Garden of eatin’: Vegetables provide fertile ground for creative chefs, mixologistsGarden of eatin’: Vegetables provide fertile ground for creative chefs, mixologists

Bret Thorn

Afew years ago, many young chefs were into the gadgetry of molecular gastronomy. Next charcuterie was hot. Then they became infatuated with the simplicity of seasonal produce.

“I’m seeing a bunch of chefs who are interested in cooking from the garden,” says Jeremy Fox, executive chef of Ubuntu in Napa, Calif. “We have a bunch of nonvegetarian cooks who are thinking the same ways about vegetables as they would about meat.”

Ubuntu’s a vegetarian restaurant, so Fox likely gets a less meat-focused group of chefs applying for jobs, but his chefs are not alone in developing a new respect for vegetables.

In part that’s a response to customer demand, says Rachel Klein, executive chef of Aura restaurant in Boston.

“I think people are definitely looking for health-smart dishes, and veggies and things like that on menus,” she says. “For the last couple of years, people have been leaving behind the [starches] and moving more toward the healthy carbs.”

Of course, some of the most popular buzzwords in cooking these days are “local” and “sustainable.” That gives vegetables new luster, and opens the opportunity for chefs to add romance to the menu by promoting the neighboring gardens from which they’re buying their produce.

In the case of Ubuntu, that garden is its own—located about six miles from the restaurant itself. Their gardener, Rose Robertson, picks and delivers the produce three days a week.

Fox says the cooks treat those vegetables with care and respect not just to meet his standards, but to meet their own. At the moment they’re getting ready for the changeover to spring vegetables.

“We’re going to be harvesting our Forono beets soon, hopefully,” he says.

That’s a French variety—long, cylindrical and red. That will be used to make a beet salad with beet purée and what Fox calls beet “dirt.” He juices the beets and adds the juice to the purée. He mixes the pulp with olive oil, sea salt and pistachios in a mortar and pestle, “so it looks like dirt, and it has some crunch.”

“It also has pistachio flavor, which goes great with the beets,” Fox says.

He also is dehydrating vegetables a lot, these days. He makes an asparagus “paper” by puréeing the cooked vegetable, mixing it with egg white, spreading it on acetate, sprinkling some brioche crumbs on it and then putting it in a dehydrator. The result “is like a pappadam,” he says.

That’s part of a dish that also includes raw and blanched asparagus and a terrine of black-trumpet mushrooms layered six times with thinly sliced brioche. Fox admits that dishes like that contribute a lot to his labor cost.

“It takes a lot more labor to do this food than normal,” he says.

At Aura, Klein is preparing a plate of what she’s calling crudités.

It’s not technically accurate, as crudités are raw, and Klein is cooking her vegetables. She’s blanching baby zucchini and different-colored cauliflower varieties and serving them with slow-roasted tomatoes, basil purée, a Parmesan emulsion and garlic. She serves that with arugula for $12.

“I wanted something that was brightly colored for the warmer weather coming,” she says, adding that she wanted to invoke the raw-vegetable tray served at her parents’ parties. “It’s fun to eat, and I like to take approachable ideas that people are comfortable with and put spins on them.”

She points out that the dish is also good for you.

“I’m trying to eat more healthy, too,” Klein says, “but I wanted something with full flavor, and there’s only so much raw fish you can eat.”

Josh Adams, chef of June in Chicago, is also putting his own spin on a classic Korean dish, kimchee. That side dish is best known as pickled cabbage, but in fact many vegetables are made into kimchee, and at June Adams uses Brussels sprouts.

He cores the vegetables, chops them into a chiffonade, rubs them in salt and lets them sit for a day or two. Then he marinates them for another four days in a mixture of rice wine vinegar, mirin, bird chiles, chile paste, garlic and minced red onion.

He serves the kimchee with scallops, risotto made from “bamboo rice,” which is colored green using bamboo chlorophyll, caramelized pineapple purée, and speck.

“Texturally, I like the Brussels sprouts better, and the flavor’s a little brighter,” Adams says. “It also stands up better than cabbage.”

The grassiness of the Brussels sprouts also goes well with the bamboo rice, he says. Vegetables also are finding their way into cocktails. Cucumbers have been a trendy addition to cocktails, especially gin-based ones, for several years now, but at Room at Twelve in Atlanta, mixologist Steven Kowalczuk also is adding carrot, bell peppers and other vegetables to his drinks.

One such drink is a Cognac Carrot Cake. For that he mixes an ounce of Cognac with an ounce of carrot juice, an ounce of cinnamon schnapps and three-quarters of an ounce of ginger-infused simple syrup. He shakes it, strains it and tops it with whipping cream that he has spiked with hazelnut liqueur and sugar and shaken until thick and frothy.

“That replicates the cream cheese frosting on the carrot cake,” he says.

He also makes a drink called the Peppered Carrot. For that he fills the basket of a coffee maker with ground black pepper and brews it as he would coffee. Then he sweetens it to make a simple syrup.

“A coffee maker’s an important tool to make syrups on the fly,” he says.

He adds three-quarters of an ounce of that to the same amount of carrot juice, mixes that with an ounce and a half of rye whiskey, shakes it, pours it into a highball and garnishes it with a grilled carrot.

His Carrot Gingerini is made by mixing 1.5 ounces of potato vodka with half an ounce each of orange liqueur and tangerine-flavored vodka, an ounce of carrot juice, and three-quarters of an ounce of ginger simple syrup. He shakes it, strains it and garnishes it with a carrot stick wrapped in a lemon twist.

Kowalczuk uses bell peppers in his Red Pepper Mohitotini.

“Red pepper’s expensive,” he says, “so you have to use it sparingly.”

He just adds a couple of splashes of red-pepper juice as he muddles the lime and mint to make a classic mojito. Then he shakes it and strains it into a Martini glass, for a more elegant presentation than a Mojito.

“The herbaceousness of the pepper adds so much to it,” he says.