The Secret Ingredient: Brown Rice Vinegar
"There's something about everything traditional that has a flavor profile that I don't think can be replicated."
Elliot, or “Chef E” as we knew him in culinary school, was our primary instructor for most of the course. Jovial and snarky, sincere and funny, he provided a balanced introduction to the mix of hard and soft skills that are needed in a kitchen, and to the holistic health-oriented curriculum of our particular program. Elliot was one of the original instructors at the Natural Gourmet Institute who facilitated its transition when it was acquired by the Institute of Culinary Education, a very different sort of organization. I think he managed to keep alive some of the spark that made NGI different from other culinary institutions, and it comes through when he talks about food.
I loved this conversation, as it ranges through themes like food quality and traditional food-making without any of the pretension that sometimes accompany those topics. As Elliot points out, it all comes down to taste: generally the stuff made simply from carefully cultivated ingredients tastes better than factory stuff and makes you feel better later on. Macrobiotics was his system for integrating that philosophy but there are simpler paths to it as well.
Elliot: It occurred to me that for years, maybe because of my macrobiotic background, I've used rice vinegar in everything. I go through tons of it. I use brown rice vinegar, which I prefer to regular white rice vinegar.
Kate: What’s the difference?
Elliot: Well to me it’s a matter of subtlety. Brown rice vinegar is milder than white rice vinegar. I get a really strong umami kick, I can taste those glutamates and that's a very satisfying flavor to me and my cooking. I also like that as a vinegar, I think it marries better with everything else. So many times you're using vinegar and it's like Bam, it goes right to the foreground unless you're super careful. And I find brown rice vinegar just melds better. I love it in so many different things. When I used to cook for clients, I’d make some French vinaigrette and swap out the white wine vinegar for brown rice vinegar, and everyone was like, Oh, this is a really good dressing. That's my one of my secrets. I always use it of course in Asian cooking because it balances perfectly with good quality shoyu or tamari. It seems to me like those two things should always be together.
The other thing I’ve done is, where a lot of people who are making vegan analogues would use lemon, I use brown rice vinegar. I think it’s the umami thing, this cheesy taste. I'll take soaked cashews and puree them, and instead of putting lemon juice in there I'll put in brown rice vinegar and maple syrup. And it makes it taste a little bit like sour cream or crème fraîche.
Kate: How did you start using it?
Elliot: I was exposed to it as a macro, that’s how I learned about it. You know, from my Ashkenazi Jewish background I didn’t know anything about brown rice vinegar. But somewhere in the late 80s, my mother gave me some books. She met some guy named Ron and Ron gave her macrobiotic books and she gave some to me. I started reading and I had never really thought about food quality my entire life or whether it had any power to heal, or what was considered a condiment in its purest form with no additives in it. That was a whole new world to me as I studied macrobiotics. I realized, Wow, I have to learn what this stuff is and where to buy it. Detroit isn't exactly you know, a world capital but it's also not Podunk nowhere. So there were several health food stores, which are becoming more and more rare now. The companies like Eden and Erewhon were bringing these things that would have even been a little bit unfamiliar even to Japanese people — not the ingredient itself but that quality.
Like if you taste the the quality of this macrobiotic stuff, this traditional Japanese stuff, it just tastes good by itself. You could taste a spoonful of brown rice vinegar and it's delicious. If you did the same thing with commercial vinegar, it’d just be overpowering. When I was a macro, I used to have friends who, when we went to a sushi bar or something, they’d bring their own tamari with them. Because there’s a lot of crap in commercial soy sauce.
Kate: It’s interesting, I think in American cooking, we see condiments as these unhealthy things that just make something taste better. I don't think we think too much about the quality of ingredients.
Elliot: No you’re right, like Sriracha, it just has a bunch of crap in it. Or French's mustard, God knows what's in that. I’d never tasted something where someone actually cared about how it was made. I would love to see how some of these things were made. I mean, I've read about it but I would love to actually see the process because they have so few ingredients and they're so pure.
