Deceptively Simple Japanese Dishes | Anthony Bourdain's The Mind of a Chef | Full Episode

Viewers like you make this program possible support your local PBS station Everything is deceivingly simple in this episode. You can take this off and have two perfect bites Chang visits Japan for some yakitori. So in a way, they're bound by a great food culture the tradition and sushi. I might cry Now it looks like a carnation And Chang eats ramen in total silence Enter the mind of a chef Somebody was gonna put a shiv in my liver Keeping things simple in the kitchen can mean many things Maybe it's paring down a dish to its most basic form or focusing on a single task for years on end or Creating a Zen like atmosphere where the different parts of the kitchen move as one animal Whatever the case may be simple in a kitchen Rarely means easy Take for instance the simple task of grilling chicken on skewers in Japan It's an art that if done right can transcend its humble origins Nowhere is this more evident than here at Birdland where chef Toshiro Wada runs the only Michelin star yakitori restaurant in Japan I'm there today. Yeah, yeah, they cut it through the kidney. Yeah, that's it. They cut it. So I go ahead Chang and his local guide Maoko sit for a meal and a lesson on cooking. I Knew how much I like to eat. Okay, there's a lot to know In general yakitori is seen as street food, right? Everybody can just we're just going to one of the actors for and have a drink and you know some sticks Wasabi You know if you're a son, I'm a sasami. What's going on? It's going to chill for a minute So this is cooked medium rare. So it's nice So it's a bit What's up So no liver my liver I want you to have to tell you I can you soon. Oh, I miss it. So it was she'll day No, so you don't balsamic on the table It's so tasty How are you? Sansho Sansho got to tell you must could be no cow at all. Could you know you could not hold on you could Yeah, I got yeah, yeah, I got today. I think I It's ridiculously good. I'm always fascinated by how the great chefs in Japan, whether it's yakitori or sushi or kaiseki, can just be so focused on doing the same thing. In Japan, there are so many restaurants. So instead of choosing a dish after going to a restaurant, we decide on a dish before we go out to eat. Today, it's yakitori. Today, it's sushi. Today, it's eel. If you go to a restaurant, you're here to eat that. That's when you have to bring it out. So you can't let your expectations get the best of you. But you have to overcome them. So in a way, they're bound by the great food culture, the tradition. Also, you always have to go over it as well. I literally went to learn how to make ramen and noodles. I learned how to make soba and all sorts of different things that I never thought. What I left loving, more than ramen actually, was yakitori. Yaki means fire grilled. I fell in love with the chicken wing. All my days off at work in Japan, I literally would go to a yakitori place in Nagano, and I would order like 20 of them. I'm cutting right down the middle of a chicken wing. So for me, this is like the best part of the chicken. You split it down the middle and cutting around and taking your time to bone out a chicken wing. Now, the beautiful thing about it is we've boned out the chicken wing. So when it's cooked, it's going to be a rectangle. So you can take this off and have two perfect bites. Japanese figured out a way to elevate the lowly, lowly chicken wing. If someone you know does this for you, they're a keeper. They're a real keeper. Being in New York, we're limited to what we can cook with and how we can cook. We don't have that ability to cook it over charcoal. And that smoky flavor, it just really makes things so much more delicious. We were presented with the problem of how do we replicate some of those flavor profiles that we find in Japan. We smoked these over hickory. So in a way, it smells like bacon to me now. I thought that we could confit something. And confit is another way of preserving the integrity of a food product. In preserving it, you can confit just about any meat and store it in fat. This is a chicken wing. The liquid is pork fat. The beautiful thing is through osmosis is the pork fat is now smoky. We didn't smoke the pork fat. We smoked the chicken wings. We cooked the smoked chicken wings in the pork fat. And over a period of time, that fat becomes extraordinarily smoky. A lot of work to clean the chicken wing. A lot of work to cook the chicken wing, which is why when cooks screw this dish up, a lot of people get upset. We didn't have a grill. And if you don't have a grill at home, you can just cook this in a pan. So you take it, your smoked confit chicken wing, and we just want to get color on it. We'll pour this fat out. We're going to glaze our wings. You could very easily just garnish it with salt right now. And very good. We're going to add our chicken wing mix, which is basically Thai bird chili, or tare, which is chicken-infused soy sauce, sake, and mirin. And just glaze our wings. It's nice and glazed. Right when it gets to that point where a lot of the moisture has been evaporated, we're going to add some scallions. So it's got a lot of the elements that you'd find in a yakitori joint in Japan, in terms of the smoky element. Future chicken wings. At the end, I think it's very delicious. And we're paying respect to something that I really have a tremendous amount of respect for. Yakitori. It's easy to get lost and overwhelmed in the madness that is Tokyo. But amongst the chaos, there's always calm to be found. Tucked away on the third floor of a nondescript office building is Sushi Sawada. Here, Chef Sawada is serving some of the best sushi on the planet. One man serving fish and rice to a very few, very lucky people. Simple pleasure on another level. Sawada-san has two Michelin stars. It's just him and his wife cooking for 12 people a day. It's a six-seat restaurant. But what Sawada's known for is his fish. He's known to get up extraordinarily early, be the first one at the market, and get the first, primest, most choice cuts of fish. This is real sushi. It's aged to develop flavor, just like steaks are aged to develop flavor. So it's a misconception that fresh fish- Is best. Not any soy, there's no wasabi extra, anything. Had this, this is when my brain exploded. Magic is about to happen. That's just insane. There's no electricity in his realm. All he has to use are charcoal and ice. This is amazing. How he peels this is insane. So all the goodness of the shrimp is still there. I prefer eating the shrimp head than the shrimp itself. And he figured out a way to peel the shrimp where the gooey guts of the head are still intact. Sushi and it's crap. Yeah. This is not. You