The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e06 Episode Script
Latitude
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In this episode, Chef Ed Lee and friends cross borders and take latitude.
Chef Stuart Brioza of State Bird Provisions of San Francisco combines ingredients from across the map.
So this is like a California hush puppy.
There's a bunch of Southerners right now rolling their eyes.
Yeah, they're pissed off.
Chefs Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman show Ed a dish of their distinctly Southern and Italian hybrid brand of cooking.
Basically you're really just making cheese grits.
That's it.
We grew up eating cheese grit casserole.
It's a direct correlation for us.
And Ed makes a pig feet pancake with America's own Emperor of Thai Food, Andy Ricker.
This is a large format pancake.
No, it's for one.
Enter the mind of a chef.
All curious chefs are just fascinated by their surroundings.
That is intense.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
I've always sort of fought with the idea of fusion.
And I've always kind of searched for a word, or some kind of concept that would help me explain the fact that I need to kind of take foods from different cultures and let borders disappear so that I can move seamlessly through cultures and culinary traditions in order to come up with a version that's clearly my own.
When we look for inspirations globally, chefs generally look to cultures that live along the same latitude, because there is a certain familiarity with produce, climate, all that terroir stuff.
And I remember thinking, "Oh, that's curious.
" Like, I should look up in a map and see, you know, where along the map I reside.
And I was blown away by the fact that Louisville, Kentucky, Korea and Brooklyn are all within two degrees latitude.
My entire life has been spent along the you know, the same latitude, pretty much, within two degrees.
And totally unconsciously.
Yeah, there are a couple of dishes that work for me from just a flavor standpoint, and there are a couple of dishes that work kind of intellectually, you know, culturally.
And there are a couple of dishes in a rare moment, there'll be a dish that works both ways.
To me, collard greens, it's an iconic dish.
Because it means so much more than the actual vegetable.
Collards were poor food, and so the only people that ate collards were the ones that couldn't afford the nicer vegetables, you know? These were the throwaways.
Collards are something that grow everywhere, and they grow very easily.
So if you think about that, something that was born out of poverty, something that was born out of necessity, became something that we now celebrate out of flavor.
And when I started thinking about the history of collard greens in that sense, it immediately made me think about kimchi.
And if you think about the history of Korea, and the rise and the prominence of kimchi, it happened after the Korean War, when everyone was poor.
There was no meat to be had, there was no fish.
And what you had was you had a lot of cabbage.
So what do you do? You take out of necessity, you take all that cabbage, and you start making kimchi out of it.
And so for me, it was natural to go, "Wow, wouldn't it be cool "if I could marry the iconic dish of the South with the iconic dish of Korea?" As a recipe, it starts out pretty simple.
It starts with some lard.
I do a little bit of butter.
Just some chopped onions.
Then I do some country ham.
There's more similarity between latitudes of cultures than longitudes.
It allowed me to understand and start to talk about why I do the things I do without using the word "fusion.
" As it cooks down, it's going to leach out the water.
It creates this incredible what they call pot liquor, which is that wonderful flavor that comes from the collard greens.
It gives me a starting place to have a discussion, and to say, "You know, there is a reason why Korea and Louisville, for me, makes sense.
" All right, so this has got this beautiful emerald green color to it.
I'm just going to add some chicken stock.
Quite a bit of it, too, actually.
I'm going to add a little bit of organic soy sauce, made right here in Kentucky.
A little bit of apple cider vinegar.
And that's pretty much it.
That's just going to go until the collard greens can't cook no more, so it's about 30 to 40 minutes.
At some point, you'll taste it, and you won't taste ham, you won't taste chicken stock, and you won't taste the vinegar.
What you'll taste is collard greens.
So the collards are ready.
And you can see the liquor is pretty much it's not totally evaporated, but it's definitely reduced.
It's really intense at this point.
And then this is my kimchi.
I'm just going to dump it in, juice and all.
The nice thing about the kimchi is that it adds that really beautiful crunch to it, as well as that pickle flavor.
I'm going to put the lid back on.
Pretty much once it comes back up to a boil, especially with these nice Dutch ovens, you can take the heat off, and that residual heat is just going to keep kind of wilting it a little bit.
I don't want to cook it to high hell.
I just want to wilt the kimchi a little bit.
And that's it.
It's my collards and kimchi.
