Veggies

Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks. Today we're going to talk about veggies. Veggies. You like your veggies? I love my veggies, yeah. Actually, there is not a single ingredient that I don't like, but I would say that there are ingredients that I don't like if they're not cooked properly. And vegetables is a very good example. Like gray, overcooked green beans, gray beans, is something nobody likes.

Oh yeah, those like typical canteen style beans that have been sitting in their water for five hours. Delicious. And it's so easy to make nice ones and quick ones, you know? Yeah, definitely. I think vegetables are super interesting and you know, especially in modern gastronomy, they've like more and more taken a center role. I mean, this whole kind of like focus has shifted so much from proteins and luxury ingredients. Also the definition of what a luxury ingredient is, has completely changed.

It used to be foie gras and truffles and caviar. And I mean, that's still there, but being able to have access to pure, well-grown seasonal food is a new luxury in itself. And vegetables are interesting because when you compare it to like meat and fish, you have such a huge variety of, well, first of all, of varieties of colors and textures. And of course there's like many ways that you can prepare a steak, but with a radish, for example, I think like you have even more.

Just adding to that, because I was thinking while you were talking, this is what was going on in my mind. I usually like cooking with vegetables, but always with some kind of animal touch to it. For example, we talked about this gargay you from Michelle Bra where he tunes it up with ham, with country ham. That's something I really like.

And you find this also like in Chinese cooking where you have like this big walks of vegetables and they have like some stripes of pork or chicken just to add flavor to it. And those things like pork and chicken to vegetables is something like I really, really like. But then again, I worked in vegan restaurants. I think those ones were not as technical as let's say Noma or 11 Madison Park.

From 11 Madison Park, I haven't heard super nice things like now in this vegan phase that they're in right now. I've heard like people saying, yeah, it was nice and it was everything cool and that's it. But from Noma, I've heard people, they had their best meal in their lives on the vegetable season. I can't believe that because I think I was talking about adding meat components or animal components, but this is probably for the umami component.

And these guys from Noma have figured out how to find that through vegetables, through fermentation processes and this condiments and funky sauces and stuff that they do in their lab. So I think that that's also like something super interesting and like a more modern approach to vegan cooking. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And also just focusing on the product itself, you know, even if you just talk about seasonal vegetables, right?

I thought this was super interesting how Dan Barber, who's got Blue Hill Stone Barns in the US where he's got a huge farm where he grows all his produce. And he was talking about why it is that the seasonal and like well-grown produce, you know, without pesticides, without anything is so good.

And like from a chef's point of view, I thought it was super interesting because he was like, imagine you grow something in organic soil with a lot of nutrients and you harvest it at the peak of its ripeness. It's super fresh, it's unprocessed and it's full of nutrients, right? It's really, really nutritious. It's full of minerals and stuff. And he was talking about how the nutrition aspect of a product immediately affects the deliciousness aspect of it also. It's equivalent.

It's like the more nutritious the vegetable is, the better it tastes straight away. And then when you just focus on that and you think to yourself as a chef, it's sort of like, well, if I'm a produce-driven chef, just like if you're in a steakhouse, you say, okay, I want to make really good steak. What do I focus on? I focus on purchasing and aging the best quality of meat that I can have, right?

And if you do the same thing with vegetables and then move throughout the season and you try to time the time where you harvest things that you will be serving, you've done 80% of the work because by itself, even if it's just a salad, it's going to be three times, four times as delicious as a salad out of season. Absolutely. I have this memory when I was visiting Italy in Toscana. I was living in Berlin at the time. And I have to say like in Berlin, it's very poor what you get.

