Industry sign banking rhode island word computer
hi welcome to the awe experience my name is chef eli dunn i'm the owner of eli's kitchen in warren rhode island and a two-time food network chop champion today is all about authenticity and nothing is more authentic to me than clam chowder my mother was the chef and owner of phoebe's fish and chips in c-conk massachusetts for over 30 years and her award-winning clam chowder was simple and delicious made from nothing more than fresh quahogs potatoes butter bacon and milk when i opened eli's back in 2014 i created this recipe as a tribute to her legacy now no chef is anything without his or her sous chef and my virtual sous chef for the day is lisa bergeron the co-creator of awe so i'm just going to give her a call hey lisa jeff how are you i'm doing well how are you it's good to see you again thank you for joining us uh from hope and maine and uh on our day of authenticity at the awe aw experience so welcome welcome yeah and i would love to say you know i want to thank you again for being a part of the reach experience that was such a wonderful experience um a really enriching experience and really helped for me lay the groundwork and the foundation for you know my pandemic pivot so thank you again for that well this is a fun way to what we're calling centered beginnings and getting our day started what better way than to cook up something and hopefully people have the recipe handy or they can get it but um i just wanted to let everyone know a little bit about you and i learned like you said a little bit about you and your business when you went through our small business reach program but let everyone know a little bit more about you sure so i um i i was born in literally above my mother's restaurant back in 1977. yes i'll be 43 in a month but um i uh i grew up in the business and um you know my mother owned a really successful seafood restaurant in second massachusetts for 30 years like i mentioned and i think you know in my childhood that seed was planted with a love and appreciation for hospitality for sourcing locally and so you know i i think that that really set the stage for me later on in life when i opened my restaurant now just over six years ago um to really try to carry on the tradition and the legacy of of my mother's restaurant so wonderful wonderful so uh tell us a little bit about what you're gonna cook today i know you mentioned some clam chowder and what do we what are we gonna what are tell me how that connects to your authenticity and all right so you're gonna be a part of this so pay attention so today i'm going to be just uh preparing a rhode island style clear clam chowder now the different what makes this clam chowder special is um instead of tradition you know the traditional milk or cream that's the base of a chowder what most people are used to this chowder is made almost exclusively with fresh quahog juice and only a little bit of butter so it's much more seafood forward not as heavy not as rich so you know really simple ingredients basically butter flour bacon potatoes onions quahog juice and fresh chopped clams and pretty much everything you see here was sourced locally as much as possible so you know my sort of guiding principles as a chef is uh you know source source responsibly cook with love and share with others and hopefully i'm gonna get to do a little bit of that today with you also i love that your food philosophy that's that's so connected to who you are right and tell people a little bit of how that that you that you cook with intention and you go beyond the dish yeah so um i think intention is kind of the sixth flavor um and i've i've had i've had customers at the restaurant come up to me and say you know i really and i really tasted the intention you put into my my meal today and that's the ultimate compliment because i put everything into cooking i love cooking i love being of service to people and i think that that's something that can be tasted in the finished product you know there's a certain passion there which i certainly have and um and so you know if i can go to a local farm if i can go to a local vendor someone um you know at a place like open maine and warren you know i can buy a local ingredient and i can then put that into a dish that i've made a million times with history and heritage and then share that with other people with other folks that sort of completes that circle of being of service to others uh being of service to the local economy of being of service to local farms and of being of service to food yeah that's it's such a ripple effect and tell everyone a little bit about i mean i want to give a shout out to hope and maine and their nurse their neighbor program but you've been a part of these causes and this purpose that food brings to people and helps our communities and people so talk a little bit about that sure and while i talk about that lisa i'm just going to start prepping some of the ingredients here just so i can get the recipe started so um so basically uh you know i as a part of my food philosophy of of being of service to others um i try to as much as possible involve myself in community-based fundraisers food events and hope and maine is sort of at the forefront and at least here in the east bay and in rhode island at sort of helping people grow their businesses helping people turn an idea leverage an idea into an actual business opportunity but they also are heavily involved in combating food insecurity and helping rhode islanders who may not be fortunate enough to afford a a meal and so you know