This
episode is all New York.
Chef David Chang goes shopping
in Chinatown...
You put this in
Whole Foods, people are going to
complain.
...visits a farm
upstate...
They're cute as a
button.
...shucks oysters
We asked a oyster farmer to grow
us the largest oyster shells possible.
...hangs with his
pals, chef Rich Torrisi and
Mario Carbone...
Do you have any
rolling pins?
We use bottles around here.
So sweaty.
It's going to be a long
morning.
...and travels all
the way to Tokyo for a taste of
New York.
It almost tastes
like I'm at the old Second
Avenue Deli, but if it opened
up in Tokyo.
Enter the Mind of
a Chef.
New York.
Possibly the toughest, most
competitive, brutally critical
environment to open a restaurant
anywhere.
We chew you up, we spit you out
because we can, because it's
what we do.
It's also David Chang's home.
It's a real trip.
I opened up the restaurant in
2004.
I didn't think that anybody
would care.
It's where he made,
in the space of just a few
years, his success and his
reputation, backing brilliantly
into greatness.
It's almost like when
you see Conan, and you watch him
and he's, like, king.
You go, like, "How did that
happen?"
He was a slave boy.
I've always wondered what Conan
would have thought.
While he's pondering on the
beginning of the movie, like
this, it's, like, "How did
this happen?
By Crom, how did this happen?"
So, that's sort of what I feel
like.
Not that I'm king or
Conan.
For both visitors
and New Yorkers, Chinatown is
one of the best neighborhoods to
be lost in.
Because at the very least,
chances are good you will
stumble upon a restaurant with
amazing food or wander into a
market with wiggly things you
never knew existed.
For Chef Chang, wandering
the markets in Chinatown
is equal parts nostalgia
and inspiration.
We're at Hong Kong
Supermarket.
It would be great if there
was one in every town because
where are you going to find
duck tails, duck feet?
You put this in Whole Foods,
they are going to die.
People are going to complain and
you're going to have to tell
them pigs have hearts, too.
Great stocking stuffer.
Dried mussels.
Asians love tubed fish cake.
It's weird.
That's a bet.
Can you eat this entire thing in
an hour?
Either way, you win, you lose.
Oh, my God.
A whole wall of dried seafood.
This is like a childhood memory.
I grew up eating this stuff.
Dried squid.
When you bring this to school
in your lunchbox, as like a
second-grader, because your
mom doesn't know any better,
you're going to get picked on.
That's not fair, man.
And then you have friends,
friends would come over and
they'd go to school the next
day and they're, like, "Dave's
house smells like crap."
Mentally scarred.
Pure sliced grapes advertised.
Ingredients: sliced ginger.
God, I wish the FDA would work
like that.
This was the genesis of
our ramen soup.
We bought this as a joke and
then we tasted it and we were
knocked on our ass.
Ah, wait, here we go.
This is my favorite.
Favorite thing in the whole...
There's no questioning what's
in here.
Monosodium glutamate.
Sometimes you can use totally
ridiculous products, and they
give you inspiration.
Trying new stuff, it just
triggers something in your
brain.
Why is it that the moment you
hear MSG, you know that the
context is going to be
that there's a problem of some
kind?
And it turns out to go back
to a letter to the editor in
the New England Journal of
Medicine back in the late '60,
early '70s.
The letter came from a doctor
who didn't have any particular
expertise in MSG chemistry, but
the doctor had noticed that
friends of his would go to
Chinese restaurants and
sometimes have a similar cluster
of symptoms... a headache, a
feeling of being flushed, of
being feverish, just general
discomfort.
And he called the set of
symptoms the Chinese Restaurant
Syndrome.
So what happened was that the
media picked up on this.
It went overnight from being a
question to being, if not a
fact, then at least very likely.
In fact, MSG is a natural food
ingredient that's found in many
of the foods that we love that
are seldom if ever found in
Chinese restaurants.
So if you love tomatoes, one of
the reasons you love tomatoes is
that they contain much more MSG
in them naturally than many
other vegetables.
If you love aged parmesan
cheese, or if you love an aged
steak, the reason you love those
foods is that the aging process
breaks the proteins down into
amino acids, MSG included.