like suki? Hokkaido. Yes. So the waters of Hokkaido have arguably the best seafood in the world. And the sea urchin is. Because it's so cold, it's so cold. I might cry. Everything that's pure and right about cooking is what Suat is doing. It is embodied in that restaurant. I left that restaurant questioning everything. It's a sublime, transcendental experience. The kind of quiet, reverential environment you find yourself in at Suat is not easy to come by. Especially in a busy ramen shop in the middle of Tokyo. But anything is possible with a strict policy. My friend Ivan was really stoked to show me this bowl of ramen at 69 Rock and Roll. The ramen has a broth that is based on chicken, salt, and he tops it with chicken fat. Cell phone's off. Yeah, so that's a biggie. One rule in this shop, you eat in silence. Remember, no talking. It's dead silence, and he's not joking around. And as insane as it seems, you just don't talk. The owner of 69, the chef, he's considered one of the godfathers of contemporary ramen. And he is extraordinarily passionate about his ramen and how you eat it, and it's awesome. I think he would be great as a Seinfeld character. This guy is a very proud soup Nazi, but at the end, it's just a very delicious bowl of ramen. Weird. I was like, I'm so full, but I felt like you had to finish the bowl. If I didn't finish it, somebody was gonna put a shiv in my liver. Back in his kitchen in New York City, Chef Chang makes a dish that is simple to make, but easy to mess up. Chicken noodle soup. All right, we're gonna make a chicken soup. My version of chicken soup. We're not making American chicken soup because American chicken soup doesn't taste good. You could just chicken it in whole, but we're gonna break it apart. It's good to know how to do. I don't think butchering a chicken is all that difficult. Basically, wherever there's a joint, that's where you cut along. Probably my least favorite part of the chicken is the breast. The basic element of ramen, it really is chicken. I'm not a historian, and I'm sure someone's gonna tell me you're dead wrong, but I think that the very beginning of popularizing ramen in Tokyo was all chicken flavored before it became pork flavored. So while that's cooking, we're gonna make a veg nage. I think the best way to control the vegetable content in your soup is keep them separated. Two white onions. We have some spring onions. A couple of shallots to reclose the garlic. Peppercorns. Two carrots because they're so naturally sweet. I just want to keep it very simple. You have a chicken, and it's cooked through, but it's not falling off the bone. Let it cool down. Pick the chicken. Once the chicken's picked, we're gonna season it. Season it really heavily with salt, soy, black pepper, sesame oil. We're taking the chicken soup. Very simple. Boil the shit out of it, and you get this, right? We have some of that veg nage that we had. Some salt, soy sauce. We're gonna cook the noodles in the broth. If you don't have fresh noodles, which most people don't, you could throw orzo in there. You could throw rice noodles, vermicelli, spaghetti. Any noodle. It's totally fine. You can pre-plate this. So far in advance, it's insane. And there's so many things you could do. You could put a poached egg underneath there. You could put vegetables underneath. Probably the only thing I cook at home is chicken soup. It's the basis for ramen. It's an important step to understanding what we do as a restaurant at Momofuku, and it's like tying your shoes. You should be able to make this. But you shouldn't know how to make a soup for someone that's sick, your boyfriend, whoever. Girlfriend. Learn how to make chicken soup. It's ridiculously simple. You know when he's doing this dish on the fly, it's true off-the-cuff cuisine, and I have no idea what he's gonna do. It's his interpretation, I think, of a beet salad. If you look at every single menu, the most ubiquitous ingredient is a beet. The only reason why it's okay to have beets in New York City is because chicken sticks are beet. You don't like beets? I hate... How long have you cooked enough beets in your life? Beets are one of the most cliched ingredients that we work with in this country. If you were gonna open up a restaurant in San Francisco and how to put things on the menu, the number one dish is put a beet salad with goat cheese. First course on the menu is really important. Resets people's expectations. It should be a statement about who we are and what people can expect for the rest of the meal. And there should be some element of discovery or surprise and some element of familiarity in it. So I'm gonna take an ingredient that you've seen a million times and do something that you haven't seen before. What we have is beets that have been roasted and then we compress them and reduce beet juice. And then there's a puree of roasted beet and that same beet juice, a little bit of rice wine vinegar. It's a beet that looks like a rose. Yogurt and rose petal ice. So you're taking these beets to a level. Yeah, that's right. So anyway, I'm gonna make one of these things. So there's two steps. The first idea about how to construct this was the typical apple rose, right? Which I didn't wanna do. But for the center, it works really well. So we start with that. And then this, we take different sized things, we punch them out and then slice them by hand. So it's totally analog. So here's a dish like no one will ever copy it. This is why people would just serve a beet on a plate. We roast the beets and the process takes a certain amount of time. Five people go down and work for two hours to do these things. If we put one person on this, they'd be finishing up around like two in the morning. So each piece gets dipped in the beet and it goes into the refrigerator. The flavors meld, it stays together. And then when you eat it, it comes apart in a really nice way. So like it eats well. Now it looks like a carnation. It's beautiful. You ready to plate this thing? We should. All right, let's do it. Bowl is frozen. Yogurt, rose petal ice, rose petals, hot water steeped like tea, lemon. For all my talking, that's a beautiful dish and it's a beet salad that I would like to eat. There you go. Even the simplest seeming dish in a great kitchen requires thought, care, constant reevaluation, constant vigilance. If someone you know does this for you, they're a keeper. They're a real keeper. A great chef is always looking to improve. That doesn't necessarily mean adding ingredients or complicating the process. Just as often, particularly in Japan, it means refining them, stripping away that which is unnecessary. It's an important step to understanding what we do as a restaurant at Momofuku. It's ridiculously simple.