As chefs, we want food that isn't something that you're just going to throw down at home.
Yeah.
And as diners, they want like, "Show me what you've got.
" You know, they want to see some style and some technique, and flavors that they hadn't thought of.
So what did you bring? I'll bet you just brought your whole pantry.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, this is basically, like, California right now.
Blood oranges are definitely a thing.
Artichokes, fennel.
You know, what kind of grows together goes together.
Right now all of these things are like if you were at a farmers market in the Bay Area, this is what you're going to find.
So we're going to do kind of a hushpuppy batter.
So I'll just do a little cornmeal and semolina.
Yeah, a little cumin spice, baking powder.
And then I like to finish it with a little garlic, yeah.
So basically, I mean, is this like, when you came up with this, are you thinking tempura, or are you thinking hushpu I mean, like I was kind of thinking a combination of, like, tempura and panisse, you know? But that all sort of is in the same family.
They're looking really good.
Perfect.
All right.
So this is, like, a California hushpuppy.
A California hushpuppy.
That's right.
There's a bunch of Southerners right now rolling their eyes.
Yeah, they're pissed off.
I like the way your cuisine seamlessly jumps around the globe, you know? There are certain chefs that are inclusive, and certain chefs that are exclusive.
And to me, exclusive chefs are the guys that are, like, you know, "I'm only cooking Sicilian food," you know? "I'm only cooking, you know, food from the region of Provence.
" Right.
"I exclude everything else.
Right.
And I feel like you're one of those chefs that are very inclusive, in that you're just like, "Whatever makes me happy.
"I can float anywhere I want.
I can do whatever I want.
" It took a while to get there, you know? I was, like, really focused on kind of a fine dining mentality, and, you know, you start thinking back to your own childhood and your own desires.
And really, you know, the idea of State Bird was not really to think about a cuisine at all.
It was more of just a philosophy of cooking and flavors and, you know, ingredient shopping, and you know, and even growing in some cases.
Mmm.
It's pretty simple.
Mm-hmm.
So I would just do sort of a pile, and then just sort of a dollop of cumin-scented yogurt.
And then let's just take these guys, kind of open those up.
Would you garnish with some of the fennel fronds? Sure.
So these are great, because yeah.
Going to do that.
I'll just throw it on, yeah.
No, don't, don't.
That's Kentucky.
I think we just stop there, you know? A little sea salt.
And then, of course, we would drizzle a lot of nice olive oil, and there we go.
Artichoke, blood orange and fennel salad.
Awesome.
I'm always saying, like, fire's an ingredient, you know? It's not just a technique, it's an ingredient.
Everybody always says, like, "What's the next food trend? Where is food going?" And for Andy and I, it's like, we feel it's getting back to this.
And this is the most pure way.
And it's also the most fun.
Yeah.
It's a lot of fun.
What's funny is this is kind of a pizza oven, I guess, but the one thing we don't do in here is pizza.
We braise, we char, we do, like, tons of stuff.
We do pancakes.
So it's kind of like it's fun for me to just have it and then experiment, see what can we do out of it.
Don't you feel like you find yourself trying to figure out more things to put into it? Oh, no, there was a time when we first got it, man, I would burn everything.
I had, like, a mess of strawberries in here for, like we had to burn the whole oven just to get all the jam out of there.
All right, guys, fire's pretty much ready to go.
Awesome.
I hear you've got a little snack for me before we do the Yeah, man.
This is ricotta.
When we were in Italy, we learned from this cheese maker.
It's unbelievable.
But they'll do it they'll throw it in the pizza oven.
So we're just going to char the outside of it and let it go.
And then, so we're just going to pop that with some pistachios.
Some honey.
Michael and Andy, like, they do this Southern thing, enhanced by a lot of these Italian flavors.
I kind of do the same thing, but reach for the Far East.
But they're going to their hometown, which is Calabria.
But Memphis and where they're from in Italy is not that far apart on the latitude.
Will you hand me those grapes? Yeah.
We'll just let it char until they burst and the juices come out.
I'll just throw them right down there.
Nice.
Look at that.
I think we're good, huh? Looks good, yeah.
All, right, I'll lift that to you.
Excellent.
But at some point, someone in their family from Italy decided they were going to move and land somewhere in America.
They chose Memphis.
It's crazy to think about.
