Chef Laurine's Stew

© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE

I’ve never done deconstructed food. It doesn’t really interest me. It seems over-thought, with little consideration for pleasure or sustainability–an intellectual style of cooking that lacks character or soul. I understand that to deconstruct is to break down, to dismantle, but I can’t figure why you’d take something apart if it isn’t broken in the first place.

If you asked me, I’d tell you I can cook pretty much anything…so long as my heart is in it. Maybe that’s where this week’s task challenged me: present a classic dish, deconstructed in a new way. In my case, fish and chips. It seemed contradictory, to ask us to be creative, but classic, constructing in deconstructing.

I devoured the best fish and chips I ever had with a friend late at night alongside a cold beer, after working a long shift. I remember it feeling so well-deserved. Fish and chips should always be eaten that way, late at night in a hungry fever, out of a plastic red basket. Doing a deconstructed version not only seems silly, it’s just not food I’d want to eat. It doesn’t hit the spot without the context.

Fish and chips is a traditionally British preparation where the fish is fried in a batter, served with a large pile of fries (“chips”), malt vinegar and lemon. Such simple flavors are hard to deconstruct beyond their already essential components, so I turned to the traditional condiments for inspiration, which as an American, includes tartar sauce and ketchup. In my brainstorming phase, I had no idea we’d be judged by Toby Young, the very British food critic, and he very well could have torn me apart for including the ketchup and tartar elements on my plate. But lucky for me, he noted that Brits also love the sweetness of ketchup and the mayonnaise based tartar sauce with their fish. A small relief!

So in addition to the fish and the potato, I included in my deconstrctionist’s pallette: oil, beer batter, malt vinegar, sugar, tomato, vinegar, mayonnaise (egg + oil), pickles, capers, parsley and lemon. And I had a bit of experience to guide me in selecting the fish, which is always to smell fish before purchasing. Matine had just been eliminated for bad fish, cod specifically, and since my dish traditionally uses cod as well, I inspected the available cod thoroughly with my nose.. It smelled off, and I immediately suspected it to be the same fish that sent Matine packing. Thinking on my feet, I opted for the halibut instead.

I wanted to oil poach the fish instead of frying it, as a twist on the original, and intended to make round chips of potato with parsley pressed between them for the more traditional fries. I planned to do a sabayon with malt powder, crispy bits of beer batter and a string of the remaining ingredients from the ketchup and the relish: sugar and vinegar poached cherry tomatoes, pickled zucchini, a lemon confit and fried capers. It was a fine plan.

I blame a bad quickfire and the potatoes, the chips, of the fish and chips, for my breakdown that day. The chips were an absolute disaster, either soggy or burned to a crisp. And this was without a doubt, my least favorite day in Vegas. I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep, the stress, the feeling of missing my life or the fact that I was being asked to deconstruct my food, but I felt like it was me who was getting deconstructed. I was done. Done with the show, done with the challlenges, done with the people. I wanted to pack up and go back to San Francisco where I loved to cook for people who love to eat my food.

When I entered the kitchen the day of the elimination challenge, Mike Isabella and Mike Voltaggio were plating their food. I watched as Mike Voltaggio carefully placed that Caesar salad on his plate–truly an inspired dish. I will be the first to say, he is a truly talented inventor in the kitchen and was clearly the most comfortable with the deconstruction challenge. Isabella, on the other hand, was still struggling to understand Eggs Florentine. Before I could think too much about any of it, I started to heat the oil for my poach.

Very quickly, the oil was too hot and I had to wait for it to cool down enough to poach, which never actually happened. With ten minutes remaining, I cautiously lowered the fish into the oil. It cooked in a matter of minutes and was very overcooked. Laying out all the ingredients beside the two chips per plate and the overcooked fish, I knew I was in trouble but I placed each part carefully on the plate and lined up every component in a dotted straight line. Effectively, this erased any lingering cohesion among them and that’s how they headed out to the dining room. Looking back, I don’t know why I plated like that. I would never put ingredients meant to be eaten together, so far apart.

This challenge pushed me outside my comfort zone in such a way that I lost sight of myself in that food. I lost my direction, I lost my sensibility, and I ended up breaking my own rules to comply with the rules of the game. I escaped elimination, but left judges’ table feeling broken down, knowing I needed to regain my perspective on food and sense of myself if I had any hopes of sticking around that kitchen.

And I happen to make a great fish and chips. The kind you eat with beer.

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