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Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks.

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Today we're going to talk about veggies.

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Veggies.

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You like your veggies?

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I love my veggies, yeah.

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Actually, there is not a single ingredient that I don't like, but I would say that there

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are ingredients that I don't like if they're not cooked properly.

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And vegetables is a very good example.

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Like gray, overcooked green beans, gray beans, is something nobody likes.

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Oh yeah, those like typical canteen style beans that have been sitting in their water for

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five hours.

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Delicious.

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And it's so easy to make nice ones and quick ones, you know?

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Yeah, definitely.

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I think vegetables are super interesting and you know, especially in modern gastronomy,

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they've like more and more taken a center role.

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I mean, this whole kind of like focus has shifted so much from proteins and luxury ingredients.

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Also the definition of what a luxury ingredient is, has completely changed.

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It used to be foie gras and truffles and caviar.

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And I mean, that's still there, but being able to have access to pure, well-grown seasonal

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food is a new luxury in itself.

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And vegetables are interesting because when you compare it to like meat and fish, you

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have such a huge variety of, well, first of all, of varieties of colors and textures.

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And of course there's like many ways that you can prepare a steak, but with a radish,

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for example, I think like you have even more.

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Just adding to that, because I was thinking while you were talking, this is what was going

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on in my mind.

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I usually like cooking with vegetables, but always with some kind of animal touch to it.

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For example, we talked about this gargay you from Michelle Bra where he tunes it up with

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ham, with country ham.

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That's something I really like.

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And you find this also like in Chinese cooking where you have like this big walks of vegetables

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and they have like some stripes of pork or chicken just to add flavor to it.

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And those things like pork and chicken to vegetables is something like I really, really

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like.

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But then again, I worked in vegan restaurants.

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I think those ones were not as technical as let's say Noma or 11 Madison Park.

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From 11 Madison Park, I haven't heard super nice things like now in this vegan phase that

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they're in right now.

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I've heard like people saying, yeah, it was nice and it was everything cool and that's

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it.

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But from Noma, I've heard people, they had their best meal in their lives on the vegetable

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season.

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I can't believe that because I think I was talking about adding meat components or animal

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components, but this is probably for the umami component.

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And these guys from Noma have figured out how to find that through vegetables, through

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fermentation processes and this condiments and funky sauces and stuff that they do in

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their lab.

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So I think that that's also like something super interesting and like a more modern approach

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to vegan cooking.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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I totally agree.

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And also just focusing on the product itself, you know, even if you just talk about seasonal

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vegetables, right?

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I thought this was super interesting how Dan Barber, who's got Blue Hill Stone Barns in

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the US where he's got a huge farm where he grows all his produce.

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And he was talking about why it is that the seasonal and like well-grown produce, you

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know, without pesticides, without anything is so good.

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And like from a chef's point of view, I thought it was super interesting because he was like,

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imagine you grow something in organic soil with a lot of nutrients and you harvest it

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at the peak of its ripeness.

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It's super fresh, it's unprocessed and it's full of nutrients, right?

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It's really, really nutritious.

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It's full of minerals and stuff.

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And he was talking about how the nutrition aspect of a product immediately affects the

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deliciousness aspect of it also.

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It's equivalent.

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It's like the more nutritious the vegetable is, the better it tastes straight away.

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And then when you just focus on that and you think to yourself as a chef, it's sort of

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like, well, if I'm a produce-driven chef, just like if you're in a steakhouse, you say,

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okay, I want to make really good steak.

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What do I focus on?

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I focus on purchasing and aging the best quality of meat that I can have, right?

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And if you do the same thing with vegetables and then move throughout the season and you

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try to time the time where you harvest things that you will be serving, you've done 80%

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of the work because by itself, even if it's just a salad, it's going to be three times,

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four times as delicious as a salad out of season.

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Absolutely.

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I have this memory when I was visiting Italy in Toscana.

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I was living in Berlin at the time.

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And I have to say like in Berlin, it's very poor what you get.

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Like if you don't go to specialty stores, what you get in standard supermarkets, you

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get the worst of the worst of the worst tomatoes and vegetables from all over Europe.

