culture@sfbg.com
It’s hard enough to eat well when the economy’s good, when time and commitments and plain old laziness getting in the way. But when there’s hardly enough money in your wallet for Cup O’ Noodle and a Coors Light, cooking gourmet food can seem damn near impossible. But fear not, Bay Area penny-pinchers. With only one chicken, a few additional simple ingredients, and some time, you can make three whole meals for two people.
But how? That’s exactly what I asked three Bay Area star chefs — Alice Waters, Gary Danko, and Traci Des Jardins. I challenged each of these SF heavy-hitters to come up with one mouthwatering, gourmet meal for two people using only one-third of a chicken plus a few low-cost ingredients.
And oh, how they delivered! Alice Waters offered a recipe for chicken breasts, Gary Danko turned in a chicken leg recipe, and Traci Des Jardin thought up a delicious soup, made from the previous the leftover chicken bones of the two previous meals.
Below are their simple, savory recipes. (But first, some advice from Danko: When you’re planning to make a few meals out of a whole chicken, always eat the breast first. The longer the breast is refrigerated, the more it will dry out. The legs, on the other hand, will retain their moisture and flavor even after refrigeration and reheating.)
ALICE WATERS’ CHICKEN BREASTS ESCOFFIER
1 whole large chicken breast, about 3/4 pound
salt and pepper to taste
12 tablespoons clarified unsalted butter
1 cup fine fresh bread crumbs
1/2 box cherry tomatoes
Skin and bone the chicken breast, and cut it in half. Remove the tendons and any fat from the two single breasts. Salt and pepper the breasts and fold the tenderloins to the side of each breast so the meat is evenly thick.
Dip the breasts in a flat dish with 6 tablespoons of the clarified butter to coat both sides. Pat the breasts in the bread crumbs to form a crust. Let the breasts stand for 10 minutes.
Heat 3 tablespoons clarified butter in a heavy cast-iron pan over medium heat. When the butter is hot, put the breasts in the pan, season with salt and pepper, and reduce the heat to medium-low. Sauté gently for 5 minutes, turn, and sauté on the other side for 5 minutes. The crust should be a rich golden brown.
Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons clarified butter in a small saucepan. Put the chicken breast on two warm serving places and pour some of the butter over each chicken breast. Serve with briefly sautéed cherry tomatoes.
GARY DANKO’S BAKED MUSTARD CHICKEN LEGS
2 chicken legs, thigh and drumstick attached (depending on the size of the chicken, you may need two more)
1/2 cup dried breadcrumbs or panko
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
salt and pepper to taste
3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon chopped tarragon, optional
(you may substitute 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs with 1/4 cups chopped nuts of choice)
Trim excess skin from thigh end of chicken. On parchment paper, combine breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley, tarragon, and salt and pepper. Mix well. Using a pastry brush, lightly paint the mustard on chicken legs. Coat legs with the breadcrumb mixture. Place single layer on a sheet pan or in a roasting pan and bake in a 350 degree oven for 45 to 50 minutes until completely cooked.
This dish may be served hot or cold.
TRACI DES JARDINS’ CHICKEN STOCK AND CHICKEN VEGETABLE SOUP
Chicken Stock
leftover chicken bones
1/2 cup each chopped carrot, onion, celery
1 sprig thyme
Pick off and set aside any remaining morsels of meat from the bones, place the bones and skin into a pot, and barely cover with water. Add carrot, celery, onion, thyme, and cook at a simmer for about 3 hours. Keep adding small amounts of water as necessary to keep the level just above the bones. Strain the stock.
(Although most people discard the remainders, Gary Danko remembers that his grandfather "loved to eat the remainders of the stock pot. Being an old Hungarian, he called it ‘a Hungarian picnic.’")
Chicken Vegetable Soup
6 cups chicken stock
1 cup each diced onion, carrot, and celery
2 cups cabbage, roughly chopped
2 cups potato, cubed
2 cups cooked rice or beans
chicken from carcass, shredded and seasoned to taste
1/2 cup pork product, cubed*
Curry, saffron, bay, pimento, or a pinch of Esplette pepper
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Juice of one lemon (add at the very end)
(Use either the chicken pieces that have been picked from the bone, or use a bit of bacon or other cured pork product. Render it or not — your choice, but include it nonetheless. The flavor will keep you coming back for more, and the fat — yes, there will be fat — helps our bodies realize we are really having a great meal.)
Sauté the onion, carrot, and celery in oil for five minutes, or until soft.
