Sights in the Mercado Publico

Some photographs of the mercado where I shopped for my most recent private chef gig.  Post to come soon on cooking a vegetarian dinner for my clients.

Maduros Fritters

One of my favorite things to eat here is called maduros.  It is simply ripe plantains deep fried and it is sold at just about every fritanga, or street vendor.  A perfect maduros is deeply caramelized on the outside to the point of chewiness and is soft and hot inside.  It must be straight out of the frier because after a little sitting they harden.  When I came across a bunch of yellow plantains at the grocery store, I figured it was time to do my take on maduros- in the form of fritters.  I first boiled the plantains, mashed them with an addition of chocolate cookies and cashews.  The filling was a bit dense and one note, so I tried to lighten it and add some tartness with yogurt.  I made a beer batter with mesquite and honey to fry the fritters in.  Mesquite has kind of a smokey- chocolatey taste and mixed incredibly well with the beer.  For a sauce, I juiced a pineapple and mixed it with yogurt for some tang and freshness.

I really loved this dish, as it was crispy and all the flavors worked very well.  However, it may not have been the best representation of maduros as it didn't have the best part: the caramelized plantain!  If I was to do this again, I would pan-fry or even roast the plantains to caramelize them before being battered and fried.

Back to the line...

In my last update in the kitchen, I had been moved from the hot line to work with sushi.  It had been a slow learning process, but nonetheless I was happy to be gaining a new set of skills.  After service one night, Albert and Abraham told me that I would be moving back to the hot line.  But this time, I would be in charge.

At first I was upset that my sushi training had been cut short, but looking at the big picture, I now think this was a move for the best.  Being responsible for all the preparation, cooking, inventory and closing of the station will be a better learning experience than continuing in sushi where the majority of my work is centered around preparation.  Its also a definite bonus to not be under the constant scrutiny of not doing things in the exact way/ order as Abraham, but to be judged more on a basis of the final dish.

Perhaps the most valuable part of this shift is the line experience I am receiving.  Although the hot foods are very simple preparations, they still require much of the same skill-set that would be needed to execute a much more complex menu, namely, speed and timing.  Here was my first challenge as head of the station: I received an order for two chicken teriyaki's and a chicken ton katsu to a single table.  These two dishes only have three components:  Chicken (one in the frier, two on the stovetop) rice and vegetables.  However each component has a different cook time.  

Here is a step-by-step outline of what must be done to ensure that all components come out at once: make sure water is on its way to a boil for vegetables- get a pan on the stove heated with vegetable oil- season each piece of chicken- place two pieces of chicken skin side in the hot oil and cover- coat the chicken for the ton katsu in flour, egg wash and panko and place in frier baskets- take out three portions of vegetables (just broccoli and carrot)  grab three plates and teriyaki and ton katsu sauce- turn the chickens skin side up- drop the ton katsu in the frier- place carrots in the water- place broccoli in the water (broccoli cooks quicker than carrot)- scoop rice on each plate- remove chicken from pan to rest on cutting board- take vegetables out and season- plate vegetables- remove tonkatsu from the frier- cut all three chickens and place on appropriate plates- finish the plates with a pinch of sesame seeds over the rice and sauce over the chicken.  

While being creative and having a good palate/ sense of flavor (what I would consider my strengths) are attributes that separate a good chef from a great chef, these are characteristics that only matter in the kitchen once you have flawless organization (one of my weaker points) and some serious chops on the line.  When looking for a cook, most chefs couldn't care less how creative or inspired a candidate is.  It is much more important for the prospective cook to be able to flawlessly crank out one of the chef's dishes consistently twenty-five times over the course of one night.

Day Off Meal

Most chefs like to cook simple food on their days off.  This is because in their restaurants, they get to cook their own food with the full resources of the kitchen.  Being a cook and not a chef, however, I do not get to cook my food in the kitchen.  Therefore, I like to use my time off as well as my private chef gigs as a sort of creative outlet.

My favorite way to cook a meal is to simply go to the grocery store or mercado and see what speaks to me. Once I get a couple ingredients in my basket, I start to conceptualize the rest of the dish around these components.  I got a taxi (for 50 cents!) about two hours after the public market had closed, so I opted for the grocery store.


The first ingredients to catch my attention were beautiful purple potatoes and very long string beans.

This got me thinking about fall ingredients (at least in Chicago) and I grabbed butternut squash.  I decided to grab some hearty steaks to stand up to the vegetables.  At this point I remembered one of my favorite dishes from Sage Grille (where I staged during my Senior year of High School) : Venison with a sweet potato pure and juniper sauce.  This became my inspiration for the meal.  I wanted that tart flavor of juniper with the sweet squash.  Since there are no juniper berries in Nicaragua, I attempted to emulate this taste through a sauce of balsamic vinegar, dried cherries and chicken stock (future post to come on the importance of making stock). 

