Category Archives: culture

Tales from a Mexican Line Cook

Puebla parade

Like many restaurants, my kitchen was staffed largely by cooks/runners/dishwashers of Latin American origin, particularly Mexicans from the state of Puebla. This made sense, given that we were cooking Latin-influenced food, but you’ll find Mexican cooks everywhere in New York, from diners to Chinese restaurants to fine dining.

There are many great cultural exchanges to be had from hanging out with Latino cooks, from hearing the latest reggaeton to learning the true meaning of Cinco de Mayo. (Turns out it’s not just about cheap margaritas.) But as you while away hours peeling yucca in the slow afternoon, sometimes the conversation takes a turn for the serious. You ponder aloud: what you’re doing with your life, what your dreams are, who you love, where it all went wrong. You share your hopes for your family, your fears that you’re not good enough, your ambitions to go to college. You tell your life story, how you came to the US and found your footing here. You do all this while crammed into a closet-sized space, with tweezers in one hand and a fish fillet in the other. This is the trench.

For those of us who aren’t first generation immigrants, it’s easy to forget that this country is built on immigrants and a dream for a better life. For those of us who can afford to go to culinary school, who have a college degree, have no family members in the military, live near a Whole Foods and have never been arrested, it’s a cold bucket of water to remember that we are part of the privileged class, even if we think we’re not.

Here’s a couple of the stories I heard:


S: I came with my dad when I was 13. Why? I don’t know, it just seemed like the thing to do, I wasn’t doing much else at home. I’ve been living and working in NYC for 9 years now. I’ve been a busboy, runner, dishwasher, oyster shucker, and now I’ve been working here for one year. Started off doing dishes here, then moved to the cold station, and now I’m on flat top and grill.

My dad died 3 years ago, and I spent $12k on his funeral. It wiped out all of my savings. I want to go to school, get a college degree, but I don’t know how or where to get the money.

What do you want to accomplish before you die?

Well, I would really like to take care of my mother, make sure she is comfortable. That’s the first thing I want to do. Secondly, I want to take care of my girlfriend, because I know she loves me a lot. Then maybe after that, my sister. But she has her own family, and she’s ok I think, she doesn’t need me. So really, I want to take care of my mother, that’s my #1 goal.
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What’s It Like to Be a (Temporary) Vegan?

Vinny’s cheeseless veggie pizza

So, what’s it like to go from an oyster slurping, pork braising, cheese grating, cream swilling chef and eater to one that’s not?

It’s incredibly easy and hard at the same time.

For the most part, V-month was FABULOUS. Much better than the time I tried to drink Soylent for a week. Unlike Soylent week, which was mindnumbingly boring, I’ve had tons of room to experiment with new foods and flavors.

I’ve concluded that it’s best to understand vegan food as vegetable, fruit and grain based dishes, not meat or cheese imitations. For the most part, vegan alternatives are invariably not the same as the original, and this leads people to be uncomfortable about “weird” textures and flavors. We go down the wrong path when we tell people “you won’t miss X, you’ll love this (can’t possibly be the same as the original) vegan version instead!” The dish might be good on its own merits, but I can’t help comparing it to what I’ve had before. But when I don’t try to mimic meat dishes, there are no voices in my head trying to compare what I’m eating to something else. In other words, it’s better to get pizza without cheese than pizza with soy cheese, so that you can divorce yourself from your prior expectations. I’ve tried two kinds of vegan cream cheese so far, and while they were fine, mentally I never really got over that they weren’t the same as cream cheese. So I switched to just using hummus or peanut butter on my bagels.

On my own, I can stick to a vegan diet relatively easily. However, external pressures and social obligations complicate matters. On one occasion, I ended up at a bar near Penn Station for dinner, and pretty much the only thing I could eat was French fries and beer. (Wait, I guess that’s not really a problem.) It’s also awkward to say no when people offer me food. After a good friend made red-wine braised oxtail for dinner and invited me over, I had to say no. As someone who often gives food as a sign of care and affection, it feels terrible to turn down someone else’s offering, especially if it’s homemade. I told people at the beginning of the month that I was trying a vegan diet, but no one really remembered. For this particular dinner party, I ended up bringing my own food, which was a good compromise but I was lucky that I’d cooked ahead of time.

