The Mind of a Chef

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>> ANTHONY BOURDAIN: There's something rotten and delicious in David Chang's kitchen.

>> CHANG: It's hard to cook with something you would normally throw away.

Turning that into something that is delicious, that's cooking.

>> BOURDAIN: Coming up, stinky delicious kimchi, XO sauce... >> CHANG: Sometimes smelly shoes taste delicious.

>> BOURDAIN: Boqueron... >> CHANG: It's a play on a lot of different flavors from several countries.

>> BOURDAIN: Rotten bananas.

>> It's almost like they've been braised and caramelized.

>> BOURDAIN: And a visit to a katsuobushi factory.

>> CHANG: Oishii.

>> BOURDAIN: Enter The Mind of a Chef.

>> CHANG: I just want to smell good.

>> BOURDAIN: Old, rotten, moldy, fermented.

These are words that on the surface do not sound very appetizing.

But in many cases, they are critical in making something delicious.

For Chang, it's a no-brainer.

He knows that some ingredients are, in one way or another, rotten.

>> CHANG: Fish sauce is the ultimate rotten food.

It smells intensely bad.

You can make it with basically any type of fish, salt it, put water on it, put it in vats, and that's all it is.

If it breaks in your apartment, you're totally screwed.

Just because it doesn't smell good doesn't mean it doesn't taste amazing.

>> BOURDAIN: If you like Japanese food, then chances are you've eaten rotten fish-- deliberately rotted fish in the form of katsuobushi.

>> CHANG: I had seen katsuobushi plants before, but I wanted to see another one, and one that was producing what people consider to be very good katsuobushi.

It's very difficult to get high quality katsuobushi in America.

To properly understand katsuobushi, we went two hours south of Tokyo to Shin Marsu, which makes some of the best katsuobushi in Japan, and met with the manager there, who gave us the grand tour.

>> (laughing): He's giant!

>> CHANG: In Japan, extra large there is like American medium.

I wear, like, extra large America.

So while it was an educational experience, I felt I was getting hazed.

>> CHANG: So even though the fish has been frozen, it's still ridiculously fresh.

The freezing process is part of making the katsuobushi.

>> CHANG: Here's a guy who has done this a million times.

For me, whenever I watch someone that butchers anything and it's so clean and so fast, it's like...

It's just watching art.

It's watching somebody that has mastered their craft.

>> CHANG: A lot of love.

>> CHANG: Besides what's so special about the katsuobushi here and these amazing white jackets is the wood.

It smells so much like the really good katsuobushi.

They use a specific type of wood in Japanese called nara.

>> CHANG: I just want to smell good.

>> CHANG: Whoa!

(coughing) When done correctly, katsuobushi tastes like umami.

It tastes extraordinarily delicious.

So it doesn't taste like rotten fish.

After smoking, they inject it with mold and they let it basically sit upwards of a year.

And it begins its petrification process.

This was fish, now it's, like, complete amber.

(knocking noises) That's crazy.

We learned so much about katsuobushi and how they make it there that I left thinking I'd never want to think about katsuobushi ever again.

>> CHANG: Kyoto-a katsuobushi.

>> Hai.

>> CHANG: Uh... (Bleep) it.

>> (laughing) >> CHANG: Every sort of chef de cuisine has their own version of XO sauce.

XO sauce was, I think, created maybe 30, 40 years ago in Hong Kong.

It smells like a funky old shoe, but it's so, so delicious.

It's one of those sauces that is great on everything.

The idea is just sort of getting this aromatic thing that has a lot of funk to it.

We're gonna have our pan sort of ripping hot.

Generous amount of oil.

A lot of garlic.

(sizzling) So we've added a cup of ginger, a cup of garlic, tangerine rinds, Chinese sausage, the pint of shredded country ham-- and again, you don't have to add salt to this because of the sausage and the country ham.

Dried scallops.

The great thing about dried seafood is you don't have to use a lot of it to get a lot of flavor.

So it's another great reason for using dried seafood.

A little goes a long way.

And now we're gonna add the dried shrimp.

So you're going to continue to cook that down over a low heat.

And it smells like a gym locker in there now.

All the garlic and the ginger has been caramelized, and so has all the protein from the shellfish.

I would say that the majority of our dishes-- the good dishes, at least the ones that I love the most-- come from scraps and the most humble of beginnings.

Anybody can cook with a filet mignon.

Anybody can cook a piece of lobster.

It's hard to cook with something that you would normally throw away.

Turning that into something that is not only just edible but delicious, that's cooking.

We've been cooking this for about 30 minutes, constantly stirring it because, as you can see, stuff on the bottom will get stuck and burn.

Sometimes smelly shoes taste delicious.

>> BOURDAIN: In a world full of cooking demos, this one from the archives stands out.

What could be more delicious than putting spicy cabbage in a jar and letting it ferment for months?

Not much.

(upbeat Korean pop playing) >> Pineapple!

>> BOURDAIN: Fish sauce, that ubiquitous ingredient found in dishes around the world.

You guessed it: rotten.

>> CHANG: We wanted to do a dish that involved fish sauce.

It's an extraordinarily delicious thing.

Romans had a version of it called garum.

Japanese have a version of it, and it's preserved in a constant rotten state.

I like versions that literally are just anchovy, salt, sugar.

That's it.

It looks like tea, but it doesn't smell like tea.

We wanted to do a dish that was sort of a version of bagna cauda, the Italian dip with oil and anchovies with vegetables.

First, let's make the sauce.

