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The V-Word, or Explorations with a Plant-Based Diet

Vegetable Stock Mirepoix

“I’m sorry, you’re doing what? Who are you and what did you do with my friend?”

“That’s cool…but please come back to us after a month, ok? Because seriously, if you don’t, there will be repercussions.”

“Oh that sounds awesome! You cook so much, it’s going to be really easy for you!”

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to eat heartily and adventurously. Is it spicy, smelly or squishy? Hand over a fork! What’s that, braised donkey? Excellent, we’re eating ass tonight! It also helps that I have the superhuman metabolism and appetite of a pro athlete (thank you daily biking!), so I’m pretty much always hungry and never say no to food. Which is why for the month of January, for the first time ever, I’m excited to be systematically stripping out large swaths of the food pyramid from my diet to go vegan. Wait, what?

There’s a number of reasons commonly cited for switching to a vegan diet: health, concern for the environmental impact of farming animals, ethics and so on. I’m familiar with the myriad arguments that are made around these issues and sympathize with all of them, but despite knowing all that I do, I still wasn’t compelled to give up an omnivorous diet. But what will my pork-loving Chinese family think? What if I take a trip to Argentina? But I work in the seafood industry, it’d be professional suicide to give up meat! What changed my mind was the realization that I could commit to a temporary stint as a vegan, and secondly, that there’s a ton of interesting innovations happening the alternative meat world (lab grown meat, cricket flour, better vegan substitutes). After all, I’m always eager to explore new techniques and ingredients, and by limiting my diet to plant-based ingredients, I will be motivated to learn just how delicious my food can be without reliance on cheats like cream, butter and bacon. If I can cook flavorful, interesting meals that will satisfy even a devout carnivore, I will consider myself truly talented as a chef.

Unlike my Soylent stint, which mostly elicited bemused curiosity and confusion, this time, the reactions from my friends ranged from enthusiasm to subdued apathy to outright hostility. Among the former camp were other folks who’d dabbled in vegetarian/vegan diets. Among the latter camp were folks who felt that my personal lifestyle choice was affecting their lives. I do tend to share food with people frequently, both in restaurants and from home-cooked meals, so I can see their point…but really, if anyone was going to be inconvenienced by my diet, it’d be myself. Even more interesting were the grumblings and fears that I might turn into a stereotypical PETA-flag-waving, fixie-riding militant vegan. The word “vegan,” it seemed, was anathema in my usual food-obsessed circles, synonymous with “hating fun” and “being judgmental.” So I began dropping the V-word and instead told people I was switching to a plant-based diet. Two sides of the same coin, but as any PR expert will tell you, it’s all in the delivery.

My mom was surprisingly supportive when I told her about my diet change, though perhaps in part because it was after the Christmas holidays and she wouldn’t be eating with me any time soon. After a few light warnings about eating plenty of beans (and not processed coincidentally vegan foods like Oreos), she started extolling the benefits of Buddhist veganism, aka what monks eat. In Buddhist philosophy, food is simply a type of life-augmenting medicine for your body, something that you eat in moderate amounts. In the same way that you would not take too much medicine, you would not overindulge in too much food (that would be sinful gluttony). Food is also not supposed to be too invigorating or exciting because you should eat with temperance. So, ingredients like onions, scallions, garlic and chili peppers are not used. And of course, alcohol is out. The end result is a cuisine that must walk a fine line between being not too interesting but not awful. “If you do this for a month,” explained Mom, “you’ll improve your fortunes and luck for the future!” Sorry Mom, I may be going vegan but I am definitely not ready to give up spicy food. So much for being spiritually purified.

I didn’t have much of a game plan going into January, but on New Year’s Eve, a vegan friend stopped by with a surprise gift, a copy of Vegan Soul Kitchen by Bryant Terry. Hold on, isn’t soul food traditionally pretty heavy on pork and butter, with vegetables being afterthoughts laced with bacon? I was intrigued. Terry studied at NYC’s Natural Gourmet Institute, whose curriculum has much more emphasis on healthy, seasonal cooking than the classical French butter-laced, gut-busting dishes that I’d learned at ICC. But in flipping the pages, I could see that Terry and I both agreed on some fundamental culinary truths. Namely: the importance of good stock.

As you read through the recipes in Vegan Soul Kitchen, you’ll notice that many of them call for various types of homemade stock. That’s right, no using store-bought vegetable stock as a shortcut, you must spend a couple hours making stock which will then be used for another two-hour recipe for what you actually want to eat. Prior to culinary school, I probably would have ignored all this and simply bought vegetable stock, but I know better now. There’s light-years of difference between homemade stock and the Tetrapack stuff, and homemade stock is a magical elixir that will add unimaginable layers of complexity and flavor into your final dish. So, step one of my vegan month: make vegetable stock.
Continue reading The V-Word, or Explorations with a Plant-Based Diet

Tournage and Stocks: How to Channel OCD into Acceptable Culinary Pursuits

Tournage vegetables

After last week’s lesson on taillage vegetable cuts, we reconvened for the quintessential skill of tournage, or turned vegetables. Essentially, you have to cut pieces of vegetables into blunt footballs. “For tonight, don’t worry too much about the number of sides,” said Chef Ray, “but traditionally there are seven sides to each turned vegetable. And remember, you have to use your wrists to curve around the vegetable.” He demonstrated and in just a few deft moves, he held up a perfectly shaped cocotte out of a shower of carrot trimmings.

