It’s brodo, chef

When so many people started saying “Yes, chef!” after watching “The Bear,” it first made me laugh, then reminded me: I hate being called a chef. Yes, I was classically trained in culinary techniques. But do I run a restaurant kitchen? The word means “head,” so are you a chef if your cooking is at home and your diners are your family? Nah. I’m a cook. A proud home cook. To say otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand the roles — and the words. (If you call yourself or anyone else a “home chef,” well, I don’t even know what to say.)

Up until last year, I had never even cooked in a restaurant kitchen. I’ve spent time in plenty of them as a journalist, shadowing chefs and their line cooks and dishwashers and expediters in an attempt to capture the (sometimes) controlled chaos that is a busy night of service.

Table of Contents

• My next Zoom cooking class: BEANS!

• I break for animals: Trunks

• Recipe: Tortellini in Charred Carrot & Onion Brodo

• More favorite tortellini recipes

Then I went on book tour for “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking.” Several restaurant dinners were on the agenda, and they each worked a little differently. At the incredible Dalida in the Presidio neighborhood of San Francisco, for instance, executive chefs Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz consulted with me on the menu choices and invited me to swing by a couple hours before service to taste their versions of “Mastering” dishes and offer feedback. Trust me, they’re so good the feedback consisted solely of moans and grins of approval. I mean, they took my recipe for whole roasted celery root with a cider glaze and decided to … smoke the celery root! Dreamy. They made me look so good, and I’m forever grateful.

Then there was the approach at another phenomenal restaurant, Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica. I had been following Jeremy Fox’s career since he cooked game-changing plant-based food at Ubuntu in Napa Valley, and was so excited when his team at RC agreed to host a “Mastering” dinner. This time, though, chef de cusine Elijah Deleon invited me to do more than taste things right before service. He expected me in the kitchen cooking!

I was a little nervous at first — he did realize that I was a proficient home cook but not accustomed to cooking on a line, didn’t he? He did. “Can you please take the lead on the tortellini?” he asked in one of our email conversations. Yes, I could!

Elijah’s team was so polite, so supportive — and so fast I did feel pretty ham-handed when I first started going. And a few hours into my stint, after a full 90 minutes kneading pasta dough by hand, and as I started hand-forming enough tortellini for the 60 diners we had on the books, as my back started aching and my hands cramping, I started questioning my choices, but I pushed on. Elijah sent over his most adept pasta-making line cook to help me get it all done, and you know what? By the time we had our pre-service meeting and it was my turn to explain the tortellini dish to the front-of-house staff, I felt a little bit less like just a food writer.

The recipe, I hope you realize, does not require chef-level talent or efficiency to pull off at home. In fact, I wrote it with multiple levels of from-scratch-ness so it would appeal to cooks who want something super-quick on any given weeknight and also to those who were up for making the pasta dough, making the filling, and forming the tortellini themselves. And just about every iteration in between: using store-bought wonton wrappers instead of pasta, using store-bought vegan ricotta instead of making it from scratch, even using store-bought tortellini.

If you’ve got the time, I do hope that you try making everything from scratch at some point, because the other thing I remember so vividly about that night at Rustic Canyon was how meditative it can be to do the same task over and over for, well, hours. Your mind can wander a bit, but you have to stay grounded enough in your body to do what you’re aiming to do with those fingers, palms, elbows, eyes.

I’ve been meditating inconsistently for many years, ever since I started teaching classes annually at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. (I’ll be there the week of April 11 if any of you have a hankering to join.) And I know from all the great teachers I’ve had there over the years that you don’t have to be sitting still with your eyes closed and hands forming the Gyan Mudra of Buddhism. You can be on a walk, petting your dog, swimming — or, yes, filling and forming 60 little squares of pasta into a classic Italian shape that will soon bob in a golden broth.

