Chef-y Recipes

I called a recipe chef-y the other week—I think it was this one—and one of my Experimental Supper Club buddies asked me what I meant by that. I thought about it and said something like, “A chef-y recipe calls for like 2 more hands, 4 more ingredients, and 8 more hours than you’ve got.” I still think that, but I also think I should clarify because not all famous chefs dish out chef-y recipes, and not all complicated recipes are chef-y.

I mean, sure, you can’t swing a dead cat through the French Laundry cookbook without hitting a chef-y recipe. Or Modernist Cuisine for that matter. Or any Noma cookbook. But that’s those chefs’ style—very French and technical. On the other hand, you have chefs like Neil Perry, whose Rockpool restaurant was on the World’s 50 Best list at one point, and whose recipes taste like it but often have no more than 4 or 5 ingredients. That’s the opposite of chef-y; that’s alchemy—the ability to turn a roasted red pepper, a splash of red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper into gold.

On the flip side of the coin, there are a lot of very complicated traditional recipes, particularly in Asian cuisines, that I don’t consider chef-y. It takes weeks to make kimchi; months to make katsuobushi, and it’s so tricky that if you don’t do it right, you can poison yourself and your loved ones. Not to mention the dozen varieties of Chinese tofu from silken to dried and the hundreds (thousands, more like) of Indian curries. Why aren’t they chef-y? Because they’re not excessive. You get out of exactly what you put into a good kimchi or a complex curry of freshly toasted and ground spices. Even on the French side: you’ll get more out of a precise brunoise of confit fennel than you ever will out of one of my hack jobs, I guarantee you. Complexity or technique doesn’t equal chef-y. Chef-y recipes are about showing off—your sous vide machine, or your army of prep cooks who diced and salted and strained 20 lbs of matsutake mushrooms into a consommé for you, or your gold leaf, or your starter made from the tears of Instahipsters who couldn’t get a reservation at your pop-up.

I don’t know: maybe chef-y recipes aren’t about showing off, maybe they’re about OCD. Who am I to judge? Maybe you have to hit “pulse” on your food processor exactly 13 times to feel OK about the size of the cold butter pieces cut into the flour you put in the freezer for 13 minutes. That’s all right, and it’s all right that you put that in your cookbook. Just don’t be offended when I de-chef-y it, when I cut 3 ingredients and 6 hours out of it because I’m not a famous chef, no one’s following me on the Insta, and I can get it to the table an hour quicker and $20 cheaper and nobody sitting at that table (and they’ve got some good palates, let me tell you) is gonna know the difference.

And while we’re on the topic, that enoki bloom recipe? You can totally use powdered turmeric and ginger (or gingerale) in the aioli, and you can skip the brining step, or just use that leftover orange juice in the fridge. That turns it from a recipe you’re never going to make (because have you tried microplaning 4 inches of turmeric root into a quadruple-layer cheesecloth square? Yeah, don’t.) into one that you might actually make and enjoy on the regular. You’re welcome, chef-ies.