Like if you don't go to specialty stores, what you get in standard supermarkets, you get the worst of the worst of the worst tomatoes and vegetables from all over Europe. So I was in Toscana and I remember just biting whatever kind of fruit in the market and it was like music to my brain just to all the complexities that this high quality produce have in front of something that is just massively grown like with cheap metals and that kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

Especially when you go to places like that, like Italy, especially if you're like in the rural areas, also a huge difference is that the variety of vegetables that you have because like everybody should know that, you know, for example, tomatoes, we all know that there's loads of different sizes of tomatoes and tomatoes, not just a tomato, there's loads of varieties then that are, you know, different, not different like an apple in a pear would be, but different

like how different types of apples are. Some are sweet, some are sour, et cetera. And the produce, especially the vegetables that we're used to, there are varieties that have been selected over the like last 100 to 200 years. What have they been selected for? They've been selected for easy to grow in large quantities, right?

And there's a huge amount of vegetables that are harder to grow, especially in large quantities without any additional help like pesticides, et cetera, but they're really delicious. So because of this need of like this industrialization and the need to feed loads of people, these varieties have gotten more and more lost, right?

And so nowadays when chefs say that they like they grow their own vegetables, especially when they grow and they choose and revive heirloom varieties, that's because they choose these varieties because of their deliciousness and their nutrition. And that's a huge thing. It's kind of like the tomatoes that we can buy in a supermarket. They are bred for being easy to grow and easy to harvest, resistant to pesticides in large quantities, not for their flavor.

So then when you get a variety that's actually, you know, usually grown for its flavor, it's a huge revelation because you're like, wow, I've never tasted the true flavor of like a tomato. Yeah, I actually tried some vegetables from Dunbarber when I was eating at Cosme in New York. And I saw this yellow beets out of his garden and it was really, really nice. Also I really recommend this book. Have you read it? The Third Plate? Yeah. That's a super cool book. It's crazy. Yeah, absolutely crazy.

Did we mention that in the cookbook episode? I don't think so. It's not a cookbook. It's like a food book more than that. Other chefs that come to mind are, well, Thomas Keller has this culinary garden, but that's like a super, I would say, structure square garden as opposed to, for instance, Christian Puglisi. He has like this more like wilder approach to growing vegetables. And Dunbarber, that's more like a, I would say, old methods, but yet industrial scale of the farm that he has.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's huge, you know, and he's got loads of staff and he's got the possibility to do all these things. He's got the land and the money to support it, but he does a lot of work that's just really good. Like what we're talking about, you know, these old varieties.

And then also, you know, he does his row seven seed company where he basically breeds vegetables, which sounds like a very artificial approach, but it's actually not been done for centuries, where he takes, for example, a pea variety. Like I think it was, I read about a snow pea variety that he had where he was like, man, this variety of pea is insanely delicious. It's so, so, so tasty, but it's really fragile, especially for pests and all that sort of stuff. It's really hard to grow.

So he was working with a grower where they crossed this variety of pea with a very resilient pea and made basically a new variety that still has the deliciousness aspects, but it's also more resilient and easier to grow. For me, that's super revolutionary because it enables people to like, you don't have this argument anymore, sort of like, well, it doesn't make sense to grow this even though it's tasty because it's not feasible.

The amount of work that you put in doesn't valid the results, which is also from a sustainability point of view is very important because the amount of work that it takes to plow a field, to sow the seeds, et cetera. If then at the end of the day, after six months, you only have a basket full of peas, you've wasted a lot of energy. So he bypasses that process and I think that's super inspiring. Do you know why carrots are orange? Yeah, I have heard about this before, but go ahead.

Original carrots were purple and that's why they call it like old carrots, at least in German, that's the way they're called. I think in Europe, they were mostly white and these were the Dutch. There was this Dutch king or queen that for some reason wanted to develop these orange carrots more like a patriot thing because orange is the color of Holland. And people, like the consumers, started liking that better than any other colors and this became a standard.

But I mean, worldwide, you don't see other colors, not even in Asia, which is super crazy. Yeah, that's super crazy. And it's super interesting to think that a lot of these things that we take for granted, so we say a carrot is orange, we just think, yeah, that's the way it is, but it's not always been like that. And it was human developed. Yeah, totally. And it's also a lot of things that it's not been that long that things have been like this, like the way that we do agriculture.

