The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e02 Episode Script
Garbage
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Garbage, if you did not know, is something chefs, especially chef-owners, spend a lot of time and energy thinking about.
In the case of Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, dealing with garbage and waste is a bit of an obsession.
So I'm going to save the spines for later.
I don't know I would eat that.
Those fish bones you've thrown away delicious.
The celery you think is past its prime it's not.
That broth you just poured down the sink rage-inducing wastefulness that speaks to your lack of character.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy.
Oh man, we are making some food here now.
When I'm looking in the garbage cans, I should be thinking about the money.
But it's actually not the first thing I'm really noticing.
It's offensive to me that you would throw something perfectly good away.
And, of course, my definition of perfectly good turned out to be very different than someone else's.
Then when you start to look in the garbage at what people are throwing away, it is so about convenience.
The details don't matter.
You're not looking, you're not paying attention, you don't care.
Oh, my god.
You walk around here, the windows just constantly grimed over from the truck traffic going on Houston Street, your hands filthy if you just stand outside.
The plastic bags hanging from the tree branches.
Oh, look at the dancing deli bag.
I have come to see the sort of poetry in it.
Yeah, we live in a trash pit.
The number one thing, of course, I want to do is reduce the garbage production.
You make money in the restaurant business by saving food versus generating it.
The yield of the broth, the liquid that comes from making the octopus, is so voluminous and so delicious, I can't stand pouring it down the drain.
So we're going to yield the broth and use it again, and then again, and then one more time.
Aww, he's missing a leg.
Seven-pus, a septipus.
I'm just going to take the head off, and put that in the freezer for another day.
They're sticking to my fingers.
And this poor puppy only has seven.
Now I'm already getting something that looks pretty golden.
In a little bit it's going to be quite purple and muddy.
I just want to see where I'm going.
Mmm.
I can't fix it later, so it's now or never.
Good.
I'm going to turn it way down.
Stubby, poor guy.
And you see this deep purple starting to turn, like, rosé.
The octopus is the freakish thing, right? My kids would go crazy for this.
The sea creature of your nightmares.
I have made this dish for an event, and I remember the event coordinator walking by and saying, like, "That is not attractive.
" And I was like, "I think this is so beautiful.
" You know when the stock is spent when you dump out, like, the chicken stock, and you're just sucking the bones.
I always eat that way-overcooked carrot.
Okay, I'm going to strain the broth.
It's so classic.
Nothing fits.
But it works.
We're going to put the round sieve in the square pan.
That is very ugly.
But underneath, definitely cook's treat.
Eat the garbage.
I freakin' love the garbage.
What you really want is the octopus.
That's what you were here for.
But, I mean, are you going to throw the liquids away? I have my mom, who is the product of wartime parents.
So a lot of, like, "Well, what are you throwing that perfectly good thing away for?" Or I love that I'm holding this Kleenex.
She would tuck it under like this, to be used again.
Boy, were we raised with that mentality.
So it's very built in.
So you know vitello tonnato, probably.
It's cold sliced veal with tuna mayonnaise.
I'm making this with pork instead of the veal.
And so it's maiale tonnato.
Tunafied pork.
And I'm going to cook it in the octopus broth, which started as water, and now is octopus flavor.
A kind of muddy red brown.
I'm sure we had chicken stock, but I'm having all this leftover octopus broth in the walk-in.
Your mind starts to hurry and hustle.
Would the octopus be good with the pork? Oh, you know, in Spain, they put a lot of pork and clams together.
I guess it makes sense that you put seafood and meat in the same dish.
Oh, yeah.
Mmm.
That looks mighty fine.
That octopus smell was so pronounced when I was taking the pork out of the oven.
Oh, man, this color now, it's so dark brown.
Mmm.
These are the little metal things in the quail.
When the pigeons, you take their bones out, this helps them hold their form.
And we save them and use them as cake testers instead of buying cake testers, because I'm recycling everything, garbage.
Why throw it in the garbage? If I make a hole in it, the liquid that's going to come out is going to be clear.
There's no pink.
So I'm going to chill that.
I'm going to do I clap my hands now? Yay! Everything in New York is tiny, including our garbage area.
Okay, that's pretty gross.
We have to store all the garbage for a period of time until we can put it out onto the sidewalk at the end of the night.
When you're a business, you pay for your own garbage pickup, removal.
So how you store your garbage, get it onto the sidewalk, get it picked up, where does it go where does it go? On a hot Memorial Day weekend, and you have no garbage pickup on Sunday or Monday, and you've had a very busy, touristy weekend, and then all that garbage just sitting in your hallway, waiting to be hauled up the stairs but when that truck pulls up, the streets are empty.