That was it.
Isn't that gorgeous? You know, I mean, one of the things I like about what you guys do is inject a lot of your Italian roots into your food.
Yeah, we moved to Italy and started going to school there, and we kind of realized kind of, you know, adopted their philosophy or their approach with food, just using what is all around them.
Well, it was really cool.
Once we got there, we realized there was such a similarity between Italian cooking and Southern cooking.
It was something I don't know where it was, but it was triggered in our memories of, like, "This feels right.
" Yeah.
And that's kind of when we said, "You know, "this is what we want to adapt as our cooking style, our philosophy.
" This dish really kind of was inspired by buttermilk fried chicken.
We didn't want to do a whole quartered bird, so the quail gives us that really great approach on the menu to do it as smaller portions.
You know, it gives you a little bit of gaminess, it plays off those livers really well, so that whole kind of that dish, it's got a little bit more oomph than chicken.
The Italian part is the gnocchi alla Romana.
Okay.
So instead of the traditional cornmeal, we use masa.
We're going to add some water to the pot, some peppercorns and cardamom, a couple bay leaves.
Okay.
Some sugar.
You do equal salt and sugar? A little bit heavier on the salt.
Yeah, it's like four and a half to one, salt to sugar.
Fennel.
This is fennel, thyme, parsley and a little bit of rosemary.
And you're just going to sort of let all that infuse together.
Yeah, like, kind of making a tea, essentially.
Well, you know, it's funny.
When I first moved down to Louisville ten years ago, I'd never had buttermilk before.
So I went and got some buttermilk.
And I was, like and I actually brought it back to the store, and I was like, "I'm sorry, but this buttermilk is sour.
" And they were like, "Yeah, idiot.
" Yeah, it's supposed to be.
You want to strain this, or you just dump it? Dump it in there.
All right.
I'm going to throw some of the herbs in there, too.
Sure.
So this is masa.
We started playing around with it because we wanted Hog and Hominy, we needed to put hominy as many places as possible, right? Just because You've just got to.
It's the name.
Screwed yourself up with the name of the restaurant.
Really handcuffed us.
We took that really traditional gnocchi alla Romana, and said, "Let's kind of put our spin on it.
" This is half cream, half stock.
So basically we're going to bring that up to a boil.
And then were you going to add eggs and cheese? Eggs and cheese.
And a little bit of butter off the heat.
So basically you're really just making cheese grits.
That's it.
So and that's what's super funny, because we grew up eating cheese grit casserole every Sunday.
And this is, like it's a direct correlation for us.
So we're just going to get this masa in there, just get it incorporated.
And we're just going to whisk in the yolks.
They're going to kind of richen it up a little bit, give it that cheese grit casserole feel, what we're looking for.
And so it's really thick, porridge-y.
And then we're just going to throw in some butter.
All right.
I notice you don't have any salt there.
Are you using the Parmesan? For sure, yeah.
So we're just going to bake it until it sets up nice and firm.
The final sauce is going to be really the chicken livers, the bacon and the soffrito.
So we're going to put this pan in the oven, get it nice and hot, add the bacon, and just let the quail roast in the oven with the polenta.
And then once we pull once the quail's done, we'll just pull the quail out, let it rest, deglaze a little soffrito, a little salt, and we're good to go.
How hot do you want this pan? Screaming hot.
Like, hot enough to burn your ass on? For sure.
We'll test it on Andy's arm.
There you go.
Who wants to test it to see if it's how hot it is? I'm good there.
So we're going to just throw this in there, just let it render out just a little bit.
Lay that guy in there.
And we'll just let the pizza oven do its magic.
How's the gnocchi? It's gorgeous.
Take a look at that.
Oh, man, that is sick.
I think we just serve the quail right on top of there.
All right, this guy's beautiful.
That's rad.
All right, cool.
Just put it here, let it rest for a second.
All right, so we've got all that.
It can go right in, just sauté these up a little bit.
I love when vinegar hits a hot pan.
It's unbelievable.
Love that.
So I'm going to go ahead, put her on there.
Just right in the middle.
Go ahead.
Perfect.
That's awesome, man.
Rustic.
That looks really delicious.
Thanks, man.
I've respected you for so long, and I've wanted to cook with you forever.
And I feel like part of what you are doing when you take your lens onto Southeast Asian is kind of what I'm doing when I went down to the South.