(By the way, in the separate tortellini recipe in “Mastering,” I worked the longest on describing in words how to form the little buggers. Do you know how hard that kind of technical instruction actually is? After writing and rewriting a single paragraph for almost as long as it took me to make the tortellini at Rustic Canyon, I ran it by tester extraordinaire Kristen Hartke for her own go, and when she cleared it, I laid out one final check: I cut a little piece of paper into a square the size of a wonton wrapper and asked The Husband, who would certainly represent the least-experienced cooks who might read the book, to follow the recipe and form it into a single, inedible tortellino. He did it in a flash. Success!)

The one shortcut I don’t want people to take with this recipe is using store-bought vegetable broth. The broth is so important in this dish that: a) you need to make it from scratch; and b) you get to call it brodo when you do. That’s simply Italian for “broth,” but, boy, doesn’t it sound fancier? Serve your guests brodo, and maybe you won’t even flinch if they call you “chef.” Just this once.

My next Zoom cooking class: BEANS!

Mark your calendars and buy your tickets! On Sunday, Feb. 22, at noon, I’m going to share all my latest tips and tricks for making a perfect pot of beans, then we’re going to turn them into three delicious dishes!

As always, you get 25 percent off a ticket to the class as a subscriber to this newsletter; just use the promo code “eatatjoes”! And don’t worry; if you just want to watch and not cook (or pipe) along, you’re welcome to do that. And if you can’t make it live but want to watch later, your ticket gets you access to a recording. Come join us — and invite your friends!

I break for animals:
Trunks

Well, something is wonky with Beehiv’s Instagram function, so I’m not able to preview the post here like usual, but trust me, you’ll want to click through to see this! Go, Trunks!

Recipe: Tortellini in Charred Onion & Carrot Brodo

Makes 4 servings // Time: Weekday // Storage: Refrigerate the tortellini and broth separately for up to 5 days or freeze for up to 3 months.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 2 large yellow onions (10 ounces/285g each), unpeeled, root end trimmed, cut into eighths

• 2 large carrots (4 ounces/115g each), scrubbed, trimmed, and cut into 1-inch (2.5cm) chunks

• 4 garlic cloves, unpeeled

• 6 cups (1.4L) water

• Fine sea salt

• 2 (9-ounce/255g) packages store-bought vegan tortellini, such as Kite Hill, or homemade tortellini such as 1 recipe Ricotta Tortellini (“Mastering,” page 246)

• Freshly ground black pepper, for serving (optional)

• Calabrian chile oil or other chile oil, for serving (optional)

• Parsley or cilantro leaves, for garnish

Directions

In a Dutch oven or soup pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat until it shimmers. (Turn the vent on if you have one.) Add the onions, cut-side down, along with the carrots and garlic and cook undisturbed until blackened in spots, about 3 minutes.

Add the water, bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium-low, cover, and cook until the carrots are soft, about 40 minutes.

Pour the broth through a sieve into a bowl (compost the solids). Rinse the pot, return the broth to the pot, and stir in 2 teaspoons salt. Taste and season with more salt as needed. Turn the heat to medium-low and cover to keep warm.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the tortellini and cook according to the package directions or following the instructions for Ricotta Tortellini (page 246) until tender. Drain.

Divide the tortellini among shallow serving bowls and pour the broth over them. Grind pepper over each bowl, drizzle with some chile oil (if using), and garnish with parsley or cilantro. Serve hot.

Note

If you’d like, you can cook the tortellini in the broth instead of separately, but it will turn the broth a little cloudy.

Adapted from “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2024), copyright Joe Yonan.

More favorite tortellini recipes

These are gift links to the recipes at the Post. Note that they require you to register but not subscribe. Gift links are free to access for 2 weeks, so if you want to come back to any of these recipes but don’t subscribe or want to subscribe (I wish you would to support the great work still happening there), I suggest you find a way to save them!

Tortellini Vegetable Soup

Tortellini Salad With Asparagus and Basil Dressing