New York is pretty much asleep.
Whoever's out, not somebody you really want to know.
There's some good rat population that happens a bit, right? Burrowing into the bags that they're about to collect.
So that big spitting beast that pulls up, it sets off car alarms, it Right, it's like the deep treble rumble, and it's kind of farting and spitting.
And then they screech to a halt in front of you.
You have a proud display cardboard and paper, metal, glass, and plastic, compostable, giant drum of all the used fat, used grease.
Okay, that's freakin' five streams of garbage.
And I'm very fastidious about like, I want all the black bags, I want all the clear bags, I want all the blue bags.
I want my cartons very tightly bound with the tiger twine.
And then there's that not-very-confidence-building moment where you're watching all the sorted garbage go in the back of the one truck, and you're just like, "What? I just did all that?" It's probably going to one big beautiful landfill.
So it started out as water, went to octopus broth, is now maiale liquid.
And forthcoming will become chorizo broth, and eventually periwinkle liquid.
Here is our maiale, our pork.
We'll slice it like sandwich meat, deli meat, and then put the tuna, mayonnaise, in between all the layers.
It's just this sort of, "What am I eating? Is it meat, is it fish?" It's kind of purring like a kitty can you hear it? Waiting for its tuna fish sauce.
It is a kind of elegant lunch dish.
I love a little bit of dabbing your a little bit of that, with your pinky out.
Just on occasion it's fun to, like, dress up.
Tuna sauce.
The two fish, the anchovy and the tuna.
And this is maiale liquid, which is my kind of smoothie, right? I hate sugar.
I never want, like, fruit crap.
Mm-hmm.
There's the tonnato.
Now a little mayonnaise.
I'm getting a faceful, too.
Here I think you should get a close-up.
A slo-mo close-up, covered in mayonnaise.
Living for the job, man.
I've never understood in the recipe why there's a mayonnaise and a tuna sauce.
But now I understand, because the silkiness of the mayonnaise you fold the two things together, and then you have this, like, mmm, perfect mouth feel and texture.
I guess it's out of fashion, but it turns me on.
I'm loving this very much.
So this, throwback, not very trendy, but very classic, ugly beauty, is maiale tonnato.
This is my meat flower.
We have a little toilet in a 115-year-old building.
With all the stresses of a weekend that we just went through, I'm sure the toilets here get flushed 720 times.
That's a lot of work for a poor little john.
I would like to go on the record as saying that the mind of a chef is not only occupied with food.
If it was only food, it would be a dream job.
I think the problem is the ballcock, which let the water in.
The ballcock? Just making sure I'm hearing you.
All right, so first thing we've got to do is we're going to shut the water off.
Is it righty-tighty lefty-loosey, like every rule? Exactly.
Clockwise it's going to shut off, counterclockwise open up.
Okay.
Put the new supply line.
Before you put it on, we're going to put a little bit of this pipe dope.
Pipe dope? Yeah.
Ballcock and pipe dope? Exactly.
Man, I'm in the wrong industry.
And what does the pipe dope do? It lubricates.
Now you've got to put the top piece Oh, I should have worn the gloves.
It's not that bad.
Okay.
Just a little bit of water.
Okay.
I did it not a drip.
Did a good job.
I still hear some water running.
Oh, you do? Yes.
Hear the water running? Yeah.
You need a new toilet.
And you're not lying to me right now? I'm not lying.
We're friends.
- Yes.
We are the oldest of friends.
We used to be friends.
Maybe not after this visit, right? Cooking becomes a very hunt-and-peck experience.
Look around, what do we have, what do we have, what do we have? Certain things here have been built into the system.
So you don't throw it away, because you know what the next step is.
You kind of go shopping in the walk-in.
You sort of scan it can be a little more rotten, it can be a little more bruised.
For me that's still perfectly good.
Use what you have.
So whenever we use any fresh sardine, we save the spine, and don't throw it away in the garbage, because you can make the most delicious well, French fry, that you've ever had in your whole life.
So I'm going to pour milk all over these puppies.
And I'm going to really, really get them down in there, get the cheeks tell me that is not macabre.
What bloodbath have we come upon? It's kind of pretty, though, right? And I'm going to dredge.
And I think you will not be sorry.
Yee-hee! This guy lost a tail, poor little puppy.
Let me just see something.
Oh, perfection.
Oh, this is Spain.
They do it in Spain, All that anchovy, sardine production.