I went to the South, and I got addicted to these you know, what I call griddle cakes, or corn cakes.
You know, there's a tradition of pancakes in Chinese cooking.
Yeah, definitely.
So is that sort of a tie-in for you at all? It is, it is.
And then pig's feet to me, this is I mean, I used to eat pig's feet as a kid.
My mom would boil them up, and we'd just put them on newspapers and eat them.
So I'm going to make a pig's feet pancake.
Okay, cool.
Throw that into some boiling water.
I'm going to smash up a couple of pieces of garlic.
I've got some peppercorns.
I'm just going to cut a lemon in half and throw it in there.
A little bit of soy sauce.
And The secret weapon.
The secret weapon is bourbon.
And, you know, it's just a little bit.
And I just find, like, you know, I remember growing up, cooking French food, and just the idea of cooking with brandy and cognac was so prevalent.
Yeah, I just replaced that with bourbon.
Sure.
And in a lot of ways, there are some parallels there with Thai and Chinese cooking, too, because of the Chinese rice wine.
When you start thinking about bourbon as an ingredient, versus a libation, it actually kind of opens up things.
This is good old Kentucky sorghum.
Most of the sorghum in the country is grown in Kentucky, made in Kentucky.
And yet another parallel with Chinese cooking is you often find sorghum used as a base for making Chinese wine.
Yes.
It is a lot of sorghum, and there's a lot of sorghum liquor.
Taste that it's amazing.
It's like it's, like, smoky, it's caramely, it's rich, it's unctuous.
Beautiful.
But I wanted to do this so as a drizzle.
so I don't want it actually, I'm going to cut it a little bit.
So I've got lime juice, a little bit of lime peel, and a little bit of butter, and that's it.
And that just is going to kind of loosen it up just a little, so it's not so thick.
And then at this point I'm going to make my corn batter.
And I don't want to do much to the corn.
I just want to soften it up just a touch.
The thing that I discovered in Kentucky is that there's a lot of parallels between and again, region, climate, a lot of parallels between Korea and Kentucky.
They both begin with the letter K.
I'm sure if you keep going along that parallel, in China, too.
You just keep following the growing region, and you find these parallels.
Ooh.
Whoo-hoo! Popcorn.
All right, cornmeal.
Regular AP flour.
A little bit of sugar, and a little bit of curry powder.
Baking powder and baking soda.
I stole some of your homemade cayenne pepper.
That flavor profile is you can't beat that.
And then my new favorite ingredient, which is buttermilk.
Ah.
So this really is a pretty traditional Southern corn cake.
Want to pull some pork with me? Let's do it.
All right.
Get everything skin, cartilage, even the little bone.
I don't care.
Cartilage is delicious.
Oh, it's the best.
Pig skin is one of my favorite ingredients.
All right, grab me that burdock root.
And just give me, like, a teaspoon or two worth.
Okay.
And then a small fistful of chrysanthemum leaves.
Rough chop is fine.
And dump this on here.
And do you mind if I use some of your soy sauce? Please, please.
Love this stuff.
Can you just squeeze me a little lime juice? You bet.
Just right over this whole thing.
Perfect.
You're drawing parallels between Southern American cooking and Korean food.
Is that mostly the flavor profiles, you think, or No, I try yeah, it's the ingredients.
I try and always start with a local ingredient.
From there I kind of generate outward.
It's almost like tentacles, you know, a dish.
It's kind of you reach for things.
All right, we're pretty good here.
Wow, this is a large format pancake.
This is a big old thing.
Ah, it's for one.
Yeah! At this point, I mean, you can roll it out onto a big platter, or you can do this, serve it.
I'm going to take that sorghum.
Beauty.
And that's it.
Beautiful.
That looks really, really tasty.
So there's two ways you can think of latitude.
Obviously the one is the geographical latitude, longitude, and it's you know, the physical points on a map.
And then the other is the idea that you have liberties that you can take, that we have choices and that we have freedoms.
And it is so relevant to what I do as a cook.
You know, it's like, give me some latitude.
Cut me some slack.
Just stay away, you know? Give me some liberty.
We have liberty to do these things.
And so if you are going to give me the latitude to do this, why the hell wouldn't I? For more information on The Mind of a Chef, go to pbs.
org/themindofachef.
