Hot chef, meme sensation ‘Salt Bae’ to open restos in London, New York

If you’re well versed on the latest trends that the internet and social media has to offer, chances are you’ve stumbled upon a video of a suave-looking man expertly filleting and sprinkling salt on a slab of meat.

After his clip was shared on Instagram, the internet quickly dubbed him as the eccentric and sensual chef “Salt Bae”, but in real life, Turkish restaurant owner Nusret Gökçe is just a simple man with a burning passion for cooking meat.

The viral pony-tailed chef, who co-owns the global Nusr-et chain of grill houses, has since become one of the most popular memes of 2017—with his clip reaching 8 million views and even gaining 2.5 million followers on Instagram.

His magnificent salt-sprinkling pose has been imitated online in several spoof videos, while his likeness was even printed on T-shirts worn by celebrities like pop star Rihanna.

Gökçe’s sudden popularity has even reached a global scale and was immortalized in graffiti in Melbourne.

Banking on his recent name recognition, “Salt Bae” will reportedly expand his business and open branches in London and New York over the next few months, according to Business Insider.

Despite not knowing any foreign language apart from native tongue, the proud father of nine is optimistic that he’ll be able to “communicate with people through meat.”

The internet sensation also said he’s amazed of his sudden fame and even shared the story behind the salt meme.

“That move at the end [salting] came automatically,” he was quoted as saying in the report. “I did not do that to show off. It is just my signature. You can think of it [as] a kind of final touch for a painting. It was a final touch to the meat; I was blessing the meat.”

Gökçe added that his videos online were mostly shot by his staff, in an effort to promote his restaurants.

Although most people would see him as ”uncouth,” Gökçe is incredibly modest and shared that he came from humble beginnings.

“I am the son of a mine worker. My father and mother [are not literate],” Gökçe shared. “I cannot go to school due to financial difficulties. I started [working for] a butcher as an apprentice when I was 14. Meat has become a passion for me.” Khristian Ibarrola

source: technology.inquirer.net

Steamed fish with lime sauce

For readers who like a tangy broth with their steamed fish

Several years ago, in a Thai restaurant somewhere in Pasig, my friends and I had a fish dish which I thought was absolutely heavenly.

The fish was laid over a simmering broth that was bewitchingly sour, spicy, sweet and savory all at the same time—a rare, perfect balance of flavors.

Made with limes, chilies, garlic and a touch of sugar, the broth was kept bubbly hot by a flame placed underneath the fish platter.

The restaurant has since closed, unfortunately, but I’ve never forgotten that dish. Whenever I dine in a Thai restaurant I look for it in the menu, hoping to recapture once more that enchanting tangy flavor.

Perhaps the best one I’ve tasted so far is the one at Tamarind—a Thai restaurant in SM Aura, where it’s listed on the menu as “pla manao.”

Other Thai restaurants also serve pla manao, but the taste of the broth is different. Maybe it’s because, lacking a supply of limes, these restaurants use lemon or calamansi instead, which isn’t the same at all.

Real limes have an emerald green interior, contain no seeds and have a unique flavor all their own. Even their fragrance is so inviting, their whiff hinting not of sourness but, strangely, of sweetness.

Limes are so enticing and can be used to enhance so many recipes that I wonder why nobody imports them to Manila. Or, for that matter, why we can’t grow our own limes here, like they do in Thailand. A substitute for lime would be dayap, but there doesn’t seem to be an abundance of dayap in Metro Manila, either.

To get my supply of limes, I buy them whenever I travel, or I cajole friends and relatives living overseas to bring me some whenever they come to visit (the limes from Australia are particularly good).

Recently, during a trip to Hong Kong, I swiped some limes from the breakfast buffet which were scattered nonchalantly around a bunch of fruits (if they knew how rare these are in the Philippines!).

As a result, I was able to cook pla manao at home, using those precious limes.

Here’s the recipe, for readers who like a tangy broth with their steamed fish. I hope they’ll be able to find their own source of limes like I did.

Steamed Fish with Lime Sauce
1 large whole apahap (seabass)
Coarse salt
1 whole head garlic, peeled and crushed
8-10 stems wansuy (coriander)
Water, for steaming

For the lime sauce:
1 tbsp finely chopped garlic
5 tbsp white sugar
5 tbsp patis (fish sauce)
½ c fresh lime juice (from 3 to 4 limes, see tips)
1/3 c water
1-2 siling labuyo (bird’s eye chilies), optional
For garnish:
Wansuy leaves
Chopped garlic
Bird’s eye or long chilies

Clean the apahap well, removing the gut and the scales (you can ask the fish monger to do this for you when you buy the fish). Cut two diagonal slits on both sides of the belly and near the tail of the fish. Rub the fish with coarse salt, then rinse well.

