Tom Colicchio, the restaurateur and a judge on Top Chef, traces his interest in cooking from crabbing with his grandfather to his revelatory discovery of Jacques Pépin’s La Technique as a teenager. From there, Colicchio went on to celebrity chefdom and later became a leader in food-policy reform. He describes this journey in FERN’s latest piece, published as part of a special food issue with Switchyard, a new magazine from the University of Tulsa.
“My father seemed to sense that food was my destiny. That summer, he got me a job at the snack shack at the Gran Centurions Swim Club, in Clark, New Jersey, where my parents were members. I started with scooping ice cream and working the register but soon took over grill duties. I flipped burgers in shorts and flip-flops — the best job I ever had. It’s also where I learned why salt is important. When I added it to a steak, everything changed. Seeing my enthusiasm, my dad brought a bunch of books home from the library at work, including Jacques Pépin’s La Technique. The book was brand new then — I have no idea what it was doing at a county jail library — but there it was, and it changed my life.
“The most important lesson: Lots of recipes simply don’t work. The chef gives you a long list of ingredients and pages of step-by-step instructions, but what if you don’t have a crucial ingredient or you don’t have the right pot or pan? Instead of following recipes, Pépin argued for developing a basic set of techniques to master — how to make a stock, how to skim it, how to make consommé by creating an egg white raft to clarify the stock. Mastering these techniques, one by one, unlocked something in my brain. I thought, ‘Wow, all that text in those magazines that I’ve been trying to get through, all they’re teaching me is how to braise a lamb shoulder?’ Well, now I know how to do that — and now that I can braise a lamb shoulder, I can probably braise anything. It’s all the same technique.”