Support your PBS station.
In this episode, Chef Ed Lee and friends cross borders and take latitude.
Chef Stuart Brioza of State Bird Provisions of San Francisco combines ingredients from across the map.
So this is like a California hush puppy.
There's a bunch of Southerners right now rolling their eyes.
Yeah, they're pissed off.
Chefs Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman show Ed a dish of their distinctly Southern and Italian hybrid brand of cooking.
Basically you're really just making cheese grits.
That's it.
We grew up eating cheese grit casserole.
It's a direct correlation for us.
And Ed makes a pig feet pancake with America's own Emperor of Thai Food, Andy Ricker.
This is a large format pancake.
No, it's for one.
Enter the mind of a chef.
All curious chefs are just fascinated by their surroundings.
That is intense.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
I've always sort of fought with the idea of fusion.
And I've always kind of searched for a word, or some kind of concept that would help me explain the fact that I need to kind of take foods from different cultures and let borders disappear so that I can move seamlessly through cultures and culinary traditions in order to come up with a version that's clearly my own.
When we look for inspirations globally, chefs generally look to cultures that live along the same latitude, because there is a certain familiarity with produce, climate, all that terroir stuff.
And I remember thinking, "Oh, that's curious.
" Like, I should look up in a map and see, you know, where along the map I reside.
And I was blown away by the fact that Louisville, Kentucky, Korea and Brooklyn are all within two degrees latitude.
My entire life has been spent along the you know, the same latitude, pretty much, within two degrees.
And totally unconsciously.
Yeah, there are a couple of dishes that work for me from just a flavor standpoint, and there are a couple of dishes that work kind of intellectually, you know, culturally.
And there are a couple of dishes in a rare moment, there'll be a dish that works both ways.
To me, collard greens, it's an iconic dish.
Because it means so much more than the actual vegetable.
Collards were poor food, and so the only people that ate collards were the ones that couldn't afford the nicer vegetables, you know? These were the throwaways.
Collards are something that grow everywhere, and they grow very easily.
So if you think about that, something that was born out of poverty, something that was born out of necessity, became something that we now celebrate out of flavor.
And when I started thinking about the history of collard greens in that sense, it immediately made me think about kimchi.
And if you think about the history of Korea, and the rise and the prominence of kimchi, it happened after the Korean War, when everyone was poor.
There was no meat to be had, there was no fish.
And what you had was you had a lot of cabbage.
So what do you do? You take out of necessity, you take all that cabbage, and you start making kimchi out of it.
And so for me, it was natural to go, "Wow, wouldn't it be cool "if I could marry the iconic dish of the South with the iconic dish of Korea?" As a recipe, it starts out pretty simple.
It starts with some lard.
I do a little bit of butter.
Just some chopped onions.
Then I do some country ham.
There's more similarity between latitudes of cultures than longitudes.
It allowed me to understand and start to talk about why I do the things I do without using the word "fusion.
" As it cooks down, it's going to leach out the water.
It creates this incredible what they call pot liquor, which is that wonderful flavor that comes from the collard greens.
It gives me a starting place to have a discussion, and to say, "You know, there is a reason why Korea and Louisville, for me, makes sense.
" All right, so this has got this beautiful emerald green color to it.
I'm just going to add some chicken stock.
Quite a bit of it, too, actually.
I'm going to add a little bit of organic soy sauce, made right here in Kentucky.
A little bit of apple cider vinegar.
And that's pretty much it.
That's just going to go until the collard greens can't cook no more, so it's about 30 to 40 minutes.
At some point, you'll taste it, and you won't taste ham, you won't taste chicken stock, and you won't taste the vinegar.
What you'll taste is collard greens.
So the collards are ready.
And you can see the liquor is pretty much it's not totally evaporated, but it's definitely reduced.
It's really intense at this point.
And then this is my kimchi.
I'm just going to dump it in, juice and all.
The nice thing about the kimchi is that it adds that really beautiful crunch to it, as well as that pickle flavor.
I'm going to put the lid back on.
Pretty much once it comes back up to a boil, especially with these nice Dutch ovens, you can take the heat off, and that residual heat is just going to keep kind of wilting it a little bit.
I don't want to cook it to high hell.
I just want to wilt the kimchi a little bit.
And that's it.
It's my collards and kimchi.