For the first time, I also have to read food labels carefully. It gives me a sense of what it’d be like to have a food allergy. Is that milk in the frozen naan? Why on earth would you put milk powder in gluten-free flour?

Vegan Mapo Tofu

What have you been cooking?

Lots of things! There’s the usual assortment of grain salads, beans and vegetable sides, but for me, the easiest jumping point is to cook Asian food, which is generally dairy-free already, and easy to make vegetarian. I loved these recipes for mushroom mapo tofu and braised eggplant with tofu. I also made time for vegan desserts (who says vegan means healthy?) and had a blast with this chocolate cake and these carrot cake cookies.

The seemingly Sisyphean task that I wanted to accomplish was to create a good vegan cheese sauce (read: one indistinguishable from your average cheddar sauce). I’ve been experimenting with a bunch of vegan cheese sauce recipes, and honestly, none of them are great when I compare them to actual cheese sauce. This recipe for vegan mac & cheese left me wrinkling my nose initially. However, if I tried to think of it as pasta tossed with butternut squash and creamed cashew sauce, then that changed matters entirely and I could enjoy it on its own merits.

One unexpected perk was that I could now swap food with vegan and veg-inclined friends, who tend to cook a fair amount out of necessity. I usually cook in massive batches over the weekend and end up eating the same thing for days afterwards. Suddenly I had more people to swap food with, and that was a nice communal experience.
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How to Munch on Munch

Food Scream

(With apologies to Edvard Munch)

At this time of the year, the produce aisle at the Food Coop is just bursting with color. Yellow tomatoes! Magenta beets! Purple broccoli! I’d been considering doing a series of meals using only ingredients of the same color. Then, a friend sent me this NPR article on art-inspired food. Presto! I decided to recreate “The Scream” in edible format. The results were quite palette-able, if I do say so myself.

Ingredients:

  • Red: swiss chard stems
  • Pink: prosciutto
  • Orange: squash
  • Yellow: beet
  • Green: zucchini
  • Violet: purple daikon radish
  • Black: seaweed
  • White: cheddar
Taste the Rainbow
Taste the Rainbow

Soylent Experiment: Cake, Cooking Without Tasting, and How to Fail Forward

Strawberry Cake Batter

I’ve been writing about what a tremendous struggle it is to fight boredom when you eat the same thing every meal, and how desperately I was craving something new (preferably greasy and cheesy). In reality though, all of the temptations I’d encountered in social situations during the week paled in comparison to what I faced yesterday, and in the end, the person who finally broke my Soylent fast had no idea that he’d done it.

My fundamental problem was this: you can’t cook without tasting. Well, you can, but it’s far from ideal, and I’m not as pro at cooking as Grant Achatz. One of the first things they teach you in culinary school is to always taste your food as you go along, so you can learn how flavors are structured and built during the cooking process, and also just to make sure what you’re serving tastes good. Every ingredient is naturally different, so you can’t simply rely on recipes or memory to cook; a tomato sauce made from ripe tomatoes in the summer might need some extra sugar in the winter.

On weekend mornings, I moonlight on the line at a local restaurant. Soon after starting my shift on Saturday morning, I was confronted with just how hard it was going to be to get through the day without eating anything. Was I going to have someone else taste all of my fillings? Each salad dressing? How was I supposed to learn how to make seafood sofrito sauce without tasting it? I didn’t see a practical way to uphold my professional obligations and continue with the Soylent experiment. It was akin to Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony while deaf.

Moreover, I was surrounded by food, and even worse, strong smells of food. I’ve always had a good sense of smell, but for the last few days, my sense of smell has been particularly heightened. Every whiff of street meat, every curl of smoke, every warm blast of rising yeast and crackling crust was a siren call to me, a torrent of emotions, desires and urges. For the first time all week, I was being constantly assaulted by food memories and I couldn’t walk away.