they have the program nourish your neighbors where essentially they have restaurants donate dishes you know for people who are experiencing food insecurity um and you know it's really important uh obviously because there are a lot of people who are suffering right now because of the pandemic but also before so really they do a lot of really amazing work here and so yeah so it's it's an honor so tell me where you're at in the recipe i am your sous chef so just back us up to what you're doing so anyone who's following along can get in those first couple of steps sure so uh the base of a chowder uh of any chowder of this particular chowder is bacon and bacon's gonna give us uh essentially gonna give us a little bit of fat to start the recipe so i have a pan here over about medium heat and i'm gonna add some bacon to the pan and what's called render the bacon so i'm basically just going to cook the fat out of the bacon and get the bacon a little bit crispy and once the bacon gets to a certain point i'm going to add butter to the pan to just add richness to the dish obviously a little more flavor and um and that's the base of what will eventually become the roux of the dish and a roux and it's a french term which is basically just flour and a fat in this case butter and it helps thicken the dish and give it a little bit of texture now this dish could also be made gluten-free if you if that's your thing just omit the flour it wouldn't have quite the same mouth feel but it would still be equally as delicious the flour doesn't add too much flavor it's more about texture so yeah and i love that you've talked about how you want to make recipes that really help everyone it's inclusive so you will you know go to your restaurant and there's something for everyone so even though we know bit flour you are ready to give those substitutes which is exciting because we've been talking about inclusivity and the importance of creating connections and so you do that through your food and your recipes yeah so my you know this idea of sharing with others as well as sourcing responsibly cooking with love i believe cooking is an act of service and so i try to divorce my ego from that process as much as possible and for me the old the chef is always right um kind of mentality it doesn't apply to the way and how i feel about food and how i cook and so i really believe in the collaborative process so like how can i make you how can i make this dish work for you where can how can i meet you where you're at um how can i you know how can i have on my restaurant menu how can i have instead of just a salad for the vegan how can i have an actual substantial plant-based meal with locally sourced vegetables you know because i want everyone to be able to experience delicious foods and so you know whenever i'm making a recipe if i can make it gluten-free if i can um if i can make it plant-based if i can make it lactose-free i i really try to create recipes that are adaptable um yeah and i just i think that i i'd hope that future generations of chefs take on that mentality because i i do think that something is lost when it's like okay i'm the chef it's my way you know this is how it is i want you and there's a place for that of course but for me um i really i want it's about cooking for you what do you want how can i make you happy that's really what guides me lisa i love that it's so welcoming and and it really just connects so much is we talk about making recipes you know people like to add their twist their little flavor and that's bringing their own authenticity into the recipe that they want to create they start with your magic and then they add a little a little sprinkle of their magic and and they create a wonderful dish so to me that really brings it back to that authentic cooking style so where are you at now tell us walk us through to where you are on the recipe process so i'm uh my but my bacon is rendering i've added the butter and i'm just essentially i want to get the bacon to a point of crispiness but i don't want it to go too far i really just want to cook the fat out of the bacon get a little bit crispy and i'm preparing my onions which are like one of the sort of most basic staples in any chowder adds a nice sweetness to the dish and you know one of the i mean there is like obviously some pro some pro tips one of the ways to cut an onion is if you cut an onion through the top the long way in half and then you turn that onion on its side and with the tip of the knife you cut strips through the onion and then turn the onion one quarter turn and then cut across the other way you get nice even square pieces of onion and it's just kind of one of those little things that we do as chefs and restaurants where um you know we just essentially get like a perfectly even cut look is there a particular kind of onion that you're using um this is just a medallion onion just a simple sweet onion i've always used white onions or sweet onions over red onions they're just a little meatier a little bit sweeter not as sharp i would i would say and just really traditional to chowder all right so my bacon and butter are really the butter's starting to foam kind of getting a little bit of that toasty brown butter aroma now i'm going to add my onions to the dish and i'm basically just going to you know i have medium high heat here i'm just going to cook these onions down until they're soft starting to get a little bit translucent and once the onions are a little bit soft that's when i'm going to add my flour which is the base of the roux that's what's going to thicken the