As chefs, we want food that isn't something that you're just going to throw down at home.
Yeah.
And as diners, they want like, "Show me what you've got.
" You know, they want to see some style and some technique, and flavors that they hadn't thought of.
So what did you bring? I'll bet you just brought your whole pantry.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, this is basically, like, California right now.
Blood oranges are definitely a thing.
Artichokes, fennel.
You know, what kind of grows together goes together.
Right now all of these things are like if you were at a farmers market in the Bay Area, this is what you're going to find.
So we're going to do kind of a hushpuppy batter.
So I'll just do a little cornmeal and semolina.
Yeah, a little cumin spice, baking powder.
And then I like to finish it with a little garlic, yeah.
So basically, I mean, is this like, when you came up with this, are you thinking tempura, or are you thinking hushpu I mean, like I was kind of thinking a combination of, like, tempura and panisse, you know? But that all sort of is in the same family.
They're looking really good.
Perfect.
All right.
So this is, like, a California hushpuppy.
A California hushpuppy.
That's right.
There's a bunch of Southerners right now rolling their eyes.
Yeah, they're pissed off.
I like the way your cuisine seamlessly jumps around the globe, you know? There are certain chefs that are inclusive, and certain chefs that are exclusive.
And to me, exclusive chefs are the guys that are, like, you know, "I'm only cooking Sicilian food," you know? "I'm only cooking, you know, food from the region of Provence.
" Right.
"I exclude everything else.
Right.
And I feel like you're one of those chefs that are very inclusive, in that you're just like, "Whatever makes me happy.
"I can float anywhere I want.
I can do whatever I want.
" It took a while to get there, you know? I was, like, really focused on kind of a fine dining mentality, and, you know, you start thinking back to your own childhood and your own desires.
And really, you know, the idea of State Bird was not really to think about a cuisine at all.
It was more of just a philosophy of cooking and flavors and, you know, ingredient shopping, and you know, and even growing in some cases.
Mmm.
It's pretty simple.
Mm-hmm.
So I would just do sort of a pile, and then just sort of a dollop of cumin-scented yogurt.
And then let's just take these guys, kind of open those up.
Would you garnish with some of the fennel fronds? Sure.
So these are great, because yeah.
Going to do that.
I'll just throw it on, yeah.
No, don't, don't.
That's Kentucky.
I think we just stop there, you know? A little sea salt.
And then, of course, we would drizzle a lot of nice olive oil, and there we go.
Artichoke, blood orange and fennel salad.
Awesome.
I'm always saying, like, fire's an ingredient, you know? It's not just a technique, it's an ingredient.
Everybody always says, like, "What's the next food trend? Where is food going?" And for Andy and I, it's like, we feel it's getting back to this.
And this is the most pure way.
And it's also the most fun.
Yeah.
It's a lot of fun.
What's funny is this is kind of a pizza oven, I guess, but the one thing we don't do in here is pizza.
We braise, we char, we do, like, tons of stuff.
We do pancakes.
So it's kind of like it's fun for me to just have it and then experiment, see what can we do out of it.
Don't you feel like you find yourself trying to figure out more things to put into it? Oh, no, there was a time when we first got it, man, I would burn everything.
I had, like, a mess of strawberries in here for, like we had to burn the whole oven just to get all the jam out of there.
All right, guys, fire's pretty much ready to go.
Awesome.
I hear you've got a little snack for me before we do the Yeah, man.
This is ricotta.
When we were in Italy, we learned from this cheese maker.
It's unbelievable.
But they'll do it they'll throw it in the pizza oven.
So we're just going to char the outside of it and let it go.
And then, so we're just going to pop that with some pistachios.
Some honey.
Michael and Andy, like, they do this Southern thing, enhanced by a lot of these Italian flavors.
I kind of do the same thing, but reach for the Far East.
But they're going to their hometown, which is Calabria.
But Memphis and where they're from in Italy is not that far apart on the latitude.
Will you hand me those grapes? Yeah.
We'll just let it char until they burst and the juices come out.
I'll just throw them right down there.
Nice.
Look at that.
I think we're good, huh? Looks good, yeah.
All, right, I'll lift that to you.
Excellent.
But at some point, someone in their family from Italy decided they were going to move and land somewhere in America.
They chose Memphis.
It's crazy to think about.
That was it.
