How to focus on simple cooking, according to a professional chef
SalonMuch has been written about the radical changes in the development of cuisine and gastronomy over the last 35 years, particularly on the discussion about the "virtues" of molecular gastronomy or modernist cuisine. The best way to describe this style of cooking is an effort to deconstruct classic and modern French cuisine, utilizing the principles of Spanish regional cuisine along with techniques and ingredients from the industrial food processing industry, which incidentally brings up the legitimacy and safety of these techniques. I'm revisiting one of the most iconic cookbooks of the 1970s: "Simple French Food" by Richard Olney; the preface of this book should be required reading by any serious cook or gastronome, professional or amateur. I always tell my students at the Institute of Culinary Education that, to become a good cook, one needs to master and completely understand all of the 12 to 15 basic cooking methods, the relationship between the ingredients in a preparation, why the ingredients have a particular sequence during the method of preparation and their ratio to each other. An equally important idea or corollary to this would be that a good cook cannot hide behind poor or mediocre knife skills — but that's a discussion for another point in time.
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