So aged parmesan cheese, aged
beef have some of the highest
levels of MSG of any food we're
going to eat, and that's part of
what makes them delicious.
Eating is a very complicated
subject.
Diet is a very complicated
subject.
In the case of MSG, the record
is clear.
There is no evidence that
MSG causes the symptoms
that were initially suggested
as being part of the Chinese
Restaurant Syndrome.
Neighborhood
boundaries in New York are in
constant flux.
Take Little Italy.
Once completely Italian, it's
now slowly being swallowed by
Chinatown.
But here at Torrisi Italian
Specialties, chef Mario Carbone
and Rich Torrisi embrace this
change and create something
completely their own.
We've known each
other a long time.
Welcome.
Buongiorno.
Like Chang, they
embody what's so amazing about
the New York food scene today...
young chefs drawing inspiration
from their backgrounds and
infusing that with the
ingredients and flavors they
find around them.
We're here today to
make a couple dishes.
They're going to do their
Italian stuff, and I'm going to
do what I do, which is...
Which is what?
American.
Maybe more Italian American than
what you guys do.
Ah, here we go.
It's going to be a long
morning.
We're making fresh cavatelli.
This dish is called
cavatelli P.S. 46, it's where I
went to school.
A public school in New York
City where you got beef patties
twice a week, and it was because
there was a lot of the workers
back there were Jamaican.
It was a cheap thing for the
schools to make for you.
The recipe is six egg yolks, a
cup of flour and this one's got
curry in it.
So it's a little funky, kind of
what we do.
Some of what we do here is
the dishes are based on classic
New York influences in dishes,
most often street food.
So this is almost like making
dry pasta.
You know, it can't be too wet,
otherwise it will get clogged up
in the machine.
So it's kind of crumbly and it
gets forced through this machine
so that it can dry really
easily.
It just kind of needs to be
pressed, so it needs to be
a real kind of thin strip of
pasta, because as it goes
through, it presses it out.
So, curry cavatelli.
All right, so this is the
ragout.
What's in the ragout?
This one's a beef ragout,
because it's a Jamaican beef
patty.
Lots of onion, some fresh
tomato, kind of Indian flavors,
sofrito, like Caribbean,
Scotch bonnets, ginger, garlic.
Sofrito is just a foundation
of the recipe, you know.
It's that building of flavor.
It's that first thing that
hits the pan.
So pasta, it's about five,
six minutes, which seems like
a long cook for these fresh
noodles, but like I said,
they're really thick and they're
compressed, they're dense now.
But that's part of the game.
That's part of the action, is
the chew of the pasta.
The beautiful yellow color
emulates the golden shell of
a proper Jamaican beef patty.
It's paying homage
to your childhood.
It's paying homage to New York
City.
But at the same time, it's
paying homage to all the flavor
profiles.
And you're doing something
that's very Italian, it's
being respectful to Indian food,
curry.
So this is New York State
goat ricotta.
And then aged goat cheese from
the same goats.
Now a little bit of Scotch
bonnet.
And that's the dish.
This dish looks
amazing.
And now Dave is going to
teach us about Asian noodles.
We're going to make
alkaline noodles.
You have your flour, you've
got a little bit of sodium,
a little bit of calcium
bicarbonate.
So basically this is kansui.
And all of Asia uses kansui.
They add it to the water
and it lowers the pH in
the water.
And it's sort of a magical
thing.
When we first opened up, we
weren't using alkaline noodles.
We were using fresh Chinese
pasta.
But after a while we started to
incorporate alkaline noodles and
our ramen got much better
because they weren't falling
apart.
It was literally because of the
pH change in the water.
That's it.
So keep on kneading this for
about ten minutes by hand.
Do you have any rolling pins?
No, we use bottles around
here.
Really? Seriously?
Seriously.
Okay.
You guys are.
He's so sweaty.
It's going to be a long
morning.
How you doing over there?
I tried to cut it like
an Italian would, which is very
irregular, and then you're
allowed to say, "Hey, it's
rustico.
It's okay to be imperfect.
That's life."
Oh, nice job.
Hey, Chang!