This is smart people who know that they have to use up their stuff.
So many ways to drain.
I love the coffee filter.
These are big.
Much bigger than I'm used to.
And I'm going to mix some smoked paprika and salt.
It's so weird, except for people who know, like people who've been to Spain, or people who work in the industry.
I am really sorry if you wouldn't chow down on that.
I sure would.
Yeah, that is cook snack right there not for sale.
I don't want to make this for sale.
This is garbage.
If this never makes it to the table, it's fine.
It can be just for us.
Oh.
Hello.
That is delicious, delicious.
That is delicious.
There's something with real sardines on the menu, you know we're going to have this.
We're going to put our garbage in the nicest napkin we can possibly make.
Okay, total failure.
Not this week.
I need to practice.
It's funny, right, how quick people are to throw things away that are in fact perfectly good, but maybe require a little work.
I mean, it's one thing to be, like, a crazy hoarder in your personal life.
But I'm running a restaurant.
The customer in the chair has to feel like I'm throwing a party, not like I'm trying to save money and run a soup kitchen.
We are finally at the end of this epic journey of the water that became the octopus broth, which then became the porktopus broth, and now will become the chorizo broth, in which we will cook the periwinkles, the garbage of the sea.
The periwinkle is a sea snail, like the whelk.
Nobody wants to eat these.
But it really has an appealing texture, if you like that kind of thing, which I do.
Firm, and not quite rubbery, but resistant.
Yeah, so you can see the bodies are starting to pop out.
Any excuse to dip your bread in that.
I've already use the broth now however many times.
It just gets clearer and clearer that now you have something extra delicious extra, extra, extra delicious.
Then I want to use some of the chorizo.
And that is about as much as I can wring out of the cloth of this plain water that we started with.
I'm using my garbage.
It tastes very, very good at the end.
Somebody had to work really hard, and maybe many people had to work very hard, to get this product to me.
And then even I had to do a lot of work, right? I had to get it down the hatch, and I had to clean it up, put it in a bin, label the container, I had to put the date on.
It's like the expense of energy and time and care and physical labor.
So I guess when I see someone, boom, tossed it, "I didn't feel like walking back to the walk-in," or, "I didn't "want to salvage the good part, so I just threw the whole thing away," it's hard for me to love someone who has a weak character like that.
Support your PBS station.
Garbage, if you did not know, is something chefs, especially chef-owners, spend a lot of time and energy thinking about.
In the case of Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, dealing with garbage and waste is a bit of an obsession.
So I'm going to save the spines for later.
I don't know I would eat that.
Those fish bones you've thrown away delicious.
The celery you think is past its prime it's not.
That broth you just poured down the sink rage-inducing wastefulness that speaks to your lack of character.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy.
Oh man, we are making some food here now.
When I'm looking in the garbage cans, I should be thinking about the money.
But it's actually not the first thing I'm really noticing.
It's offensive to me that you would throw something perfectly good away.
And, of course, my definition of perfectly good turned out to be very different than someone else's.
Then when you start to look in the garbage at what people are throwing away, it is so about convenience.
The details don't matter.
You're not looking, you're not paying attention, you don't care.
Oh, my god.
You walk around here, the windows just constantly grimed over from the truck traffic going on Houston Street, your hands filthy if you just stand outside.
The plastic bags hanging from the tree branches.
Oh, look at the dancing deli bag.
I have come to see the sort of poetry in it.
Yeah, we live in a trash pit.
The number one thing, of course, I want to do is reduce the garbage production.
You make money in the restaurant business by saving food versus generating it.
The yield of the broth, the liquid that comes from making the octopus, is so voluminous and so delicious, I can't stand pouring it down the drain.
So we're going to yield the broth and use it again, and then again, and then one more time.
Aww, he's missing a leg.
Seven-pus, a septipus.
I'm just going to take the head off, and put that in the freezer for another day.
They're sticking to my fingers.
And this poor puppy only has seven.
Now I'm already getting something that looks pretty golden.
In a little bit it's going to be quite purple and muddy.
I just want to see where I'm going.
Mmm.
I can't fix it later, so it's now or never.
Good.
I'm going to turn it way down.
Stubby, poor guy.
And you see this deep purple starting to turn, like, rosé.
The octopus is the freakish thing, right? My kids would go crazy for this.
The sea creature of your nightmares.
I have made this dish for an event, and I remember the event coordinator walking by and saying, like, "That is not attractive.
" And I was like, "I think this is so beautiful.
" You know when the stock is spent when you dump out, like, the chicken stock, and you're just sucking the bones.
