Creating recipes is an artform, one that doesn't get nearly the amount of respect it should. So we wanted to celebrate the process chefs go through to arrive at a recipe worthy of their customers. Four chefs share their secrets, tricks and techniques for developing new recipes. 

Bulgogi Street Food-Style

B&I chef brings global flavors to action station.

When Molly Cunningham, executive chef for Flik International at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York, wanted to satisfy customer demand for diverse cuisine, she looked to her Korean background and love of Asian cuisine and developed these beef bulgogi sliders. She spoke to FSD about the process of getting this unconventional burger just right.

“What I did with this dish was take an idea that could be condensed down into something affordable because usually you would use rib eye or sirloin with bulgogi. So I decided to create it in a burger because ground beef is less expensive. I decided to put a little spin on it with a Korean barbecue sauce glaze and then paired it with different types of salads like slaws, kimchi and pickled vegetables. We feature the dish in our action station.

The idea for the dish came about because the clientele here is really into global cuisines. At the action station, we always try to have something that provides a ‘wow.’ So I was trying to think of something that wouldn’t make my food cost go crazy, but would still bring the customers some flavors that they may not have had before. I am Korean and I’ve always been interested in cooking with Asian flavors. So I came up with these sliders as a way to deliver an Asian street food at the action station.

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First, I made a slider the way I thought it should be and swapped out ingredients I didn’t think were working. I really didn’t change that much from my first version of the dish since the flavors of bulgogi are pretty set. I took the components of what bulgogi is and I also added some other items that are used in Asian cuisine to give a little more flavor since bulgogi is mostly marinated with sesame oil and ginger and garlic. Instead of having just one side salad we wanted to do several because in Asian cuisine they offer lots of little components. So we created five or six side salads.

I also created my own Korean barbecue sauce for the glaze. The barbecue sauce is ketchup based to give the familiar flavor of barbecue sauce. Then I used ginger, fish sauce, Korean chili paste, apple juice, soy sauce, a little beef stock and a brown sugar rice wine vinegar to give it that acidity.

We plate it as three two-ounce sliders. We glaze them with the barbecue sauce. Then on the side we’ll have perhaps a soba noodle salad, an apple and kimchi salad or, in the summer, we’ll do a peach and kimchi salad. Then there will be about six different dipping sauces to accompany the burger, such as a scallion soy sauce, a sesame dressing or a cilantro dressing.

The dish was really well received in the cafeteria. People thought it was a great idea taking something that was low cost and making it into something they might not have seen before. It’s definitely a different flavor than your normal cheeseburger.” 

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A Sweeter Sweet Potato

Chef wages war on traditional Southern sweet potato preparation.

At Virginia Tech University, in Blacksburg, the dining services team had to create hundreds of recipes for the campus’s new Turner Place at Lavery Hall dining facility. Mark Moritz, senior executive chef, says that with these recipes he and the team felt it was key to keep things simple, which is exactly what he did with his Citrus Sweet Potatoes for the Southern portion of the grill station. Moritz spoke to FSD about his process to make this dish work.

“I try to keep everything as basic as possible to make it easy on our student employees—the simpler the better. One of the dishes I do is Citrus Sweet Potatoes. I developed this dish for Turner Place’s Fire Grill concept, which has two sides—a grill and a Southern comfort food side. This recipe is for our Southern comfort food side. Personally, I despise the Southern-style sweet potatoes with the brown sugar, nuts, mini marshmallows and all that junk. I can’t stand it. It’s bad for you. But I love sweet potatoes.

This dish is based on dauphinoise potatoes, which are just sliced white potatoes with garlic and heavy cream. With this one, because sweet potatoes don’t have starch to thicken things up, I decided to do layers of sweet potatoes and then a layer of russet potatoes. I did want the starch to thicken it up, but I wanted to use as many sweet potatoes as possible because of their health benefits.

I just wanted to show, not only my bosses but the students as well, that sweet potatoes have incredible flavor on their own. When they are enhanced, especially with citrus, it brings out the sweetness and the subtle flavors of the potato, so you don’t need to put all that other junk on them to make the dish good.

The first time I made the dish I made it with only sweet potatoes and it didn’t work because there was no starch. It was all wet and soupy. So I thought there were a couple of ways I could fix this. I could add cornstarch to the orange juice concentrate to thicken it up and that worked OK. Or instead of using the modified starch, I could do layers of the white potatoes in between the sweet potatoes and in the cooking process the starch in the russet potatoes would thicken up the orange juice and hold it all together. That worked better. Originally I also did try the dish with straight orange juice, but I found that even with the use of the white potatoes, it was still runny so it was far easier to either put the orange juice on the stove and reduce it or use straight orange juice concentrate, and the concentrate worked out a lot better.

Next I had a tasting with the team, which is made up of students, our director and other staff. We had it before the building was even finished so the menus were all set. We’re talking several hundred recipes that had to be tasted during this process. When you put the dish down and tell the tasters what it is and then leave to get another dish and you come back and they are licking the plate, that’s a good sign.” 

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New School Enables Chef to Get Creative

Chef uses student favorites from chain restaurants to create popular versions for school.