soup later on when i add the clam juice and the potatoes and at the very end the chopped clams which the chopped clams you add at the very end because you really don't i mean they take just a minute like just a few moments to cook so i usually add the chopped clams right at the very end can you overcook uh chopped plants yes i mean you can overcook anything um i i do think that um it's really not going to take away from the experience too too much but growing up in a seafood restaurant i'm quite picky about seafood and so i think most seafood scallops shrimp most things even salmon benefit from being slightly undercooked and i do think you know that and that makes people a little bit nervous but in my experience it's completely safe to eat and slightly undercooked scallop or a slightly undercooked piece of salmon or something like that versus pork or chicken obviously so i'm just peeling my potatoes while i'm cooking the onions the bacon and the butter good well while you're chopping and cooking tell us a little bit about where you're at right now what's what's happening in in the world of chef eli the million dollar question so um you know i think that uh i'm a glass i'm a silver linings person i've always been that way and in every uh situation no matter how dire and extreme there's always a silver lining and for me the silver lining in the age of coronavirus has been the extraordinary permissions that coronavirus has given us that the pandemic that quarantine has given us um as a a permission to essentially reinvent ourselves to reinvent ourselves to um to essentially go into to pause take a step back and say you know do i go back to where i was pre-pandemic or do i exercise some agility and some innovation and do i evolve you know as an individual and in my case well both as an individual and as a and as a business owner and so our evolution at eli's kitchen has really has been organic i mean i don't think any of us could have predicted what happened in 2020 and what continues to happen but um one of the the first things that we had to do was kind of go into a sort of lean manufacturing type place where we had to trim everything down just to we are still currently only offering takeout and and so we had to kind of take a step back you know and we're really small we don't have outdoor seating we don't have a lot of space um and so we've focused instead of uh figuring out how we can safely feed people in person we focus on how we can uh leverage takeout as a sustainable business model and for us it's a little bit of kind of a hibernation you know we're kind of just treading water waiting for the world to get quote unquote normal again but at the same time knowing that all of these changes that we're making uh are sort of guiding us in this direction of of the evolution of the business um and that it probably will never be the way it was before and that's okay i do i challenge people to say you know why why go back to the way it was before the way it was before may not have been the best way for you as a person for your business and so i do think it's really critical for us as business owners to be open you know i love the metaphor of um of this situation and life in general as um as being a river right and like you know you can step into the river and you can let the river carry you downstream or you can fight against the current or you can try to claw your way back onto the bank you know and i've really just stepped into this river and said where is where is this going to take me i trust i'm open and i trust that wherever i go and wherever my business goes as long as i'm using my guiding principles right source responsibly cook with love and share with others as uh as my sort of core values then i do think that i'm going to come out of this or we're all going to come out of this better in a better place so i love that i love that and we've been talking about that all last two days and we'll be really diving into that later today because we have permission as you said to pivot and when we go back to what's our guiding principles our values it's just like i bring it back to actually cooking a recipe it's really hard to duplicate it sometimes to make it exactly the same way right and maybe the next time i go to cook something i try a little twist or i get a little better and my recipe gets better i don't always try to duplicate it um exactly so i love this idea that we get to create our our next uh plan and and that's exactly what you're doing so i congratulate you on i'm really sharing that philosophy it brings uh you are beyond the dish you're making me taking food beyond the preparation so very very cool thank you lisa so i just um i chopped up my potatoes into small maybe half inch squares and added it to my onions bacon butter and i added a little bit of flour and i'm just gonna kind of cook all of this in the flour for a little while whenever you're making a roux a flour-based roux you always want to cook it for a minute or so to cook that sort of raw flour taste out but stir constantly because what you don't want is the roux to burn to the bottom of
