How to Dress an Egg | Ned Baldwin

How to Dress an Egg: Suprising and Simple Ways to Cook Dinner

By Ned Baldwin & Peter Kaminsky

Intro:                  Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Ned Baldwin:                  I'm Ned Baldwin. My first cookbook is How to Dress an Egg.

Suzy Chase:                  For more Cookery by the Book, and to see what recipes I made out of this cookbook, head on over to CookerybytheBook on Instagram. Now for my quarantine question round. On Instagram, you wrote on your Houseman Restaurant account, "We're closing today. No takeout, no delivery. Don't know for how long. Looks like residents are going to be cooped up for some days. I'll be in the restaurant through tomorrow, closing things down, dealing with perishables, et cetera. We plan to reopen in whatever form is appropriate as soon as we can. We'll miss you." So, that was on March 17th. How are things going for you now as a restaurant owner in the epicenter, in New York City?

Ned Baldwin:                  Yeah. It makes me sad to hear that. Well, we're still closed. I'm still not doing takeout. Every day, several times a day, I do the thought experiment about what it would feel like to do takeout, and who it would benefit, and at what risk. I mean, I have to say I kind of love working under adverse circumstances. Probably if I didn't, I wouldn't work in restaurants at all. You know, there was a blizzard a couple years ago. We were the only restaurant in the neighborhood open. My wife was hosting. She doesn't know how to do that. My daughter was busing tables. The guy who owns a suit shop next door was mixing drinks. He does not know how to mix drinks. It was me and one other cook. And because we were the only restaurant open, and nobody wanted to go very far, we were crazy busy, and it was one of my favorite nights that we've had at the restaurant. It was super fun. I think we did 80 covers, me and another cook.

Ned Baldwin:                  And I would love nothing more than to serve the community in that way under these circumstances, but these are not the same. My chef de cuisine has a child, and I have two. I think the best thing that I can do right now... As much as I'd love to be providing Houseman's roast chicken to the people, the best thing we can do is be closed, and go to the grocery store infrequently, and encourage our customers to do the same. And, you know. I'm spending my time talking about this cookbook, which I'm excited about, and I think is an appropriate tool for the time.

Suzy Chase:                  What dish are you making at home that is getting you through this time?

Ned Baldwin:                  That's a fun question. I think one of the funny consequences of sort of living the life that I've carved out for myself is I'm like a gastro thrill seeker. I want maximum spice and acid and crunch and creaminess, and a panoply of spices. I mean, I'm actually not bored during this time at all, but when it comes time to eat, I get excited about it. That's probably no different from any other day of the week. And my family are normal people when it comes to food, so for them, I cook a recipe from the book maybe twice or three times a week, and that's the roasted broccoli.

Ned Baldwin:                  Everybody loves broccoli, and actually, that recipe is in the book because my family likes it so much. That's broccoli kind of cooked like it's meat. So, salted a little bit, broken up. I show a way to cut it nicely, that has these sort of sweeps out of the dock, in a hot pan and then in the oven, and it's done. That's just sort of fun. My kids love crunchy stuff, and they also love browned stuff, so the heads have a lot of caramelization, and the stalks still have a good amount of crunch in them. So, that's what I'm cooking for the family. I mean, that's not all, but that's a thing that everybody seems to like a lot.

Ned Baldwin:                  And then for myself, I can't seem to get enough of curry flavors right now. Curry is a broad, loose, kind of flabby term that describes a whole bunch of different combinations of spices, depending on where you are and what you're doing. I've been doing it with chick peas, with pork, with chicken and lots of spices, and with fried leeks. I mean, the sky's the limit.

Ned Baldwin:                  Actually, I discovered something super fun a couple of days ago. I was breaking down a hangar steak, and hangar steak has this sort of ribbon of super tough, chewy... Like you can't eat it the way it is when you cook a steak... gristle. And you know, I removed it, and I looked at it for a second and thought, "Wait a minute. I love tendon." You know, in Chinese restaurants? And I love pork skin, and all that kind of stuff. And this piece, it's that, so it just needs to be cooked differently. So I immediately put it in a pot with ginger and shallot and garlic and chile, and with some onions and a bunch of other stuff, and braised it for two or three hours. And, wow. What a revelation, and super fun. I guess that's kind of the sort of nonsense I'm getting up to.

Suzy Chase:                  You are a gastro thrill seeker. I had no idea you were going to say that. That's so funny. Hey, I made your broccoli last night. It's life changing.

Ned Baldwin:                  Cool.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm never making broccoli any other way ever again.

Ned Baldwin:                  I love hearing that.

Suzy Chase:                  It's so good. So, on to the cookbook.

