A Food Lover Journeys to Lyon
AFAR Magazine
(click on title to open printable pdf file)
A Food Lover Journeys to Lyon
AFAR Magazine
(click on title to open printable pdf file)
“My goal is to be evocative, not provocative,” Chef Christopher Kostow explains, describing his culinary philosophy. So while the 34-year-old chef has gained renown for some unusual-sounding dishes at The Restaurant at Meadowood – goat poached in whey, for example – he’s quick to counter any notion that his food is edgy.
“We’re not here to shock anybody,” he says. “It just tastes really good. There’s a lot of finesse, a lot of technique and it’s very delicate. We’re not hitting you over the head with anything. I would say my food is thoughtful.”
Kostow is more qualified than most to turn out thoughtful food: he actually holds a degree in philosophy. But after college, Kostow gravitated to his other passion—cooking—and moved to San Diego to work with Trey Foshee, one of Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs 1998. By the age of 22, Kostow was creating his own dishes.
Seeking to hone his technique, the chef next ventured to France, where he worked in a variety of kitchens, from a Paris bistro to the Michelin-starred Le Jardin des Sens in Provence. Back in the States, he was sous chef to Daniel Humm at San Francisco’s Campton Place Restaurant and went on to become top toque at Chez TJ in Mountain View, earning two Michelin stars of his own.
At Meadowood, Kostow continues to collect accolades, including three Michelin stars; a rare four stars from the San Francisco Chronicle; and a spot in the ranks of Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs 2009.
As the chef looks back on the mentors who taught him along the way, he also looks forward. “I was able to come here because I worked for other people who were successful,” he says. “Hopefully, now I’m creating opportunities for other people; hopefully I’m teaching them the right way to do things.”
The right way, according to Kostow is to employ flawless, innovative technique that never steals focus from the food. “Some chefs use technique to make things look unbelievably unique,” he explains. “We put that on its head and say, ‘We have all this ability and know-how and tools. Why don’t we use technique to make food taste unbelievably good?‘” One example the chef cites is an unassuming amuse-bouche, the baked potato parfait. “It looks pretty basic, just a white cup with a white espuma [foam] on top and a little caviar and oyster,” Kostow relates. “But it actually has six layers of potato goodness in each bite. People taste it and they love it!”
How does Kostow conceive his nuanced dishes? “Some start with flavor memories I want to evoke in the guests,” Kostow says. “I think there’s a degree of shared food memory. That’s when you really speak to your guests—but it’s not about being derivative or making something taste like something else. This is a starting point.”
One dish began with the idea of roasted chicken, “the interplay of meat and skin, how that tastes and feels in your mouth,” Kostow explains. That flavor memory is reborn (with considerable culinary alchemy) as crispy poussin, turnips, tofu and white soy—a breast roulade accompanied by a perfect mosaic of leg meat and braised greens—not exactly what Grandma used to make.
“As dishes evolve, we develop certain techniques to achieve the desired results,” he adds. “I think that’s the mark of a good restaurant. You’re leading and developing the techniques that other people eventually use.”
In addition to his passion for technique, Kostow is focused on ingredients. One luxury Meadowood affords him is having a garden, as well as greenhouses and chickens. “I sit down every season with our gardener and we discuss what we’re going to plant and how much we need. That way,” he says, “I can look forward to my menus for the season.”
When Kostow describes the blue barrow borage, finishing herbs, arugula and strawberries he’ll soon be weaving into dishes, he leans forward with excitement, then adds, “In the spring, we do an additional tasting menu of just vegetables, based on produce from the garden,” clearly relishing the possibilities. “We’ll do a shelling bean course, an artichoke course, turnips baked in the dirt from
the garden…”
That ability to eagerly seek out the next challenge keeps him on top of his game, the young chef says. “We’re very, very forward-thinking. We’re constantly evolving. There’s elegance at Meadowood, but there’s also a dynamism that comes from youth. And that’s why we’re successful within the context of Meadowood. It just works.”
Chef Interview:
Christopher Kostow
Culinary Trends
(click on title to open printable pdf file)
It was London, the early 1990s. We had our first encounter at the Hyde Park Hotel. Then a rendezvous at Brown’s Hotel. Which led to a brief, unplanned interlude at Fortnum & Mason. The affair was outrageous, indulgent, decadent. I had fallen madly in love. With clotted cream.
