Scratch Cooking

Executive Chef, Bryan Moscatello

I am a firm believer in scratch cooking, I think you should make everything yourself as long as space and equipment permits.  Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of very good artisanal products out there but when you eat house made products compared to their store bought counterparts there is a distinct difference.  That difference may not be a positive one for your product straight out of the gate but the beauty is that you can adjust, refine and tweak until you feel the flavor is spot on. 

With some items say cured meats, it is harder to get the results due to the long curing process but for cooked sausages you can improve as you go by make little tasters before committing the entire batch to casings.  I think it is the control element that makes me want to make everything.  This rings true in restaurants other than your own a perfect example is ricotta cheese. 

I buy a very good fresh product the problem is that when I think of the warm house made ricotta I ate at Ajax Tavern, man that was delicious.  Unfortunately for me I do not have the space to produce the quantity of ricotta I need on a daily basis, so I buy the best I can.  Pasta is another great example of fairly easy to produce but a much higher quality then the fresh industrial produced products that are available.  House made and hand rolled pastas are soft and silky while still maintaining integrity when cooked.  The industrial produced example however seems to be dry and hard.

 Even the bacon that we cure and smoke in house is well worth the time and energy.  I say these things because I believe this is the path to a bigger picture in the local dinning food world.  This is traceability, I like the fact that I know where the hogs came from which we took the bellies, cured them then smoked them and finally ate a great BLT that was served with tomatoes grown by a farming co-op in the Shenandoah valley, lettuce from a hydroponic grower in west Virginia and olive bread made in house at Potenza.

  It’s nice to know for a fact that my burger came from one specific cow on Valentine Miller’s farm.  Having this knowledge is powerful especially when you are tasting this product against many others because you develop a relationship with the farmer by giving regular feedback and through that you end up with a more tender more flavorful product.  Jeff Lawson knows exactly how I like my lambs so he picks out the ones that meet my specifications, and to date his lambs have done nothing but improve.  How does this affect us as a whole?  In my opinion if you know who is growing your food and they are people that are filled with pride in what they produce you in turn will have a better product that you needn’t overwork with outside flavors.  In the end buy from your local farmers, who cares if every tomato isn’t a perfect red globe they don’t taste as good as the misshapen colorful examples any way.

Tags: Mangi