What impresses me is the [traditional foodmakers] do things and the reason for them is not readily evident. Sometimes I've watched demonstrations and I'm like, Well, why did they do that? There's always so much care. Like in miso, once they mix the mashed soy beans with the Koji, they make little snowballs out of it and they pack these balls into the container and like, why don't you just put the paste in there? Why are they individual balls? There's always a reason for everything but it's not readily apparent. So you wonder if you did it yourself whether you'd wind up with the same product because of all these little things that you may or may not know how to do.
When you’re a culinary instructor, everyone believes you should want to do everything. You know, when students ask me about gardening, I'm like, Yeah, I don't want to know anything about gardening. I love gardens. I want to take what comes from gardens. I don't want to know how to grow anything. If there's great rice vinegar in the world, do I want to make rice vinegar? Not really. I want to cook with it. But there is this expectation that cooks should want to make everything from scratch, including the condiments they use. But when someone makes something perfectly, like a really great miso, I don't feel the need necessarily to make it.
Kate: Considering whether something’s good quality, is that just a matter of taste and looking at the ingredients?
Elliot: Yeah, I think for me at least, those two things have been kind of the package.
There's something about everything traditional that has a flavor profile that I don't think can be replicated. We've spent decades and probably millions of dollars to synthetically make flavors, but they always taste that way, to me anyway. They’re not all bad, I don’t mean to say that some of those flavors aren’t good, but they never taste like the thing to me.
[Before I started studying macrobiotics] I had never eaten anything of any quality. You know, I liked crap like every American. The only traditional food I had was from my own background, and I hated the cuisine I grew up with. I like it more now than I did then. I was an Ashkenazi Jew and that meant roast chicken, brisket, chicken soup. And I think that was it.
When I moved to New York, I was still a hick. I had never had Indian food before. A lot of people don't respond well to all that change, but I was like, Oh my God, there's a whole world of flavor out here. And then macro struck me the same way. It was a whole family of flavor I had never tasted before. Umeboshi, I love that flavor. That stuff's crazy. There’s nothing like it in the world. So macrobiotics was like a place to start with the wider world of food.
Kate: What I feel like I’ve understood about macrobiotics is that it’s characterized by a lot of rules and restrictions, but for you it was more of a jumping off point to a much wider variety.
Elliot: It’s interesting because that’s what’s encouraged. I just feel like Americans couldn’t wrap their minds around it until it was rule-based. But really at the root of it, it's like, eat whatever. But notice when you eat certain things. If you're going to eat sugar, if you're gonna eat meat, you're going to feel a certain way, you're going to have a certain kind of energy. And then you should understand what it would take to bring that back into balance. But I think Americans need this: Yes to this, No to that.
Over the years, I’ve really seen the students gravitate more towards that. It used to be they would soak up all the intuitive models. And now I feel like they are much more in tune with the Western evidence-based nutrition classes. We’re in a different time and you notice that no one talks about macrobiotics anymore at all. It’s, like, dead. It hurts me because I love these things, but should we really even be teaching macro anymore? It was a very meaningful model to me, but no one even knows it anymore.
Kate: That's something that I think is really interesting and is really at the heart of cooking. I mean, paying attention to how you feel. It takes a very particular type of attention to notice the taste of a high quality ingredient. And I wonder if there's a way to get at that from a different angle, or outside of the framework of macrobiotics.
Elliot: Macrobiotics is a really stupid word. You know, all this is is really traditional foodways stuff. And every culture could benefit from that. How did we used to make this condiment before it was made in a factory? We can do that with virtually anything. It's not hard to make mustard. You simply soak mustard seeds and some vinegar and wine and puree that up and add a little bit of shallot to that and like, Wow, that tastes totally different than what I get in a jar. And, oh, actually taking whole spices, toasting them yourself and then grinding them is much more vibrant than just shaking it out of some container that's like two years old. That was the cool thing about our program. That's what I care about.
What I’m cooking
Golubtsi (cabbage rolls) with mushrooms and pine nuts (v)
Pine nuts are a magical meat-nut; toasting them with caraway seeds almost smells like you’re cooking sausage. The filling for these cabbage rolls is hearty and very savory. I like the contrast of the filling with the tangy, slightly sweet tomato sauce, but sometimes golubtsi are topped with a mushroom gravy, which you could try instead.