Yes, I swooned over something that sounds like you should put a Band-Aid on it rather than eat it. But, oh, the stuff was glorious: unctuous, buttery, rich. Every afternoon of my trip, I slathered it on scones snatched from tiered silver trays in hushed hotel tearooms.
And, like most of those smitten with a new love, I didn’t bother to ask for details. I vaguely assumed it was heavy cream, whipped almost into butter but stopped just short of that transformation.
Returning home to the United States, I pined for clotted cream. It wasn’t to be found at even the swankiest hotel tea services, where whipped cream was foisted on me instead. That started the questions: What, actually, is this rich, golden goo? How is it made? And why are the Brits keeping it all for themselves?
On a recent trip to England, I set out to find the answers — and the best clotted cream the country has to offer. At first, my research pointed me toward Jersey, one of the Channel Islands near France and origin of the Jersey cow breed. Jersey cows typically give milk with a higher percentage of cream, rumored to be the best for making clotted cream.
But wait, it’s not just the cows; it’s what they eat. Turns out, the lushest English grass grows in Cornwall, along the far reaches of England’s southwest coast, where there’s a microclimate so different from the rest of the country that palm trees thrive.
And, despite a bit of bluster from the neighboring shire of Devon, which touts its version as “Devon cream,” I discovered that the country’s largest clotted cream producer is based in Cornwall.
So my husband, Paul, and I point our rental car toward Land’s End and set out on a meandering expedition to the Cornish coast. Besides clotted cream, the region is famous for fishing villages, artists, gardens, smugglers and the hand pies known as pasties (pronounced “PAST-eeze”). On our tour we will encounter everything on that list that is legal.
The first thing I learn, strolling the constricted streets of Polperro, a tiny village of whitewashed stone cottages arrayed on ocean-side cliffs, is that Cornish tea isn’t a grand affair reserved for the afternoon. The town is clogged with modest tearooms and cafes offering “cream tea.” And though the fishing fleet still bobs in a little cove, I suspect Polperro serves far more scones than mackerel to the tourists who ramble the maze of pathways between the ancient abodes.
Here, “cream tea,” means two scones, a pot of tea and a hefty dollop of clotted cream, and it’s served nearly all day long. Passing up a boat tour (“nice dogs and happy babies go free”), we settle at an outdoor table and order the “Scones From Our Own Special Recipe,” not an uncommon claim here.
“Where’re you from, then?” the proprietor asks as a pink-cheeked waitress delivers our tea. His bushy eyebrows shoot up when we reply, “San Francisco”; they shoot up again when I ask for seconds on the clotted cream. In the name of research, I know no shame.
The cream is cool, smooth and sweet (though not sweetened). It clings to the knife as I spread it in artistic swirls, then melts just slightly into the warm, round scone (containing no currants, blueberries, chocolate chips, nuts or other distractions). It’s delicious, and I confirm the source is Rodda’s, the country’s largest clotted cream producer.
One requirement for Cornwall’s lush pastures is rain, and with storm clouds massing, we decide to head indoors . . . to a garden. We motor down narrow two-lane roads lined with solid walls of green hedges and trees arching to meet overhead, past little towns with odd, Harry Potter-ish names (Crumplehorn, St. Blazey Gate), until we reach the Eden Project.
Imagine botanical gardens on the vast scale of an eco-amusement park, and you’ll have an idea of the size. At the base of a 200-foot-deep, 37-acre quarry, two “biomes” covered with a series of huge hexagonal-bubbled domes (cousins to Beijing’s Olympic Water Cube) are the largest conservatories in the world, housing more than a million plants, in addition to a large waterfall. They showcase tropical and Mediterranean species, as well as the Cornish zeal for gardening and the founders’ passion for sustainable practices.
The next morning, at our tidy farmhouse B&B, we get an alternative review of the Eden Project. “That’s boring!” a fellow tourist pronounces at the breakfast table as we tuck into eggs, bacon and baked beans.
After he classifies several other famous Cornish gardens as “boring,” I finally discover he and his traveling companion are landscape designers visiting from Germany, and they don’t even have plans to see the Eden Project. Clearly, their quest (to find “acceptable” gardens) is less satisfying (but certainly less fattening) than my search for the perfect clotted cream.
