Before you cook like a pro, you’ve got to think like one.
I realized this a few weeks ago when I visited Ignacio Mattos in his kitchen at Café Altro Paradiso on Manhattan’s west side. Mattos is a subtle, soft-spoken guy. The better you get to know him, the more he reveals. I guess you could say the same is true about his food—it appears simple, almost minimalist. But with each bite, it grows more complex, more rewarding.
He had agreed to teach me how to compose his fennel salad. That’s the first lesson I learned—you and I toss a salad, Mattos composes a salad. He considers each ingredient, giving one a drizzle of oil, another a dash of sea salt or a sprinkle of lemon or orange zest (yes, he grates two types of zest).
“Every ingredient has its own texture or density,” Mattos explained. “Butter lettuce, for instance, is different from escarole. If you tossed them together, the butter lettuce would wilt.”
With that, a light bulb went off in my head. A few nights earlier at home, I made what I thought was going to be an excellent salad: butter lettuce, shaved radish, toasted pepitas, and cubed avocados. I tossed it all together with a shallot vinaigrette and…it turned into a gloppy mess. The tumbled avocado resembled guacamole, the lettuce wilted, and the nutty seeds got lost.
For his fennel salad, a staple on the Altro Paradiso menu, Mattos started by breaking up a handful of Castelvetrano olives. He added some minced fennel fronds and sliced stems, then a squirt of Chardonnay vinegar (chefs love those plastic squirt bottles) and a hit of olive oil. He flicked an orange over a Microplane, the zest fluttering down, then tossed the mixture with a dash of crushed red pepper flakes and a pinch of pebbly gray sea salt. (“You want the salt to pop with each bite,” he told me.) After spooning the olive mixture onto a plate, Mattos reached for a plastic mandoline and shaved a big pile of fennel. He spiked it with lemon juice, more gray salt, and lemon zest (the sweeter orange zest plays better with the briny olives, he said).
And, oh yeah, for a welcome note of richness, he shaved some provolone picante atop the olives before crowning it all with a mountain of dressed fennel.
When I looked at the finished plate, all I saw was fennel. Pretty meh. But then I started eating it. A bite of the bracing anise-flavored vegetable gave way to buttery cheese, which eventually yielded to those oil-slicked, orange zest–dusted olives. Unlike the salad I had made at home, no two bites were the same. With each forkful, I tasted each individual ingredient.
I had never thought about composing a salad this way—layer by layer, ingredient by ingredient, flavor by flavor. And to be honest, there will be times on, say, a random Tuesday night, when I’ll still just toss together some greens in a bowl. But now I know to add cubes of avocado (perhaps doused with lemon juice and a shot of sea salt) after the lettuce is plated so they don’t break down too much. And maybe I’ll sprinkle on the pepitas at the table, their salty crunch adding a finishing pop to vinaigrette-dressed greens. That’s me thinking like a chef. The first step to cooking like one.