Ok, so I have a question for you. Do you think my food is creative?
If you said yes, I think you are wrong. I get this “creative” comment all the time.
In a recent class, I served a kale salad that looked something like this: kale, apples,
walnuts, dry cherries, labne mustard dressing. One of the students asked me how I came up
with such a creative combination. I told her that I didn’t come up with this. Then she
asked me where I got the recipe. I told her I didn’t get a recipe. Some version of this
salad is currently on the menu at pretty much every farm-to-table restaurant in America,
so… you know. I just pay attention to what I eat.
After thousands of questions like these, I finally decided that it’s time to explain
the secret to culinary creativity.
I believe that there are 3 layers of cooking skills. The first layer is knowing how to
make ingredients taste good. If you were a singer, this first layer would be singing
on key. If you were a writer, this first layer would be grammar. Without it, everything else
falls apart. In this layer, you are learning all about
controlling the taste with salt and acidity. You are learning about controlling the texture
with knife skills and heat. You are also learning to shop for ingredients like tender steak
and ripe produce.
This is the layer I live in. Other food writers that explore every nook and cranny of this
layer are Samin Nosrat in her fabulous book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and Kenji Lopez Alt
in his equally fabulous the Food Lab. My favorite dish to give to students to help them appreciate
this layer is a roasted chicken breast -- because there is really nothing “interesting”
or “creative” about it. People ask me again and again -- “this is just chicken,
salt, and oil? Really? how could it be this good?” It could be. If you become a salt
and heat master, a chicken breast could be delightful.
What I wish stuck with my students from the kale salad was the level of salt and acidity,
and the fact that I chopped the kale very finely to reduce the chewiness. But I fear
that as soon as I added the apples, dry cherries, walnuts, and labne to this poor salad, that’s
all anyone paid attention to. In that case, you might say why add this stuff at all. Well,
ok, you got me -- it does make the salad more complex. These additional ingredients give
you different aromas and textures. Nuts are crunchy, apples are juicy, dry cherries are
chewy and that makes the salad more fun to eat. And I think what my students are trying
to ask me when they ask about “creativity” is how do you pick these ingredients. Why
add apples and not... I don’t know -- bananas?
This is where the second layer of cooking skills comes in. If in the first layer, we
were concerned with how to cook, in the second layer we are concerned with what to cook.
Just like musicians choose their instruments and modes, cooks choose their ingredients
and their heat sources. In the music world, that’s what makes jazz sound like jazz,
and classical sound like classical. And in the food world, that’s what makes Italian
food taste Italian and Japanese food taste Japanese. The only way to get comfortable
in this layer is to expose yourself to lots and lots of great examples.
I can’t emphasise enough the importance of eating out. We get very mixed messages
about eating out these days. Is it good? Is it bad? You know. It’s what you make of
it. It’s an amazing source of culinary knowledge and inspiration if you can analyse what you
are eating and remember it.
Some people do it subconsciously. I have no control over it. You know that black mirror
episode where you can record your whole life because you have a special chip in your brain.
I kind of have that chip, but only for food. So, when I am thinking about what to put into
a kale salad, I simply think through all the kale salads I’ve ever eaten. It’s like
an instant database of food. Is it nice?
Hmm… When I am cooking it’s awesome. When I am eating out, it can be a little miserable
because everything I put in my mouth gets instantly compared to all the previous versions
of this dish, so it becomes harder and harder to have an interesting meal. At some point,
I gave up on interesting, now I am just happy if I go to a restaurant and it tastes good.
If you were born with the same brain abnormality, you don’t need any help from me. But if
you are the kind of person who remembers a restaurant was good, but can’t remember
what on earth you ate there, then here are some tips on how to develop your food memory.
Don’t try to remember every single ingredient. Do some ingredient processing to abstract
and generalize. Instead of remembering kale, apples, dry cherries, pecans, sumac, labne,
mustard, apple cider vinegar, etc. Try to remember green veggie, fruit, nut combination.
This will give you an abstract type in your mind under which you can file a crazy number
of other dishes. Seriously. For the next month, every time you look at a restaurant menu (even
if you don’t order the dish) see if you can spot the “vegetable, fruit, nut” pattern.
I promise you, it’s everywhere in American farm-to-table restaurants. Of course, other
cuisines have other patterns and the more you travel, the more you get exposed to them.
A big thing for me in this second layer is not ingredient combinations, but the staples
for each cuisine. That’s really what determines its palette (I mean like a color palette the
artist uses). What do they use for acidity? Lemons, Limes, Balsamic Vinegar, Kimchi, Tomatoes,
Pomegranate Molasses? What do they use for salt? Salt, Olives, Capers, Soy Sauce, Parmesan
Cheese, Fish sauce, Pickles? When people ask me what do I cook from my trips to France,
Japan, Spain, and Peru on a regular basis, the answer is nothing really. But those trips
have forever changed the palette of my cooking. You’ll see me use Dijon mustard, miso, black
sesame paste, smoked paprika, lime juice and aji amarillo paste all over the place. I don’t
restrict myself to the palette of any one cuisine. If my bolognese is crying out for
some pomegranate molasses, why say no?
The third layer of cooking skills is something most of us will never touch with a 10 foot
pole. It’s how do you make food that becomes an iconic part of a culture. How do you change
how other people cook and eat. This layer requires doing something actually innovative
and being good enough at PR to get that innovation to go viral. It requires great cooking talent,
business savvy, and just dumb luck. This is where food becomes art and I really have no
advice for you about this layer since I don’t do art. My cooking lives in the first two
layers and it’s a craft, not an art.
So, my one advice to all of you in search of culinary creativity is to eat other people’s
food, think long and hard about it, and then go home and try to reverse engineer it. It’s
just like evolution. You copy that DNA millions of times and sometimes mistakes happen. Some
mistakes are neutral, some mistakes make things worse, and some mistakes make things better.
And the mistake that makes it better is what people call “creativity”.
Oh yeah, if you want to know what’s in my kale salad, the link is below. If you want
a little homework, go mess around with that kale salad and see how you can change it.
Here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.