So much of what I have to do in a restaurant kitchen goes above and beyond the necessity of an ordinary kitchen. This fact often becomes a blanket statement that allows for the run-of-the-mill foodie to disregard something I might make as being above their comprehension or ability. Quite the opposite.
So much of cooking is utilization of your surroundings, here, in America and the West as a whole, have so much available in our surroundings. With that said I can make an oven for pizza with a single burner, a pot, and a sheet pan. Not the best pizza I've ever made (it was compared to Pizza Hut...I died a bit inside), but I made it work. The idea of utilization is the best aspect of cooking. Nutrition, experimentation, satiation are all nice aspects of cooking, but they are end results; utilization is the process that one gets to the end result.
The reason I am harping on utilization so much is that I see such a lack of utilization in this country. We are inundated with the best of the best products to the point that we forget where one gets sense of accomplishment and love and purpose and, of course, utilization. I am not the best teacher of cooking, but I can show anyone how to prepare a simple dinner that will astound even the most indentured of culinary minds; the catch being an overwhelming choice of simply prepared, prepackaged, pre-butchered, precooked food items. I think Thomas Keller (proprietor of two of the best restaurants in the world, Per Se and The French Laundry, along with many other great restaurants) put it best when he said: "It's easy to cook a filet mignon, or to sauté a piece of trout, serve it with browned butter à la meunière, and call yourself a chef. But that's not real cooking. That's heating. Preparing tripe [offal], however, is a transcendental act."
The term offal is a blanket word used to encompass the entirety of parts of animals we, as Westerners, usually throw out. It goes beyond organs to also take into account cheeks, tongues, brains, feet and tails.
Meat does not come in a Styrofoam container, nicely dressed in plastic wrap, and all dolled up for your eyes to ogle at. Meat is meat, a fact many Americans have disconnected from and allowed veils to placed between them and the origins of their food products as a whole - not just meat.
Before the advent of commercialization of food, before what I even understand how a kitchen should operate, before any of that the best cooks were peasants. The rich had the filets, the rib eyes, the chicken breasts, fresh fish, the butter, the cream, the truffles, the game, they had the best of the best, while the peasants were given what was left over: the feet, the tongues, the organs, the tails; but damned be all if they were not going to make those items delicious. Those former items take very little time - a quick sear, cook it to appropriate temperatures, and serve it, easy - in doing so they take very little care and love to properly prepare it. Those latter items take a lot of time to cook, many tricks of the trade, a lot of patience, a lot of love to create them (in case you're wondering how much time and patience Thomas Keller's recipe for beef tongue takes four weeks to cure before cooking it for twenty four hours - that's patience...and yeah, it is definitely worth every second.)
This also takes into account utilization. Slaves in the South were given the intestines of the pigs after their masters were done with the pork chops. Now we have chitlins (a good recipe here) one of my favorite things in the world. Utilization also taps into the Native American principle of using every piece of the animal they killed: the skin as tepees, bones as utensils and weapons, fur as clothing and so on. The last piece of information is, for me, the most important as it represents something that resonates with me. I have no problem with vegetarians, but whenever we at the restaurant get someone who is vegetarian its hard to switch gears and try to accommodate (we're just asking for a little heads up that's all!). Most of the time when I ask as to why a person is a vegetarian they say the same thing: "We treat animals so poorly here." Which is wholly true, partly because we throw away so much of the animal so, at the end, we need quantity over quality. Every cow can only give us one tenderloin for your beloved filet mignon (which, honestly, is my least favorite cut, give me short ribs any day!), there are only two breasts on each chicken, each pig can only give 26 bone-in pork chops that are too small to satisfy any American.
When a chicken is killed it can weigh anywhere from 6 to 12 pounds or even higher. Let's pick the round number of 10, a chicken is killed and it weighs 10 pounds. Remove the head, feathers, and feet; next take out organs and chuck those away as well; separate the breast from the rib cage, separate the legs and thighs as well, and there really is no reason to keep the bones so they'll be garbage too. What's left? Two breasts, two thighs, two legs weighing (at most) 5 pounds. Name any industry that plays middle man from beginning raw product to end product. Got a name? Good. Those in that business would gawp at the prospect at losing fifty percent of their product just because that's just how things work. You won't stay in business for long. (And yes, there are great recipes for every part of those 'garbage' parts of the chicken even the cockscomb) Not only from a humane perspective but from an economic perspective does using every part of the animal makes more sense.
This whole prose was not just a plea to try and experiment with utilization of an animal, but, also, a plea to cook at home for God's sake. I do recommend easing yourself into the offal world by finding a bistro in your area (any self respecting bistro will have some form or another of offal on their menu, try tongue or cheek to ease the transition even further), after that become great friends with your local neighborhood butcher (these days they need the friendship more now than ever) and get the freshest organs or tongue you can and give it a go. A word of warning: there is one thing that can disgust even the most avid offal eater and that is overcooked livers or kidneys. With that said I can only cover so many things in a single post so for more information please read over the book The River Cottage Meat Book. This book is one of the most important culinary books of the last two decades, many of the topics in his book I have touched on, but he will be able to go into great detail and provide AMAZING recipes for you to try at home. Also, a great chef by the name of Chris Cosentino has a blog devoted wholly to this matter.
Almost every run-of-the-mill restaurant will feature chicken breast, filet mignon, and pork chops on their menu and why shouldn't they? They're all popular and the restaurant can get money from it. But it is your job (I'm looking at you America) to change what is popular. Soon, I hope, I can get chicken livers and pigs' trotters on every menu - I know they'll be on mine.
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