I always eat that way-overcooked carrot.
Okay, I'm going to strain the broth.
It's so classic.
Nothing fits.
But it works.
We're going to put the round sieve in the square pan.
That is very ugly.
But underneath, definitely cook's treat.
Eat the garbage.
I freakin' love the garbage.
What you really want is the octopus.
That's what you were here for.
But, I mean, are you going to throw the liquids away? I have my mom, who is the product of wartime parents.
So a lot of, like, "Well, what are you throwing that perfectly good thing away for?" Or I love that I'm holding this Kleenex.
She would tuck it under like this, to be used again.
Boy, were we raised with that mentality.
So it's very built in.
So you know vitello tonnato, probably.
It's cold sliced veal with tuna mayonnaise.
I'm making this with pork instead of the veal.
And so it's maiale tonnato.
Tunafied pork.
And I'm going to cook it in the octopus broth, which started as water, and now is octopus flavor.
A kind of muddy red brown.
I'm sure we had chicken stock, but I'm having all this leftover octopus broth in the walk-in.
Your mind starts to hurry and hustle.
Would the octopus be good with the pork? Oh, you know, in Spain, they put a lot of pork and clams together.
I guess it makes sense that you put seafood and meat in the same dish.
Oh, yeah.
Mmm.
That looks mighty fine.
That octopus smell was so pronounced when I was taking the pork out of the oven.
Oh, man, this color now, it's so dark brown.
Mmm.
These are the little metal things in the quail.
When the pigeons, you take their bones out, this helps them hold their form.
And we save them and use them as cake testers instead of buying cake testers, because I'm recycling everything, garbage.
Why throw it in the garbage? If I make a hole in it, the liquid that's going to come out is going to be clear.
There's no pink.
So I'm going to chill that.
I'm going to do I clap my hands now? Yay! Everything in New York is tiny, including our garbage area.
Okay, that's pretty gross.
We have to store all the garbage for a period of time until we can put it out onto the sidewalk at the end of the night.
When you're a business, you pay for your own garbage pickup, removal.
So how you store your garbage, get it onto the sidewalk, get it picked up, where does it go where does it go? On a hot Memorial Day weekend, and you have no garbage pickup on Sunday or Monday, and you've had a very busy, touristy weekend, and then all that garbage just sitting in your hallway, waiting to be hauled up the stairs but when that truck pulls up, the streets are empty.
New York is pretty much asleep.
Whoever's out, not somebody you really want to know.
There's some good rat population that happens a bit, right? Burrowing into the bags that they're about to collect.
So that big spitting beast that pulls up, it sets off car alarms, it Right, it's like the deep treble rumble, and it's kind of farting and spitting.
And then they screech to a halt in front of you.
You have a proud display cardboard and paper, metal, glass, and plastic, compostable, giant drum of all the used fat, used grease.
Okay, that's freakin' five streams of garbage.
And I'm very fastidious about like, I want all the black bags, I want all the clear bags, I want all the blue bags.
I want my cartons very tightly bound with the tiger twine.
And then there's that not-very-confidence-building moment where you're watching all the sorted garbage go in the back of the one truck, and you're just like, "What? I just did all that?" It's probably going to one big beautiful landfill.
So it started out as water, went to octopus broth, is now maiale liquid.
And forthcoming will become chorizo broth, and eventually periwinkle liquid.
Here is our maiale, our pork.
We'll slice it like sandwich meat, deli meat, and then put the tuna, mayonnaise, in between all the layers.
It's just this sort of, "What am I eating? Is it meat, is it fish?" It's kind of purring like a kitty can you hear it? Waiting for its tuna fish sauce.
It is a kind of elegant lunch dish.
I love a little bit of dabbing your a little bit of that, with your pinky out.
Just on occasion it's fun to, like, dress up.
Tuna sauce.
The two fish, the anchovy and the tuna.
And this is maiale liquid, which is my kind of smoothie, right? I hate sugar.
I never want, like, fruit crap.
Mm-hmm.
There's the tonnato.
Now a little mayonnaise.
I'm getting a faceful, too.
Here I think you should get a close-up.
A slo-mo close-up, covered in mayonnaise.
Living for the job, man.
I've never understood in the recipe why there's a mayonnaise and a tuna sauce.
But now I understand, because the silkiness of the mayonnaise you fold the two things together, and then you have this, like, mmm, perfect mouth feel and texture.
I guess it's out of fashion, but it turns me on.
I'm loving this very much.
So this, throwback, not very trendy, but very classic, ugly beauty, is maiale tonnato.