Ned Baldwin:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  I love that this cookbook is all about cooking simple things. At first glance I thought, "Oh, this is a restaurant cookbook," but it's really not. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ned Baldwin:                  Yeah, sure. So, I was 36 years old when I set foot as an employee in a restaurant environment first, and preceding that, I was both an impassioned home cook, and a great eater in New York City restaurants, and other cities' restaurants that I managed to get into. I just love eating, and I love cooking. And so, I was a home cook for more years than I even still have been a restaurant cook.

Ned Baldwin:                  I ended up working in the industry and opening Houseman Restaurant five years ago, and so I've been a restaurant cook for maybe 10 years, and the way I kind of feel... You know. I do my best to be a great restaurant cook when I'm in the restaurant. But also, there's a part of me always that's like a home cook spy in the restaurant world, and sort of picking apart, "Oh, that thing, the way that we do that." And that would be totally useless at home. No home cook would ever do that. It's timely. It requires unusual equipment, and just not useful at home at all. And then, other things, a few here and there, I think, "Wow. God, I wish I had known that when I was only cooking at home." So, almost like a home cook spy in the restaurant world.

Ned Baldwin:                  And the book, it isn't all stuff that I learned in the restaurants that I thought would be useful at home, but some of it is. The broccoli, for example, just was like, "I know my kids are going to like broccoli cooked like this." Like our roast chicken recipe, which I think is one of the more important chapters in the book, was born from cooking chicken in several different restaurants.

Ned Baldwin:                  Restaurants are funny. You go in and you sit down, and there's certain windows of time that the kitchen has to produce food. Like, you want your entrée between 15 and 30 minutes from when you sit down in the restaurant, and if it's more than that, a customer starts to get kind of anxious. So, roasted chicken takes a long time, and so a lot of restaurants mitigate that by precooking or par cooking their chickens, which I think decreases its quality by 15 to 40%, right off the bat with that.

Ned Baldwin:                  And so, I wanted to cook chicken from cold, like take it out of the fridge to done in 12 to 18 minutes. And just kind of goofed around with a bunch of different ways of doing it, and finally discovered that I could get certain size chickens and cook them from raw pretty efficiently. That translated to the home very well, and it also, like there was a big a-ha moment when I was... I think I was at Craft and I saw cooks doing this. That they used the floor of the oven. They lift the rack up to the higher shelf, and just put pans on the floor of the oven.

Suzy Chase:                  What does that do? Does it bring more heat underneath the chicken?

Ned Baldwin:                  Yeah. The way ovens are designed, there's almost all ovens, the heat comes from an element that's underneath the metal pan on the floor of the oven. And so, if you set the pan on the floor, that element is like a low temperature burner. So, it's sort of like having your pan on a low flame while also in the oven. And what that does, if you're cooking something wet... Like any kind of meat, chicken... the liquid that comes out of it while it's cooking that would otherwise inhibit the skin from crisping properly, like if it was on a shelf in the middle of the oven, it cooks that water off really fast. So, one of the things people love about our roasted chicken is the skin is like a cracker. Crispy. Really, really crispy, and nicely browned.

Suzy Chase:                  So, speaking of your chicken, in 2015, Pete Wells wrote in The New York Times, "Houseman is a new restaurant where you can get, among other good things, an excellent roast chicken. 'Big whoop,' you say. 'I can get excellent roast chicken at a place in my neighborhood.' Well, no you can't," he wrote, "Unless you live across the street from Barbuto. But let's not argue." And then Pete even wrote, "In restaurants, I manage to get a chicken like this roughly once out of every 50 attempts." That is some high praise right there. After he wrote that, were people just coming in for your chicken all the time?

Ned Baldwin:                  We sold a gazillion, gazillion roast chickens. Yeah. Yeah. It's impossible to work at Houseman, and not end up being a great chicken cook. And for what it's worth... And I kind of love that this is true... all my cooks, when they cook chicken at home, they do it the same way they do it in the restaurant. Because it works, and it translates at home.

Suzy Chase:                  So, you know this to be true. If you can learn to cook one thing well, and make a recipe truly your own, you have opened the door to creating a lifetime's worth of recipes. What's the first thing you learned to cook well?

Ned Baldwin:                  Oh. Fun question. Well, that's an opportunity to talk about my wife's father, my father in law, who is one of my best friends in the world, and who is just a spectacular cook. I think my love of home cooking... I probably would have been there anyway, but boy did it get a chance to emerge, in cooking and building a relationship with him. He cooks everything well. His name's Jay. We did moules, just like Belgians do mussels. One of my great loves in cooking and eating is finding a thing that I thought I didn't like, and just falling in love with it.

Ned Baldwin:                  I actually quoted him at the beginning of the book, saying, "If you think you don't like something, you probably just haven't had it cooked properly." That's his perspective.