So in here I have some chili pepper, some Thai bird chili, some garlic.

We're gonna add walnuts and we're gonna add maybe, like, half a cup of fish sauce.

(whirring) I'm gonna add some sugar to this, a couple tablespoons.

A little water to cook it through.

Somehow it's gonna represent Italian food, uh, southeast Asian food.

So this is a baby artichoke, very easy to clean.

Basically you just want to peel off all the crap around the ends and, um, put it in water so it doesn't oxidize, because they oxidize very fast.

So instead of doing a braised or roasted artichoke, we're gonna deep fry them.

It's about 325.

There's so much fat with the walnuts and the fried artichokes, why don't we add a pickled anchovy?

And that's going to cut through the fat.

The boquerones from Spain-- they're pickled, highly acidic, and delicious.

So we have some breakfast radishes.

Radishes and anchovies go really well together, I feel.

Just for color on the plate, we have some scallions.

We just cut them about an inch and a half in terms of width and they're going to look like blades of grass, very thinly sliced, and if you throw them in ice water, they're going to just curl up.

I'm gonna take the boquerones and just lay them in between.

So that's our dish of bagna cauda.

Instead of using anchovies, we used fish sauce pureed with walnuts.

A very simple dish, play on a lot of different flavors from several countries.

>> BOURDAIN: Chef Christina Tosi is part owner and the creative force behind the Momofuku Milk Bar restaurants.

Anything sweet in Chang's world is usually hatched in the mind of Chef Tosi.

>> (fly buzzing) >> TOSI: We're gonna make a banana cream pie, which for me is like the real celebration of a banana.

Everyone really wants that really rich, true banana flavor, but no one really wants to know how you get it.

But this is how you really get it.

It looks kind of gross, but it tastes really good.

This is bananas in their several stages of life.

Bananas at this stage are really bitter and very starchy.

This banana I would also not touch.

They're a little less starchy and a little more sweet, but they're still of mostly no use to us.

(laughing) This is the kind of banana that I like to eat.

I like a little bit of starch to it and a little firmness, and it's just a little sweet, it's not too sweet.

If I want something sweet I'm gonna eat a cookie, not a banana.

Bananas at this stage are gonna play a role in our banana cream pie.

They're sweet, they still have a firmness to them, but this is where you start to taste the banana.

And this is where bananas, in my opinion, really, really taste like bananas.

If you stick a banana that's like this in your freezer, this is what it'll look like after two or three days, which is what we need to make our banana cream.

We'll peel them.

A smart man once told me that the easiest way to peel a banana is from the bottom.

It's almost like they've been, like, braised and caramelized, but they're really just aging in their own skin.

They go in a blender.

Egg, egg yolk.

Sugar, salt, corn starch.

Milk, and a little bit of heavy cream.

This is not how most people make banana cream.

I blend them all together really quickly.

They think I'm crazy until they do it.

I'm telling you.

So you just throw it in a pan on the stovetop.

As it heats, that corn starch that we put in is going to start thickening it.

We'll let it continue to go.

In the meantime, we're going to bloom gelatin.

We use sheet gelatin in our kitchen, but powdered gelatin also works at home.

We just bloom it in cold water until it is soft.

Our banana cream is nice and thick.

It's come up to a boil, and you can really tell the difference in the consistency of it.

We're gonna pour it back into the blender.

We're also going to add the gelatin that we just bloomed-- it's nice and soft-- and put some yellow food coloring in.

A really good banana cream pie isn't yellow just because.

It's yellow because somebody put food coloring in it.

So do a few drop sat a time.

That was more than a few, but... You've got a really yellow mess.

Next step: fridge, to cool.

For me, the perfect balance to a banana cream pie is a crust that can really hold up to the sweetness of banana and banana cream, which means chocolate crust.

The chocolate crumb is very easy to make.

It's flour, some corn starch, some sugar and some salt.

The secret to chocolate crumbs is the cocoa powder.

We use Valrhona cocoa power.

So just take the dry ingredients, toss them around a little bit, and we add a little bit of melted butter.

Toss it around until we get some clusters, some chocolate clusters.

These get spread out on a baking pan, just baking them in the oven until they dry out.

And then we throw them into our food processor, put just a little bit of room temperature or melted butter in there.

You're just going to grind your chocolate crust down to a sandy, pliable texture, and then we push it into a crust.

Maybe that should be your test.

When your banana's this color, it's ready to make pie.

This is whipped cream and the banana, the yellow banana mixture, mixed together.

I'd say you'd pour a quarter of it into your pie crust.

In my opinion, the best part of the banana cream pie is, like, the hidden bananas in the center.

And for that, we're gonna use not the eating banana but the "just getting ripe" banana.

So I just make an incision.

Use the peel as, like, your cutting board, and then I like to cut them in half.

Once I cut them widthwise, I like to cut them in half just so you can get a little banana in every bite.

That's kind of like the perfect bite theory.

Then you're just going to layer the rest of your banana cream on top.

I drown them, force them back in.

You are gonna want to put this pie back in the fridge.

It's also pretty good semi-frozen.

If this were a fable, the moral of the story is don't cry over rotten bananas.

They're not rotten, actually.

They're the best part of the banana.

Look, he's like a snail.

He's left a trail of banana for us.

>> BOURDAIN: Rotten stuff is good.

We all like rotten, whether we know it or not.

The whole process of ripening, of intensifying flavors, is inexorably entwined with the dark forces of bacteria, mold cultures, putrification, and rot.

Rot, for lack of a better word, is everything.