In our new series BuzzFeed Breakfast, we invite a chef to hang out and cook stuff at 10 a.m. Then we show you how to recreate what he or she did.
Design by Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed. Photograph by Lauren Zaser/BuzzFeed
When chef and recent James Beard Award winner Jamie Bissonnette showed up at BuzzFeed's test kitchen with a cooler full of farmers market vegetables and homemade chorizo, we nearly passed out from excitement.
We'd invited him to visit and make whatever he wanted for this post, the first in a new series called BuzzFeed Breakfast, wherein we ask chefs to come hang out at 10 a.m. and cook. Bissonnette has three restaurants, Toro in NYC, Coppa in Boston, and Toro in Boston, and the delicious chorizo he brought to use for breakfast wasn't too much of a surprise: He just wrote his first cookbook and it's all about cured meats, The New Charcuterie Cookbook.
His goal is to show people that making pate is just as easy as making meatloaf — "just lose the ketchup and add more kinds of meat," he says. "To write the recipes I was like, How would I tell my Dad, who isn't a chef, how to make this?, so that's what I did, I just walked through it all asking him."
The book's instructions for blood sausage, for example, are divided into three recipes: blood sausage for beginners, blood sausage for intermediates, and blood sausage for ninjas.
Watching Bissonnette go into ninja mode to cook breakfast was fascinating because he worked so cleanly. His ninja tool is a dough scraper, which he uses instead of the back of his knife to transfer food to the pan and to transfer trash to the trash. "One thing I think is really important for home cooks to learn is that the cleaner you are the more efficient you're going to be, and the more fun you'll have eating because you'll be eating in a clean kitchen." In fact, we couldn't even get him to leave before he had scrubbed down the entire range. Thanks chef.
If you like the looks of the chef's apron know that it doubles as a knife roll and you can get one from thebluntroll.com.
Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed
