Chew on This

When the Culinary Institute of America invited members of the Dining Services team of Penn State University to attend its upcoming Flavor, Quality & American Menus forum, held in Helena, Calif., on the CIA’s Greystone campus, Corporate Executive Chef Bill Laychur jumped at the chance to attend. The conference, also hosted by the University of California, Davis, consisted of four days of speakers, chef demonstrations, a farm tour and networking. Here, Laychur talks about what he took away from the conference.

“It was very interesting. There were a lot of presenters there from different industries, which is good because then you get to network with everybody and you get to see different styles. There were some people doing the cooking demonstrations like Suvir Saran, who owns a restaurant in New York called Dévi. It’s also interesting to hear from the sponsors, especially when you can see how they associate with sustainability. Hopefully, we’re able to grow those ideas into things we can do at the university. For example, looking at some of the things that the Peanut Board was presenting, I realized we might be missing the peanut train. I learned we could look at using peanut oils in dressings and whatnot.

The first day after the introduction we attended some chef demonstrations. There was one on produce menu development, which focused on flavor and texture development strategies that make small plates, sides and salads best sellers. That session was presented by chefs like Alex Ong of Betelnut in San Francisco and Suvir Saran. Another interesting one was a session called Creating High Flavor Dishes While Controlling Food Cost: Inspiration from Italy, which talked about how to use plant-based foods that would still be profitable for volume foodservice operations. That demo was presented by Duskie Estes, owner of Zazu in Santa Rosa, Calif., and Craig Stoll, chef-owner of Delfina in San Francisco. You can always learn something from other chefs because we all have different styles and we have all trained under different atmospheres. My style is taken from a blend of regional American cuisine and has been center-plate driven. At this forum, I learned to take advantage of different spice blends and flavors and use more plant-based products in new ways.

We also got to go on a field trip to the orchard where UC-Davis has its almond trees, olives, peaches, etc. We got to talk to some of the professors who are in charge of research for that. Then we went to a farm and the farmer gave a presentation on heirloom vegetables and some new techniques. We also got to go to UC-Davis and tour their facility to see their tasting kitchens, where they offered two workshops—one on types of gazpachos and one on beer and nut tastings.

I learned as much during the breakout sessions and during the sponsor vendor fair by just networking with all the different people as I did in any of the sessions. It’s good to be able to have some people from private industries, other universities and companies that run contracted universities. At the sessions, you learn the nuts and bolts about things. When you’re looking at chefs from restaurants you’re taking their knowledge of different flavors from their type of cuisine, whether it’s Asian or Italian. You watch them put their twist on it and then you take those ideas and bring them back and intertwine the ideas for your operations. We have all-you-care-to-eat operations as well as retail and à la carte, so it’s about taking those ideas in each one of those sessions and being able to decipher what we can and what we can’t use and then implement it in our different operations.

We need to continue to learn. You can’t stay stale. The wheels are always turning and moving forward. If you don’t continue to move forward with new ideas or rehashing old ideas with a new twist then you’ll be left behind and your operations are going to become stale. Nobody’s going to benchmark against you. You should always try to stay on the learning curve and have a balance of new and old ideas so that you’re never satisfied. Always be looking at what you can do to improve, otherwise somebody else is going to be a leader.”