Q. Basically creating an essence of parsley.
A. Right! One that has body and structure and character. But you have to be careful, because just like you can add too much butter to something, you can add too much xanthan gum, or too much carrageenan. And that throws things off. As a cook, you know that if you add too much flour to a sauce it becomes gummy and pasty, right? So you know how to fix it. We’re just learning how to fix things. We’re learning that hydrocolloids are very powerful, so you have to use just a very small amount. You have to be more precise.
So the blog really helps us catalog our information. We call it our digital notebook. It’s interesting for us because we really put everything out there. We kind of wear our passion on our sleeve.
Q. And your secrets, too—it seems like you give some pretty detailed recipes and notes about what you’re making.
A. We give everything away. Besides what we do on the main part of the website, if you look at the PDFs on the sidebar, those are thousands of pages of notes from us. A new PDF notebook goes up every couple months or so, depending on how prolific we are in our notes. We write about every idea, and we’ve had people say ‘holy cow, how are you guys giving away all this information?’ Eventually we’ll get something out of it. If you don’t give it away, you’re not going to get anything back.
Q. You mentioned when I spoke to you last summer that you were looking to open a restaurant in New York. Are you still?
A. We have been, but not to great success. So currently we’re doing some small, intimate catering gigs, and we’re doing these cooking classes and looking at opportunities. And of course we’re doing the website.
Q. Who are some chefs that inspire you?
A. Anyone who’s really passionate. I certainly have a lot of admiration for what Thomas Keller has done. Wylie [Dufresne] has been a friend of ours for a number of years, and we’ve been pleased with what Grant Achatz has been able to achieve in Chicago. I think Chicago has been good to him; they’re focused on ingredients. I think New York is very much about labeling people and things, and so here you have to define what someone is cooking. You can’t just serve “food;” you can’t just cook with “ingredients”—that would be silly!
And in the same sense New Yorkers, while they like to define everything, couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Do people really want to know the hows and whys of how food is prepared—from the long, slow braise to the use of an artisanal olive oil from the far reaches of wherever? At day’s end, no, they don’t. It takes however long to describe a dish, and then the food’s cold. It doesn’t really matter the steps that were taken to make it; is it tasty or not tasty?
Q. There’s something to be said for good sourcing, though.
A. Sure, but do you have to put it out there? It should just be expected.
Q. But you pay for great ingredients—there’s a lot of expense, time, and labor involved.
A. Very much so, but that’s where you get into attention to detail. And attention to detail swings back to the website—because when you get into writing about the food, and photographing and tasting it, you can really start to fine-tune what you do, if you’re willing to analyze the process.
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