he pan which you know will change the flavor and also um it won't thicken as well so i'm really just cooking the roux here for a little while with the veggies and now i'm gonna take um fresh quahog juice literally just that's all it is the juice that came out of quahogs and i'm going to add this right to my vegetables and bacon here and essentially i'm just going to cook this once this comes up to a simmer i'm going to cook it until the potatoes are a fork tender and then i'm going to add my chopped clams season and then plate the dish with some other things so they're getting us all hungry for lunch and i want to let everybody everyone should know that the recipe will be if they don't have it we'll be sending it to them and we'll be posting it at our website this is such a fun way to get our day started i you know we did this cooking demo we did some things yesterday's pre-sessions just a way to avoid the zoom fatigue and and and really create connection among people i think even for teams i've heard lots of fun zoom activities for distant teams who are not together in person to share a favorite recipe and actually cook a meal together it's it's a great way to bring people together when you break bread yeah and and speaking to that speaking of bringing people together and breaking bread personally my coronavirus pivot as a result of the pandemic and the fact that the restaurant is is really kind of lean right now is that it's given me more bandwidth and more time to explore other revenue options you know under the corporation of eli's kitchen and i've been able to essentially open myself up in my schedule up to private parties micro catering now so many people had weddings planned had things planned this year and the entire industry was decimated and so i started receiving calls early in the pandemic hey my caterer canceled what can you come and cook can you help and i used to have to say no to those types of calls because i didn't have the time or the bandwidth and i said yes let me the river of life is saying go here let me go there and so i've been able to personally get back to doing what i love to do you know as a business owner i found myself staring at the computer more and worrying about numbers and paying bills and all that stuff and and there was a certain fatigue to that and coronavirus essentially gave me the extraordinary permission to come and do to pivot and to do something different and i've come back to my roots which i get to go and cook for people on site you know you can hire me chef eli dunn i come to your house on site and i prepare a custom meal for you and your guests under 25 or 15 depending on the governor's limit and you know we in it in a safe fun inclusive engaging way i collaborate with these people to sometimes i end up planning parties with people and sometimes they just say we got it come to my house and cook and so i'm eight year old i want you to come to my house yeah so i hope everybody out there like invites you to come and then those are and those and those people zooming in from different parts of the country again you know another pivot is is really thinking about online and i think that's the really exciting part about uh you know of course it's caused people to hit the pause button and we talked about this priority shift it makes us rethink uh where we're at and it is it's a permission i think it was your word it's my permission to pivot yeah extraordinary permission to pivot and it's been wonderful and so if anybody is listening and this is my shameless plug and if you're interested in booking me you can do so through www.eli's kitchenwarren.com and just click on the book chef eli dunn tab and people reach out to me and you know we have a discovery call and it's really wonderful because then that whole process kicks in right that source responsibly cook with love share with others i get to collaborate with these people and curate a menu tailored to their dietary needs their party their whatever the situation and so i'm able to both be a restaurant owner now and um and and and and also um kind of do what i love you know i love to cook and i love it so yes and which i love it and i hope everyone that's watching you cook is thinking about their yes and and that's that's exciting so tell us where you are in the recipe so we don't want to we want to know how we can make this delicious uh clam chowder so um essentially i'm a you know this this mixture just came up to a simmer and i'm i'm just cooking the you know i'm stirring a little bit to prevent the roof and burning to the bottom um you know i wouldn't you wouldn't want to do this over really high heat so i have like a medium to medium-high heat and i'm essentially i'm just going to cook these potatoes till they're fork tender you know i actually had the opportunity to cook this dish on national tv for martha stewart which is like a story for another time really but briefly i was on chops and somehow you know the gods were were watching and in the first mystery basket that i opened there were quahogs and it couldn't have been more unfair for the other contestants i mean i literally grew up in a house with a driveway made of quahog shells so um so i was able to make my rhode island style clear chowder but with quahog's yuchoy which is like a sort of like a bok choy type vegetable chinese tea eggs which are like a weird fermented kind of hard-boiled egg and chicken schmaltz which is chicken breasted chicken fat and so i made a chowder using all those ingredients with this with with these ingredients basically and i impressed martha stewart you know which is which is pretty cool so there's a little a little little history to this dish i i love that you said that you kind of have that unfair advantage of damn cogs because i don't even think middle of the country may not even know what to call it yeah well people are like quahog you know and it's just you know and and watching watching some of the other contestants from tennessee from san francisco wherever trying to open a quahog was like oh there's poor people