So, we made a strawberry cake, using petite, perfectly squishy strawberries from the farmers market. Afterwards, I commented that it hadn’t risen as much as previous iterations, but it also looked less crumbly and had a better consistency than before. T said that he’d changed the amount of baking powder he’d used, and handed me a piece of the cake. “Try it,” he said, “so you can taste the difference.” Oh no, that’s ok I’m going to pass, I replied. “No, try a piece,” he repeated. “It’s really good!”

I caved. I tried the cake.

I should mention that I had not explained the Soylent experiment to my kitchen team. Part of this was because up till now I’d been debating whether it even made sense to try to explain what the hell I was doing, given that I was still going to have to eat at some point over the day. The other hindrance was that I was nervous about explaining a philosophically-driven, esoteric, First-World-Problem type experiment to a bunch of Mexican line cooks. Look, I love my crew and we’re pretty tight. We’ve had long conversations on topics like friends with benefits (Me: “Guys, I need friends with benefits…like a yacht.”), arguments over the best whiskey, and lessons on curse words in Chinese and Spanish. But when it came to describing the Soylent experiment? Let’s be honest, I was pretty sure I’d be laughed out of the kitchen.

By the way, the cake was indeed really, really good.

Roasted Pork Leg

Then I went back to pulling watercress leaves off the stems and shredding two whole legs of pork, fresh out of the oven with crisp crackling on top. I pressed the pork fat through a chinois, added salt, vinegar and hot sauce to the meat, then tasted it to make sure it was properly seasoned. It tasted like victory.

Lately, I’ve been playing Dungeon World with my role-playing game group. In that game, the mechanics work such that every time you fail, your character automatically gains XP (an experience point), which means they’ve gotten a little wiser and are a bit closer to gaining new knowledge and powers.

In the same way, although I’ve failed my stated goal of doing a Soylent fast for a week, I do think that I have failed forward, and come away with some wisdom and insights I never could have attained otherwise.

Pizza

After breaking my Soylent fast, I took a sip of the Soylent that I’d stashed in the lowboy cooler. I was immediately repulsed by the monotony of the texture, the leaden color and the rush of misery that flowed forth. Having already broken my streak and decided that I’d accomplished what I set out to learn, I was ready to go back to enjoying food again. After my shift ended, I went around the corner and grabbed two slices of pizza. They dripped grease and seared the roof of my mouth. It was, no joke, the best pizza I’d ever had. I’m pretty sure that meal has undone whatever health gains I might have obtained from my stint on Soylent, and I’m quite content with that.

Soylent Shake

In the future, I do plan to keep drinking Soylent now and then, when I’m in a pinch and don’t have time to cook. It is after all, by design, the fastest healthy food, or the healthiest fast food. I have some Soylent mix leftover now, and in fact, I just drank some for breakfast since I need to head off to the restaurant soon. I’ll be heading to the Food Coop after work to stock up on lots of fibrous vegetables, fatty yogurt, and yes, some more chia seeds and nuts for future batches of Soylent.

Here’s to a future of healthy, fast AND pleasurable food, however you may define it.

Soylent Experiment: What Do I Have in Common with Astronauts, Soldiers and Prisoners?

Free food!
Photo: Traci Cappiello

It’s day 4 of Soylent week, so I’m over halfway through the experiment. Last time, I posted in a state of relative euphoria over my newfound productivity gains. Let me tell you, the closer you fly to the sun, the harder you crash into the ground.

On day 2, social obligations kicked in again. I went to an event with free food and drinks, and turned everything down. I met with old friends and tried not to stare at their sandwiches. I met with new friends who kept offering beer, and explained that yes, I do drink, just not today, and no, I don’t have a problem with alcoholism, I swear. I met someone for the first time and casually asked if they were familiar with Soylent, and they said that it sounded like a terrible, ridiculous idea.