I’ve been trying to contact an artisanal producer, Gwavas Jersey Farm, but my e-mails and phone messages have gone unanswered. So instead, we decide to do some sightseeing, since any self-respecting Cornish tourist destination also serves cream tea.
St. Michael’s Mount will look startlingly familiar to anybody who’s visited Mont St. Michel in France. In fact, the two island churches were under the purview of the same Norman abbot in the 11th century. Several hundred years of sackings and stormings later, Cornwall’s was taken over by the St. Aubyn family, whose descendants still live there after 12 generations.
Unlike at Mont St. Michel, there’s no raised causeway to convey visitors above the waters. Fortunately, we arrive at low tide and tread the same stone pathway, inlaid with seaweed, that medieval pilgrims followed. After a steep climb, we tour the family castle and take in sweeping views back to the coast and straight down to the island’s gardens, laid out like verdant skirts around the Mount.
There’s just enough time for cream tea at the cafe before scurrying back to the mainland ahead of the tide. Alas, though the scones are tasty, I’m given another little cup of Rodda’s clotted cream. Yes, it’s good, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever find any other kind. Rodda’s seems to have a lock on the market.
I chat up a chap in the Mount’s gift shop, who suggests we take our search to a “farm shop” and recommends one near Hayle. We head up the Cornish peninsula and discover two farm shops, emporia of local produce, jams and dairy products.
At the first, Richards of Cornwall, we find (at last!) tubs of clotted cream made by a smaller producer, Trewithen Dairy. I happily part with some cash for a tub of my own. Then, at Trevaskis Farms, I buy a box of fresh-picked strawberries, tiny and sweet. There’s also a cafe, where a refrigerated case is packed with desserts. I stand in awe as servers dish up pies, crumbles and sponge cakes, all served with a whopping dollop of Rodda’s clotted cream on top.
We forgo this dessert wonderland and opt for dipping strawberries into the Trewithen clotted cream. The texture is less uniform, the flavor sweeter, a bit more intense. Rodda’s and I have had a lovely relationship, but now I switch my fickle affections to Trewithen.
The seaside town of St. Ives is a feast of a different sort, a banquet of Cornish light. The ocean seems bluer, the beach more sparkling and the stone houses more boldly limned against the sky. That blessing of light has made the once-humble fishing village an artists’ haven for more than two centuries. Many of the views Turner and Whistler painted here can still be found, either by strolling the town or by visiting the Tate St. Ives, a branch of the major British art museum.
We walk off our clotted cream and strawberry orgy on St. Ives’s cobbled streets, stopping by galleries that display paintings, ceramics and handmade clothing.
The summer light lingers late in England and, after surviving a particularly hair-raising wisp of a road, we spend the evening’s last rays seated in a cliff-top amphitheater looking out to sea. We are near Land’s End, the most westerly bit of this entire country, watching a play at the Minack Theatre. The performance is entertaining, but my eyes keep drifting out to the cobalt waters and rocky headlands burnished by the final shafts of sun that shine on England.
The next morning, we’re in luck. Will Bowman of Gwavas Jersey Farm rings up and tells us to come on over. His farm is only six miles away, down toward England’s most southerly point, on the Lizard Peninsula.
Gwavas is a father-and-son operation: 90 Jersey cows, a handful of employees and Wiggles, the world’s cutest Jack Russell terrier, housed on a farmstead that was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.
Will, who runs the dairy while his father watches the cows, takes us on a tour of the fields and the dairy buildings. “I’m not what most people around here would call a conventional farmer,” he confides, and I have to agree: He’s sporting shorts, sneakers and a soccer jersey.
“It’s a bit more interesting than just farming,” he says, explaining why he started making clotted cream and yogurt 12 years ago, “because it’s a different challenge every day. If you enjoy yourself, you can make it a little bit more unusual; if you’ve got the passion, you can make it that much better.”
Will confirms my research about Jersey cows — that their milk has more cream (5 percent vs. 4 percent or less for other breeds) — but that’s not all. “It also has more lactose, more protein, more solids in general,” he says.
