The evolution of a dish

The new year has started, we have a new president and as a restaurant guy I'm trying to come up with ideas to get new customers and keep my existing ones with new dishes or new ideas. Sometimes you create dishes because of something you read, or maybe something you saw on television or you tasted something. Many times it is an idea which might have hit me while walking through the farmer's market or talking with other chefs. Seasonal be it produce or proteins, sometimes traditional food combinations sometimes combinations based on the land where the food was raised and the grapes were grown. These ideas start and sometimes sit with you for a long time before the right time comes along and you can use it. The sweet corn tamales morphed into a side dish of grits with corn and asiago cheese served with pork and a pinot sauce.
You hang out with friends and experience different cultures and foods and you store that and along the way something comes up and a dish materializes. New Years Day I was lucky enough to tag along with my friends Abe and his wife Sarah and got to experience the foods of a traditional Japanese New Year's Day with their friends in the hills above Beverly Hills. The wood burning oven on the patio allowed me to experiment with our pizza dough as well as beets and duck confit. Hopefully the ideas which I have been kicking around will grow into a dish.
A recent trip to Washington D.C. and a visit to an Indian Restaurant called Risakka introduced me to a great bar snack-- popcorn. Of course this one was seasoned with cumin, chile powder, coriander and fried curry leaves, a little spicy, great and unusual.
Which brings us to Fried Chicken. We were searching for a dish to serve Sunday nights at Sage on the Coast ( Eastbluff has Stroganoff). Something along the lines of the barbecue rib dinners we served during the summer. Comfort food for hard times.
In August I cooked a dinner for my friend Joe Davis's birthday in the central coast wine country with Henry and Michele Salgado from the Spanish River Grill in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Henry had worked with Edna Lewis in Atlanta and had learned to make her legendary fried chicken. We decided to make this chicken as one of the dishes for the party. I followed Henry discreetly notebook in hand and tried to write down as much as I could. The dish was a two day operation or maybe it just seemed that way. He brined the chicken overnight, rinsed it and soaked it in buttermilk. Meanwhile he seasoned some lard in a "rondo" with a ham hock, or maybe two. After the ham hock cooked through on low heat,he seasoned the chicken with the secret flour mixture-or was that potato flour?- and then began the frying process. Helped by our new found drinking buddy, Bradley Ogden, we were able to cook 50lbs.of chicken quarters successfully for some of the best fried chicken I've ever had. Better yet we shredded the ham hock and added it to our slow cooked greens.
So with this experience under my belt I set about with Chefs Kris and Adam to come up with our own fried chicken tradition. After a few false starts ( the beauty of this dish is even the mistakes still taste pretty good) we have begun the process and I think are on our way to a dish that, while not legendary will still be pretty darn good.So far we have studied brining and learned about the inticacies of buttermilk and when we have finished we will have created our own version of something similar to what I ate with Henry, though the ambiance of that occasion might never be recreated.
Some of the things we have been thinking about besides the process and the flavors is how we are going to cook the chicken, with bones( traditional) or without bones (due to our time constraints in the kitchen). How is the portion going to look, how big is our serving size? Who is resonsible for assembing the dish? What are the sides going to be? How will it look? What do we do with the leftovers besides employee meals. We after all are in a business and need to utilize as much of the dish as possible to sell to our customers. Our major concern is that it tastes great but all of these other thoughts go in to creating a dish. Timing in the kitchen and how many steps a dish takes is important when you are trying to create your menu. You need to balance the different stations in the kitchen so one section doesn't get "slammed" and force everyone else to lose their timing. Kitchens get out of synch and customers end up waiting for their food way longer than is desireable.
We are now working on our product figuring we will unveil the dish the Sunday after the Super Bowl. I will continue to update during the next few weeks and hopefully you will be able to come and taste the finished product.