Cooking at Home

Introduction

Dave Chang

I am a bad cook who can make delicious food. Yes, I m a chef, but I ve long felt that cooking doesn t come naturally to me. It took me a while to realize, though, that what cooking meant had long been defined for me, by others. First, by culinary school, where I was taught that there is a right way to cook and a wrong way to cook, whether it s braising meats or saucing pasta. Then, early in my career, I worked primarily in European-fixated restaurants, where the whole point is to make the same thing, the same painstaking way, again and again. You have to follow the rules. You can t just make stuff up. And so I forced myself to learn the rules.

Meanwhile, I never used to cook at home. In fact, I bragged in interviews about how my fridge was mostly just filled with beer. I lived in my restaurants. My apartment was a place to crash, so restaurant cooking was all the cooking I knew.

But that s all changed now. I have a wife, a baby, and in-laws, and most of the time, it s my job to feed them. I ve had to learn to become a home cook for the first time in my life, and it s entirely different from how I cook at restaurants. Now I make stuff up out of necessity, with my new guiding principles: to create something as delicious as possible, in the least amount of time possible, while making as little mess as possible.

At home, I am flying by the seat of my pants: I play fast and loose with my microwave, throw aesthetics out the window, and generally don t adhere to any particular style or cuisine. When you re busy and you have a family and you need to put food on the table, you do what you have to do. As I m writing this, I am in the kitchen of a rental house, where my family has been quarantining because of the coronavirus pandemic. When we arrived, the cabinets had dried thyme and bouillon cubes and that was it. I diluted a bouillon cube in water, mixed it with crushed tomatoes, and added some sugar, salt, and fish

David Chang and Priya Krishna