Despite the mysterious nature of clotted cream (do a Google search and you come up with all sorts of conflicting recipes, including some calling for sour cream), it turns out to be fairly straightforward. “It’s a simple way of doing something with milk, but it has to be precise,” Will explains.
Cream is separated from pasteurized milk by a centrifuge system, then placed in large shallow pans that are heated to 194 degrees, not quite boiling, for an hour. “Scalding it the traditional way gives it more color and more flavor,” Will says. Water evaporates, the cream thickens and a thin crust forms on the top. Then it cools, rests and thickens more.
We watch as a white-coated worker scoops the finished product into tubs. It’s a deep golden color, denser in some places, a bit runnier in others. “It’s a moving product,” Will says. “As it gets older, it will thicken.”
He picks up a tub and invites us to have a taste. We sit on a picnic table outside his weathered stone house, while Wiggles and a resident cat snooze nearby in the sun.
Digging a spoon into the clotted cream, I realize I’m going to be mainlining the stuff: no scones, no berries. But one bite and I know I’ve found clotted cream nirvana. The textures roll across my tongue, buttery, rich and intense. It seems as if I’m devouring the distilled essence of the Cornish landscape, the green that overgrows stone fences and nearly chokes the roads.
“Good milk,” Will says by way of explanation, “has just got a fresh taste to it, and the sweeter the grass, the sweeter the milk.” I ask if we can visit the cows that produced this wonder, and Will leads us to pastures bordered on one side by the ocean.
“Thank you, ladies!” I shout, holding up my tub of clotted cream, as the nosy bovines come over to investigate us. They are fawn-colored, with little topknots between their ears. “Each one has a different hairdo,” Will points out, grinning.
Surveying the fields rimmed by wild foxgloves and bright-pink thistles, he says: “We don’t need any more than what we’ve got around us. There are lots of people who don’t have it so good.” That includes clotted cream lovers who don’t live in Cornwall; preferring a personal relationship with customers, Will refuses to sell his product outside its borders.
After our visit, we drive a few miles to Kynance Cove, considered one of Cornwall’s most beautiful spots. I hike across the cliffs clutching my tub of Gwavas clotted cream. There is a little cafe at the end of the trail, and I’m sure it will have scones.
As we sit outside, looking down at the turquoise ocean bashing and frothing around craggy black rocks, I slather the cream over a warm scone. The heck with posh hotel tearooms. This is the best clotted cream I’ve ever tasted, and this spot, right here, is the best possible place to eat it.
Chef Interview:
Mai Pham
Culinary Trends
(click on title to open printable pdf file)
High Steaks:
Top chefs re-think an American classic
Four Seasons Magazine
(click on title to open printable pdf file)
Roberto’s gentle brown eyes register a twinge of concern. Following his gaze, I see my husband, Paul, snapping a photo of an oak tree. Innocent enough, except this isn’t just any oak tree. It is Roberto’s secret hunting ground for white truffles, a knobby little fungus that can fetch more than $5,000 a pound at retail.
We’d made reservations at a farmhouse inn, near the tiny village of Murazzano in Italy’s Piemonte region. The owner, Silvana Faggio, e-mailed us asking, “Can you say to me if you want to eat a dinner? Do you want a trouffle?” Trouffle, truffle, truffe, tartufo — however you spell it, the answer was yes. I’m a fan of the pungent subterranean delicacy, and Paul is seriously truffle-obsessed.
Since it sounded as if Silvana had a local truffle connection, I wrote back asking if it would be possible to participate in a truffle hunt. So here we are, slogging through the damp countryside with truffle hunter Roberto Bovetti, his truffle dog, Gaia, and Silvana’s gracious, English-speaking husband, Gianni Galli, who has offered to accompany us as translator.
A proper truffle hunt, it seems, must begin with a nip of grappa, high-octane liquor that fortifies the blood against chilly fall air. So before we set out, Roberto had invited us into his family home, past three or four truffle dogs tethered in the farmhouse courtyard, yapping to go fetch some fungus. He set out bottles of flavored grappa (cherry, juniper) on the kitchen table and we toasted to a successful hunt.
Through Gianni, we learned that Roberto is 30 and works part time at a factory. He has dark, shoulder-length hair and a full beard. It would be easy to mistake him for Jesus of the Church of Truffles. He’s a bit bewildered and flattered that foreigners would want to go poking around the countryside with him. “I have never had guests on a truffle hunt,” he says.