Insert some garlic cloves and wansuy leaves inside the fish. Prepare the steamer, making sure there’s enough water in it. Arrange the fish in a heat-proof plate and place it in the steamer. Cover the steamer tightly.

Steam the fish over medium heat for about 15 minutes (depending on the size of the fish). Check the fish after around 15 minutes.

The fish is cooked when the eyes have bulged and the flesh of the fish is white and flaky (should not be glassy). If it is not yet cooked, continue steaming for a few more minutes.

When the fish is cooked, take it out of the steamer and remove the garlic and wansuy leaves.

Transfer the fish to a clean plate. Pour half of the lime sauce over it and garnish with wansuy leaves, garlic and chilies. Serve the remaining lime sauce on the table. Serve immediately.

To make the lime sauce:
Combine the garlic, sugar, patis, lime juice, water and chilies (if desired) in a saucepan. Heat for one to two minutes. Pour half over the cooked fish and serve the remaining sauce on the table. Garnish the fish with wansuy leaves.

Cook’s tips:

Green lemons are not the same as limes, but they can be used in this recipe, too (though the taste will be slightly different). A better substitute would be dayap.

Make sure you use wansuy, not kinchay, which may look similar to wansuy but has a very different taste and aroma.

You can also cook this with lapulapu, mayamaya or any whole white fish.

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

Learn a New Dish With This Red Beet Risotto Recipe

The weekend is always a good time to experiment in the kitchen. For tonight, we suggest for you ace a rice dish by preparing some risotto. This Italian dish will make you think twice of our local staple and may just help you whip up a dish when your friends decide to come over.

Red Beet Risotto with Flank Steak
Ingredients
1 tbsp onion, minced
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup meat stock
1/4 cup arborio rice
3 tbsp beetroot juice
2 beetroot bulbs
1/4 cup broccoli
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
1 tbsp all-purpose cream
300 grams flank steak
Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation
1. Peel the beetroot and cut them into small cubes (around 1 cm).  Set aside.
2. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, add olive oil, and sauté onion and garlic.
3. Add the beetroot, broccoli, and uncooked rice. Mix continuously.
4. Pour the beetroot juice, cream, and meat stock and stir until mixed well. When the mixture is almost dry, add more stock and let it simmer for around 15 to 20 minutes or until cooked.
5. While waiting, season the steak and start heating the searing pan. Add olive oil and sear the steak for around two minutes each side. Once cool, slice into bite-sized pieces.
6. When the rice is cooked, turn off the heat and add parmesan cheese into the saucepan for a creamier texture.
7. Place the risotto on a plate, add the steak on top, then serve.

Source: Charlie Carbungco for Northern Living, “Paint It Red,” February, 2015.

Photo by Patrick Segovia

Brazilian Helena Rizzo named world's best female chef

LONDON - Brazilian chef Helena Rizzo, of the Mani restaurant in Sao Paulo, was on Tuesday named Veuve Clicquot's World's Best Female Chef for 2014.

Rizzo, who last year became the first winner of Veuve Clicquot's Latin America's Best Female Chef, will receive the award at a ceremony in London next month.

She takes the award from Italian Nadia Santini, who cooks at the three-Michelin-starred "Dal Pecatore" in Canneto sull'Oglio, Lombardy.

Rizzo apprenticed at Spain's El Celler de Can Roca, currently rated as the world's best restaurant.

She opened Mani with her husband, chef Daniel Redondo, in 2006. Their specialty is an interpretation of classic Brazilian Maniocas baked and served with a foam tucupi sauce, coconut milk and oil with white truffle.

"I am not and have never intended to be 'the best female chef in the world'," Rizzo said of the award.

"I hope that this award makes the gastronomic world open its eyes to the work of female cooks and to the wonderful kitchens we have in Brazil."

The list of 2014's top 50 restaurants will be announced on April 28 at a London reception organized by British magazine Restaurant.

El Celler de Can Roca last year knocked Noma from the top spot. The Copenhagen restaurant, run by Rene Redzepi, had won the previous three years. — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

Mango Tree updates the meaning of ‘Modern Thai’

Mango Tree has amassed a loyal following in the two years it has been in the Philippines. Its secret is offering a healthy mix of the traditional and the modern along with a dose of good, old-fashioned Thai hospitality, Filipino style.