With the pinot grigio bottle.
So sweaty!
We had made our own
ragout.
But I figure that the flavors in
their ragout might pair better.
Just like how they transported
us to Italy and India,
we're going to use the same
ingredients and transport us to,
hopefully, to Kuala Lumpur and
Italian America.
Just chopped chilis, there's
some dried beef, pork.
That's a lot of chili.
Now these are dried
anchovies and some chopped
scallions.
The pasta.
You know what's crazy is you
actually added the most Italian
ingredients to that dish than we
did.
As I said, I'm
just trying to channel my inner
Italiano.
I'm going to steal again
their mise en place.
Nice.
And a poached egg.
And we're going to go slow
poached.
We've now taken Asian
ingredients and made a dish that
I think is homage to the
chili pan mee I had in
Kuala Lumpur, but also to
southern Italy.
It's a beautiful thing.
Torrisi wants first
dibs on that.
But if this is New
York today, what did it used to
be?
Long before pizza, pretzels,
bagels or bialys, the original
New York food was the oyster.
They were ubiquitous,
everywhere.
Cheap and available all along
the waterfront, in the streets.
At one point New York's Hudson
Bay Area contained more than
half the world's oysters.
We exported them across the
globe.
We ate them by the scores.
We were Oyster Town.
And it was glorious.
So we wanted to do a
dish that was based on what
Indians would have been eating
before 1492.
So we know that New York, the
island of New York, had berries,
had lots and lots of shellfish,
tons of fish, game, all this
stuff.
But what they did love and what
was a delicacy was oysters.
We asked an oyster farmer in
Long Island to grow us the
largest oyster shells possible.
So, we're going to roast these
giant oysters from Long Island.
You don't want to hammer the
oyster.
You want it just so the juices
are still in there.
It's all the natural oyster
liquor.
Do not throw that away.
We're going to transfer it from
here onto a salt bed.
We smoked cherrystone clams to
preserve them, and we just
boil these clams with water.
What we get is this clam
essence.
Very smoky, very clammy.
Clammy in a good way.
We took burnt onion powder and
we mixed it with some chestnuts
and acorn flour, which is going
to add just a little bit of
bitterness because there's a lot
of sweet and fruity elements
in this dish.
We're going to add to the liquor
blueberries and freeze-dried
strawberries.
Here we have some chickweed and
you have wood sorrel.
So, that's the dish.
Very simple.
When you live on an
island slammed together with 1.6
million people, it's easy to
forget that the food you're
eating comes from places like
this.
I think that people
need to be much more cognizant
of where their food comes from.
It doesn't come in a plastic
wrap.
People don't want to even think
about that something died.
Let's keep it sterile and fake.
About a hundred
miles outside of the city in
Jeffersonville, New York, the
Hahn family raises many of the
animals that are served in
Chang's restaurants.
You know, when you look at a
farm, it seems like it would be
so relaxing.
Romantic and
glamorous.
It's not even... it's hard
work, it's stressful.
Come on, Daisy.
But it's satisfying when it's
done.
They've been teaching
myself, and the guys from the
restaurant, all the hard things
that go into making food happen.
It's shaped the philosophy of
how we do our restaurants and I
just wanted to be here and show
people where, sort of, at least
I learned a lot about farming.
Heifers!
And this is one
thing I love about the Hahns.
They love their animals.
Hi, honey.
And they know every
name.
This one here is Daisy.
Daisy's his favorite.
Janice's got a lot of history
here with us.
Her name is Sasha.
She's a great mother, she's
got a great disposition.
I don't think people
realize each pig has a different
temperament and a different
taste in terms of muscular and
fat content.
And it's really not quantity
that we're after, but we want
the quality in the animals.
We're very careful of what's in
the feed.
We wouldn't feed it if we
wouldn't eat it.
It's a huge difference
if you see a commodity farm,
confined pigs, it's stressed.
If it's stressed, it's not
going to taste delicious.
But this is hog heaven.
They only have one bad day.
I love 'em.
Across the globe.
Tokyo, Japan.
Even here, the influence of New
York can be found.
