Michel Nischan pioneered his full-flavored, healthy cuisine at
Heartbeat in New York. He can be seen on David Rosengarten's In
Food Today and Sara Moulton's Cooking Live.
Mary Goodbody is the original editor-in-chief of Cooks magazine,
She is a Connecticut-based food writer and a contributing editor to
Chocolatier and has collaborated on and co-written a number of
cookbooks.
Minh + Wass (Ngoc Minh and Julian Wass) is a husband-and-wife
photography team who specialize in food and lifestyle shots for
books and magazines. After 10 years in New York, they recently
relocated to Paris.
Minh + Wass (Ngoc Minh and Julian Wass) is a husband-and-wife
photography team who specialize in food and lifestyle shots for
books and magazines. After 10 years in New York, they recently
relocated to Paris.
Michel Nischan isn't French. He's a child of the Chicago suburbs
whose first name made him something of a target on the playground
but, eventually, a natural in haute cuisine kitchens. And it wasn't
just his name that made his early life the chronicle of a chef
foretold. Nischan's parents had fled their respective family farms
in the South when industrialization made them obsolete, but the
couple preserved a slice of rural life in the middle of suburbia.
"In Des Plaines, Illinois, we had less than a quarter acre,"
Nischan says, "and my mother rented two rototillers from Ace
Hardware, dug up the backyard and side yard, and planted what our
neighbors called 'the farm.' We had a small brick patio with a
couple of lawn chairs and a table and rows and rows of vegetables.
My mom taught me how to cook, but the fact that I knew what good
ingredients were did more to rapid-fire my career than
anything."
Nischan never forgot the magnificence of his mother's fresh
vegetables, but for a few years he kept her lessons in simple, pure
flavors simmering on the back burner. As a chef at various French
restaurants and at his own place, Miche Mache, in Connecticut, he
often masked the food's true taste with complex, multilayered
sauces. "The French 'mount' sauces with fat, usually butter," he
writes in the introduction to his new cookbook, "Taste Pure and
Simple." "This means they thicken and smooth their sauces by adding
small amounts of fat during cooking, letting the fat emulsify
rather than melt, and then add more until the sauce achieves the
velvety texture and superrich flavor that have made French sauces
famous the world over. I embraced this technique
wholeheartedly."
But eight years ago, the Nischans' 5-year-old son, Chris, was
diagnosed with diabetes. The outpouring of empathy made Nischan
realize how many people around him had diet-restricting health
problems. All those diners who time after time would request the
same chicken and fish dishes, sauce on the side the "narrow-minded"
ones who Nischan wished would "live a little" - were, he says,
"ordering food that way because there was nothing else on the menu
for them. They were "trying" to live a little."
He decided to cook for them. He got his big chance in 1998, when he
was hired as chef for a new restaurant in New York called
Heartbeat. As he tried to create a menu with no butter, cream, or
saturated fat, he realized that fat was overrated as an imparter of
flavor. He saw that if you didn't "mount" a sauce, you wouldn't
have to dismount it, so to speak - that is, if you didn't thicken a
corn sauce with butter, cream, and flour, then you wouldn't later
have to add vanilla, nutmeg, and brown sugar to reawaken the flavor
of the corn. Instead you could, from the start, bring out the
corn's true flavor by squeezing the kernels in a vegetable juicer
(Nischan is really big on juicers) and adding just a dash of lemon
and seasonings. Drizzle some of this creamy but creamless sauce on
scallops, and you'll be showered with gratitude. Pureed pistachios
allow you to avoid processed starch in a simple, rich sauce for
roasted chicken. Asian flavors like ginger and lemongrass make a
robust yet light sauce for grilled snapper.
Nischan found that piling fewer ingredients atop one another saved
time as well as calories, and allowed the main ingredient to sing
out full-throatedly. But, he points out, "the less fat you use, the
more exceptional the quality of your ingredients has to be." To
that end, he left the restaurant and committed himself to bringing
organic, healthy food to everybody. With a couple of cohorts, he
started the New American Farmer Initiative, which introduces
immigrant farmers (Cambodian, Chinese, Latin American), with their
own growing techniques, to successful small farmers. The
organization then links the farmers to chefs, who order their
produce. It's a clearinghouse for farmers, and, he says, "the field
is the warehouse."
Nischan dreams of the day
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