Review
Michel Nischan isn't French. He's a child of the Chicago suburbs whose first name made him something of a target on the playground but, eventually, a natural in haute cuisine kitchens. And it wasn't just his name that made his early life the chronicle of a chef foretold. Nischan's parents had fled their respective family farms in the South when industrialization made them obsolete, but the couple preserved a slice of rural life in the middle of suburbia. "In Des Plaines, Illinois, we had less than a quarter acre," Nischan says, "and my mother rented two rototillers from Ace Hardware, dug up the backyard and side yard, and planted what our neighbors called 'the farm.' We had a small brick patio with a couple of lawn chairs and a table and rows and rows of vegetables. My mom taught me how to cook, but the fact that I knew what good ingredients were did more to rapid-fire my career than anything."
Nischan never forgot the magnificence of his mother's fresh vegetables, but for a few years he kept her lessons in simple, pure flavors simmering on the back burner. As a chef at various French restaurants and at his own place, Miche Mache, in Connecticut, he often masked the food's true taste with complex, multilayered sauces. "The French 'mount' sauces with fat, usually butter," he writes in the introduction to his new cookbook, "Taste Pure and Simple," "This means they thicken and smooth their sauces by adding small amounts of fat during cooking, letting the fat emulsify rather than melt, and then add more until the sauce achieves the velvety texture and superrich flavor that have made French sauces famous the world over. I embraced this technique wholeheartedly."
But eight years ago, the Nischans' 5-year-old son, Chris, was diagnosed with diabetes. The outpouring of empathy made Nischan realize how many people around him had diet-restricting health problems. All those diners who time after time would request the same chicken and fish dishes, sauce on the side the "narrow-minded" ones who Nischan wished would "live a little" - were, he says, "ordering food that way because there was nothing else on the menu for them. They were "trying" to live a little."
He decided to cook for them. He got his big chance in 1998, when he was hired as chef for a new restaurant in New York called Heartbeat. As he tried to create a menu with no butter, cream, or saturated fat, he realized that fat was overrated as an imparter of flavor. He saw that if you didn't "mount" a sauce, you wouldn't have to dismount it, so to speak - that is, if you didn't thicken a corn sauce with butter, cream, and flour, then you wouldn't later have to add vanilla, nutmeg, and brown sugar to reawaken the flavor of the corn. Instead you could, from the start, bring out the corn's true flavor by squeezing the kernels in a vegetable juicer (Nischan is really big on juicers) and adding just a dash of lemon and seasonings. Drizzle some of this creamy but creamless sauce on scallops, and you'll be showered with gratitude. Pureed pistachios allow you to avoid processed starch in a simple, rich sauce for roasted chicken. Asian flavors like ginger and lemongrass make a robust yet light sauce for grilled snapper.
Nischan found that piling fewer ingredients atop one another saved time as well as calories, and allowed the main ingredient to sing out full-throatedly. But, he points out, "the less fat you use, themore exceptional the quality of your ingredients has to be." To that end, he left the restaurant and committed himself to bringing organic, healthy food to everybody. With a couple of cohorts, he started the New American Farmer Initiative, which introduces immigrant farmers (Cambodian, Chinese, Latin American), with their own growing techniques, to successful small farmers. The organization then links the farmers to chefs, who order their produce. It's a clearinghouse for farmers, and, he says, "the field is the warehouse."
Nischan dreams of the day when "you'll go through an entire produce section in the grocery store and find only local lettuces." Meanwhile, like his parents, he's never quite gotten over leaving the farm and is going to some lengths to reclaim it, recreating his childhood homestead at his house in Fairfield, Connecticut. "Right now it's costing me an arm and a leg and a sex organ to feed my family organic food," he says. "That's why I have to get this farm running, man." A farmer in preppy Connecticut named Michel: "C'est le destin," - O Magazine
Formerly the chef of HeartBeat restaurant at the W Hotel in Midtown, Michael Nischan is known for recipes that make the most of flavors without much butter or cream. Relying mostly on heart-healthy canola and grapeseed oils, as well as rich stocks and reductions, every recipe seems to be designed to get maximum flavor with. Be forewarned -- you'll need a juicer. -New York Post
Product Description
Contains 80 of Michel's favourite recipes for appetisers, soups, salads, main courses and desserts.
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