Moshi moshi it’s chawanmushi time

I’ve recently noticed that this blog is slowly but surely turning into a food blog. To help with the transition, I’ve decided to bang out another post about cuisine; this time, Japanese. 

I moved to Japan when I was 23 literally because my love of sushi took me there but I quickly discovered an even more delicious delicacy (well, more than one actually): chawanmushi.

Fun to say and even more fun to eat, chawanmushi is an egg custard made with fish stock, sake, soya sauce, ginger and a cornucopia of fillings (my favourites being shrimps, scallops, asparagus and shitake mushrooms). 

I start by frying the fillings in some sesame oil and garlic, with a little salt and pepper. Once that’s done, I beat two eggs. Then I slowly add a cup of cooled fish stock, a splash of sake and a dash of soya sauce to the eggs. 

I carefully and evenly (!) separate the custard into dishes that can be cooked in and then eaten out of. Finally, I add the fillings to each dish.

To cook, I place the dishes in a saucepan filled with a generous bottom of boiling water and steam for about 15 minutes. At the end, I grate a little ginger on the top and then, itadakimasu, I enjoy.

Oishi desu!

Coming home or A partridge in a pear tree

There is something about certain people and places that make us feel like we’ve seen them before. They feel familiar.  Like when I first met my beau. There was something about him that reminded me, or made me think of, my grandfather. 
 

Funny story: About two years ago, my father gave me my grandfather’s old watch to wear. Shortly after I met my beau, it stopped working. I brought it in to get fixed but it stopped working a second time when I saw him again.

I took it as a sign.

Not surprisingly, there was also something very familiar about his family’s cottage. Those who know me well know that my grandfather built a cottage that the entire family used to visit when I was younger. 

From the moment I saw his family’s cottage this Thanksgiving, I felt like I was coming home, returning to a long lost memory. There was a similar atmosphere and vibe, yes, but the wood paneling was also the same, as were the couch and some glasses. 

And then there were the binoculars. 

I’ll never be able to return to the cottage my grandfather built because it isn’t in the family anymore, but somehow, I’ve been graced with the possibility of returning to a very similar, and familiar, one.

Thank you.

  

Eric Ripert speaks

What is your first food memory—what’s the first really delicious thing that you remember eating? (Mine is Camembert): Wow… (laughs) that’s really cool, I remember at age like 4 or 5, two things. I remember eating the apple tart of my grandmother and eating a lot of crepes. I remember the sweet. I don’t remember savoury but the sweet for sure. That is the good memories. The bad memories, I remember my parents trying to force me to eat brains and throwing the brains all over the kitchen! 

Was that popular where you’re from? In that era, they believed that kids would be smarter if they ate them. 

What are some of your favourite ingredients and why? The black truffle for me is the most magical and esoterical, tasty, fantastic thing so I love the black truffle. I don’t think you will be surprised if I say all kinds of seafood (laughs). 

When did you get into seafood? You know, all my life when I worked in restaurants in France, even in the US, I always ended up at the fish station. And then you obviously develop love for cooking fish and the knowledge and technique that you have to apply to be an expert. And then when I came to Le Bernardin I was already very, very well trained on how to cook fish.

What is the most unusual, or exotic, ingredient you’ve ever used? Maybe the geoduck? You know what that is? (Me: no, I don’t know what that is). You know what is a steamer? Okay, so the geoduck is basically 30 times bigger than the steamer. It looks like… yeah… (laughs) A very, very large steamer with a very long trunk. In Canada and the United States, in the Northwest you find them and Asian people love it. 

What is your favourite guilty pleasure or junk food? (Me: hot dogs) I have no guilt. (Me: what’s your favourite junk food then?) Dark chocolate. But it’s not junk. I’m not a junk food guy. I eat everything I like with a certain moderation which is not forced, it’s kind of instinct. Therefore, I have no problem to eat pizza but I’m not going to stuff myself with pizza every day of the week. Once a week, once every two weeks I have a nice, good quality pizza, you know, and things like that. But I don’t, for instance, if I have a burger I definitely eat a good quality burger. I’m not going to go to... (Harvey’s!). Yeah. No, I’m not going there. 

What is your ideal meal? It obviously depend of the season, if it’s a celebration. (Me: if you’re at home, with your wife on a Friday night watching a movie) I always like to have appetizer, main course, dessert. That’s for sure. And then I like light food at night, so I will say definitely something in the form of a salad, and if I am at home I don’t eat fish because I eat fish at Le Bernardin every day. Therefore will be meat, and probably poultry, maybe like a roasted chicken. And depending of the season, if it’s the season of the tomatoes something like that, and sometimes cheese, but for sure dessert. I like a sweet at the end of my meal. (Me: mostly chocolate or...) if yeah, sometimes it’s a little cake or like something like cookies and if I have a square of dark chocolate... it’s what happens every night actually. 

What was your worst experience as a chef? Did you ever walk out of a kitchen? When I was in the military I ended up cooking for the officers and I thought they were eating good food so I was very excited about it but on my first day I realized that the food was terrible and I went to see the colonel and told him that I don’t mind to do my military duties which at the time were mandatory but if you put me in the kitchen I’m going to be depressed and you’re going to have to send me back home so he laughed and offered me the job of becoming his waiter (laughs). 