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So I was in Toscana and I remember just biting whatever kind of fruit in the market and it

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was like music to my brain just to all the complexities that this high quality produce

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have in front of something that is just massively grown like with cheap metals and that kind

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of stuff.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Especially when you go to places like that, like Italy, especially if you're like in the

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rural areas, also a huge difference is that the variety of vegetables that you have because

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like everybody should know that, you know, for example, tomatoes, we all know that there's

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loads of different sizes of tomatoes and tomatoes, not just a tomato, there's loads of varieties

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then that are, you know, different, not different like an apple in a pear would be, but different

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like how different types of apples are.

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Some are sweet, some are sour, et cetera.

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And the produce, especially the vegetables that we're used to, there are varieties that

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have been selected over the like last 100 to 200 years.

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What have they been selected for?

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They've been selected for easy to grow in large quantities, right?

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And there's a huge amount of vegetables that are harder to grow, especially in large quantities

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without any additional help like pesticides, et cetera, but they're really delicious.

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So because of this need of like this industrialization and the need to feed loads of people, these

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varieties have gotten more and more lost, right?

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And so nowadays when chefs say that they like they grow their own vegetables, especially

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when they grow and they choose and revive heirloom varieties, that's because they choose

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these varieties because of their deliciousness and their nutrition.

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And that's a huge thing.

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It's kind of like the tomatoes that we can buy in a supermarket.

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They are bred for being easy to grow and easy to harvest, resistant to pesticides in large

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quantities, not for their flavor.

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So then when you get a variety that's actually, you know, usually grown for its flavor, it's

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a huge revelation because you're like, wow, I've never tasted the true flavor of like

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a tomato.

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Yeah, I actually tried some vegetables from Dunbarber when I was eating at Cosme in New

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York.

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And I saw this yellow beets out of his garden and it was really, really nice.

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Also I really recommend this book.

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Have you read it?

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The Third Plate?

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Yeah.

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That's a super cool book.

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It's crazy.

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Yeah, absolutely crazy.

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Did we mention that in the cookbook episode?

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I don't think so.

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It's not a cookbook.

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It's like a food book more than that.

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Other chefs that come to mind are, well, Thomas Keller has this culinary garden, but that's

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like a super, I would say, structure square garden as opposed to, for instance, Christian

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Puglisi.

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He has like this more like wilder approach to growing vegetables.

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And Dunbarber, that's more like a, I would say, old methods, but yet industrial scale

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of the farm that he has.

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Yeah, definitely.

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I mean, it's huge, you know, and he's got loads of staff and he's got the possibility

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to do all these things.

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He's got the land and the money to support it, but he does a lot of work that's just

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really good.

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Like what we're talking about, you know, these old varieties.

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And then also, you know, he does his row seven seed company where he basically breeds vegetables,

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which sounds like a very artificial approach, but it's actually not been done for centuries,

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where he takes, for example, a pea variety.

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Like I think it was, I read about a snow pea variety that he had where he was like, man,

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this variety of pea is insanely delicious.

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It's so, so, so tasty, but it's really fragile, especially for pests and all that sort of

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stuff.

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It's really hard to grow.

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So he was working with a grower where they crossed this variety of pea with a very resilient

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pea and made basically a new variety that still has the deliciousness aspects, but it's

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also more resilient and easier to grow.

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For me, that's super revolutionary because it enables people to like, you don't have

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this argument anymore, sort of like, well, it doesn't make sense to grow this even though

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it's tasty because it's not feasible.

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The amount of work that you put in doesn't valid the results, which is also from a sustainability

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point of view is very important because the amount of work that it takes to plow a field,

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to sow the seeds, et cetera.

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If then at the end of the day, after six months, you only have a basket full of peas, you've

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wasted a lot of energy.

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So he bypasses that process and I think that's super inspiring.

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Do you know why carrots are orange?

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Yeah, I have heard about this before, but go ahead.

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Original carrots were purple and that's why they call it like old carrots, at least in

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German, that's the way they're called.

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I think in Europe, they were mostly white and these were the Dutch.

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There was this Dutch king or queen that for some reason wanted to develop these orange

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carrots more like a patriot thing because orange is the color of Holland.