This is my meat flower.
We have a little toilet in a 115-year-old building.
With all the stresses of a weekend that we just went through, I'm sure the toilets here get flushed 720 times.
That's a lot of work for a poor little john.
I would like to go on the record as saying that the mind of a chef is not only occupied with food.
If it was only food, it would be a dream job.
I think the problem is the ballcock, which let the water in.
The ballcock? Just making sure I'm hearing you.
All right, so first thing we've got to do is we're going to shut the water off.
Is it righty-tighty lefty-loosey, like every rule? Exactly.
Clockwise it's going to shut off, counterclockwise open up.
Okay.
Put the new supply line.
Before you put it on, we're going to put a little bit of this pipe dope.
Pipe dope? Yeah.
Ballcock and pipe dope? Exactly.
Man, I'm in the wrong industry.
And what does the pipe dope do? It lubricates.
Now you've got to put the top piece Oh, I should have worn the gloves.
It's not that bad.
Okay.
Just a little bit of water.
Okay.
I did it not a drip.
Did a good job.
I still hear some water running.
Oh, you do? Yes.
Hear the water running? Yeah.
You need a new toilet.
And you're not lying to me right now? I'm not lying.
We're friends.
- Yes.
We are the oldest of friends.
We used to be friends.
Maybe not after this visit, right? Cooking becomes a very hunt-and-peck experience.
Look around, what do we have, what do we have, what do we have? Certain things here have been built into the system.
So you don't throw it away, because you know what the next step is.
You kind of go shopping in the walk-in.
You sort of scan it can be a little more rotten, it can be a little more bruised.
For me that's still perfectly good.
Use what you have.
So whenever we use any fresh sardine, we save the spine, and don't throw it away in the garbage, because you can make the most delicious well, French fry, that you've ever had in your whole life.
So I'm going to pour milk all over these puppies.
And I'm going to really, really get them down in there, get the cheeks tell me that is not macabre.
What bloodbath have we come upon? It's kind of pretty, though, right? And I'm going to dredge.
And I think you will not be sorry.
Yee-hee! This guy lost a tail, poor little puppy.
Let me just see something.
Oh, perfection.
Oh, this is Spain.
They do it in Spain, All that anchovy, sardine production.
This is smart people who know that they have to use up their stuff.
So many ways to drain.
I love the coffee filter.
These are big.
Much bigger than I'm used to.
And I'm going to mix some smoked paprika and salt.
It's so weird, except for people who know, like people who've been to Spain, or people who work in the industry.
I am really sorry if you wouldn't chow down on that.
I sure would.
Yeah, that is cook snack right there not for sale.
I don't want to make this for sale.
This is garbage.
If this never makes it to the table, it's fine.
It can be just for us.
Oh.
Hello.
That is delicious, delicious.
That is delicious.
There's something with real sardines on the menu, you know we're going to have this.
We're going to put our garbage in the nicest napkin we can possibly make.
Okay, total failure.
Not this week.
I need to practice.
It's funny, right, how quick people are to throw things away that are in fact perfectly good, but maybe require a little work.
I mean, it's one thing to be, like, a crazy hoarder in your personal life.
But I'm running a restaurant.
The customer in the chair has to feel like I'm throwing a party, not like I'm trying to save money and run a soup kitchen.
We are finally at the end of this epic journey of the water that became the octopus broth, which then became the porktopus broth, and now will become the chorizo broth, in which we will cook the periwinkles, the garbage of the sea.
The periwinkle is a sea snail, like the whelk.
Nobody wants to eat these.
But it really has an appealing texture, if you like that kind of thing, which I do.
Firm, and not quite rubbery, but resistant.
Yeah, so you can see the bodies are starting to pop out.
Any excuse to dip your bread in that.
I've already use the broth now however many times.
It just gets clearer and clearer that now you have something extra delicious extra, extra, extra delicious.
Then I want to use some of the chorizo.
And that is about as much as I can wring out of the cloth of this plain water that we started with.
I'm using my garbage.
It tastes very, very good at the end.
Somebody had to work really hard, and maybe many people had to work very hard, to get this product to me.
And then even I had to do a lot of work, right? I had to get it down the hatch, and I had to clean it up, put it in a bin, label the container, I had to put the date on.
It's like the expense of energy and time and care and physical labor.
So I guess when I see someone, boom, tossed it, "I didn't feel like walking back to the walk-in," or, "I didn't "want to salvage the good part, so I just threw the whole thing away," it's hard for me to love someone who has a weak character like that.