‘wichcraft: Craft a Sandwich into a Meal–And a Meal into a Sandwich

Think Like a Chef
Cookbooks by chefs can be daunting. They’re apt to include tricky restaurant recipes, or, alternately, watered-down “translations.” Tom Colicchio, chef at Manhattan’s top-rated Gramercy Tavern, has a better way. Think like a chef, he advises, and you tap into food preparation creativity–the ability to forgo recipes, when you wish, for spontaneous kitchen invention. In a series of innovative chapters that explore cooking fundamentals, culinary themes and variations, and “plug-in” component preparations, Colicchio provides a cooking “anatomy” for gaining kitchen mastery. The book’s 100-plus recipes are offered not as ends in themselves (though they stand as delicious examples of Colicchio’s simple yet sophisticated style), but as illustrative keys to the culinary processes.
How does it work? Beginning with a chapter that reviews basic cooking techniques, and includes exemplary stock- and sauce-making formulas, the book then presents a series of “studies,” building-block recipes like Roasted Tomatoes, followed by simple-to-sophisticated variations, such as Roasted-Tomato Risotto. A chapter called “Trilogies” explores clusters of three-ingredient recipes–duck, root vegetables, and apples is one ingredient grouping–that show how various techniques, applied to the same ingredients, yield various exciting dishes. “Component Cooking,” which focuses on vegetables (Colicchio’s major source of inspiration), provides recipes like Corn and Potato Pancakes to be used for assembling a “plate.” Concluding the book is “Favorites,” a selection of Colicchio’s specialties that range from My Favorite Chicken Soup to Poached Foie Gras, a taste bonus that also stimulates the cooking imagination. Illustrated with more than 100 color photos, and including a wide range of tips, Think Like a Chef succeeds at helping readers see through a chef’s eyes–and in so doing to visualize cooking with fresh insight. –Arthur Boehm –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Craft of Cooking: Notes and Recipes from a Restaurant Kitchen
Curing duck breasts and hanging them like hams in your refrigerator for three weeks may not be your particular pail of blueberries. Or brining a whole, 30-pound piglet as a precursor for making porchetta. But how about grilling a hangar steak and slathering it with a bordelaise sauce? Mind you, this is a sauce that calls for a bottle of dry red wine and three quarts of veal stock as well as the requisite vegetables. But that’s the point here: the best imaginable ingredients and a lot of focused work leading to a sublimely simple outcome. Simple in this case being an ultimate grilled steak experience. The kind of experience dished up at Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Craft. Craft of Cooking is Colicchio’s way of making that same experience available in your own home.
The author of Think Like a Chef is betting that if he shows you what he does in a commercial kitchen, it will have an impact on your home cooking. Because what he does in his kitchen is what he likes to eat at home. It’s not about speed, and it’s not about convenience. It’s about making food taste great without fanfare or pretension. The book breaks out in major ingredient sections, meat, fish, vegetables, and the like. Subsections in meat, for example, include charcuterie, roasting and grilling, and braising. Some of the recipes, like the one for baby lamb, are simply too big for the home kitchen. But Colicchio wants you to see what he’s up to. He wants you to think about it. There are long asides about various products–the hangar steak, mesclun, beurre fondue–called ingredient portraits. And there are notes that detail how all the elements of a restaurant from prep to wine service fit together.
For anyone who simply loves to read delicious recipes, this is an elegant book. For those home cooks with some experience–skilled amateurs–Craft of Cooking is a challenge as well as a portal to a whole new realm of fine cuisine.

Quickfire:
A challenge from TV Guide to recreate a classic TV dinner. TV Guide picked 7 iconic shows to inspire the chefs. Knifes are drawn and the shows are The Sopranos, Gilligan’s Island, The Flintstones, Sesame Street, Mash, Seinfeld and Cheers.
Bottom: Jennifer, Robin
Top: Kevin, Bryan
Win goes to Kevin who gets a version of his dish featured in the Top Chef Schwan’s frozen food home service.

