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Someone’s in the Kitchen with Daniel
Boulud’s pantry is stocked, like most in his culinary bracket, with the cream of the seasonal crop, a legacy perhaps of being raised on the family farm in Lyon. But it’s the way the chef handles his raw materials with a neurosurgeon-like attention to detail that must be the secret ingredient. This becomes clear after witnessing him at work during a private cooking lesson, post-burger. I’m here to learn how he transforms something even more pedestrian than the humble beef patty. I mean, it’s one thing to make an easy crowd-pleaser like his oft-copied haute burger, but it’s another thing altogether to make a potato and leek soup into, well, soupe. I meet him in the small catering kitchen of Daniel, his flagship restaurant, just down the hall from the gleaming service kitchen. Boulud arrives wearing a pristine chef’s jacket, a perfect suntan and a Cheshire grin. I instantly deem him charming, creative and meticulous. In short, he’s a French chef. (And no offence to the burger, but if he were single and Jewish, I’d marry him too.) We set to work on a cold potage Parisien purée with sorrel. “First, you make a soup with potato and leeks and good chicken stock. And then, separately, you blanch Boston lettuce and sorrel in salted water.” He squeezes out the water. “Then you boil a little bit of cream. Et voilà.” Boulud pours it all into an industrial-grade blender and sticks his spoon into the running blender, which ranks as the second most dangerous thing I’ve ever witnessed. He adds salt and pepper – “always be seasoning” – a little more stock for that bull’s eye consistency, and then he sticks his finger into the moving blender for a taste, which is, hands down, the most dangerous thing I’ve ever witnessed. After the chartreuse-coloured soup is strained and cooled, he dollops a fluffy cloud of whipped cream atop the bowl, explaining that the quality of the ingredients, the seasonality and the technique make even a simple dish sublime. But he’s not done yet. “And now we have some caviar floating on the cream,” he says (of course we do), at which point he starts spoon-feeding me his own line of Caspian osetra straight from the tin. Then the chef employs such gravitas while meticulously arranging fresh sorrel leaves and wee homemade melba rounds around the bowl’s outsize rim that I’m just waiting for him to pull out a ruler and calipers. Meanwhile, the cream and caviar gently loll atop the soup before slowly creeping over it like delicious sea foam. “Et voilà!” We both sneak a spoonful. Mmmm. Sensing the caviar boosts the bottom line and recalling the price of my lunchtime burger ($32), I ask the chef how much he would charge for this lovely potage if it were on the menu. And with that, he laughs the laugh of a man who’d charge $90 for a bowl of soup. |