Ramen fanaticism in Japan rivals
barbecue in the U.S., with
glossy magazines profiling new
styles and techniques and
treating chefs like rock stars.
One such chef is native New
Yorker Ivan Orkin.
He's bringing the flavors of New
York City into the heart of
Tokyo at his popular shop Ivan
Ramen.
So we're here at Ivan
Ramen.
You opened this place in what
year?
2007.
I had come back to Tokyo in 2003
after a ten- or 15-year hiatus
and it was at the beginning of
the ramen boom and I started
eating ramen a lot, obviously,
and I was really impressed with
the double soup shio ramen.
The double soup or, as
I call it, the double dip, or...
Take two completely separate
soups and put them together.
And, so, because I was so
intrigued by the double soup
shio ramen, I decided that
was the one I wanted to lead
with.
In my case, I do a whole chicken
soup.
No vegetables, nothing, just
nice chickens from a special
chicken region.
And I blend it with a
katsuokonbu miboshi dashi.
Ivan is a special
character.
And Ivan, in Japan, has become
sort of this culinary Japanese
ramen renegade.
I decided to come up with a
sofrito and it's basically an
onion, garlic, ginger and
apple.
And you cook it like a
sofrito, like a blond
sofrito?
Yes, I cooked it
for about seven hours.
That's interesting
that you're using sofrito, a
staple of Tuscan cuisine, as
your base for a Japanese soup.
Right.
Right now he's
captured the minds and
imaginations of the dining
public because what he's doing
is flashy in the ramen world.
Is it going to be amazingly
epic?
I don't know.
Now, the hardest thing, also,
is sort of measuring out all the
stuff and coming out with the
right portions.
Ivan is adding
something very non-kosher, which
is a lot of pork fat, but then
he's adding something that is
very Jewish in cuisine, and that
is schmaltz, which is chicken
fat.
The schmaltz here yields out
of my chicken soup.
I love that you're
just... you're cooking with
schmaltz.
Yes.
I mean, nobody knows.
All these people have no idea
that I'm secretly sort of
feeding them Jewish food.
But, uh, you know.
For me, I know.
I love it.
So, we do... I add a
sprinkling of this stuff in
here.
Katsuobushi, and I got it
in the powdered form that I also
blend with another kind of salt.
This is a technique
that was not available when I
was in Japan.
Ivan's broth is unique in that
it's majority chicken based.
His is sort of like a Japanese
pork, kosher chicken soup
without the matzo balls.
I heat my meat just in water,
you know?
And I'll tell you why.
With all the other stuff
going on, I think it really
works to have the noodles and
the soup really be the
main attraction.
And then I have the noodles
here, which we make upstairs.
This is actually a 58% bread
flour.
Which is a hard,
hard wheat.
Yes.
And then you're mixing
it in with the local udon flour,
which is traditionally a very
soft flour.
The whole idea of mixing the
flours is to get the right
texture with the noodle mixed
with the kansui.
Right.
And I also wanted a noodle that
cooked very quickly.
34-second noodle...
And then we have these
hosaki menma.
Those look amazing.
Yeah, they taste like a
bamboo shoot.
And the egg, which I'll show
you, which I really obsessed
over.
When I was a kid eating ramen in
Tokyo, my favorite thing was
putting that egg on your
little... and, you know,
slurping some of the yolk.
So I think we're
long-lost brothers.
Yeah.
So that is, uh, my
hanjyukutamago shio ramen.
These noodles are
really perfect for the broth
because every bite's perfectly
seasoned.
It literally picks up the
flavors.
For me I only have one real
ramen rule here.
The noodles have to slurp and
the soup has to stick to the
noodles.
When you eat a bowl of ramen
that's really unsatisfying, I
think it's when you get
naked noodles in your mouth.
This is delicious.
It almost tastes like I'm at the
old Second Avenue Deli, but if
it opened up in Tokyo.
No naked noodles here, just a
kick-ass bowl of ramen.
New York City.
Everything and everybody comes
here.
And a lot of times we turn right
around and sell it back to the
rest of the world.
It's easy when you live here for
a while to think you live in the
center of the universe.
You don't, of course.
Not by a long shot.
But looking around, it's a
forgivable delusion.