Silvana had spent the morning phoning neighbors to borrow knee-length rubber boots for us. Now, in the misty late afternoon, the footgear makes me feel like a local, ready to muck undaunted across muddy fields and dank forests. Roberto has a scarf wound around his neck and sports a knit cap. His jacket and field vest have plenty of pockets, most to stash truffles, but one with treats to reward Gaia when she makes a find.
We cross the country road in front of Roberto’s house and scramble down a scrubby embankment to a hazelnut orchard. Roberto tells us that truffles particularly like to grow in the soil around hazelnut, chestnut and oak trees. We are foraging through tartufaia, truffle lands.
Gaia, who looks vaguely poodle-esque, starts sniffing and scurrying in circles. Soon her shaggy, pinkish-tan hair is wet and streaked with mud. Roberto carries a cane, and I learn that it’s not just a jaunty truffle-hunter prop but a tool that he uses to suggest spots where Gaia might search. He keeps up nonstop Italian patter, like a sotto-voce cheerleader, encouraging the dog and telling her where to look: “Here, here, look here, what about here, good girl, over here now.” Roberto knows the areas where truffles have been found before — knowledge handed down from his uncle — but only Gaia can pinpoint their location.
After about five minutes of searching, Gaia suddenly scratches the dirt with her two front paws, sticks her nose in the hole and takes a big, unladylike snuffle. Roberto grabs her and pulls her back from the little indentation. “You have to stop them, because if they dig down to the truffle, they might eat it,” he says. Roberto takes out an eight-inch tool, rather like a miniature hoe, and carefully carves the dirt away from what turns out to be a black truffle the size of a walnut. He wraps it in a square of paper and tucks it into a pocket.
Then Roberto turns back to the hole and scoops up some loamy, black earth. “Smell it,” he says. We take a puzzled sniff and discover that even the earth reeks of truffle. It’s a musky, sultry, decadent, decidedly sexual scent. “They only give off this aroma when they are ripe,” he tells us, “So the dogs only find them when they are ready.” He carefully replaces the dirt and layer of dead leaves where the truffle was extracted. Any evidence might tip off other truffle hunters who could later snatch more truffles from this patch when they’ve ripened.
All this stealth is due to the fact that truffles mostly grow wild (they’re starting to be cultivated in a few places by treating tree roots with spores, but it’s a long, iffy process). An official truffle hunter — trifolau , as the Italians call them — must take a test and obtain a permit to roam around in search of the fabulous fungi.
We tromp across a field to a cluster of oak trees, another of Roberto’s favorite hunting grounds. “I am relieved,” he says. “I was worried maybe we wouldn’t find any truffles. Gaia is a little nervous with strangers around.”
As Gianni translates this, he comments that, in the famous truffle territory around Alba, truffle hunts are often staged for tourists with “planted” truffles. “It is like, like . . . like Pasqua,” he huffs, his indignation overcoming his command of English.
“Easter,” I guess. “It’s like an Easter egg hunt!”
“Si, si,” he replies, as Gaia scampers off and starts digging.
This time Roberto, who’s been trying to follow our conversation, is late on the grab, and Gaia gobbles what must have been a chick pea-size truffle, despite his efforts to pry it from her jaws. Episodes such as this explain why Italians use dogs to search for truffles, rather than pigs, Roberto says. It’s not uncommon for French truffle hunters to be missing a finger or two from tussles with their truffle-crazed porkers.
As we stride across the hillside toward a lone oak tree, we ask what type of dog Gaia is. “He says he only uses bastardi.” Gianni translates. “They make the best truffle dogs. Bastardi — you know?”
“Mutts,” I tell him. What else could it mean?
“Only females,” Roberto adds. “The males are too distracted by other smells.” I nod and smile a knowing female smile.
The dogs are trained from an early age with tiny pieces of truffle, and by the time they’re full-fledged truffle hunters, Roberto claims, they’re worth about 3000 euros, or more than $3,500. So Gaia, who by now is wet, matted and muddy, is more valuable than many a pampered purebred. She proves her worth by bagging a white truffle, the most valuable of them all. Roberto gingerly digs it out, wraps it and places it in a pocket on the inside of his jacket. “I keep the white ones close to me,” he says, smiling.