Do you think chefs like Gordon Ramsay, for example, are giving the profession a bad name or do most of them (not including you, of course) have bad tempers? I think Gordon Ramsay and especially the production around him are doing a terrible job at inspiring a young generation. How to abuse and insult people. I always thought a happy cook could cook much better than a scared or a sad cook. Who likes to be insulted, who likes to be abused? 

So what’s the atmosphere like in the kitchen at Le Bernardin? Strong discipline, um, at the same time it’s very intense so a lot of focus, discipline, but it’s a very kind kitchen. We don’t yell at people. 

What do you think makes Le Bernardin unique? First of all we are a seafood restaurant and then we are a very sophisticated restaurant. Formal but at the same time very relaxed for a formal restaurant. We want people to have a special experience. So we try to find out what people are looking for in terms of experience and then we deliver. That’s what makes the place special in a sense. (Me: how have you stayed at the top for so long?) In New York there is such competitiveness it is such a difficult... but you know we have a lot of passion to do and we are very motivated so competition is actually not a bad thing but a good thing. (Me: what’s the hiring process like?) We want people who have a little bit of knowledge obviously, a lot of passion, and they have to be able to be team players. If they’re not team players it doesn’t work. By yourself you don’t do much. 

Classical French cooking and health-consciousness don’t necessarily go together? How do you (if you do) reconcile the two? I may disagree on that. When people think of French cuisine they’re talking about Parisian cuisine. And Paris is cream, and it’s butter, and it’s very classic, I mean today those things are strange but not so long ago Parisian cuisine was very rich. But if you eat in the South of France for example, or the Basque region or even the French Riviera you don’t talk about butter and cream you talk about olive oil, garlic, herbs, spices... like the Italians do or the Spanish do, so French cooking has a lot of variety. But it is true that a lot of people made the effort to travel to Paris then... that’s what they know.

What’s your opinion on molecular gastronomy? Well I think mg was an interesting, definitely a revolution in cuisine. The last time that we saw a movement becoming so powerful and inspiring was nouvelle cuisine. NC was liberating in the seventies from exactly what you were thinking about French cooking. Heavy, and rich, and the sauce masking the flavours and so on. NC was about the ingredients and so on and created a new kind of cuisine that was served in a plate not in a platter served by the waiter and so on but then nc became a caricature of itself and you ended up with a piece of chicken with a kiwi on top and nc died on its own however the heritage was transmitted to a more classic way of cooking is the benefit of nc. And mg is the same thing. Molecular has used techniques which we didn’t know before and using new technology, new ingredients, people believe it is very chemical because of the name but very often it is tapioca. So molecular cuisine has been inspiring, it has been fun, but it’s not my kind of cooking. We use some of the techniques, we implement it into our cooking, but we’re definitely not molecular. And today nobody wants to do molecular for molecular. It goes back to the quality of the ingredients and so on.

I’m curious how you got involved with the City Harvest? Well because I felt that we were very lucky, myself, including my team and especially the clients that eat here. And then we are in a city where there is a lot of contrast between the rich and the poor and I think it’s unacceptable to have people that are not homeless, but have jobs and families, not being able to provide food for the family. And we cannot accept hunger in one of the richest cities in the world. Therefore to me it was a natural relationship right away.

I read also that you collect watches like the Dalai Lama, whose another one of my heroes (laughs), who you also met. What was that like? Well, I tell you what, very emotional. Definitely, and very powerful of an experience. Not only I met with him but last time we closed the restaurant for him and we did a fundraising for him. So it was very powerful. And then I had the luck to have a private audience with him so that was very powerful as well. I am very lucky. (Me: when did you become a Buddhist, if I can ask?) It has been a progression. I started to have some interest 20 years ago, actually when I started to follow his teachings 15 years ago, and you know it grows in you and today I probably study more than ever. (Me: do you often go to Asia?) No I don’t go often but when he comes to New York, which he does every year, during the year I’ll learn from his books and tapes and DVD’s and so on. Although I went to Dharamsala, in India where he lives, a few years ago but I didn’t have the opportunity to have a teaching. In July he is coming to Washington, DC for 11 days for a very important teaching and I’m going to join him at one point.  

What do you think of plane food and how would you improve plane food, if you could? (Laughs) Yeah. Well it’s two things. When you fly domestic, and I’m talking about First Class because that’s usually what I fly, it’s really bad. But when you fly, for instance, to Asia on one of those long flights, food surprised me; it’s pretty good. So it’s possible to do good food on an airplane, yes, it’s just a matter of spending the money for it. The right ingredients, the right equipment, and especially the training of the steward on board because you don’t have a chef. But I was in Cambodia, and I was in Vietnam, and I flew Asiana (Airlines) when I left and I came back on Cathay Pacific and CP was outstanding. The food was like “wow.” (I tell him about my meal enRoute to Japan). On Japan Airlines I couple of years ago the food was completely “wow” so it’s doable definitely it’s a matter of like, look, if you’re going to spend like 19 hours or 15 hours on a flight paying thousands of dollars I think the airline can invest in 30 to 40 dollars (per person) for the food. If it’s a short flight and the ticket is fairly cheap then the airline doesn’t want to invest that much money in the food. (Me: but it makes all the difference.) Big time!