Teaching Dad to cook his way
My Dad has never learned to cook. It’s not something men of his generation did in Korea. Surprisingly, he expressed interest in learning at the age of 79. So I’ve tried a few times with detailed instructions and elaborate explanations but to no avail.
He needs to cook his own way. I found a hint in his travel habits.
My Dad travels differently.
Dad’s travel guide
Dad loves to travel so much he started a travel agency. He’s been to pretty much everywhere in the world except the North and South Poles.
Over the two decades of travel he has developed three rules. Perhaps he can apply them to cooking.
Stay at locally owned hotels.
On our family trip to Japan in 2018, we stayed at a thousand year-old ryokan (traditional inn) in Kanazawa. Our family name 夫(Bu) was written at the entrance in beautiful Japanese calligraphy. The rooms were immaculately crafted with tatami mat flooring, and our room had an outdoor hot spring tub open to the falling snow. All the guests were given yukata (Japanese robes) to wear around the inn.
Dad did extensive research to curate our stay.
“Dad, when cooking at home, imagine you’re in one of your travel hotels as in Provence or Hakone. Use the nicest plates and silverware. Have good lighting at the dining table. Share the experience with friends and family. Make dishwashing part of the ritual of keeping the home nice like a five star hotel.”
Eat seasonal, local foods.
Dad picked Kanazawa in December for crab season. Our first meal was at a sushi restaurant that opened just for our family, which Dad arranged ahead of time. We had peak season, local seafood that was out of this world delicious, including the prized winter crab. Dad arranged every single meal during the week-long trip. This included a local handmade buckwheat soba noodles place in the middle of nowhere and a tonkatsu restaurant in a shopping mall, crowded with locals.
“At home, take advantage of your knowledge of the neighborhood. Explore the local markets. Talk to the butcher, fishmonger, and baker. You will find people just as passionate about good food as you are.
Ask what is in season and buy ingredients in season.”
Let art lead the way.
Every day, Dad had art on the itinerary, as he likes to instill these experiences into our family’s collective memory. He knows through art we understand the best of humanity and sometimes feel a nudge to be part of the greater human story.
“Embrace cooking as an art. Because it is.”
Cheers!
Dad has an unspoken rule. Enjoy a good drink with food. A good Barolo with steak, sake with sashimi, makgeolli with galbi, and a good lager with burgers.
So here is my recipe for caprese for my Dad. His way.
Italian flag
Caprese is really simple, just three ingredients: basil, mozzarella, and tomatoes. I was taught to make it resemble the Italian flag, the three colors of green, white and red. For best results use fresh basil, buffalo milk mozzarella, and end of summer ripe tomatoes. Recipes instruct us and restaurants reinforce us to slice the tomatoes and mozzarella with perfect precision, but it doesn’t have to be like that.
In fact, trying to make it like the Italian flag just makes it taste ... underwhelming.
Caprese is a love song
My Dad should make caprese like Italian artist Giorgia de Chirico’s “Love Song (1915).” It’s free, creative, beautiful, delicious. So instead of trying to replicate the elements of the flag and having rules about how the ingredients are sliced, I’d rather Dad be playful with them.
Like the white bust, rip and fragment the mozzarella into irregular pieces.
Like the red glove, tomatoes need not be perfect in shape.
Like the painting’s perfect green sphere, use whole basil leaves.
Tomatoes
If end-of-summer tomatoes aren’t in season, buy cherry or grape tomatoes. They are sweeter and provide the acidity you need to make the salad jump. Slice them in half so when you bite into them, you experience the texture of the juicy insides and the crunchy outsides.
Be weird with the shapes like the red glove in the painting.
Mozzarella
If you can’t get buffalo milk mozzarella, which is tough to find outside of Italy, try to find cow milk mozzarella that’s been preserved in water, not plastic. They usually come in a tennis ball size in water. The moisture of the mozzarella makes it taste amazing. Try to avoid the mozzarella in plastic tubes that are easy to cut but less fresh.
If you get fresh mozzarella you will find out that slicing fresh mozzarella is next to impossible. Just rip it with your hands.
Basil
Get fresh basil- don’t use dried basil.
Use the whole leaf. Don’t cut the basil. It will make it turn black and lose color.
Be an artist
Most importantly, I want my dad to feel free to make this salad. He is an inherently creative person. Instead of a stiff Italian flag, he should aim to make an abstract painting of torn mozzarella, whole basil leaves, and chopped up tomatoes. Salt to taste and drizzle extra virgin olive oil. That’s it.
Caprese ingredients
Basil ….. handful of whole leaves
Mozzarella ….. fresh baseball size
Tomatoes ….. cherry tomatoes (amount you can hold with the palm of two hands)
Extra virgin olive oil ….. 1/4 cup. Don’t be shy.
Salt ….. to taste
Instructions
Get a big mixing bowl.
Rip the mozzarella into bite size pieces with your hands. Put them in a big mixing bowl.
Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and put in the mixing bowl.
Place whole leaves in the mixing bowl.
Drizzle extra virgin olive oil.
Salt to taste.
Mix with your hands.
A word on balsamic vinegar
Sometimes the tomatoes need a little help. Balsamic vinegar with the perfect balance of sweet and sour will do the trick.
You can also turbo charge the balsamic by adding some lemon juice and honey (or sugar), then reducing by 1/2 over medium heat. A turbo balsamic reduction. Pour it into a glass jar and cool in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.
Drizzle before serving.
Matter of taste
While searching for a better way to teach my Dad, I learned his way of travel is perfect for cooking. He doesn’t shop seasonal ingredients, he travels to the ingredients. For my Dad, even with a simple recipe like caprese, art must lead the way.
Like travel, cooking is a matter of taste.