The first thing people notice is that the restaurant is modern, lacking any of the usual decor that marks the "usual" Thai restaurant. Modern interiors that focus on comfort and style reflect menu choices—dishes that have roots in Thai home cooking, but many of which have been updated for modern times, most of them recipes taken from the kitchen of the founders themselves.

Pitaya Phanphensophon, CEO of Coca Holding International Co. Ltd. is a second-generation restaurant owner. He started Mango Tree in Bangkok in 1994, later opening its first overseas location in London in 2001. “Growing up in a restaurant environment taught me how to please people, at least with hospitality, and obviously, we are a bit choosy and picky in food,” he says. “The first thing they taught me about the hospitality business is ‘you should give your customers the best value’ because we were taught that money is hard to make, hard to come by. When people spend, they want to make sure of its value.”

Pitaya, who is very active in menu development, takes great pains to say that he is not a chef. “I keep insisting on that because I think that chefs who have gone through proper training deserve recognition. It’s not like anyone who can cook well can call themselves a chef,” he explains. “I learned [how to cook] from my mother. My mother was a very good cook. She’s the eldest daughter and in the Chinese [household], she cooks for the family. She learned from my grandmother, that kind of thing. When you ask her for a recipe, she says, ‘A bit of this, a pinch of that,’ that’s how I learned how to cook.”




He takes great pride in Mango Tree’s menu, having tweaked the dishes to appeal to an international audience that is not afraid to spend for quality. “We always introduce what’s available locally…[In the Philippines], because you have good seafood, you have good beef, we introduced rock lobster to our menu. We listen to our customers, what they really want.

“We always start our Thai food a bit mild, entry-level. Having spicy food is like a drug addict. You have to go a bit, one notch up... We introduce different presentations, we introduce different plating, we introduce cuts of meat into our food. That makes us different from others, not to mention that we always use fresh ingredients. We never use frozen. We don’t cut corners.”

Mango Tree’s new menu items include their version of massaman curry, a Malaysian-influenced Thai dish that CNNGo listed as the number one in the article World’s 50 most delicious foods. “We introduced Massaman with short ribs and potato,” Pataya says. “If you look at it, there is no Thai dish with potatoes. That’s why when people ask me how authentic our Thai food is, I say, ‘We can’t claim that we are Thai a hundred years ago. We are modern, evolved.’”

The restaurant also plays with everyone’s favorite soup Tom Yum Gong, using locally available rock lobster in place of prawns.




Pitaya takes time to talk about how he draws on the soup’s history to create Mango Tree’s version, explaining that the soup originated as a dish for royalty, made with river prawns that gave the otherwise clear soup a bisque-like consistency. “As time passed, these dishes went from palaces to the countryside where you cannot find the prawns with big heads, so they added milk into it to thicken it,” he says. “This is why I keep on insisting that Tom Yum should have clear broth. That’s how we do it here, unless the customer requests otherwise.Obviously, rock lobster doesn’t have that kind of head, but it still gives you a different texture, a different experience.”

The Yam Pu Nim substitutes the catfish in the traditional catfish salad with crispy soft shell crab. “We decided to put it together to deliver something different in terms of texture and taste. They’re going through the elements, spicy with a bit of sour from the salad, but then you’ve got that bit of crispiness from the soft-shell crab,” Pitaya says. “For me, traveling the world and seeing different Thai restaurants, one thing I feel sets us apart is that we innovate this way—we’re always trying to introduce new things to our customers, and that comes primarily from [number] one, our passion. Number two, we have such a loyal following, we want to give them something else.”

Mango Tree’s forward thinking when it comes to Thai cuisine extends all the way to dessert. “You will see our dessert menu is not typical Thai desserts,” Pitaya says. “It’s obvious that traditional people would rather see Thai desserts on the plate, but our experience tells us that a lot of these Thai desserts are not palatable to many foreigners, so we introduced chocolates, panna cotta, cheesecake. I feel that desserts should be sweet to cleanse the palate. With Thai desserts, with sweet, you get salt, with savory, you get sugar, so you never know when your meal ends—that’s why we adopted  European desserts. At least when customers leave, they may not be happy with everything—you can’t be happy with everything—but at least they remember that Mango Tree gave them something different.”