Once home, I tasted the mysterious purple potatoes (raw).  Tasted like a cross between potato and jicama!  After pan roasting them, the potatoes lost much of their vibrant purple color which had initially attracted me.  However, they tasted great and their sweetness really came out when cooked.

I Marinated the steaks with canola oil, onion, balsamic, lime, parsley, garlic and ancho chiles.  Sauteed the squash with cinnamon and blended with yogurt.  The puree was very tasty and had a velvety texture.  The fault of this dish was the steak being slightly chewy.  Next time I cook beef here, I will make a point of tenderizing it first.  However, I totally captured the flavors that I can still distinctly recall from the Venison dish at Sage- a victory in my book.

Visuals of me in my apartment and Sushi Q

Getting up for work

 My apartment

Slicing pepino (cucumber) in the mandoline

 Albert and Me

Miscommunication in the Kitchen

Being an American with very limited Spanish in a Nicaraguan kitchen, there is bound to be a certain level of miscommunication.  However, I have become increasingly frustrated with what I have grouped into two basic types of miscommunication.  The first, is the obvious language barrier.  Sometimes, Albert will ask me to do something in rapid Spanish, and I'll just stare at him with a blank face and say no comprendo.  This normally leads to a minute of Spanglish between the two of us until I have somewhat of an understanding of what he wants me to do.  Other times, I will think I know what he wants, and once I do it, I will get an earful of "por que?" (why) or "no quieres apprendar" (you don't want to learn).  Many times this can be as minute of a mistake as grabbing the wrong cutting board.
The second type of miscommunication is essentially personal preference.  Both Avraham and Albert are very adamant about doing things in a very particular order and specific way.  However, I often find they teach me to do things not necessarily because its better but because its the way they do it.  So often Albert will ask me to do something- I will do it the way Avraham has taught me- and Albert says I am doing it wrong.  One similar instance is when I was cutting the string off a beef negamaki after cooking it.  I placed the knife under the string and pulled up.  "No, no no, cortar aqui"(cut here) he says- and demonstrates by by cutting the string downward on the side of the meat.  As I proceed to cut the string the way he showed me, chef Q walks in.  "Adam, you're butchering the beef!"  Cut it like this- he cuts it the exact way I was cutting it before being corrected by Avraham.

Update: Where I am Now in the Kitchen

So, when I started at Sushi Q, I was working the cooked food station.  Every day I would prep tempura batter and egg wash for tempura frying.  In addition, depending on what we were low on, I would boil and shock quail eggs then wrap them in bacon, chop cabbage and lettuce for salad, cook rice, devain shrimp for rolls or break down chicken for teriyaki.  I enjoyed these tasks, but typically only two or three of them were needed per day which left a lot of down-time after prep and before service.  I also wasn't crazy about seeing so much of the frier, since the majority of cooked food orders are the fried components of rolls.
However, one day out of the blue, Albert told me I would start my training for sushi.  The first day, I literally did nothing but watch him work.  Since then, first and foremost, I have prepared countless amounts of wasabi- ginger plates.  In addition, when it gets busy, I will often plate and sauce the sushi. The majority of my work, however, occurs during prep.  I arrive before albert to clean and set up the station.  This starts by taking the fish out of the refrigerator, making sure it is fresh and putting it in the sushi display fridge.  Next, I cut cucumber into long, thin strips for sushi rolls, peel and slice avocado, prepare spicy tuna, red snapper and guacamole for our spicy tuna napoleon special and wash (3x) and cook sushi rice.  Once in a blue moon, Albert will teach me something like how to make a sushi roll- which will go to customers- or nigiri- which we eat.  It's certainly a gradual process, but it's progress nonetheless.

My new job: private chef

So, an interesting new track opened the other day.  In addition to my work at Sushi Q, I will now be starting as the private chef for Ben Sandzer-Bell, CEO of CO2 Bambu, a company which builds low-cost post disaster bamboo homes.  My first task was to create a three course meal for his family and two investment officers of LGT (the social impact finance fund of the prince of Lichtenstein).  I was asked to use as many Nicaraguan ingredients as possible to give the dinner a local/ Latin American theme.  The first curveball arrived about thirty minutes prior to dinner.  I was just about finished when I received the news that the investors plane was cancelled and the meal was rescheduled for the next day.  Luckily, I had chosen two of three courses that could essentially be made completely ahead of time (and a quick desert) so all went fine.

First course- Chilled curry corn soup with lime, mint oil and sweet chili sauce

Right when given my task, my first thought was to start with a soup.  Soups are well within my comfort zone and its a great way to start a meal.  To me, the perfect soup is a small portion, packed with flavor  and ideally with a crunchy/ textural garnish.  I cooked the corn in coconut milk along with the bare cobs for extra corn flavor.  The coconut milk gave the soup a very nice richness/ creaminess, cut by the acid of the lime.  My one critique of the dish is that the corn kernels on top were slightly on the chewy side (as opposed to crunchy).  This was probably because they were cooked the day before and reheated.  