Isn't that gorgeous? You know, I mean, one of the things I like about what you guys do is inject a lot of your Italian roots into your food.
Yeah, we moved to Italy and started going to school there, and we kind of realized kind of, you know, adopted their philosophy or their approach with food, just using what is all around them.
Well, it was really cool.
Once we got there, we realized there was such a similarity between Italian cooking and Southern cooking.
It was something I don't know where it was, but it was triggered in our memories of, like, "This feels right.
" Yeah.
And that's kind of when we said, "You know, "this is what we want to adapt as our cooking style, our philosophy.
" This dish really kind of was inspired by buttermilk fried chicken.
We didn't want to do a whole quartered bird, so the quail gives us that really great approach on the menu to do it as smaller portions.
You know, it gives you a little bit of gaminess, it plays off those livers really well, so that whole kind of that dish, it's got a little bit more oomph than chicken.
The Italian part is the gnocchi alla Romana.
Okay.
So instead of the traditional cornmeal, we use masa.
We're going to add some water to the pot, some peppercorns and cardamom, a couple bay leaves.
Okay.
Some sugar.
You do equal salt and sugar? A little bit heavier on the salt.
Yeah, it's like four and a half to one, salt to sugar.
Fennel.
This is fennel, thyme, parsley and a little bit of rosemary.
And you're just going to sort of let all that infuse together.
Yeah, like, kind of making a tea, essentially.
Well, you know, it's funny.
When I first moved down to Louisville ten years ago, I'd never had buttermilk before.
So I went and got some buttermilk.
And I was, like and I actually brought it back to the store, and I was like, "I'm sorry, but this buttermilk is sour.
" And they were like, "Yeah, idiot.
" Yeah, it's supposed to be.
You want to strain this, or you just dump it? Dump it in there.
All right.
I'm going to throw some of the herbs in there, too.
Sure.
So this is masa.
We started playing around with it because we wanted Hog and Hominy, we needed to put hominy as many places as possible, right? Just because You've just got to.
It's the name.
Screwed yourself up with the name of the restaurant.
Really handcuffed us.
We took that really traditional gnocchi alla Romana, and said, "Let's kind of put our spin on it.
" This is half cream, half stock.
So basically we're going to bring that up to a boil.
And then were you going to add eggs and cheese? Eggs and cheese.
And a little bit of butter off the heat.
So basically you're really just making cheese grits.
That's it.
So and that's what's super funny, because we grew up eating cheese grit casserole every Sunday.
And this is, like it's a direct correlation for us.
So we're just going to get this masa in there, just get it incorporated.
And we're just going to whisk in the yolks.
They're going to kind of richen it up a little bit, give it that cheese grit casserole feel, what we're looking for.
And so it's really thick, porridge-y.
And then we're just going to throw in some butter.
All right.
I notice you don't have any salt there.
Are you using the Parmesan? For sure, yeah.
So we're just going to bake it until it sets up nice and firm.
The final sauce is going to be really the chicken livers, the bacon and the soffrito.
So we're going to put this pan in the oven, get it nice and hot, add the bacon, and just let the quail roast in the oven with the polenta.
And then once we pull once the quail's done, we'll just pull the quail out, let it rest, deglaze a little soffrito, a little salt, and we're good to go.
How hot do you want this pan? Screaming hot.
Like, hot enough to burn your ass on? For sure.
We'll test it on Andy's arm.
There you go.
Who wants to test it to see if it's how hot it is? I'm good there.
So we're going to just throw this in there, just let it render out just a little bit.
Lay that guy in there.
And we'll just let the pizza oven do its magic.
How's the gnocchi? It's gorgeous.
Take a look at that.
Oh, man, that is sick.
I think we just serve the quail right on top of there.
All right, this guy's beautiful.
That's rad.
All right, cool.
Just put it here, let it rest for a second.
All right, so we've got all that.
It can go right in, just sauté these up a little bit.
I love when vinegar hits a hot pan.
It's unbelievable.
Love that.
So I'm going to go ahead, put her on there.
Just right in the middle.
Go ahead.
Perfect.
That's awesome, man.
Rustic.
That looks really delicious.
Thanks, man.
I've respected you for so long, and I've wanted to cook with you forever.
And I feel like part of what you are doing when you take your lens onto Southeast Asian is kind of what I'm doing when I went down to the South.
