Meals from the master

• A key ingredient for cooks is improvisation

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Chef Amy Ferguson-Ota's Crisp Five-Spice Chili Duck can readily be translated to the home as a lively dish made with chicken breast. This duck was served at a luncheon at the Fairmont Kea Lani Hotel in Wailea, Maui, last month, with turnip cake and a salad topped with delicate corn shoots. Photos by Rick Eggers •  Special to The Advertiser

At the same cooking demonstration/luncheon on Maui, chef Mark Ellman shared his secrets for a gingered squash soup that can be served as a low-fat entree or become a sophisticated and rich first course. Future Food & Wine Masters To find out about future Food & Wine Masters meals and demonstrations, call (800) 798-4552, or (808) 875-4100.

The printed recipes were pure fiction. The demos were pretend. Lots of stuff went wrong.

And everyone learned a lot: how to layer flavors in a soup, how to differentiate true kaffir lime from regular lime leaves, what a shimeji mushroom looks like, what a corn shoot tastes like, how to properly cook a duck breast (and what to substitute if you can't find them or don't like them).

Guests had a great time, too — especially because the food, when it was prepared "for real" and served at a luncheon following the Fairmont Kea Lani Food & Wine Masters cooking class, was delicious.

The weekend of March 22-23, the first Food & Wine Masters event in several months was the occasion for a reunion on Maui of four of the original Hawai'i Regional Cuisine chefs: Mark Ellman, Amy Ferguson-Ota, Bev Gannon and George Mavrothalassitis.

Being busy with their own restaurants, we don't hear as much as we used to of Ellman and Ferguson-Ota so the March 22 demonstration by the pair was an opportunity to find out what's on their minds — and on their menus.

Genial pony-tailed Ellman founded the Maui Tacos restaurant chain and owns a small, folksy Italian eatery in Lahaina, Penne Pasta Cafe. But many at the demo recalled with pleasure and regret his original Lahaina restaurant, Avalon, where the clams with black bean sauce were the best anywhere and the sole dessert, Caramel Miranda (grilled fruit and mac nut ice cream laced with warm caramel sauce), was a dreamy indulgence. Ellman whipped up a gingered squash shop and showed the audience how to have it their way — as a low-fat, vegetarian dish or as an elegant, rich starter.

Ferguson-Ota is proprietor of Oodles of Noodles in Kona, a restaurant that features noodle dishes from around the world plus East-West fusion creations, and she has a catering company as well. She spends a lot of time behind a desk running her businesses these days — a happy circumstance for her family, because she said she has started cooking at home again because she misses her pan time.

Ferguson-Ota mostly talked about her dish, a multilayered quartet of simple recipes that got its start in a daydream about Peking duck, but is much easier for the home cook to prepare.

In addition to the practical side of things, it was interesting to note that both Ellman and Ferguson-Ota, 10 years down the road from the HRC explosion, spent time reflecting on the place of food in life, on affectation vs. common sense, on diet and health.

Ellman, who said he has thickened up since the early HRC days, but is more heart-fit than he has ever been, good-naturedly dismissed a question about the number of calories in his gingered squash soup. "I have no idea and I don't care," he said.

But he followed up quickly with an explanation. "It's to cook healthy food, not health food — food that's not difficult to make, that uses fresh ingredients." At Avalon, he recalled, the black bean sauce was full of butter, which is why it tasted so good, but he has cut back considerably on fatty meat and dairy foods since then. "I realized people were paying me to feed them, not to kill them."

His soup recipe revealed his current philosophy — offering people choices. If he were making it for the cafe operation at Down to Earth, he said he would prepare the soup using vegetables, flavorings, a little water and wine and he might not even puree it, for a heartier, low-fat, vegetarian main course. If he were making it to be served at Nick's Fishmarket at the Kea Lani, he might saute the ingredients in butter rather than olive oil, puree and strain the mixture for a silky texture, and finish the dish with cream and perhaps even more butter or creme fraiche.

Ferguson-Ota, who said she had been looking forward to the demo like an excited child because she has so little contact with people now, said a key ingredient is attitude. "If you don't have a good attitude, if you're not cooking with love that day, put the knives down, put the food away and go out," she said. When the cook doesn't feel good, the food won't taste good, she said.

Both chefs talked about the importance of tasting frequently while cooking, which they said would seem obvious but is often neglected by home cooks. Taste throughout the process, while there is still time to correct problems with flavor or texture.

Or start over again, if you need to. "The best way to fix burned soup," Ellman said, "is to throw it out."

Ferguson-Ota, a little frazzled by being in front of an audience again, said she spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what had gone wrong with a Chinese-style turnip cake recipe. Later, she dumped sesame oil into a dipping sauce that wasn't supposed to feature that ingredient, then laughed and said, "It's never a failure. It's an education. This is how we learn."

The key is learning from what went wrong; Ferguson-Ota realized her turnip cake didn't work because she used the wrong kind of rice flour. Now she knows.

"Until you learn to taste and know the ingredients you're working with, there's no way you can cook," Ferguson-Ota said. This means developing the ability to predict what a dish needs by tasting it as you go, and understanding the properties of the ingredients so that you know what will happen to them as you work with them.

A key ingredient for cooks is improvisation

Chef Mark Ellman says the purpose of cooking demonstrations is not to teach a recipe. Rather, it's to illustrate the true art of cooking, which is improvisation, and which is composed also of shortcuts and techniques and tips that come only with experience. Some information gleaned from the March 22 demonstration at the Fairmont Kea Lani:

• True kaffir lime leaves are double-segmented, with a smaller leaf attached to a larger. However, plain lime leaves work fine. The leaves are edible; just trim out the center rib and mince.
• Shimeji mushrooms are long-stemmed, fawn-colored mushrooms with a firm, silky texture. They're available packaged at Daiei or Shirokiya and are lovely whole as garnish. They may be used anywhere mushrooms are used but, because they're pricey, are best reserved for finishing or in dishes where they are used sparingly and the texture is retained.
• When you're using dried herbs in a soup or other long-cooked dish, it's interesting to add some of the fresh herb (minced or julienned) to finish the dish, for a depth of flavor.
• To add another flavor layer to a soup, stir in a spoonful of soup base (powdered stock or bouillon) in the last 30 minutes of cooking. Be sure to do this before the final seasoning process as soup bases are often salty and you may not need to add salt afterward.
• When you're cutting a vegetable that is round, cut a slice off one side and rest the vegetable on that flat surface so it won't roll.
• Healthful lecithin can be used to thicken soups and sauces instead of cornstarch or other conventional thickeners.