Rain earlier in the day rinsed competing smells out of the air, so the truffles are easier to find, Roberto tells us. Hunting is good at night, too, when there are fewer odors, “but there are wild boars and they can kill the dogs,” he adds. Dusk is closing in, and Gaia disappears with Roberto into a clutch of dense brush. Like a gullible camper who’s just been told a ghost story, I listen for the grunts of a cinghiale that could materialize from the underbrush at any moment and impale me on its vicious tusks.
Roberto and Gaia emerge, trailed by neither a boar nor a man with a bloody hook. The light is so dim that we decide to call it a day, and trudge through the mud to a modest home nearby, where Gianni wants to say hello to some friends. A woman comes to the door holding a partly assembled jacket lapel. “She does hand-finish work for some of the top Italian couture,” Gianni says as he introduces us. Within just three hours, I’ve hunted legendary little lumps of astronomical value, escaped wild boars and come upon a magical cottage where Armani suits appear.
We bid goodbye to Roberto and tell him if he visits the United States, we will take him on a hunt for parking spaces, which are nearly as rare as truffles. He refuses a gratuity, which we’d conspired with Gianni to present, just as he’d refused an offer of payment when the expedition was organized. “It is my pleasure,” he maintains.
At this point, I could use a spot more grappa, but we are late for dinner, where Silvana is going to show us what she can do with the precious fungus.
Silvana, we’d learned, ran a restaurant for 25 years, and her meals so far have been feasts, even sans truffles. She brings out two white ones for us to choose from, telling us they are sold by the gram. They sit royally on a small wooden tray beneath a glass dome. Paul dubs it a “truffle trap.” Appropriate, because when Silvana lifts the lid, a cloud of captured truffle musk escapes and wafts out to seduce us. We choose our truffle and she carefully brushes it off, telling us in a combination of English, French and Italian that truffles should never be cleaned until just before they’re eaten.
Silvana overwhelms us with a seven-course extravaganza, including three dishes topped with truffles, which she shaves at the table, letting the steam transport the potent truffle aroma up to our noses. The food is simple, so the truffles can star: small crepes, oozing with rich local cheese; homemade, hand-cut tagliatelli in a light sauce of butter and milk; and an egg, sunny-side up. This is the perfect finish to a successful treasure hunt. Except Paul isn’t finished.
“Santa Silvana,” he asks (having granted her sainthood by this point), “could I have scrambled eggs con tartufi for breakfast?”
Silvana looks puzzled. “For breakfast?”
“Yes,” Paul replies, giving her the same deprived, heart-melting look Gaia flashed when she was pulled away from a truffle.
“Why not?” Silvana says, laughing.
© 2005 Gayle Keck Reprint rights to this article, including complete service information, are available for purchase. Photos are also available.
It’s in the Leaves
360 Magazine
(click on title to open printable pdf file)
Blog posts reporting from the 2010 Fancy Food Show:
Gayle created the Hunger Challenge for the San Francisco Food Bank, recruiting food bloggers to eat on just $4 a day (the average amount given to food stamp recipients in California). She also took the challenge and blogged about her experiences.
Blog posts from the 2009 Hunger Challenge:
The 2009 Hunger Challenge: Déjà Food
The 2009 Hunger Challenge: Grocery Shop ‘Til You Drop
The 2009 Hunger Challenge Day 1: Food Hoard
The 2009 Hunger Challenge Day 2: Small Comfort
The 2009 Hunger Challenge Day 3: Has Beans
The 2009 Hunger Challenge Day 4: Irrational Rewards
The 2009 Hunger Challenge Day 5: Unreasonable Facsimile
The 2009 Hunger Challenge Day 6: Leftover and over
Blog posts from the 2008 Hunger Challenge:
The Hunger Challenge: Not Going Anywhere, Not Eating That
The Hunger Challenge Day 1: Brasato al Barolo…Hold the Barolo
The Hunger Challenge Day 2: Living in a Food Museum
The Hunger Challenge Day 3: Small Plates
Hunger Challenge Day 4: Don’t Chicken Out!
The Hunger Challenge Day 5: The Other Soul Food