I went to the South, and I got addicted to these you know, what I call griddle cakes, or corn cakes.
You know, there's a tradition of pancakes in Chinese cooking.
Yeah, definitely.
So is that sort of a tie-in for you at all? It is, it is.
And then pig's feet to me, this is I mean, I used to eat pig's feet as a kid.
My mom would boil them up, and we'd just put them on newspapers and eat them.
So I'm going to make a pig's feet pancake.
Okay, cool.
Throw that into some boiling water.
I'm going to smash up a couple of pieces of garlic.
I've got some peppercorns.
I'm just going to cut a lemon in half and throw it in there.
A little bit of soy sauce.
And The secret weapon.
The secret weapon is bourbon.
And, you know, it's just a little bit.
And I just find, like, you know, I remember growing up, cooking French food, and just the idea of cooking with brandy and cognac was so prevalent.
Yeah, I just replaced that with bourbon.
Sure.
And in a lot of ways, there are some parallels there with Thai and Chinese cooking, too, because of the Chinese rice wine.
When you start thinking about bourbon as an ingredient, versus a libation, it actually kind of opens up things.
This is good old Kentucky sorghum.
Most of the sorghum in the country is grown in Kentucky, made in Kentucky.
And yet another parallel with Chinese cooking is you often find sorghum used as a base for making Chinese wine.
Yes.
It is a lot of sorghum, and there's a lot of sorghum liquor.
Taste that it's amazing.
It's like it's, like, smoky, it's caramely, it's rich, it's unctuous.
Beautiful.
But I wanted to do this so as a drizzle.
so I don't want it actually, I'm going to cut it a little bit.
So I've got lime juice, a little bit of lime peel, and a little bit of butter, and that's it.
And that just is going to kind of loosen it up just a little, so it's not so thick.
And then at this point I'm going to make my corn batter.
And I don't want to do much to the corn.
I just want to soften it up just a touch.
The thing that I discovered in Kentucky is that there's a lot of parallels between and again, region, climate, a lot of parallels between Korea and Kentucky.
They both begin with the letter K.
I'm sure if you keep going along that parallel, in China, too.
You just keep following the growing region, and you find these parallels.
Ooh.
Whoo-hoo! Popcorn.
All right, cornmeal.
Regular AP flour.
A little bit of sugar, and a little bit of curry powder.
Baking powder and baking soda.
I stole some of your homemade cayenne pepper.
That flavor profile is you can't beat that.
And then my new favorite ingredient, which is buttermilk.
Ah.
So this really is a pretty traditional Southern corn cake.
Want to pull some pork with me? Let's do it.
All right.
Get everything skin, cartilage, even the little bone.
I don't care.
Cartilage is delicious.
Oh, it's the best.
Pig skin is one of my favorite ingredients.
All right, grab me that burdock root.
And just give me, like, a teaspoon or two worth.
Okay.
And then a small fistful of chrysanthemum leaves.
Rough chop is fine.
And dump this on here.
And do you mind if I use some of your soy sauce? Please, please.
Love this stuff.
Can you just squeeze me a little lime juice? You bet.
Just right over this whole thing.
Perfect.
You're drawing parallels between Southern American cooking and Korean food.
Is that mostly the flavor profiles, you think, or No, I try yeah, it's the ingredients.
I try and always start with a local ingredient.
From there I kind of generate outward.
It's almost like tentacles, you know, a dish.
It's kind of you reach for things.
All right, we're pretty good here.
Wow, this is a large format pancake.
This is a big old thing.
Ah, it's for one.
Yeah! At this point, I mean, you can roll it out onto a big platter, or you can do this, serve it.
I'm going to take that sorghum.
Beauty.
And that's it.
Beautiful.
That looks really, really tasty.
So there's two ways you can think of latitude.
Obviously the one is the geographical latitude, longitude, and it's you know, the physical points on a map.
And then the other is the idea that you have liberties that you can take, that we have choices and that we have freedoms.
And it is so relevant to what I do as a cook.
You know, it's like, give me some latitude.
Cut me some slack.
Just stay away, you know? Give me some liberty.
We have liberty to do these things.
And so if you are going to give me the latitude to do this, why the hell wouldn't I? For more information on The Mind of a Chef, go to pbs.
org/themindofachef.