This mindset of innovation and modernization has obviously been successful, with Mango Tree growing to 40 branches in 9 countries, the latest branch opening in India. According to Pitaya, the secret to Mango Tree’s success is no secret at all. “The things that we do that bring us success is being honest to our customers and delivering on what we promise,” he says. “When they come here, they find that the food is different from other Thai restaurants that they have experienced. They come back.” — BM, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Chef Richard Toix offers delicate plating artistry, Michelin-starred cooking

Most children dream of becoming a doctor, lawyer, or even an astronaut when they grow up, but Richard Toix was not like most kids; he knew that he wanted to be a chef someday.

He discovered his love for food at an early age, and during his teenage years he secretly applied to a culinary school without his parents’ permission. His tenacity to enter the culinary world to hone his cooking skills has led him to what he is today—a Michelin-starred chef.

A pinch of passion and a dash of determination

Toix, who recently spoke to Manila journalists on Skype, is a native of Perpignan in France. He got his culinary education at Lycée Hotelier, then moved to London to do more training with the Roux brothers at their three-Michelin-star restaurant. He returned to France when he was around 30 and worked for various restaurants before opening his own establishment.

It was in 1993 when he and his wife, Laure, launched their first restaurant, Le Champ de Foire in Lencloitre. They opened another restaurant concept in 2007, Passions et Gourmandises, which offers traditional French cuisine presented in a modern way.

Barely a year after the Toixes opened Passions et Gourmandises, the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star, an honor for any chef.

Chef Richard said that he likes to work with the season, to ensure the freshness of the ingredients he uses. He also makes sure to support local suppliers, as sustainability in cooking is also important to him. In his restaurant, the menu changes every month and the degustation menu changes every day, depending on the availability of produce and other ingredients in the local market.





With over 20 years of culinary experience, Toix has mastered the art of food fusion, which diners may perceive in his artistic plating presentations. In 2010, he collaborated with Zhou Tiehai, a Chinese contemporary artist, to fuse painting with traditional French pastries as part of a grand exhibition.

Even after decades of being in the culinary world, Chef Richard says that he continues to wake up with a smile on his face, as his passion for cooking has not wavered.

A week in Manila

Manila’s gourmands will have the opportunity to sample his world-class cuisine when he visits the Philippines to cook at The Tivoli from February 24 to March 2. Food connoisseurs may either partake of the business lunch or the six-course degustation menu.

His menu includes potato black truffle croustillant with brown butter, lapu-lapu filet, crabmeat avocado cannelloni and shellfish vinaigrette, and lamb loin in seaweed crust, lemon pâte and garnish.

His culinary creations might be too pretty to eat; make sure to feast with your eyes first to fully appreciate the artistry of Chef Richard Toix. — BM, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

U.S. celebrity chef Paula Deen explains use of racial epithet in deposition

U.S. celebrity chef Paula Deen, known for her high-calorie Southern cooking, admitted in a deposition that surfaced on Wednesday that she has used racial slurs but her attorney says she does not tolerate prejudice.

A former employee of Paula Deen Enterprises, Lisa Jackson, is suing Deen and her brother Earl "Bubba" Hiers for racial and sexual discrimination in the work place, and the video-taped deposition was related to the suit.

In the deposition, Deen, who is white, was asked if she had used the so-called N-word, a racial epithet directed against African-Americans, to which she responded: "Yes, of course."

She said she had used the epithet when describing, probably to her husband, how a black man robbed a bank where she was working. She said had used the word since, "but it's been a very long time."

The lawsuit filed by Jackson alleges that when discussing with Jackson plans for Hiers' 2007 wedding, Deen said she wanted a "true southern plantation-style wedding" and used the slur to describe the black men she would want serving at the wedding dressed in white shirts, black shorts and bow ties. In the deposition, Deen said she referred to the race of the servers as black.

The celebrity chef whose recipes have been featured in cookbooks and on popular Food Network shows was also asked if members of her family had told jokes at home using the racial epithet.

"I'm sure they have," she said in the deposition, made on May 17 in Savannah, Georgia. "My husband is constantly telling me jokes."

When asked if she was offended, she responded "No, because it's my husband."

The plaintiff's attorney, S. Wesley Woolf of Savannah did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Deen's attorney Bill Franklin of Savannah law firm Oliver Maner LLP, declined by email to discuss the case with Reuters because it was pending in court but has said Deen did not find epithets acceptable.

"Contrary to media reports, Ms. Deen does not condone or find the use of racial epithets acceptable," Franklin told CNN on Wednesday. "She is looking forward to her day in court." — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com