Simply conceptual
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
Concepts, not recipes. That's what Suzette Gresham believes cooks need — whether trained chefs or folks preparing food at home.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
Gresham, chef-partner at Acquerello, one of San Francisco's most awarded and lauded restaurants, told culinary students at Kapi'olani Community College last week that she wouldn't care if the recipes she shared with them that day blew away in the wind right after the two-hour demonstration.
Suzette Gresham, right, demonstrates techniques involved in preparing a chicken-roll dinner, below, at Kapi'olani Community College.
"You can always find recipes. Concepts stay with you," she said.
Concepts such as how to properly marry the ingredients of a delicate custard so that it doesn't curdle, how to rescue a "broken" sauce, how to cut a boned chicken breast so that it cooks evenly.
These are the hard-earned how-tos that often come from someone else's trial by error, she explained.
Gresham, a community college culinary graduate herself (in Redwood City, Calif.) speaks at a machine-gun pace and offers up her ideas, recipes, tips and career advice freely. "I tell all," she says with a laugh. Internships at her restaurant are sought after; she demands a lot, she admits — three months of often split shifts, time spent in the meat shop and bakery as well as on the line, homework in the form of specific cooking assignments. But for students in whom she sees a passion that matches hers, she's willing to extend herself.
Gresham was in Hawai'i for the second time this year (the first was for an appearance at the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival). She prepared centerpiece dishes for two Honolulu Wine Festival events benefiting the Hawaii Lupus Foundation over the Sept. 17-18 weekend, but was still up to join students at 6 a.m. the next Monday. She taught the students two dishes — a cheese custard right off the Acquerello menu and a stuffed and poached chicken breast that illustrates a technique she uses often with various meats, poultry and fish.
Each dish involves several subordinate recipes, all themselves useful in a variety of contexts.
So, for example, a fresh-made, emerald-colored spinach and zucchini sauce can be served warm with the cheese custard but also can be made with water instead of stock, thinned with fruity olive oil and a splash of vinegar, and used to dress a salad.
The technique for the filled chicken breast — split, stuffed, wrapped in poached romaine and steamed in casings made of plastic wrap — can be replicated with duck, veal, pork, even fish.
Her house vinaigrette is a lemon and garlic concoction made in quantity and a standard in the kitchen, used to dress salads, or drizzled over fish or prepared vegetables.
The cheese custard is a seasonal specialty that can be served with asparagus and pea sprouts in spring, zucchini and spinach in summer, celery root in winter or a red pepper puree in fall.
Fifteen-year-old Acquerello is an Italian restaurant, and Gresham's cooking style is steeped in the techniques and foods of Italy. She uses the Italian terms for techniques — bagno maria instead of baine marie or water bath, bechamella instead of bechemel or white sauce. She packs her workshops with information about Italian ingredients. Pecorino, for example, means "sheep's milk" and many types of cheese can be made from sheep's milk: pecorino romano, pecorino sarda, pecorino de la montagna.
"Italians have a great love of vegetables and a great respect for them," she told the students as she prepared a quick saute of paper-thin triangles of carrot — just melted butter, a little sugar, salt and pepper and lemon juice to taste, sauteed until the carrots are limp and well-glazed. She said her Italian friends think nothing of serving a particular seasonal vegetable in several courses during a meal if that particular vegetable is at its peak at the moment.
For this demonstration, she prepared a nothing-to-it light and fresh zucchini salad that will change your mind about this much-maligned and often boring vegetable. All she did was wash and dry a medium-size zucchini, shave it lengthwise through a mandoline with the small julienne setting, then toss the thin strips of crisp zucchini with a little chopped flat-leaf parsley, some kosher salt and white pepper and a few splashes of her lemon vinaigrette (recipe inside this section). This crisp, tangy salad was served as a relish atop the cheese custard but could be a side dish for grilled meat or fish. Just do not prepare it until right before serving because the zucchini tends to draw up salt and moisture and get watery.
And speaking of kosher salt, Gresham has strong feelings about this ingredient. She prefers it because not only is it made to exacting standards for a cleaner and less salty flavor, but it is flaked instead of made into granules, so that it dissolves very readily.
For the Kapi'olani Community College demo, Gresham talked and demonstrated techniques while students did the actual cooking. Every few minutes, she would break off and taste the dishes they were preparing. "Use your senses," she urged.
That means not only the sense of taste but also watching carefully as you slice through the width of a chicken breast, to be sure your cut is straight; and using your nose to see if something is caramelizing properly or starting to burn.
Finally, she advised: Eat. "Build your palate. You know how to build your palate? You eat. You cook and you taste. You go out to eat and you taste. If you're cooking and not tasting, something is terribly wrong."