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And people, like the consumers, started liking that better than any other colors and this

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became a standard.

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But I mean, worldwide, you don't see other colors, not even in Asia, which is super crazy.

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Yeah, that's super crazy.

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And it's super interesting to think that a lot of these things that we take for granted,

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so we say a carrot is orange, we just think, yeah, that's the way it is, but it's not always

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been like that.

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And it was human developed.

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Yeah, totally.

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And it's also a lot of things that it's not been that long that things have been like

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this, like the way that we do agriculture.

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This was a few centuries ago, not like thousands of years ago.

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Exactly, exactly.

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And that's also super crazy.

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Like mentioning Dan Barber's book, The Third Plate, he talks about this a lot.

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Yes, for me, it was eye opening because just like with the carrots, I thought that a lot

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of things were always like this, you know, the way that most of the world does agriculture,

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which is not necessarily super sustainable.

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Like for example, with corn, right?

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Corn takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of nutrients out of the ground.

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And if you don't treat the ground between planting corn, it'll get completely drained.

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And one of the things that I found super fascinating is that he was talking about, well, the way

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that we harvest corn, which is like mowing down the entire field, then plowing it and

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then regrowing, that's not how it used to be.

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It used to be that the plants were twice the size, especially the roots were twice as long.

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Yeah, there are pictures of this.

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And used to pick the corn and leave the plant.

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And in between the plants, ideally, you would have a symbiosis of different weeds and other

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plants that then give the ground what it needs.

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So you basically have like a food forest, right?

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It's this whole thing of the three sisters, which gets mentioned in permaculture a lot,

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you know, where you have a field of corn, pumpkin, and beans, you know?

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And things just get plucked and harvested, but the plants themselves, they are left to

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grow because they are in a symbiotic environment where they take things, but they also give

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something into the ground, which then another plant needs and it's a closed circle.

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Can you think of, apart from gargayou, which we already talked about, like a really representative

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vegetable dish that you could think of?

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Yes.

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Let me think, a really representative vegetable dish.

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Something from Alan Passard, maybe?

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Yeah, I mean, Alan Passard has a few, but then again, Alan Passard is, in my opinion, less,

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he doesn't concentrate as much of sort of like representing the area as such or like

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the French cooking culture, you know, but he's fully just focused on the product, you

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know?

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Like he'll send out dishes that are just raw turnips sliced and dressed, you know, or raw

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tomatoes as a carpaccio, you know?

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I mean, if you can afford that, if you have a product that good that you can do that,

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why would you do anything to it, right?

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Well, that's the thing, you know, and like that's where all his like energy goes into,

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I think, sort of like then also he's got a very, very fine way of cooking, you know,

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and understanding.

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But, I mean, he's like a super interesting how Alan Passard grows vegetables because

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he's got two different gardens on two different spots in France with two different types of

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soil.

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And so he's so obsessed with the intricacies of the quality of the produce that he will

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grow a turnip in one garden and another turnip in the other garden and then compare the two.

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Same type of turnip, same time of planting, but he just only wants to see the difference

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between what the soil does.

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If it's a sandy soil or like a loamy soil, you know, loam soil is when there's a lot

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of organic matter or clay soil, you know, like it makes a huge difference also because

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of the minerals that the vegetable sucks up, right?

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It's crazy, you know?

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That's super interesting getting those two different vegetables on a dish has to be super

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interesting to compare the difference.

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I really like doing that.

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Like when you get like, I don't know, say a pasta with four different types of parmigiano,

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so you can really tell the difference from one to the other, like this kind of tasting

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experience and a restaurant experience and comparing, super cool.

235
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Absolutely.

236
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I had a crazy experience when I was in Japan.

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My head chef at the time, he took me out for dinner one time and we went to this chicken

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restaurant.

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They only do chicken in different types.

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It wasn't a yakitori restaurant or anything like that, but it was mainly chicken.

241
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And it's the first time that I ate chicken sashimi, right?

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Raw chicken.

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I've heard a lot about that from people in Japan that it's really impressive and it breaks

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your brain once you trade it.

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Yeah, I think so because for us culturally, it's completely counterintuitive.