um you know and i was just like like just you know a minute i opened them all so it was really really lucky you know and i'm great i feel like even though you and i are in two different locations here i feel like i can really smell that beautiful dish simmering i really do and it's making me super hungry that's the goal so where are we at that's the goal i mean and then you know i love food so much lisa that uh when and i'm sure you can see when i talk about food i get passionate right and i have such a powerful taste memory that if i go to new orleans or if i go to san francisco or i go to new york i go somewhere and i have a really amazing food experience i i always i come home and i'm like how can i how can i recapture that and my taste memory is so powerful like i don't have a palette where i can taste every ingredient down to you know the half teaspoon but i have a sense sensual sensory taste memory you know and so when i talk about food i'm talking about it's sort of like encapsulating all the amazing food experiences i've had and i get really excited and i get really passionate about it so i can see that and you know it gives it brings it back to where our day is launching today it's all about authenticity as leaders we have to be authentic you know running our businesses we have to be true to ourselves as you said the pandemic has helped us think about maybe even shift our priorities a bit so it's exciting so tell us where we're at on our recipe so we're really close we're you know about a minute out here i'm just waiting for these potatoes to get a little bit more tender at this point they're you know they're not quite fork tender so um you know i really want to the clams literally when i add the clams i'm just i'm adding them and i'm turning it off and i'm just going to let the residual heat of the chowder cook the clams i don't want to boil them i don't want to i mean you can eat clams raw as most most of you know you know you can have a raw little neck maybe not a raw quahog that might be a little weird but you know so i really just want to kind of get them in there at the very end and it just adds that last last bit of of magic and then um i always finish my chowder with a chopped fresh dill um a little bit interesting i wouldn't have thought about that i would have thought of like a parsley or a different ingredient yeah so dill is one of those nostalgic scents and flavors for me my mom had it growing in her garden so um i think it's just it's it's just kind of my thing i don't know i'm sure there are other things that would work really well fennel parsley but i just love the how dill adds like a little pop of freshness and herbaceousness to what's essentially a pretty rich dish and then i add a little bit of garlic butter which again like fortifies and adds some more flavor and then a little sprinkling of paprika which to be honest i do because my mom did it i don't think it adds a ton of flavor and actually the judges on chop didn't like the paprika i think i put too much on one side so yeah so i'm just really just waiting for uh these potatoes to get fork tender and they're pretty much there um and you know this is pretty much the last bit of the recipe yeah these are good these potatoes are good so i'm just gonna add lisa these chopped clams right to my pan and if you were making this dish at home um you know from just say just quahogs right you know like at the restaurant we'll get we'll get chopped clams and we'll get quahog juice because we make giant batches right and it wouldn't make a lot of sense to open all the quahogs from scratch but it's still fresh it's just it works done for us but if you were doing this at home you know you would literally open the quahogs first thing separate the juice from the quahogs chop up the quahogs remove any bits of sand or shell that might be in there and which is important because you don't want to get a crunchy you know piece of shell and in a bite of food and then set that aside for the for the end of the dish all right so i've added the quahogs and i'm just going to give a taste here well that's not fair can you send me a virtual taste oh my god it's so good okay so i'm just gonna um i'm essentially just gonna plate this in a bowl and you know this batch i made here again the recipe you'll have access to the recipe online and you know hopefully you download that recipe and you try to make this dish yourself at home this is exactly that recipe and i think here um you probably this would probably feed six like six bowls maybe eight cups depending on how many people so you know a good size dinner party so i'm just gonna gonna get some of this chowder i don't quite have the right tool for this but i'm just gonna get some of this in this bowl here here in rhode island you know chowder is one of our favorite recipes of the fourth of july right and a lot of times i know it's it seems sometimes like a weird dish in the heat but it actually works seafood plays in the hot weather really well and i think this is a great dish to pair with some clam cakes you know sitting outdoors on a patio or so i'm just going to add to this bowl of chowder maybe you know like a teaspoon of garlic butter right in the middle and this is some fresh dill that i got from four town farm one of my favorite places to shop check them out in seahawk mass and so i'm just going to add some chopped fresh dill to the top of this chowder and just a little sprinkle of paprika for color to finish the dish and that is it that is rhode island style clear clam chowder cooked with love thanks lisa [Music] you