This was a few centuries ago, not like thousands of years ago. Exactly, exactly. And that's also super crazy. Like mentioning Dan Barber's book, The Third Plate, he talks about this a lot. Yes, for me, it was eye opening because just like with the carrots, I thought that a lot of things were always like this, you know, the way that most of the world does agriculture, which is not necessarily super sustainable. Like for example, with corn, right?

Corn takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of nutrients out of the ground. And if you don't treat the ground between planting corn, it'll get completely drained. And one of the things that I found super fascinating is that he was talking about, well, the way that we harvest corn, which is like mowing down the entire field, then plowing it and then regrowing, that's not how it used to be. It used to be that the plants were twice the size, especially the roots were twice as long.

Yeah, there are pictures of this. And used to pick the corn and leave the plant. And in between the plants, ideally, you would have a symbiosis of different weeds and other plants that then give the ground what it needs. So you basically have like a food forest, right? It's this whole thing of the three sisters, which gets mentioned in permaculture a lot, you know, where you have a field of corn, pumpkin, and beans, you know?

And things just get plucked and harvested, but the plants themselves, they are left to grow because they are in a symbiotic environment where they take things, but they also give something into the ground, which then another plant needs and it's a closed circle. Can you think of, apart from gargayou, which we already talked about, like a really representative vegetable dish that you could think of? Yes. Let me think, a really representative vegetable dish. Something from Alan Passard, maybe?

Yeah, I mean, Alan Passard has a few, but then again, Alan Passard is, in my opinion, less, he doesn't concentrate as much of sort of like representing the area as such or like the French cooking culture, you know, but he's fully just focused on the product, you know? Like he'll send out dishes that are just raw turnips sliced and dressed, you know, or raw tomatoes as a carpaccio, you know?

I mean, if you can afford that, if you have a product that good that you can do that, why would you do anything to it, right? Well, that's the thing, you know, and like that's where all his like energy goes into, I think, sort of like then also he's got a very, very fine way of cooking, you know, and understanding. But, I mean, he's like a super interesting how Alan Passard grows vegetables because he's got two different gardens on two different spots in France with two different types of soil.

And so he's so obsessed with the intricacies of the quality of the produce that he will grow a turnip in one garden and another turnip in the other garden and then compare the two. Same type of turnip, same time of planting, but he just only wants to see the difference between what the soil does.

If it's a sandy soil or like a loamy soil, you know, loam soil is when there's a lot of organic matter or clay soil, you know, like it makes a huge difference also because of the minerals that the vegetable sucks up, right? It's crazy, you know? That's super interesting getting those two different vegetables on a dish has to be super interesting to compare the difference. I really like doing that.

Like when you get like, I don't know, say a pasta with four different types of parmigiano, so you can really tell the difference from one to the other, like this kind of tasting experience and a restaurant experience and comparing, super cool. Absolutely. I had a crazy experience when I was in Japan. My head chef at the time, he took me out for dinner one time and we went to this chicken restaurant. They only do chicken in different types.

It wasn't a yakitori restaurant or anything like that, but it was mainly chicken. And it's the first time that I ate chicken sashimi, right? Raw chicken. I've heard a lot about that from people in Japan that it's really impressive and it breaks your brain once you trade it. Yeah, I think so because for us culturally, it's completely counterintuitive. But what was so interesting about that experience was that they served a plate with three different kinds of chicken, right?

They served on one side, one little bit of breast, raw, sliced, and a little bit of thigh, raw. And the same thing again, the same thing again. And they said, well, these are three different types of chicken with different fat contents, with different feeds, et cetera. And you ate it in the most pure form, raw. And the difference between the chicken meat was crazy, like it was huge. For me as a chef, it was super interesting because for you, chicken is chicken, especially you never eat it raw.