Then add spice seasonings and the pork product if you are including pork. Stir and cook for five minutes, then add in the stock and bring to simmer. Let it simmer slowly for 15 minutes, then add the rice, potato, or beans (or all three) and let simmer another 15 minutes. Season to taste. Makes about 6 quarts. Freeze all but two, no matter what the yield. Finally, when you heat up a meal’s worth of soup, add a raw egg to the pot. Turn the heat down very low and cover. In three minutes, dish it up. Add a dash of sriracha sauce and a teaspoon of good extra-virgin olive oil. Serve with a slice of good bread on the side.
CLARIFIED BUTTER, CLARIFIED
Clarifying butter removes the milk solids and water from the part of the butter you want for sautéing — the translucent, bright yellow butterfat that can be brought to high temperatures without burning. (The smoking point of clarified butter — also known as ghee, the beloved cooking fat of India — is 485 degrees. By contrast, whole butter smokes at 350 degrees and virgin olive oil smokes at 375 degrees.)
For the Chicken Breasts Escoffier, you’ll need two sticks of unsalted butter to begin with. Cut the butter into one-inch cubes, and heat it in a heavy-bottomed pot over a low flame. As the butter melts, it will separate into three layers — a thin foamy top layer, a middle layer of clarified butterfat, and a bottom layer of white milk fat. Skim off and discard the foam, and ladle the bright yellow butterfat into a heat-proof container. Discard the milk fat. You may need to continue skimming bits of foam off the top until your mixture is pure. You will keep around 80 percent of the butter you started with.
TIPS FOR LOW-COST COOKING FROM GARY DANKO
Meal planning is a great way to cut your grocery bill. If you go to the store less frequently, there’s less impulse buying. It also keeps you from running to the store next door, where you’ll pay more for your food.
•The cost of meat has been going up. The best way to cut back on the amount of meat you use is by substituting a healthy filler, like tofu, in your meatloaf recipe. Try to stretch a pound of meat into two recipes instead of one or substitute meat with less expensive ingredients like beans.
•Risotto is a great, inexpensive way of getting a lot of bang for your buck and it can be used as a base for endless flavor profiles using leftovers.
•Take a doggie bag if you have steak or chicken leftover from your restaurant visit. Just last night I had some steak and a double cut pork chop left over from a restaurant dinner. For lunch, I took a can of Amy’s vegetarian chili, a can of rinsed kidney beans, and a cup of store-bought salsa, combined them with the chopped meats, doctored them with spices, and simmered the mixture for 10 minutes. I had rice I made two days before, a dollop of sour cream, and a spoonful of salsa. It fed four people a hearty lunch.
› culture@sfbg.com Chef Damon Barham, an instructor at the California Culinary Academy in the Potrero Hill District, is 32, with boyish good looks, a wide, expressive mouth, and the energy and build of a cross-country runner. He has a nonchalant way of spicing up explanations with Borat impressions ("vary niiiice") and fiery mamma mia!, pinching-the-air Italian accents. If online rating sites give any indication of general opinion, students absolutely adore him. "Chef Damon ROCKS!!" gushes a former pupil on RateMyProfessors.com. "There’s so much knowledge one can squeeze out of my fave chef!! :)" But Barham, who teaches a restaurant production class, is unafraid of dishing out blatant criticism. "No," he declared frankly to a couple of students who’d been hard at work on an elaborate putf8g of their amuse-bouche of rice cakes and snow peas. "It’s a mess." It’s absolutely crucial that Barham give his students a "sense of reality," as he calls it. The class he teaches, restaurant production, comes at the tail end of CCA’s culinary arts program, following ten months of plodding through slow-paced courses like kitchen math and principles of European cuisine. In restaurant production, the final two-month course at CCA, Barham leads his eager, though often ham-fisted, students through the harried, breakneck creation of haute cuisine for paying customers at Carême 350, the student-run restaurant. After Barham’s restaurant production class and a three-month unpaid externship at a restaurant, graduates sink or swim in the real world. And, as one CCA grad put it to me, in order to make it in the food industry, "you have to be as serious as a heart attack." On my recent tour of CCA’s campus — a chef’s paradise of stainless steel, enormous state-of-the-art appliances, and soaring views of downtown — a couple of students in a European cooking class admitted to me that they were "definitely a little nervous" about cooking food for paying customers. But they were thrilled for the chance to have Barham as an instructor. After spending an evening in Barham’s restaurant production class, it was easy to see why. "Hey, guys!" hollered Barham at his five students, who were scrambling to assemble their mises-en-place. He crouched, one hand balled in a fist at his side, and the other pointing stiffly toward the dining room. "We’ve got one hour till people start walking in that door!" he roared. Barham circled through the kitchen, clapping rhythmically and yelling, "Let’s go!" Students