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But what was so interesting about that experience was that they served a plate with three different

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kinds of chicken, right?

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They served on one side, one little bit of breast, raw, sliced, and a little bit of thigh,

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raw.

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And the same thing again, the same thing again.

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And they said, well, these are three different types of chicken with different fat contents,

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with different feeds, et cetera.

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And you ate it in the most pure form, raw.

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And the difference between the chicken meat was crazy, like it was huge.

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For me as a chef, it was super interesting because for you, chicken is chicken, especially

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you never eat it raw.

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And you don't necessarily think of the difference between different birds and different breeds

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and different feeds.

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And it makes you think of the actual product in depth in a much more detailed way.

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Yeah, we are what the things that we eat, eat.

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Let's say a vegetable is a result of the biodiversity that lives in that ground where it grows.

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It's the flavors that get into the actual food.

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I had like also this crazy gastronomic experience once.

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This was a student's final project where I was invited.

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In one of the courses, they bring a glass with a small spray and they spray the glass

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inside.

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So the idea was just to get the aroma.

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And you would get the aroma from this glass.

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And this smelled like poppourri, you know, like this dry flowers that you see in grandmother's

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bathrooms.

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It smelled like that.

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And it was like everybody said, I agree.

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So they asked like, what is it?

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And everybody agreed.

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Yeah, this is like dry flowers, flowers, whatever.

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So what they did is they distilled a honeycomb.

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Oh, wow.

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So and this is built so that there was like this flower aroma because this is built out

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of flowers, right?

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They kind of extracted just that aroma.

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And so I thought that was super interesting.

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That's really interesting.

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00:16:50,080 --> 00:16:55,000
It reminds me of a dinner that I had in London at one time, which was a pop up from, uh,

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Leandro Carrera, Portuguese guy, very cool chef in London.

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And he had a pop up.

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I remember they had this dish that was all around peas, right?

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And as a beverage pairing, they, what they had done is they had distilled, I think it

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was the green pea shells, but just the raw ones into like, I don't know how they did

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it.

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They distilled it into like a clear liquid and they added a little bit of that into the

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white wine that you were drinking with the peas.

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So this white wine had this like fresh, if anybody's ever like bitten into a pea straight

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from the like bush, it's a super fresh, fragrant pea flavor.

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And it was just very, very lightly in the wine, which usually if you think about adding

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something to wine for wine pairing, a lot of some of these would be like, oh my God,

296
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no.

297
00:17:38,680 --> 00:17:39,680
You know?

298
00:17:39,680 --> 00:17:40,680
Wow, that sounds really nice.

299
00:17:40,680 --> 00:17:41,680
Yeah.

300
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It was super perfect.

301
00:17:42,680 --> 00:17:46,400
And it like really kind of like brought you into this, like, uh, this thing.

302
00:17:46,400 --> 00:17:49,280
That's what I mean with like the vegetables and like these raw ingredients.

303
00:17:49,280 --> 00:17:53,440
They're so versatile, you know, because a pea or raw pea completely different to a cooked

304
00:17:53,440 --> 00:17:54,440
pea, you know?

305
00:17:54,440 --> 00:17:55,440
Yeah.

306
00:17:55,440 --> 00:18:01,840
Peas are like these things, uh, I'm okay using frozen ones when to make like sauces or this

307
00:18:01,840 --> 00:18:02,880
kind of thing.

308
00:18:02,880 --> 00:18:03,880
That's also another thing.

309
00:18:03,880 --> 00:18:08,080
There are high quality preserved vegetables and high quality frozen vegetables.

310
00:18:08,080 --> 00:18:09,080
Yeah.

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00:18:09,080 --> 00:18:13,120
It's not like everything has to be like fresh is the only way.

312
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Same.

313
00:18:14,120 --> 00:18:16,240
There are also high quality hydroponics.

314
00:18:16,240 --> 00:18:19,880
So it's not that everything has to grow on the soil to be fine.

315
00:18:19,880 --> 00:18:20,880
Absolutely.

316
00:18:20,880 --> 00:18:23,480
It's just different production methods.

317
00:18:23,480 --> 00:18:24,480
That's it.