And you don't necessarily think of the difference between different birds and different breeds and different feeds. And it makes you think of the actual product in depth in a much more detailed way. Yeah, we are what the things that we eat, eat. Let's say a vegetable is a result of the biodiversity that lives in that ground where it grows. It's the flavors that get into the actual food. I had like also this crazy gastronomic experience once.

This was a student's final project where I was invited. In one of the courses, they bring a glass with a small spray and they spray the glass inside. So the idea was just to get the aroma. And you would get the aroma from this glass. And this smelled like poppourri, you know, like this dry flowers that you see in grandmother's bathrooms. It smelled like that. And it was like everybody said, I agree. So they asked like, what is it? And everybody agreed.

Yeah, this is like dry flowers, flowers, whatever. So what they did is they distilled a honeycomb. Oh, wow. So and this is built so that there was like this flower aroma because this is built out of flowers, right? They kind of extracted just that aroma. And so I thought that was super interesting. That's really interesting. It reminds me of a dinner that I had in London at one time, which was a pop up from, uh, Leandro Carrera, Portuguese guy, very cool chef in London. And he had a pop up.

I remember they had this dish that was all around peas, right? And as a beverage pairing, they, what they had done is they had distilled, I think it was the green pea shells, but just the raw ones into like, I don't know how they did it. They distilled it into like a clear liquid and they added a little bit of that into the white wine that you were drinking with the peas.

So this white wine had this like fresh, if anybody's ever like bitten into a pea straight from the like bush, it's a super fresh, fragrant pea flavor. And it was just very, very lightly in the wine, which usually if you think about adding something to wine for wine pairing, a lot of some of these would be like, oh my God, no. You know? Wow, that sounds really nice. Yeah. It was super perfect. And it like really kind of like brought you into this, like, uh, this thing.

That's what I mean with like the vegetables and like these raw ingredients. They're so versatile, you know, because a pea or raw pea completely different to a cooked pea, you know? Yeah. Peas are like these things, uh, I'm okay using frozen ones when to make like sauces or this kind of thing. That's also another thing. There are high quality preserved vegetables and high quality frozen vegetables. Yeah. It's not like everything has to be like fresh is the only way.

Same. There are also high quality hydroponics. So it's not that everything has to grow on the soil to be fine. Absolutely. It's just different production methods. That's it. Yeah. But peas are also a good example for talking about what luxury is, you know, because in Spain, you know, we have this product called Gizantes Lagrimas. Yeah. Like micro peas or tear peas literally. Yeah. Teardrop, teardrop peas, I think they're called.

And you know, they're very, very seasonal product that is really will teardrop shaped peas and they're amazing. Right now they're in season. You will find them in restaurants here in San Sebastian right now. Yeah. They're amazing. You know, they're super sweet. They're like little pea caviar. You know, they're popping fresh. You know, you always get them like raw or just very, very lightly cooked.

Everybody's looking forward to this, you know, and they are very expensive also because for you need a lot of quantity. Like they're very small, so you need quite a lot of quantity and it takes a lot of work to shell them, you know, until you have a spoonful of these like tiny peas. But they're a huge, for me, they're a huge luxury product, you know, for me on the same level as, you know, let's say caviar or whatever, you know, it's like. Yeah, they're called vegetable caviar, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Asparagus also, you know, I mean, like even here and like in Germany, everybody's looking forward to the white asparagus season. And when it's there, you know, like when we get into the season, that's like you make a celebration out of it. It's like a whole thing. It's like, oh, today we'll eat white asparagus. And it's like a whole ritual. You poach it, you make the potatoes, you make the hollandaise or whatever you eat it with.

Not even for like culinarily interested people, but even just like people who don't have a particular interest in it. When you sit down, you eat asparagus, it's like something special, you know, because you know, it's going to be over again. Yeah. Exactly, exactly, you really have that feeling of the season. Yeah, yeah. I guess that's it. I guess we can finish here. Yeah, that's good though. That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks.

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