visibly picked up the pace. One student directly in front of me glanced up at Barham, then resumed slicing a bulb of fennel with renewed gusto. A few minutes later, Barham interrupted a student, Benjimin Hill, who was painstakingly arranging vegetables for a duck confit. "Don’t contrive things," Barham chided, repositioning the food. "Don’t waste time doing a stupid little cucumber fan or a sunburst of carrots. Just put a pile of carrots on the plate." "I was really pumped to be coming in here and working with Chef Damon," Hill told me later as he spread some bright, buttercup-colored polenta across a baking pan. "I really like him." When Barham graduated from California Culinary Academy a decade ago, he was no stranger to the rigors of the industry. Long before Barham attended CCA, he went to what he calls "the school of hotel hard knocks." He started working in kitchens as an 11-year-old, washing dishes and shaping meatballs in an Italian restaurant in Arizona. "I had these old Italian guys pouring me glasses of Barbera, glasses of Chianti," he remembered. When he was 14, his father, a hotel manager, would call on him to wash dishes, chop vegetables, or cook on the line if the dishwasher, prep guy, or line cook didn’t show. And if a housekeeper, bellhop, server, bar back, or busboy called in sick, he’d cover for them, too. On the weekends, while other kids were out playing baseball, he’d be working an assortment of jobs, occasionally pulling 16-hour days. Barham continued cooking on the line and serving tables through high school and beyond. By the time he was 22, he landed a job as an assistant wine buyer at The Fish Market, a seafood restaurant in San Mateo. Not long afterward, the restaurant owner offered to promote him to a managerial position. But Barham wasn’t interested. His passion lay elsewhere. So in 1999, he enrolled in CCA to "fill in the gaps" in his knowledge. "We had these really crazy tests," he recalled. "If you missed three days of class, you failed." But he worked hard and estimates that he ranked fourth in his class. After he graduated, Barham made rent and repaid his CCA student loans — which he continues to pay down today — with a medley of jobs: private chefing, cooking on the line, waiting tables, and a part-time job as the culinary assistant to Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook fame. (With a sly smile, Barham remembered that one of his tasks entailed feeding Yan’s koi.) Then, in the spring of 2004, Barham called the CCA to see whether the school was hiring. He ended up landing a job as an associate instructor in garde manger (in a kitchen, the garde manger prepares the cold food). According to Barham, CCA has changed noticeably since he was a student. "People might argue that it’s not as tough as it used to be," he said. "The tests used to be more stringent. If you failed, you just failed." During his five years as a CCA instructor, Barham has taught classes about foods of the Americas, garde manger, and contemporary European cuisine skills. For the past year, he’s been teaching restaurant production, a class that students anticipate with anxiety and excitement. While Barham receives rapturous praise, online and off, the CCA isn’t exactly basking in a glowing reputation. Some CCA alumni are unhappy with the return on the $47,400 they invested in their culinary education — particularly when the high-prestige jobs they dreamed of turn out to be elusive. But Jennifer White, who took the helm as CCA’s president in October 2007, has been looking to make changes. The school, she said, was "a diamond that got scuffed and needed to be brought back to its brilliance." She now uses her orientation speech to address cable TV’s glamorization of the food industry. "If you think you’re going to be on the Food Network," she warns incoming students, "this isn’t the place for you." For his part, Barham feels little sympathy for embittered alumni. "We do the best that we can here to get these people out and prepared for the industry and to be fully functional chefs," he said, sitting at a table in Carême 350 and noshing on a hunk of bread. "But at a certain point," he continued, throwing up his hands, "they gotta leave the nest and fly on their own. If they get eaten by an alligator, they get eaten by an alligator." I asked Barham if he keeps track of how his former students are faring in the industry. "Not really," he replied with obvious disinterest. He makes an effort not to develop personal relationships with his pupils. "I don’t have a bunch of students on my Facebook account," he said. He doesn’t take ownership of any of his former students’ successes or failures, either. "That would be hugely narcissistic," he said with a stony expression. What about his current students, who clearly admire him — does he love them back? Not especially. "I’m not trying to be anybody’s friend," he told me. Despite the five years Barham’s spent behind the sleek, protective walls of the academy, it seems he’s maintained the guarded toughness he developed in the "school of hotel hard knocks." He told me if there’s one thing he’s constantly reminding his students of, it’s this: if he ever leaves academia and returns to the industry, "You’re gonna be my competition."
For a special bonus recipe from Gary Danko, check out our
Taking the heat
HOTEL HARD KNOCKS
A SCUFFED DIAMOND