The Mad Chef is an Instinct

When I want to cook I don’t imagine prepping on a plastic cutting board over a granite countertop and tossing vegetables in a Teflon pan over a gas stove. I imagine stoking a fire in a brick and clay hearth, spreading the ashes, and searing ingredients just above these glowing embers. I see wooden countertops used for baking and cutting directly on the surface. I see salted vinegar scrubs to clean the wood adding yet another element of flavor. I have worked with normalized equipment my whole life and every time I do I feel like I am sacrificing a piece of myself and several elements of flavor for convenience. The idea that convenience is more important to us than experience is disappointing and depressing. I mean I get it, the world is moving a million times faster than we did in the days that fire was used to cook and gather. My goal is to slow the world down for a few minutes a day. To let the fire burn, the food temper over the coals, the conversations light up, and the wine flow. My goal is to rewind the clock back to the 1800s where stocks and soups boiled in hanging cauldrons, where herbs dried over the fireplace, where slabs of meat dripped over open embers and vegetables cooked in cast irons and clay pots. 

Nowadays we try so hard to innovate by refining ingredients, streamline processes, and mastering techniques like machines. The more we refine, the smaller the creative box becomes and the number of possibilities decreases dramatically. The more we streamline the process the more passion and love are taken from each plate. The more we try to master and obsess over a single technique, the less we have fun in the moments that we should be remembering and cherishing. Currently, I cook like a normal person, just trying to have enough decent sustenance to eat throughout the week. The craziest part about it is that I am still miles ahead of others just by making the food at home. Most people do not have the privilege of time to prep out a week’s worth of food which pushes them into fast foods and premade snacks. It may pass as sustenance, but it is not food, it is not a meal, and it certainly does not qualify as an experience. So how did everything go so wrong, and how can we take our lives back? 

As I said, refining an art form causes this art to die. Disagree? Picture this: a warm and moist piece of meat sitting in a plastic bag for two-plus hours marinating in its own humidity, yummy! Also, where is the art in that, where is the passion? French cooking is all about rules and refined techniques that utilize the newest technologies to scientifically screw up ingredients. The culinary arts recognize French cooking as the birth of the culinary revolution and consider a person who studied in these programs as classically trained. The training consists of creating an order of operations and applying rules and regulations to profile dishes and meals. Classical training teaches you specific cuts that not only take a long time to master, but also create a lot of food waste as a result. When you make potatoes look like diamonds and stalks of celery look like perfect squares, you are wasting huge amounts of product. More importantly, the one thing that is prettier and more impressive than a perfectly square 4mm by 4mm carrot, it a rough-cut carrot with the dirt-kissed skin still on it! People don’t learn passion in school and no one’s favorite meals came from a classically trained chef. 

Your favorite foods come from your mother or grandmother and I guarantee they were not spending five hours making your potatoes into perfectly rectangular sticks. Grandma’s cooking is recognized for its love and passion as well as its ability to turn cheap ingredients into delicious delights. You cannot replace passion and love with refining and regulating but you can replace refined and regulated technicians with robots. Not only can the refined chef be replaced with a robot but the robot is better and faster with refining and following rules. The GM of a restaurant can easily replace a classically trained chef, but they will have a much harder time replacing a passionate chef. 

I am a passionate cook ready to learn from everyone and everything, but culinary school was becoming the death of my passion. I couldn’t understand all of the rules and fancy concepts. I felt that learning the hundreds of French cuts was a waste of valuable time that could be used to build a fire or marinate an ingredient. I want to make it clear, I do not hate French cooking, I just think that it is massively overrated and does not compare to rustic cultural cooking. The more that I started to rebel against the classic techniques and studied cultural cooking around the world, the more excited I became about cooking. After a year of suffering through culinary school, I finally quit and started to become even more obsessed with fire, fermentation, smoking, and sourdough bread making. In school, they taught us how to break down meat into baby overpriced cuts, but I learned the art of whole hog BBQ and Argentinian Asado from youtube! I traveled to Peru and learned about Pachamanca, building a fire, and burying the ashes in a hole with vegetables. Yes, they used to make massive crock pots in the ground, but instead of tasting like an overcooked stew, they tasted like wood, smoke, and earth. Then I thought wow, the FDA would never allow that, and that’s when I discovered Virgillo Martinez. Peru’s most famous chef replicating regional indigenous meals in an industrial kitchen. You may not be able to dig a hole in the middle of a restaurant but you can encase the embers and vegetables in clay and bake them. The day I quit culinary school is the day The Mad Chef was born. I was using the rule book as a fire starter, I was breaking down the barriers and rebuilding them as brick ovens, and suddenly cooking was not a chore anymore, it became my life! 

You see I am not The Mad Chef, The Mad Chef is an instinct that we all have inside of us. The Mad Chef is primitive and natural; it is the part of your brain that gets excited about eating and cooking food. We all have an inner Mad Chef, we just don’t know how to unlock its power. My goal as the spokesperson for The Mad Chef is to help you unlock this inner chef, this instinct, and let it take over! You see, refining food, following recipes, and boiling the nutrients out of delicious ingredients is crazy-stupid. Experimenting and pushing flavors and combinations as far as they can go is madness and madness makes marvels. I am going to make Mad Chefs out of all of you, and your madness will make marvels out of anything you cook!