In concentrated silence, we began turning our own vegetables. My knife zipped through the soft potato, ending precariously close to my thumb on the other end. “Use your wrists,” said Chef Janet, “and when you get home, practice by running a paring knife over an egg. That’s the kind of curved motion and shape you’re looking for.” I cut some diamond-shaped pieces, some flattened pieces, some cylindrical pieces. My fingers began cramping from the unusual knife position. You have to choke up on the paring knife blade and hold it pretty tightly with your index and middle fingers while your wrist guides the motion of the blade. My partner asked my opinion on his cocotte and I replied that it was pretty good, much better than mine.

Between cuts, I was rinsing off my knife to clear the trimmings. Chef Janet stopped by to check on our station and said, “You don’t have to clean off your knife between cuts, just let them fall off naturally. That will save you some time, there’s no need to be anal about it.” I looked at her with some amusement. “Wait, you realize that you’re telling me not to be anal as we cut vegetables into 7-sided footballs?” Chef Janet laughed and said, “Ok good point, be selectively anal about the right things!” On the other side of the station, my partner cracked up and couldn’t stop laughing for a few minutes. I went back to whittling lumpy eggs from my carrot.

Then, it clicked. Rather than starting from one end of the vegetable and cutting through to the other end (as instructed), I could simply start halfway down the vegetable, cut, and then rotate the piece 180 degrees and finish the other side. It would take twice as many cuts, but my results were much more uniform. For the first time, I could visualize exactly where to cut to get the shape that I wanted. Suddenly, I felt like a sculptor, manipulating my knife with confidence and power. At this point, Chef Ray was calling for everyone to clean up, since most of the class was almost done. I was behind and raced to finish my last four pieces of turnip. When I dropped the last pieces on my cutting board for appraisal, Chef Janet examined them and said, “Pretty good!”

Garniture Bouquetiere

By the end of class, we’d cut and cooked all the vegetables for a traditional garniture bouquetière: artichoke hearts, peas, string beans, carrots, potato, turnips, pearl onions. It was a plate of 7-sided vegetables with a total of seven vegetables, a dish that usually accompanies a roast or meat dish. It may look simple but each of these elements is cooked in a particular way, designed to ensure they express their best flavors and look gorgeous to boot. For instance, the potatoes are cooked three times: blanched in salted water, sauteed over high heat, and roasted in an oven with butter. The entire time I kept thinking, is it really worth cooking these same potatoes three different times? But the end product was incredible, a cloud of creamy mashed potato on the inside and crispy edges on the outside. These were the best potatoes I’ve ever made, and it really hints at the gulf between home cooking and fine dining, and the technical prowess required to execute the latter.

Roasted veal bones

The next class was Stock Day. As a class, we made marmite (beef stock) and veal stock, and in teams of two, we each made chicken stock and fish stock (fumet). The overarching goal of stock making is to extract desirable flavors (no masking flavors like garlic) and to remove impurities (remove blood, foam and excess fat). I’ve made “stocks” before, mostly consisting of vegetable scraps and leftover bones from roast chickens, but I’ve never had the breadth and quantity of ingredients to make a truly top-notch stock. “Now remember, you never add salt to a stock, you never cover a stock, and you never stir a stock,” said Chef Ray. “Stock should be clear at the end, not cloudy.”

Veal stock in progress

For veal stock, you begin by roasting bones until they are golden brown. The smell of roasted veal bones soon filled the air, and we all inhaled deeply. Next, you roast your mirepoix (carrots, onions and celery), using the moisture from the vegetables to deglaze sucs from the bone roasting pans. Everything gets combined with cold water, and then all that’s left to do is to skim the foam off the top occasionally while the pot simmers, and wait for 8-12 hours. Luckily, Chef Janet would be present to help strain and cool our stock, so we wouldn’t have to be there in the morning. I gazed at our 80 gallons of veal stock, burbling away in a steam kettle. It was a thing of beauty.

Fish stocks are much more delicate and only require 20 minutes or so of simmer time. Each team was handed 3 sets of flounder bones and tasked with cleaning them. I’ve never cleaned a whole fish before, and I looked at my partner with trepidation. “Uh, did you see how Chef cut out the gills? Because I still have no idea where the gills are,” I said. My partner swooped in to the rescue, “Oh, they’re right here, see these red ridges? I go fishing a lot, so I’m pretty familiar with fish.” I snipped out the gills with kitchen shears, then scraped out the rest of the fish roe, heart, stomach and other entrails. It reminded me of biology dissections, except I have no desire to eat frogs in formaldehyde. Next, we cut up mirepoix (onion, celery, white leek, mushroom; no carrot to retain the purity of the stock color), sweated our vegetables in butter, and added the bones and water.

After we simmered our fumet, we let the stock settle, then used tongs to carefully lift out bone and vegetable solids from the top and slowly ladled out the stock into another container. This avoids agitating the sediment at the bottom of the pot. The final 1″ or so of the liquid in the stockpot was simply tossed. All of the stocks were chilled and frozen; we would be using them as a class for the remainder of the course.

Next week: sauces and legumes.