Second course- Chiles en Nogada

So there's obviously nothing groundbreaking about stuffing a chile pepper.  With that said, there's something to be said for a classic dish and to me nothing says classic Mexican food like a Chile en Nogada.  Although every Mexican region/ cook will have its own version, the typical Chile en Nogada is a poblano pepper stuffed with meat, fruits, raisins, tomatoes onions and nuts with a crema and walnut based sauce.  For fruits I used apple peach and dried cherries.  For the meat, Chef Kevin from Imagine hooked me up with some beautiful cornish hens.  I brined them overnight in a mix of salt, honey, cinnamon bay leaf and garlic and roasted them the next day.  The sauce is made of ground walnuts, cream, goat cheese and nutmeg.  The tartness of the sauce is nice with the sweet stuffing, but since both aspects are pretty rich, I made a simple salad of greens and tomatoes with a lime vinaigrette to be served family style.

Third course- Caramel bananas with a sea salt nutella chocolate sauce and walnuts

So, I've been playing with savory flavors in caramel for the last week.  Salt really brings out the flavor of caramel, so I have some fish sauce in there as well as a touch of chili sauce.  The addition of the chili sauce isn't to make the dish spicy per se, but to give it a hit of warmth. If you're not particularly looking for it, you may not even notice it.

So, my first private chef gig was a hit.  It was a lot of preparation ahead of time, but this ended up working in my favor. 

First Impressions: Sushi Q - my new "kitchen family"

I arrived in San Juan Del Sur on Friday, the 26th of August (ya I know I majorly procrastinated this blog), and had arranged to meet chef Q on Saturday at 1:00.  However, San Juan being the small town that it is, I wound up running into him in the street.  He told me to come by that night.  As soon as I stepped into Sushi Q (which is literally a stones toss from the ocean), Chef Quesada greeted me and took me into the kitchen to meet my future coworkers:  First off is the sushi chef, Albert.  Chef Q had "hand-picked" him from a sushi restaurant in a hotel in Managua and from the get-go made it clear that Albert is next in charge after himself.  To make matters more interesting, Albert also had an extra room that he was looking to rent out, so for the next few months until I find my own place I will also be his roommate.  Next is Abraham, who is in charge of the cooked food station (where I will be joining him).  Abraham previously worked at Pelican Eyes resort as a bartender.  Last in the kitchen is Alvaro who helps with some prep and washes dishes.  Chef Q asked me when I would be ready to begin.  We had previously agreed on September 1st (this coming wednesday) but my answer was "whenever you're ready for me".  "How about tomorrow morning at 10:00?"  done.  After introductions, I sat down with my family to have dinner.

From vision to decision: how I found myself working in a sushi restaurant in Nicaragua

For the past few years now, I have been toying with the idea of becoming a chef.  Cooking is my passion, and I find myself spending a great deal of my spare time checking out food-related blogs and reading my constantly growing collection of cook books.  My senior year in high school, I staged at an upscale progressive American restaurant near my house.  Two years later, and I am finished with my Sophomore year at the University of Texas, with no additional restaurant experience.  I love college life and living in Austin, however the experience feels slightly unfulfilling.  I didn’t have the same passion for my classes as I did for life in the kitchen.  


That summer was when I decided I needed to make a major life decision.  I would not return back to school, but get a job working in a restaurant.  At the time I was reading Grant Achatz’s autobiography Life on the Line.  One of the things that resonated with me and may have aided my decision process was the tremendous  work ethic and focus toward a single vision that Achatz possessed.  Here I am with similar aspirations to Achatz, yet doing nothing to make my dreams a reality.  The only question remaining was where.  Being a counselor at a camp in Wisconsin made this process quite difficult.  I wrote emails to about 12 or so restaurants in Austin that looked interesting to me.  After getting exactly zero responses, it became clear the only way to land a job would be through a face to face interview.  I only had a couple more weeks to decide whether or not I was enrolling at Austin, and if I had chosen not to enroll but to spend the year in Austin anyway, I would have been risking being jobless and out of school.  

On somewhat of a tangent, rewind one year-  I am in Granada Nicaragua, visiting my mom and step-dad, Ben (who live there) over winter break.  I meet a Nicaraguan chef who has run quite a few restaurants in Miami and Georgia.  He goes by "Chef Q" and tells me he has plans to return to his home country and open a sushi restaurant.  At this point, who knows whether these plans will materialize, but I expressed my interest and took his card.  Remembering this exchange, I decided to contact Chef Q to see what was going on with his restaurant.  It turned out, not only had he just opened, but he had an available position in the kitchen.  The combination of learning a new cuisine, living in another country, learning spanish (crucial in just about any US kitchen) and being a part of a new restaurant seemed like a winning combination.

This blog will be about my experiences working at sushi Q.  Along the way, I also hope to shed some light about what inspires me as a chef (in training), what I'm cooking on my days off/ ideas I'm playing with and current culinary news and trends.