Last year the new Collegiate Academy high school opened in the Union Public Schools in Tulsa, Okla. Of the school’s $27 million bond, $3 million went into creating a state-of-the-art dining program. Because the school is so large—more than 100,000 square feet and eight stories—dining needed to be decentralized, almost like what’s found on a college campus, according to Eli Huff, executive chef and culinary operations coordinator. Huff designed nine dining concepts, including an energy bar, panini grill, Mexican and Italian. One of the student favorites is the Asian concept, Wok Works, and its Orange Sesame Chicken Stir-Fry. Huff talks to FSD about designing the concepts and the stir-fry.

“I was used to doing small-scale restaurants. As a chef, the challenges designing menus [for schools] were all over the place. First of all I had to figure out the regs. I spent a year designing the layout, specing equipment and designing the menus. We’ve come up with about 200 new recipes for the high schools in the past six months. About 20% to 30% were existing recipes. We tweaked a couple of things like adding orange vegetables or changing the cooking method to meet the new regs and add flavor. Even with those recipes, I still had to come up with more ideas to fit the nine different concepts that we had designed.

I had a list of the things I needed to follow for the new regs. Then I had an idea of what I wanted to do from a chef’s standpoint. And then I had the customers to think of and what the kids like. I researched online what kids like. I watched cooking shows that I had never watched before, like ones that are based on families because it’s insightful to see what moms and dads are cooking for their kids at home.

Another element that we really wanted to look at was buying locally. A local farm, Peachcrest, is growing between 30% and 40% of the produce for the entire district. We worked with the farmer to see what he could grow for us and we use that to plan our menus.

We still have off-campus lunch for seniors. We have a lot of competition around the high school. We want to compete to keep [students on campus]. I went into Panda Express to see what the kids were buying. I took the most popular two flavors—orange peel and honey sesame—and put them together. It turned into an orange sesame chicken dish. Then I went to the farm to figure out what vegetables I could use from there that would hold up in the wok—we had enough money when we designed the concept for me to purchase a wok. We don’t cook to order. There are three lunch periods for each grade and for each lunch period, we fire up the wok. The kids can see us cooking on the wok, almost like a show kitchen. Every time we run the dish it sells out.

The sauce is semi-housemade. We take a chili sauce and we’re adding things like ginger, garlic and chicken starch to that. I put the dish with steamed rice and a vegetable stir-fry. We found some sesame seeds to use as a garnish. We also serve fortune cookies with it. Instead of on a school food tray we put them in Asian to-go boxes. The kids see that and it looks like a real restaurant. This makes the kids think they don’t need to go to Panda. They can get it here for $2.10.” 

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Chili Cook-Off

Regional differences challenge menu planners in Virginia health system.

Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Va., is made up of nine hospitals, each with its own distinct taste preference. Creating menus to meet those differences can sometimes be a challenge, admit Laura Gunter, R.D., director of dining and nutrition services, and Jay Brinkley, culinary director for FoodService Partners, the company that manages the system’s centralized kitchen.

Gunter: “Each hospital has its own cultural acceptance of menu items. We have regional opinions, even within southwest Virginia. We start with a base recipe and the hospitals can alter those to fit their population’s tastes. We had a need for a new chili recipe. We were buying a product, and for a smaller facility to use a five-pound container up within our time standard of two or three days, it just wasn’t happening.
The ideas come from our menu teams, which are dietitians on the patient side or supervisors and cooks on the retail side. Then we go to FSP and say we’re looking for this, will you make a recipe for us? That’s what happened with the chili we serve in retail. We tested it four or five times and there were 12 people tasting it each time.”

Brinkley: “We had a landmark location downtown called the Roanoke Weiner Stand. It was located in an arts theatre and that theatre needed to be remodeled so they had to tear it down. The chili was then no longer available. At the same time, the system was looking for a hot dog chili. So I said, ‘let’s resurrect the Roanoke Weiner Stand hot dog chili recipe.’ We had 12 different people who remembered different flavors for that chili.”

Gunter: “Some said it tasted like taco meat. Some said it had too much tomato; some said it needed more tomato. Then some supervisors and Jay had a contest to see who could get it right.” 

Brinkley: “The supervisors modeled their version off the Ben’s Chili Bowl (a D.C. restaurant). They put a hint of curry in there. Southwest Virginia is no place for curry.” 

Gunter: “We finally thought we got a chili that everyone would like and we sent it out. Nobody would say anything and then hospitals said they didn’t like it. We made a simple tweak to the recipe and now everybody likes it.

For our barbecue, we use a vinegar base because of the health benefits. At some of the hospitals south of here they do not want vinegar based, they want tomato based. Those patients get a hamburger that day because they won’t eat the recipe. Or some facilities are adding a little bit of tomato or barbecue sauce in order to make it have a more tomato taste.”

Brinkley: “Another simple one we had a hard time coming together on was pinto beans. It’s common to cook pinto beans with a little bit of fatback. Well, that’s not something the dietitians were enamored with. We ended up with a compromise. We put in some onion.”  

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