Improvisation and the Rule of Yes
We further explored improvisation in the kitchen over this past weekend. We had the pleasure of conducting an exploration of tastes and flavors (a cooking school) with one base rule, we would say yes. Aki and myself believe in an intimate setting with limited numbers inspiration and improvisations are weaved together.
In order to facilitate our process, we began with a few base recipes: egg yolk pasta dough, Guinness bread and pizza dough. After working through these basics the kitchen became an interactive performance with ingredients and the methods of preparation. Only one element was constant, the word yes. By saying yes and traveling down rarely visited culinary paths our kitchen became and improvisational theatre. And, at the end of the day, it was Aki and I who learned the most.
We made, created, were exposed to or discovered with the help and influence of our cooking contemporaries: stinging nettle and almond pesto agnolotti with animal farm ricotta cheese (thanks to diane and the cows), vanilla-soy and meyer lemon soft boiled egg mayonnaise, chorizo-black trumpet mushroom-aged gouda pizza, artichoke eggs benedict, smoked tomato-mushroom ragout, whole fish grilled on a bed of sugar cane, fig and dried cranberry compote with extra aged gouda.
There is and was more, but at the end of the day our success came by saying yes.