Elimination:
The chefs get to take over Tom Colicchio’s “Craft Steak” restaurant. The chefs will be serving 4 judges and 7 other guests. The special guest is Natalie Portman who surprises all the chefs by telling them she’s a vegetarian. Tough challenge when you’re in a steak house. So the chefs get to cook their dishes in a superb steakhouse, but they don’t get to use meat. They all run back to the coolers and start to rethink their menus… and cooking time begins.
Top three: Kevin, Michael & Eli, with the win going to Kevin. But Michael wasn’t too happy about it.

Bottom three: Mike, Robin and Jennifer and Mike’s sent packing.

The quickfire challange is to create an “out of this world” dish featuring… you guessed it, potatoes. All of the potatoes themed dished looked fairly good. The only tension during the challenge was when Preeti mistakenly took off some boiling water she thought was hers, but was actually Ashley’s. Ashley remained remarkably calm even though she only had minutes left and no boiling water to finish her gnocchi dish.   Jennifer ended up winning the guickfire with her steamed mussels, Yukon gold and blue potatoes with lemonrass potato sauce.

After the quickfire the chefs are introduced to Colonel Dave Belot, the 99th Air Base Wing commander from Nellis Air Force Base. The challenge is to prepare a meal for 300 servicemen and women. The catch is the chefs have no idea what they’ll be working with until the next day when they arrive on base and visit the kitchen. When the chefs arrive, they’re a little stunned that most of what they have to work with is canned and dried foods. Not much equipment either with no ranges in site.  The chefs pair up with Jennifer taking over as exec. chef. She does a good job in my opinion, keeping things on track, organized and well thought out. She did get a little pushy to Hector asking him to basically shut up and work. A little unneccesary in my opnion.  Everything goes smoothly during the meal service with all 300 of the servicemen/women and thier families really enjoying the meal.  It looked like all the dishes came out really good. The one thing that stuck out to me was the pasta salad made by Preeti and Laurine. While it looked good… I was thinking “way to simple for Top Chef”. I turned out to be right.

During judges table, Padman pulled out Mike I., Michael V., Eli and Kevin as the top chefs. This is where it got interesting. While asking Mike and Michael about thier dish, Mike came right out and said he had nothing to do with Micahel’s side of the dish (braised pork belly)… he only did the work on his shrimp salad. Big mistake Mike. I could tell watching Colicchio’s expression (which tells all), that he wasn’t thinking to highly of Mike at the moment. Michael V, was declared the winner. Then the fun started. Padma tells them to send back Preeti, Laurine and then looks at Mike and says you’ll need to come back too.  Oh yeah, I thought Mike’s head was going to explode.

The judges question each of them, with the best Colicchio expressions coming when he asked Preeti about her dish. She said it was good and Tom couldn’t believe what he was hearing. You could almost read his mind, that he thought she had to go.  Mike was really ticked off that he was called back, and even admitted so. But he promised to do better and step it up.  The judges ended up sending Preeti packing since she defended a terrible dish and she honestly thought it was good.

The first show of the season jumped right in and gave a good feel of what the chefs are about. The first to stand out is the loud mouthed Michael Isabella. Wow, here’s some big ego. He should be great for stirring up some confrontations. I don’t think he’ll make it to the end though, just because of his attitude. The ones who I think have a good chance of going the distance are the brothers, Michael and Bryan, along with Jennifer and Kevin.

A few quick comments… Preeti, you knew you were coming on Top Chef and you didn’t think you would have to  shuck a  clam… really! That’s just plain sad. I could tell where that quickfire was going as soon as it started.

Jennifer… seitan on your first dish. Not a good good choice. It would have possibly worked later in the season, but you should have played it a little more common and safe to start with. In Tom Colicchio’s blog he said it wasn’t the seitan that did her in; it was just the dish was generally poorly done.  Either way, I think it was a bad choice to start with.

So bye-bye Jennifer– it’s never fun being the first to go.