Daniel Orr Real Food

From Barnes & Noble

Anyone who follows the New York restaurant scene will know the name of La Grenouille—it's one of the city's finest traditional French restaurants. But fans of the place might be surprised to learn that the true passion of the chef who creates the restaurant's rich and elegant food is for an entirely different kind of cooking, a lighter, more ethnically influenced, and much less labor-intensive kind of cooking he calls Regime Cuisine. In his new book, Real Food, Orr offers Regime Cuisine recipes for simple, quick, everyday breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, as well as menus for entertaining that feature more sophisticated dishes that are neither heavy nor formal.

About Daniel Orr and Real Food

With his strawberry-blond hair and big blue eyes, Daniel Orr still looks a lot like the corn-fed, midwestern boy he once was (he hails from Indiana originally, where he says there was one kind of fish in the market when he was growing up: frozen cod), but his innovative way with food betrays his international sensibilities. Orr says that at La Grenouille, he's surrounded all day by ingredients like butter, cream, and foie gras, and at some point he had to start spending his weekends at the gym to try and get rid of the extra pounds he was putting on at work. But he doesn't have any desire to give up the pleasure he takes in eating and cooking. "I don't like our concept of dieting in America," Orr says. "We think of it as punishment." He wanted to eat in a way that was good for his body, enjoyable to prepare, and delicious. So he turned to the French and their concept of the "regime" (a systematic, beneficial plan) to create Regime Cuisine: "Regime Cuisine is something wonderful you do for yourself every day," he says. "It's all about flavors, and taking out the fat, the gluten, the red meat, the processed foods—and cooking very naturally, with the best ingredients from the farmers' market or organic market."

The first section of Orr's new book, Real Food, is devoted to everyday Regime Cuisine meals. Appealing breakfasts like French Toast with Warm Berry Compote and Yogurt or Irish Oatmeal Porridge with Pine Nuts and Raisins combine whole grains with fruit for a deeply satisfying and healthy start to the day; lunches include Cool Buckwheat Noodles with Steamed Salmon and Rice and Bean Salad with Herbs and Corn; dinners range from an ambitious and elegant Mixed Fish Bouillabaisse with Regime Rouille and Spelt Croutons to a simple, delicious Herb-Perfumed Chicken Breast with Vegetable Fleurettes and Sweet Potatoes. Soups, snacks, beverages, and desserts are included as well. The last section of Real Food is devoted to menus for entertaining, such as "Outdoor Italian Lunch" and "A Gardener's Supper," comprising elegant dishes that demand a bit more effort but are no less healthy than the everyday Regime meals. Orr's own charming drawings, illustrating the best way to present each dish on the plate, populate this section, along with the gorgeous color photos that appear throughout.

About the Menu

As soon as we tasted the first dish Orr prepared, Endive Barquettes (little boats) filled with White Bean Brandade, it became clear that his food is out of the ordinary. White bean puree can be flavored dozens of different ways, and it's the perfect showcase for Orr's innovative use of spice blends—he includes the recipes for several of the blends he's created in the book, and they show up frequently in all sorts of dishes. Orr says he was inspired by an Indian colleague who described her mother's 24-ingredient masala, or spice mix. "It's completely different from what you'd do in French cuisine, where you want to taste one clear flavor, even though it's framed by many other flavors. I assumed that so many spices would lead to a muddled flavor, but instead they really work wonderfully," Orr says. "They really help coax out the flavors in your ingredients, without having to add the heavy cream, the butter, or the excess of olive oil you might otherwise depend on."

The endive barquettes were crisp and creamy, redolent of toasted cumin and the pungent, currylike pickled masala spice blend sprinkled on top. Next came a seemingly sinfully rich Autumn Chestnut Velouté, made with only skim milk—it was a perfectly smooth, toast-colored bisque that tasted deeply of sweet chestnuts, enlivened with just a hint of heat from jalapeno pepper and enriched with fennel and roasted garlic. The Tandoori Salmon with Braised Cabbage and Mashed Sweet Potatoes resonated with an inspired combination of flavors—the creamy curried Regime Sour Cream (pureed, flavored tofu that retained no trace of tofu flavor) coating the fish broiled to a delicious, brown-crusted topping and played perfectly off the rich sweetness of the sweet potatoes and the crisp caraway flavor of the cabbage. The dessert was one of the most visually appealing I've ever been served, and one of the most unusually refreshing I've ever tasted. The delicate, champagne-colored ice crystals of the Vermouth Granité were surrounded by deeply colored ruby-red grapefruit sections, with delicate julienned strips of candied lemon zest artfully scattered over all. The taste was light, tart, and palate cleansing. We drank a fresh, delicate, slightly oaky Pouilly-Fuissé from Louis Jadot with the entire menu.

Tips from Daniel Orr

• "I like to use gray sea salt from Brittany; it's a hand-raked sea salt, with large crystals and a very nice sea flavor," Orr said. "When you use it to garnish a dish at the end of cooking, it gives you a great little salt fix—that's the way I like to use salt. Instead of putting a lot into my cooking, I put a little bit on at the end, and you get both a textural experience as well as the saltiness, a little crunch and a little salt explosion, so you don't need to use a lot while you're cooking."
• Lemon zest is a great flavor enhancer—Orr uses it in many recipes. He advises using a vegetable peeler to take off a strip, but unless you have a very sharp one that takes off a perfectly thin ribbon, you'll need to cut the bitter white pith off the inside of the strip with a knife. Then cut the strip into very fine dice to add to spice blends or for sprinkling on top of finished dishes.
• One trick to use when you're cooking a vegetarian dish but you want to give the impression of meaty richness is to add ingredients like fennel, or coriander. "Fennel is what's in Italian sausage that gives it an anise flavor, and when you taste it, your mind tricks you into thinking you're eating meat, since the tastes are linked in memory."
• Toasting whole spices before grinding them releases a whole new level of flavor. Orr demonstrated the proper way to toast the cumin seeds for the endive barquettes without burning them, paying close attention to their smell. "When the smell wafts up from the pan and permeates the room, they've reached the proper temperature," he says. Grind the toasted seeds finely in a spice mill, a coffee grinder reserved for spices, or in a mortar and pestle.