An Interview with Mitchell Davis, author of Kitchen Sense Potter Recipe Club: There aren’t many cookbooks that are as broad-reaching as Kitchen Sense. How have you come to be so knowledegable about so many different cuisines? Mitchell Davis: I’m an equal-opportunity eater. And I love to experiment in the kitchen with different ingredients and different cuisines. Sometimes it takes a little while before I’m satisfied by my cooking in a different idiom. For years I would try to make Chinese food at home, and even though it was often good, it never really satisfied my craving for Chinese food in a restaurant. I just couldn’t find that “wok chi” Chinese chefs are always talking about, whatever that means. Then one day something just clicked and suddenly my Chinese food just all came together. The techniques and ingredients just became second nature and I began really cooking Chinese. A similar transformation happened with my Italian, Thai, Mexican, and Middle Eastern cooking. I’m an obsessive kind of person and I work on getting something right. And my readers get the benefit of me having figured all of this stuff out before they attempt a dish in a new or unfamiliar cuisine. PRC: What are the major challenges that face the home cook? MD: These days I think the home cook is done a bit of disservice by the rise in popularity of chef cookbooks. I love chefs and I love their food. But when it comes to translating their food for home preparation, I think most chefs fall short of the mark. And just as you don’t want to eat in a restaurant every night, you don’t want to cook a chef’s menu every night. We’re living in a curious time, foodwise, I think, when people know a lot more about food because of all the media and excitement about it, but they don’t know how to cook. This makes cooking frustrating, because you see or taste or hear about a succulent and spectacular braised veal shank that Daniel Boulud makes, but when you go to cook something, it doesn’t meet those expectations. With their staffs of cooks and dishwashers and piles of equipment and access to amazing ingredients, chefs aren’t always thinking about what it’s like to cook at home. It drives me a little crazy when a recipe keeps having you put things in different bowls, when you could do it all in one. Or when a recipe calls for an odd amount of an ingredient, that leaves a spoonful left in a standard can. (At times my fridge has been full of little dried up half-full cans of tomato paste.) I remember a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from a book of a great New York pastry chef that made 6 dozen miniature chocolate chip cookies. Who at home needs six dozen miniature chocolate chip cookies? That’s a yield for a restaurant with a petit fours tray. At home you want 2 dozen giant chocolate chip cookies. I recall another recipe that had you strain a soup twice through a chinois (a fine mesh strainer). I have a weakness for buying kitchen equipment, so I have an expensive chinois, but I only have one. And so I would have had to clean it between strainings. This sort of excess use of equipment and refinement (if you strain something once at home, I think it’s strained enough) is a hallmark of chef recipes. That’s why we pay them so much when we eat out. When we eat at home, the soup can be a little lumpy. Having worked in professional kitchens and with professional chefs, but being a home cook at heart, I am always aware of the distinctions between the different way professionals and amateurs approach cooking and I try to account for these differences in my recipes. I don’t believe in dumbing anything down, I just want my recipes and techniques to be as efficient and practical as possible for someone cooking in a home kitchen. PRC: Do you have a favorite recipe from the book? MD: An impossible question to answer. I don’t have a favorite recipe, per se, but during the writing of the book and now that it is done, I go through periods when I like a recipe so much I make it over and over. I’m obsessive that way. The Southwestern Baked Beans with Chorizo, Poblanos, and Orange is a good example. This was a recipe I made up with some things I had on hand. I put a bunch of ingredients in a casserole and baked it overnight. When I got up in the morning, the smell was intoxicating. And the beans were really delicious. I made them repeatedly for weeks. I must have eaten a ton of these beans. PRC: Do you have a favorite cuisine? Why? MD: I guess my default cuisine is Italian. I spend a lot of time in Italy and I just love the simple approach to food there. It’s taken for granted in Italy that you will be surrounded by good ingredients that you can assemble in a simple way to come up with something very satisfying to eat without much effort. With a bag of pasta and some good olive, garlic, maybe anchovies or cheese or black pepper, you are never more than 15 minutes away from a delicious dinner. That’s the essence of good food. Not that I don’t get all complicated and fancy from time to time, but Italian is my fall back cooking. Plus, Italian food is rarely very good in restaurants—despite all the Italian restaurants around New York. So I save the other cuisines for when I’m eating out and cook Italian at home. PRC: Eric Ripert, executive chef/co-owner of Le Bernardin thought highly of Kitchen Sense and suggested: "Try the Simple Seafood Sausage; it’s the best I’ve ever had.” How did you develop this recipe? It's pretty ingenious. MD: Funny you should ask because that recipe is a combination of techniques from a couple of chef friends of mine. For the Foie Gras...A Passion book, Susur Lee of Susur in Toronto submitted a very complex recipe that included a scallop roll made by pureeing scallops, reshaping it, and then poaching it in water that had just come up to a boil and been shut off. I noted it in the back of my mind because the texture of the final product when we were testing that recipe was really lovely. And the technique was so easy I thought it could have other applications. Maybe 7 or 8 years later, I was cooking a dinner with some friends, and Eric Ripert was invited. We had decided to do a seafood choucroute, which is a traditional but little known version of the famous Alsatian sauerkraut dish. I wanted to make seafood sausage to go into it. I called up my friend Dano, who is a chef in upstate New York and a great sausage maker, and I asked how he made his delicious seafood sausage. I took Dano’s advice for seasoning (with some mushroom and spinach for color, flavor, and texture) and I applied it to that scallop base I remembered from Susur’s recipe, and voilà, Mitchell’s famous seafood sausage was born. When Eric ate it in that choucroute, he proclaimed it the best he’d ever had. (A variation of it ended up on his menu at Le Bernardin a few weeks later—I’ve never been so honored, culinarily speaking.) And I was stunned by how easy and delicious it was. I was so excited I made it for everyone for a few months. My sister was visiting, and watched me make it for her, and she thought it was so simple she could even do it herself. PRC: What is your most humbling cooking memory? MD: Oy. There are many. I recall spending a whole Saturday teaching a friend how to make gnocchi, the Italian potato dumplings that run the risk of being too heavy and gummy if you add too much flour or work the dough too vigorously. At the dinner party that night I left the table to put the gnocchi from the freezer, where they were firming up, into the boiling water. I waited a minute, stirred the pot, and all I saw was potato mush. I was so worried about making them too heavy that I didn’t add enough flour to hold them together. They disintegrated I didn’t say anything and carried on with the meal—as always at my house, there was plenty to eat. It wasn’t until after dinner that my friend asked what happened to the gnocchi we made. PRC: Do you have any advice for home cooks? MD: Some words to the wise about cooking: 1. Don’t worry so much about fat, just choose better fat. Your cooking will be lighter and more healthful if you do. 2. Neither cooking nor baking are science. You can be creative. Recipes are guidelines. You really learn about food by paying attention to what you do and seeing what works and what doesn’t. 3. Good cooking begins with good shopping. If you buy ingredients—produce, meat, even prepared foods—you are halfway toward making good food. |