As a chef the further away
you step from actually pulling a carrot from the ground, the more difficult it
becomes to use that product with understanding. Being able to somehow connect to
those ingredients just seems to make sense if it is your job to cook
them. Most chefs today, however, have no connection with the actual
origin of the ingredients for the food they cook: meat, poultry and fish come
pre-portioned in plastic bags with no bones and no unsightly remnants of its
living, breathing past; fruits and vegetables are picked inedible and ripened
along the way losing out on those last weeks of sunshine, rain and fresh air
that allow its natural flavor to develop; spices have lost their shape, now ground and packed in
beautiful shiny tins and colorful labels with aromatic descriptions, and dairy
surely misses its cow.
Traveling throughout
Indonesia, a country that is rich in both culture and natural resources, has
given us the most intimate connection to every ingredient we use in Cuca and
reminded us of so many amazing ones we have foolishly ignored. Products that
are so packed with flavor and character that our job is less of being a surgeon
trying to bring dying broccoli back to life and more like a tailor simply putting
good quality together well.
Drinking coffee in the
mountains where people are handpicking ripe cherries and the smell of roasted beans
perfumes the air, spotting cashew nuts cling from their maturing fruit that
hangs high up in old trees, watching locals stripping bark from young shoots
that when dried becomes cinnamon, video-recording golden rice stalks being smashed
against wooden ramps to shed them of their grains of rice and attending a traditional
ceremony where within an hour a massive buffalo walks in and soon becomes
sticks of BBQ satay. This isn’t a summary of the last five years we spent in
Indonesia, this happened last week. Welcome to Indonesia, where those products (except for the buffalo for now) have become part of Cuca’s recipes.
