Rushing to throw together another sabayon on the fly, I put the finished sabayon in a quart container, put a lid on it and threw it in a water bath under the heat lamp. Several hours after the dinner was over, we were cleaning up, and I realized the sabayon was still warm and not broken. Ever since that day, I've always warmed the sabayon in a covered quart container in a water bath.

http://www.jesseschenker.com/

An Examination of Failure Notes From A Kitchen Volume Three: Part One By Jeff Scott

One of the most magnificent books being published this fall is Jeff Scott's limited edition "Notes from a Kitchen" volume 3, part one. Jeff and I both went into the kitchen with chefs. I came back with practical tips. Jeff came back with beautiful photographs and poetry of the people and the place. The rhythm of cooking. The words echoing from the soul. The cryptic scribbles of inspirations. Scott delved into the psyches of stars like Dave Chang, Dominique Crenn and Alex Stupak. And, in some of them, found a connection to the topic of my book, mistakes. Here, Jeff has written a guest post on Dave Chang's room of ideas and his failure philosophy.

“ You have to embrace failure. You have to sort of be attracted to it. It’s a very daunting task and it takes some time. It’s almost sick and twisted and warped to think about it like that, because ultimately you’re hurting yourself, but it’s the only way you learn. ” – David Chang

Ask anyone you greatly admire in life what their strongest memory is of and my guess is it will be about feelings of love and overcoming failure.

Inside David Chang’s expanding culinary experience, inside its core is a special and sacred room, or perhaps it’s a unique mindset that’s perhaps represented by this one exclusive room. The space in question is Momofuku Culinary Lab, in Brooklyn, NY. 

I was fortunate to observe and record what goes on in this idea space, and my photographs and recorded conversations take up a good amount of idea space inside Volume Three.

Volume Three: Part One opens up this enigmatic idea room, and takes you into a deeply personal journey inside this private place.

“ There’s perfection in that imperfection. ”– David Chang

This is where flavor is looked at over long periods of time, where copious notes are taken, where ideas are perhaps more like a floating ball in the center of the room, everyone walking around it, circling above and below this ball, this idea, this unknown flavor not yet created or identified.  Within this special room, chef David Chang, along with chef Ryan Miller work to answer complex questions and explore the unknown … it is inside this place is where time is suspended, and ideas nurtured.

Mistakes are completely encouraged, as that’s where unknown flavor lives, where mysteries of umami develop and come alive.  The future of sensory experience for the diner and for chefs alike will take place here … in this perfect idea space, in this isolated place of the unknown.  Ideas will pass from this room then out to chefs in Dave’s restaurants, where ideas and new questions about flavor will then emerge/evolve, and then the process will take unknown flavor reformations, be freshly inspired in ever new directions, and will change and evolve again.  A cycle repeats.

One of the days I was in the lab, Dave was working on a dish he was to cook in the coming week, it was a serious showpiece dish and he was working to perfect.  Dave was working on making a chickpea puree to serve with some prawns and he wasn’t happy with the results.  He was working over a pot and just kept staring into it, almost trancelike, thinking, adjusting the contents of the pot. He was asking himself if he had soaked them ( chickpeas ) long enough, he believed he did, did he cook them long enough, again, yes.  Were the chickpea’s too starchy, do they need to be passed through another grade tamis, was there enough salt in the water? The consistency of the puree just wasn’t coming together as he desired and so he patiently worked and reworked his ideas, he spoke with his team … he pulled back time and again and I captured him just thinking. Dave speaks at great length in Volume Three of all these different critical nuances that need to be carefully considered for just this one element of this one dish, as still he wasn’t getting the results he was after during the entire day.  It was to require more ideas, more trials, more thought. He was trying to find this perfect ( imperfect ) balance, but it was going to need much more work in the days ahead.  So he was left with a pretty critical and glaring idea from the day, that doing simple is really insanely hard. 

Notes From A Kitchen Volume Three is about these critical ideas and probing questions; about better understanding failure and the ongoing evolution of a new idea; about nature and how our finest chefs think, feel and react … it’s a brutally honest documentation of creative fluidity.  

“ If you’re not embracing failure, you’re never going to get

where you want to go. ”– David Chang

Jeff Scott

Author, Notes From A Kitchen

Notesfromakitchen.com

@_jeffscott

The OG Mistake Maker

I got the very first copy of my book today, shrink-wrapped, sent by messenger from Dan Halpern, my editor at Ecco. Though i was tempted, I didn't open it. Instead, I called my mother. My mother is the OG mistake maker. Throughout my life, she'd called attention to her own comical errors. Every time she made a mistake, she'd say, "well, I hope some time I'll stop having these learning experiences!" Her willingness to admit when something went wrong rubbed off on me, and helped inspire me to write the book.

So I brought my mother the book, and she hugged it with pride before sitting down and flipping through. Here's my mom looking at the cover. I got a kick out of the fact that her sweater and my book jacket were in the same color family. Cosmic coincidence.

This is the kitchen in the apartment I grew up in. My mother is still living in the same place, using this amazing stove to boil water for instant coffee. My mother doesn't cook.

These spices haven't been used in over 20 years, but my mother likes to keep them just where they are.

The heat in the kitchen made the dots drip on this very cool wall clock. Dali would approve.

Note to self: Putting spice behind a toaster oven and next to a stove is not ideal.

Welcome Mistake-Makers!

The cover of my new book, out on October 14, 2014. Published by Ecco. 

Welcome to all the mistake-makers of the world. I've come to believe that people who make mistakes, and are willing to embrace them in order to correct them, are the greatest people in the world--risk-takers, learners, achievers, dreamers.

I'm new to this way of thinking, and it's changing my life.

Here's how I got to this point. A couple of years ago, something began to trouble me. I'd been Editor in Chief of Food & Wine Magazine for almost two decades, but I consistently made mistakes when I was cooking for my family and friends. Every meal had an I-can't-believe-I-just-messed-that-up moment. It seemed like a cosmic joke. How could someone (me!) know so much about food, be friends with the best chefs in the world, eat out all the time, and still get tripped up in the kitchen?

To find out and to improve, I decided to tackle my problem head-on. I contemplated my options--cooking school, hours of instructional video on YouTube, cooking shows--but then figured out the right choice for me: enlist my favorite chefs to identify my errors and show me how to fix them. At some point along the way I decided I wanted to share the amazing lessons I was learning, and that's why I wrote my first cookbook: Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen.