Ming Tsai: Voice of Fusion 2/4 | Asian American Innovators

Asian American Profiles

Chef Ming Tsai: Voice of Fusion

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GS: You seem to be a big fan of ginger. What do you see as the role that ginger plays in your cooking?
MT: Maryann was too short and the Professor was too geeky, so Ginger was certainly my favorite. [laughs] No, I think Maryann was my type, to be perfectly honest. I'm Chinese. I was born on ginger. Whenever I was sick I would be drinking ginger honey tea. I can't thik of a chinese stirfry dish that didn't start with garlic, ginger, scallion. We used it as much as soy sauce. [There's] very few stirfry in any Chinese cuisine that doesn't start with garlic, ginger. It's a very complex flavor too. It's not just gingery, right? There's a spiciness to ginger. There's that subtle aftertaste that kind of lingers in your mouth. There's a great texture to it when it's diced up well. When it's really finely minced, you still get a little crunch to it.
     There's young and baby ginger, the pink ginger which has a great crunch to it and you can use more quantity of it. And you can use it in so many ways. You can use it chopped up in stirfry, you can infuse it into an oil to get ginger oil, you can steep it in water or stocks. It makes great soups of course, and you can exude the oil and flavor out of ginger that way, so it's a such a versatile product. And believe it or not, it's still dirt cheap. It's amazing -- one hand of ginger packs more flavor than anything I can think of besides maybe galangal. Galangal is a cousin of ginger. It's a rhizome, it grows in the ground. In Southeast Asia they use a lot of galangal. Funny enough, a term they use in Southeast Asia is blue ginger when they talk about galangal -- which you know is the name of my restaurant. There's so much flavor in a ginger root. Even more than a truffle or a black truffle or jalapeño. Jalapeño is hollow. Yes, it's spicy, but it's a two-dimensional flavor. Ginger is a three-dimensional flavor, and again, you can use it in so many different ways.

GS: On Simply Ming you've had guest chefs doing various sauces and pestos. What is the quality that makes your cuisine stand out from those of other chefs that work with fusion?
MT: I'm probably in a group of five hundred to a thousand chefs in this country that are decent chefs. I would never say I'm the top chef in this country because there are so many chefs here. The reason I'm sometimes put on this pedestal is because I have a TV show. I'm on this little black box so I become the via sortia, the expert. Believe me, I don't mind this monniker by any means but it's not necessarily real. There are a lot of chefs that can cook me around the table easily. Having said that though I am very proud of the food we do and the establishment that my wife and I have created here. We're six years old. The reason blue ginger sometimes stands out versus other fusion or east/west is because of the very first comment I made -- because we really respect the ingredients and techniques of all the cultures that we're using which is all of Asia, French, American -- call it what you want -- and I really try to appreciate and understand how those products are used and bring them in slowly, blending not to be different, blending to be better.
     I think a lot of people are creating dishes because they've never been done before. There's probably good reason why these dishes have never been done before; it's because they're horrible. I would never say, nor should any chef ever say, no one's ever done this before because someone has done something like what I just did before in some way or fashion. If anyone ever tells you that they've ever created a new cuisine, you might as well just move on, 'cause no one creates a cuisine. The French did. The Chinese did. Italy did. Everyone created cuisine in the beginning of time. No one's creating cuisine now. There is the raw food movement and trends like that, but that's not a cuisine that's going to stay for a thousand or two thousand years.
     But there is a style of food that everyone does. Every chef cooks based on their personality, where they lived and who they trained with. Again, I'm Chinese by birth, I've trained in Japan, I've opened a couple of Southeast Asian restaurants, and I've lived and trained in France. Those experiences molded the style of cuisine I do. And I happen to be Chinese, so I call it east/west cuisine, and I proudly call it that. But at the end of the day, because we do understand and appreciate all these techniques and ingredients, the flavor does end up becoming what I always shoot for, something that's bold in flavor. It has to be bold. If you call it ginger broth, you should taste the ginger. If you call it lemon grass chutney, you should taste the lemon grass. It's all about flavor, and the way we train everyone here is you have to taste as you go. Just like people at home -- you have to taste as you go. I go around before service, I taste every single thing on the line including the water. The boiling water I taste to make sure there's enough salt in the water. People think I'm weird, sticking my hand into boiling water but you have to. If the water's not perfectly salted, then your noodle's not going to be seasoned well. You have to be meticulous. It's an art form of course but you can't just be a flambouyant artist and expect to do 250 dinners equally well from the first dinner to the last dinner. That's more system, structure and knowing that your base stuff tastes great.

GS: So you're not a fan of improvisational cooking shows like Iron Chef?
MT: Au contraire. I love the show!

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GS: What do you like about a show like that? You seem to believe in the importance of basing every dish a solid foundation.
MT: Oh, absolutely. But once you have a solid foundation, once you're given a mystery basket, you can take your foundation and create food on the spot. Morimoto is a friend of mine, and he has an incredibly solid foundation in French and Japanese technique. He gets a mystery basket and he immediately can apply his Japanese and French training to that mystery basket. I would have been honored to be on Iron Chef. I would have loved it. I did with Sissy Biggers's Ready, Set, Cook once, a long time ago on the Food Network. I had a hook because I am the most competitive guy I know and the fact that you could put cooking with a competition was a huge hoot for me. I loved doing it.
Yes, I am structured and methodical and try to be a perfectionist when we do food at the Blue Ginger, but a lot of dishes we create because... "Wouldn't it be great if we put this with that and now striped bass is running why don't we grill that?" I get input from my sous chefs now bcause they have a great talent now and so it's a team effort now but I do love to be creative on the spot. That's always fun.

GS: You wrote Blue Ginger in 1999 and Simply Ming in 2003. How has your cooking philosophy evolved between those two books?
MT: The books are different. Blue Ginger was my restaurant cookbook. It was my tribute to the restaurant Blue Ginger fearturing the signature dishes, so it's more restaurant food and there's a chapter called "Over the Top". That's expensive stuff, very time-consuming stuff. It is over the top, it's truffles and caviar and foie gras and not what 80% of the country is going to cook at home, but it is what we did. Thirty percent of the recipes are pretty easy, but some of them are challenging and some of them are really hard because it is a restaurant cookbook. But I really took to the heart all the emails. I used to get thousands of emails over the Food Network and the most common comments: one, people loved the show, loved that I matched food and wine together. And [there were] "I wish I could get those ingredients and I wish I had time to do what you do." The last comment I took to heart. PAGE 3