Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (51 page)

PHOTO OF DAVID LEBOVITZ USED BY PERMISSION OF PIA STERN

David Lebovitz was a pastry chef at the renowned Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California for over a decade. Since then, he’s written several well-received books on desserts. His blog is at
http://www.davidlebovitz.com
.

What was working at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse like for you?

Chez Panisse is a great place to work. Money is no object when it comes to sourcing ingredients, and it’s a great training ground for cooks. The restaurant really supports the owners and the other cooks, who are very, very interested in producing good food. Once you’re in that environment, it’s hard to leave. You go somewhere else and you’re working with a bunch of line cooks that just care about who won the game last night and how fast they can cook the steaks on the grill so they can get out and go drink beer.

The whole idea of Chez Panisse is to find good ingredients and do as little to them as possible. When we had beautiful fruit, we would often just serve a bowl of fruit or a fruit tart with ice cream; or if we had really good chocolate, we would make a chocolate cake, but it wasn’t a cake that was highly decorated, it didn’t have a lot of technical swoops and things. Chez Panisse is all about flavor. A lot of the fancy stuff doesn’t taste good, so we were more concerned with flavor.

I had dinner last night at a fancy restaurant. They brought this chocolate mousse and there was tapenade on the side. Someone was, like, “Olives: it would be really cool on the plate!” But if someone tasted it? Disgusting. I just wanted to go into the kitchen and say, “Have you guys tasted this food? Because it’s stupid.”

You had worked at Chez Panisse for years before taking culinary training. What surprises did you run across in that culinary training?

I wasn’t expecting things not to taste good. I took a course in making cakes in France, and I thought, “We’re going to make cakes that are delicious.” It actually was making mousses with gelatin and with fruit purees from the freezer, and everything was like sponge cake, gelatinized fruit puree, and decorations. It was interesting, and I learned something, but those skills don’t even translate to what I do. Even if you use fresh fruit, it’s just not the best way to use it. I’m an ingredients-based cook.

I did go to chocolate school and that was great; I learned a lot about chocolate, how to work with it, how to manipulate it. Once again, I’m more interested in finding wonderful hazelnuts and in rolling them in chocolate, rather than opening up a can of hazelnut paste and making chocolates out of it.

What would you recommend to somebody who wants to learn how to bake?

The best thing they can do is just bake. The thing about baking is it’s very recipe-oriented. If you want to learn to make a pound cake, you just make a recipe, and the longer you go, the more you see how things work, how you can change things. You can add an egg yolk to make things richer or substitute sour cream for the milk in the recipe.

A lot of bakers are very precise, and we do have a reputation, especially in the professional world. A chef once said to me, “Why are you guys all so weird?” There are a lot of strange people in the pastry world, because we are very precise, we do like to go in our own little world, and we’re very analytical people in general. We think a lot about things, whereas a line cook, it’s a lot of brawn; it’s big, bold flavors; it’s roasting meat; it’s frying vegetables; it’s grilling. Those are ways of coaxing flavor out, but pastry is a much more delicate thing, it demands a lot more care, a lot more softer skills.

This is probably sexist, but a lot of women work in pastry for that reason, because a lot of women are very sensitive. I’ve always worked in women-owned restaurants, except for one, which was interesting. I never was aware of the whole “macho” thing — the way the guys would talk and treat people — until I went to other restaurants. I read these kitchen memoir books about sexual harassment and stuff, but to me, it’s about the food.

When you’re working on a pastry, how do you go about getting unstuck when it’s just not coming out the way you want it to?

If you knew how to get out of that, you wouldn’t be in there in the first place. I develop recipes and write books, so I’ll be making things, I’ll make them over and over again, and if I’m really stumped, I have a decent network of people who can help me. I might write to a friend who is a bakery cooking professor and say, “I’m trying to make persimmon pie; have you ever made it?” and he’ll be like, “Oh, persimmons have a chemical in there that prevents this from happening, and try doing this...” Bakers are sharers, so we do have a loose-knit community. Also, a lot of baking is science. If I make a cake and I want it to be moister and higher, I just have to sit down with my calculator and work it out.

How do you know what the formula is for working it out?

There are printed formulas, which some bakers use. But I’m not so good with math. Michael Ruhlman wrote a wonderful book on ratios, but my brain isn’t wired to think that way. So I just make things a million times, until I get it right.

So yours is a much more try-it-and-see approach, as opposed to sitting down and trying to figure out the optimal formula?

Yeah.

A lot of people are very analytical about cooking, and they want to know how things work. It’s a different method. It’s like a lot of Europeans wonder why Americans won’t give up their measuring cups and spoons, which is a terrible way to cook. It’s inaccurate and leads to people doing all sorts of weird things. Americans like to hold measuring cups and spoons; it makes us feel good, so we’re not going to give them up. Cooking is a visceral thing, a lot of people like to overanalyze recipes. They’re like, “Can I make this cake without the quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract?” and I’m like, “Okay, well, think about it, what do you think?” A lot of people don’t know, because they’re overanalyzing the recipe. They’re not stupid, it’s just that they’re not, I don’t know what... It’s like, “If I let 5% of air out of my tire, can I still drive?” “Yes. Better if it’s full.”

Why do you think Americans overanalyze recipes?

That’s the big question nowadays. Everyone’s trying to figure out why are Americans scared to cook? I think that Americans are in this weird space now where they want to be told what to do; they want to have a recipe; they want an authority to tell them that this is the recipe, don’t change it. We spent eight years under Bush and nobody questioned what he did for four and a half years. Everyone just wanted to be told what to do rather than say, “Wait a minute, look at the facts!” A recipe might say bake a chicken for an hour, and someone will write and say they baked it for an hour, and it was too dry. Well, your chicken was probably four pounds instead of six. There’s only so much stuff you can put in a recipe.

Where do you think this fear of failure comes from?

That’s something I haven’t been able to figure out, because everybody makes mistakes. A lot of people look at food magazines and the pictures are beautiful, and they’re like, “Oh, mine doesn’t look like that!” Well, you don’t have a team of food stylists and a camera and a photographer lighting it right. The best piece of pie is not supposed to hold together with 2” sides that are perfectly smooth. The best chocolate chip cookies are not the ones that look perfect; they’re the ones that are full of oozy chocolate chips that are gushing all over the place.

Why did you start your blog?

The site was started in 1999, when my first book came out, because I thought — famous last words — I thought it would be a good way for people to get in touch with me in case they had problems with the recipes. You don’t want people saying the recipes don’t work; you’d rather have them write to you and say, “I made this cake and it didn’t work; what did I do wrong?” Now it’s like, “I made Bill Smith’s chocolate cake and it didn’t work; what did I do wrong?”

I have a recipe — actually, it’s in the oven right now — for a cake that has one egg in the whole cake; that’s the only fat in it. Some woman wrote me — she’s trying to eat less fat — what could she replace the egg with? I’m like, one egg yolk? That’s 5 grams of fat for 12 servings. Somebody actually asked that, and then I wonder how these people go to the bank every day, get their driver’s license, pay bills, write a check, and work. What’s going through their minds?

I’m not quite sure I follow you there.

Those kinds of things seem common sense to me. Somebody who is concerned about eating an eighth or a twelfth of an egg yolk because they’re on a low-fat diet? I don’t understand that thinking. If the recipe had six egg yolks or four egg yolks, maybe I could
see it, but it’s a cake, and it’s like saying, “I don’t like chocolate; how can I make these chocolate chip cookies without chocolate?” It’s like sorry, that’s what it is.

I just read that book,
French Women Don’t Get Fat,
because somebody had it at their house and I borrowed it. I was reading it, and I was like, “Oh. My. God.” They pass on this myth that French women eat a certain way, that they drink half a glass of champagne only once a week. The book sold millions of copies in America based on something I don’t consider necessarily to be true. There’s a lot of fat women here. [David lives in Paris.] Everyone’s asking me what I think about that book, and I’m like, ask the one who wrote it. Do you really think French women don’t eat junk food and don’t smoke their brains out? Wake up. It’s like French people saying, “Don’t all Americans carry guns?” I’m like, “Yes, when we’re born, they put a gun in our hand. When you’re two, everyone gets a gun in America.”

I think there’s a certain cultural gullibility that we have in both directions, both Americans dealing with people with international backgrounds and being in other countries and talking about Americans. I was at a Thanksgiving that was 18 international students from Harvard’s Kennedy School and I started talking about the ghost of Thanksgiving past, present, and future, where the ghost of the turkey that you had previously eaten would show up. These international students just ate it up. They totally believed that this was part of the American “story.” I was like, “Really, no, this isn’t true guys; I’m completely pulling your leg.” It’s amazing how much cultural misunderstanding there seems to be about these things. I wonder what cultural differences there are in learning how to cook?

Well, French people, and this is a generalization, because it’s not necessarily true for everybody, but they’re much more relaxed about how things look. Americans jumped on the fast food wagon in the 50s and 60s, whereas the French jumped on it in the 90s and now; so they’re losing that whole connection with homemade things, but they still are closer to it than we are. It’s not unusual to go to someone’s house for lunch and they made a quiche; whereas, in America, you’d be like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you made that, you made the crust, you made the filling, you chopped the vegetables?” That’s changing here [in France]; everyone is eating frozen food now.

Is there any sort of cultural backlash against that from part of the French community?

Not yet. Americans have seen our cuisine decline and are now interested in farmers’ markets and all that stuff, whereas the French didn’t fall as far as we did. They’re like, “Everything at the market is local, and is fresh.” I’m like, “Well, everything’s from Morocco, look at the box.” To which they say, “Oh, well, it’s not like America.”

But you’re saying Europe is actually becoming more like America, in that sense?

Yeah.

What do you think of people who really feel like they need to have the most up-to-date technical equipment and toys?

Well, that’s an American thing. I go back to America and everyone has wine refrigerators, and they’re filled with Kendall Jackson Chardonnay. If you have good wine, you don’t put it in one of those refrigerators, because they have compressors that shake, which is bad for wine. Unless you have a very good wine refrigerator that doesn’t shake, you’re better off without it. It’s funny to see people who have wok burners and wine refrigerators and all that stuff in their house. A lot of people want to have the illusion of cooking; they want to have all these bottles of olive oil wrapped up on the counter in baskets and things, but on the other hand, do they really need all that stuff?

It sounds like one piece of advice you would give to somebody is to not obsess over equipment?

Yes. You don’t need every saucepan in the world, you need like three. For me, having a mixer is very important; for me, having an ice cream machine is important. But you don’t need a panini grill; you can use your skillet and just put a weight on top of it, something like a can of tomatoes, and there you have it.