The one super strong craving that I’ve been having is for a slice of pizza. Not fancy pizza, a greasy New York cheese slice, the kind you get while drunk at 2 am. My roommate just told me she has pepperoni pizza in the fridge RIGHT NOW. This has been an incredible test of willpower and self discipline.

See, food has become really, really boring. For the first time in my life, I’m eating for purely utilitarian reasons. There’s nothing fun or interesting about my meals, and I only eat enough to stop from feeling hungry. It’s akin to forcing myself to work out because I know it’s good for me. I look at the container and think, “Just drink 2 more ounces!” in the same way that you’d push yourself to run another 1/2 mile. This means I’ve been eating smaller meals, but more frequently throughout the day. Overall, I’m eating less than when I started, and I’m definitely not drinking the entire 2000 calorie batch each day. I really hate the taste of chocolate/cocoa powder right now. No chocolate, ever again, after this week.

It’s so bad that I look forward to brushing my teeth just to taste another flavor. Time to dig out that orange-flavored toothpaste.

This makes me ponder what’s it like to be an astronaut or soldier or prisoner eating very similar meals all the time. In some prisons, they provide a bland “nutraloaf” for unruly prisoners. In my opinion, this is cruel and unusual punishment. Or, can you get used to repetitive meals? If you were never exposed to a diverse diet, would you be more comfortable drinking Soylent for every meal?

What about animals, do dogs and cats get tired of eating the same thing for every meal? A friend with a dog assured me that no, dogs will be excited when you give them food, every time. But who knows, maybe they’d be happier if they had different types of food to look forward to. Are we so sure that humans are the only ones intelligent enough to crave a diverse diet?

Another unexpected effect: I’m incredibly thirsty and my mouth is dry, and no matter how much water I drink it doesn’t seem to help. This might be because the weather has gotten hotter this week and I’ve been sweating more. (I’m still biking my normal routine of 7-15 miles per day.) Other possible factors: fiber is hygroscopic (absorbs water) and I’ve probably doubled my fiber intake, solid food also contains water so I need to supplement with additional water, and chewing solid foods helps stimulate salivary glands, so when I don’t chew anything my salivary glands go dormant.

Ironically, after explaining all of this to my roommate (who is sick this week with a severe cough), I offered her some Soylent and SHE LOVED IT. “Wow, that was really nutritious, I feel so much better and more energized now,” she said. “This is like crack! Can I make more for myself in the morning for breakfast?”

Sure, no problem, I’ll just be over here staring at the pizza…

Soylent Experiment: Day 1

Soylent Selfie

One day and three meals into Soylent week and I have to say it’s been awesome.

Last night, I made a week-long batch of Soylent. For 21 or so meals, my food will come from this container. It’s a little weird for me to eat shelf-stable food (aside from the milk), and probably the first time I’ve “cooked” a meal that’s intentionally not seasonal.

Soylent Week Batch

Am I tired of drinking Soylent yet? The minty chocolate taste of Soylent isn’t my favorite, but neither do I hate it. More importantly, it tastes like:

  • 20 extra minutes of sleep in the morning, or 20 minutes to learn Spanish
  • Multitasking through lunch because I can drink my lunch at my desk. I know, this sounds sad and I don’t usually work through lunch, but today I had things I wanted to work on continuously.
  • Cranking out 3,000 words tonight for a proposal due tomorrow that I wouldn’t have been able to write if I’d needed to cook dinner

My biggest challenge so far is to make sure I don’t squander the extra time I have by just sitting on the Internet and staring at cat photos.

All right, on to the juicy stuff. I’m definitely pooping more often but it’s nothing crazy (twice/day vs once) and while there is some extra gas, it’s silent and NOT deadly, and is easily remedied by simply going to the bathroom (see previous clause).

Did I mention extra sleep? After getting 4 hours of sleep on Saturday night and feeling like shit the next day at work, I’m going to bed before midnight tonight for the first time in days. That is definitely a win in my book.