318
00:18:24,480 --> 00:18:25,480
Yeah.

319
00:18:25,480 --> 00:18:28,640
But peas are also a good example for talking about what luxury is, you know, because in

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00:18:28,640 --> 00:18:31,600
Spain, you know, we have this product called Gizantes Lagrimas.

321
00:18:31,600 --> 00:18:32,600
Yeah.

322
00:18:32,600 --> 00:18:35,640
Like micro peas or tear peas literally.

323
00:18:35,640 --> 00:18:36,640
Yeah.

324
00:18:36,640 --> 00:18:39,200
Teardrop, teardrop peas, I think they're called.

325
00:18:39,200 --> 00:18:44,120
And you know, they're very, very seasonal product that is really will teardrop shaped peas and

326
00:18:44,120 --> 00:18:45,720
they're amazing.

327
00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:47,880
Right now they're in season.

328
00:18:47,880 --> 00:18:51,040
You will find them in restaurants here in San Sebastian right now.

329
00:18:51,040 --> 00:18:52,040
Yeah.

330
00:18:52,040 --> 00:18:53,040
They're amazing.

331
00:18:53,040 --> 00:18:54,040
You know, they're super sweet.

332
00:18:54,040 --> 00:18:55,040
They're like little pea caviar.

333
00:18:55,040 --> 00:18:56,720
You know, they're popping fresh.

334
00:18:56,720 --> 00:19:00,760
You know, you always get them like raw or just very, very lightly cooked.

335
00:19:00,760 --> 00:19:06,680
Everybody's looking forward to this, you know, and they are very expensive also because for

336
00:19:06,680 --> 00:19:08,240
you need a lot of quantity.

337
00:19:08,240 --> 00:19:12,160
Like they're very small, so you need quite a lot of quantity and it takes a lot of work

338
00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:16,240
to shell them, you know, until you have a spoonful of these like tiny peas.

339
00:19:16,240 --> 00:19:19,960
But they're a huge, for me, they're a huge luxury product, you know, for me on the same

340
00:19:19,960 --> 00:19:23,560
level as, you know, let's say caviar or whatever, you know, it's like.

341
00:19:23,560 --> 00:19:26,160
Yeah, they're called vegetable caviar, I think.

342
00:19:26,160 --> 00:19:27,160
Yeah.

343
00:19:27,160 --> 00:19:28,160
Yeah, absolutely.

344
00:19:28,160 --> 00:19:33,400
Asparagus also, you know, I mean, like even here and like in Germany, everybody's looking

345
00:19:33,400 --> 00:19:37,000
forward to the white asparagus season.

346
00:19:37,000 --> 00:19:42,400
And when it's there, you know, like when we get into the season, that's like you make a

347
00:19:42,400 --> 00:19:43,400
celebration out of it.

348
00:19:43,400 --> 00:19:44,400
It's like a whole thing.

349
00:19:44,400 --> 00:19:45,640
It's like, oh, today we'll eat white asparagus.

350
00:19:45,640 --> 00:19:46,960
And it's like a whole ritual.

351
00:19:46,960 --> 00:19:51,720
You poach it, you make the potatoes, you make the hollandaise or whatever you eat it with.

352
00:19:51,720 --> 00:19:56,480
Not even for like culinarily interested people, but even just like people who don't have a

353
00:19:56,480 --> 00:19:58,040
particular interest in it.

354
00:19:58,040 --> 00:20:01,360
When you sit down, you eat asparagus, it's like something special, you know, because

355
00:20:01,360 --> 00:20:03,000
you know, it's going to be over again.

356
00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:04,000
Yeah.

357
00:20:04,000 --> 00:20:07,320
Exactly, exactly, you really have that feeling of the season.

358
00:20:07,320 --> 00:20:08,320
Yeah, yeah.

359
00:20:08,320 --> 00:20:09,320
I guess that's it.

360
00:20:09,320 --> 00:20:11,320
I guess we can finish here.

361
00:20:11,320 --> 00:20:16,760
Yeah, that's good though.

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That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks.

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If you like what we're doing, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss

364
00:20:23,520 --> 00:20:24,520
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You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok as Potluck Food Talks.

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