Hands-On, Hands-Off

Hands-On, Hands-Off

One of the more disturbing things I recently saw in my garden was a huge and beautiful clump of lettuce. Why disturbing? Because I hadn’t planted this lettuce; it was a volunteer. Having grown from a seed that wafted into a currently unutilized area of the garden, it was three-times as big as any of the lettuce I had carefully watered and weeded.

Could it be that by lavishing attention on intentionally planted lettuce that I was actually inhibiting its growth? Was I maybe watering it too much? Perhaps messing with it when all it wanted to do was grow in peace. Was my undue attention screwing everything up?

During a recent segment of Kevin Pang’s “Cheeseburger Show” when Gary Wiviott is explaining how to cook burgers, he cautions that the patty should be placed on the grill and that backyard chefs should avoid “futzing” with it: pressing it, turning it too soon or too often, or otherwise unnecessarily getting between the meat and the fire that makes it so delicious.

Oddly, this same warning not to futz was issued by Grant Achatz in a video about a turkey cook that he did last autumn. . It seemed to me ironic that Achatz would propose a hands-off approach when he exemplifies a very hands-on approach to culinary creation: few people manipulate food more than Achatz. In Chicago what is variously called “Molecular Gastronomy” or “American Progressive” represents a highly manipulative school of cooking, and practitioners like Bowles, Cantu and others use a range of technologies to transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, like turning a goose liver into a lolly or carrot juice into a soft-ball sized spheroid. It’s adventurous; it’s fun; I like it.

In the hands-off camp, there’s a growing cadre of Chicago chefs who seem to pride themselves on doing less, restraining the chefly impulse to futz with the food. I’m thinking of chefs like Levitt, Virant and Kahan, who seem to focus on more traditional foods, and by” traditional” I mean foods most people ate about 100 years ago: locally produced, not overly mediated chow that looks like what it is – a pork chop is clearly a pork chop; it’s not gasified, gelled, weaponized or whatever. In “noninterventionist” restaurants, excellent locally grown food is frequently presented with minimal embellishment so as to enable the natural goodness of the stuff to shine through. It’s simple; it’s satisfying; I like it.

The lettuce – the stuff I didn’t plant but just grew like a weed without my supervision – was the best lettuce I tasted from my garden. I find this disturbing, but I find it comforting that in Chicago, you can go hands-on/hands-off in dinner choices and be very happy either way.

A ceramicist friend of mine once taught me how to throw a coffee mug on the wheel. When it came time to add the handle, she held firm on technique: tack it on at two points, add a little slip, and leave it alone (i.e. no futzing).

I've often seen this functioning as a metaphor for other aspects of my life, cooking included. It's interesting to see a similar philosophy playing out among our best chefs.