Tom Colicchio: Tender at the bone
When he was first introduced by Gail Simmons, Tom Colicchio’s name was greeted by a roar of swooning women and one who yelled out that he was a “hottie.” Arriving with a humble wave, Colicchio announced that he was going to be doing a very ambitious 45 minute demonstration of confit.
He jumped right into the first item: lemon. We won’t divulge his recipes here and, in fact, won’t even refer to them as recipes. Throughout the demonstrations Colicchio insisted that following recipes was no the way to improve as a cook. “Don’t trust the recipe,” he advised. “Get away from the recipe; learn how to cook.”
Next up were tomatoes, which Colicchio nonchalantly prepared and switched out for the premade dish while dispatching philosophies on cooking. Namely that when you are cooking a dish you should be doing just that: cooking. The preparations should already be done so that you can concentrate on the cooking of the dish rather than risk letting your main dish burn while you’re busy crushing garlic.
Tuna confit followed, and then the pièce de résistance, the pork-butt confit, which received loud oohs and ahhs of appreciation when Colicchio used just a fork to pull the tender meat away from the bone.
A short Q&A session followed the hurried demonstration (in real time each dish would have taken hours to complete), during which Colicchio answered questions about specific dishes as well as about cooking and restaurants in general. The only question he couldn’t answer, he said, was who won this season’s Top Chef, mostly because they haven’t filmed the finale yet.
The most widely applauded answer of the afternoon came when Colicchio was confronted by a woman who asked if he thought we should be eating this kind of food all the time. She was particularly sensitive to the seemingly large amount of salt and fat used in the dishes. Colicchio answered no, we shouldn’t be eating this kind of food all the time. But some of the time is just fine (especially if you box four times a week like he does). And that if we didn’t eat salt or fat we’d die, which segued into a nice plug for the documentary that he and his wife are making that examines hunger in America. Yay, fat, the audience applauded. And then it was over before it began, and the Top Chef heartthrob gracefully exited.—Justine Sterling