Suzy Chase:                  True.

Ned Baldwin:                  Which is great. What he's saying is it's a fundamental openness to all food on the planet. And I make those mussels all the time. And then, even more impactful was lobster bisque that he made, that just blew my doors off. So delicious and rich, and it was about squeezing flavor out of every step of the way. Breaking the lobster down, and crushing the shells and roasting them, and reducing and roasting and reducing, and flaming with cognac. I mean, it was great. Just great. And I've done some version of that recipe hundreds and hundreds of times now.

Suzy Chase:                  So, the one thing I've been cooking more than anything else during quarantine has been eggs. We are going through eggs like they're going out of style. Would you share the story of the dressed egg?

Ned Baldwin:                  Shortly after the restaurant opened, I was going to put a dish on the menu called oeuf mayonnaise, which is a boiled egg in some kind of delicious mayonnaise. I had gathered some ingredients, and was on my way down the stairs to where the food processor was to make the mayonnaise. I was just literally halfway down the stairs with an armload of stuff, and stopped and thought, "Why does this need to be mayonnaise?" Walked back upstairs, and made the following. I made something that we now call egg candy, which is almost like a slurry of capers and anchovies, chile, lemon zest, some fried herbs, and a lot of olive oil. And then we made some fried leeks and some fried parsley. That was the first one.

Ned Baldwin:                  I put it on the menu. It was one of those lovely moments where it was like, "What are we going to call it?" "I don't know." "Oh, let's call it a dressed egg." And then it became one of our bestselling things, and one of the things that's consistently been in the restaurant since we opened. I sort of recognized a framework, like your seven and a half minute eggs are gorgeous. Jammy and delicious all by themselves or with a little bit of salt, but then if you dress them up... And you can dress them up a million ways.

Suzy Chase:                  So, tell us about your co-author, Peter Kaminsky, and how he influenced you.

Ned Baldwin:                  Well, Peter is a cookbook rockstar. He's written with a zillion chefs who are better than me. I honestly... You know, I just have to say, between Gerardo and Pete and Christopher Sheinlin and Melissa Hamilton, who photographed the book, and Rux Martin, who edited the book, and David Black, who's our agent... Every minute that I think about this team, I say the same thing. I don't know how the hell I got on this team. It's just an amazing crowd of people.

Ned Baldwin:                  You know, it started with Pete. Pete came to the restaurant. He read Pete Wells' review. As he likes to say, he's not really a review chaser. He wrote the Underground Gourmet for New York Magazine. He was a food reviewer there for some years. I think he's sort of done with the next trendy restaurant, but he said he thought he found something in Pete Wells' review that made him excited about trying Houseman, and he came, and [inaudible 00:13:16]. Pete has a parallel life as a fishing writer, and I mentioned earlier, I'm totally obsessed with fishing. It's all I want to do if I'm not with my family or cooking.

Ned Baldwin:                  And so, when I saw he was coming in, I had actually just read a book that he wrote, which is just lyrically beautiful, about fishing in Montauk in the fall. It's called The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass. I had just read it for the second time about a month before, and so I... You know. Normally if I recognize somebody in the restaurant, if they're not a friend, I leave them alone. Meryl Streep or whatever. But Gabrielle Hamilton, that owns Prune, had a great line. She said, "You know, if they changed your life, tell them." So I did that, and we ended up chatting and finding that we got on well, and shared a sense of humor.

Ned Baldwin:                  He came back a few more times, and I guess wasn't disappointed with the food. And then on December 17th of 2015, called the restaurant, and he said, "Do you want to do a book?" And I said, "No." Which was insane, but... You know. I had just opened a restaurant. And he said, "You know, Ned, it takes a long time to write a book." He was quite right. It took us a year and a half to kind of carve out what the concept of the book was, and then a couple more years to get it fully written. I took cookbook writing 101, 202, 303, 404 with Peter, who has written 17 cookbooks.

Suzy Chase:                  Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook, and why?

Ned Baldwin:                  I... And I bet you do, too... I love Bonnie Slotnick. I love her bookstore. I love going in there and spending half the time talking to her, and half the time looking at books, and I have done for many, many years.

Ned Baldwin:                  I can pull out some silly ones. I love Rex Stout, the author. He wrote the Nero Wolfe books that take place in New York City in the '30s and '40s and '50s, and he was a gastronome who lived in the West '30s in his townhouse, and he had a chef in his house? This is all fictional. He had a chef in his house. His name is Fritz. And one of the great joys of the books is him describing the meals that Fritz, who's a German cook, but was making what I think is really traditional high American food from that era. There are probably, gosh, I don't know, 20 or 30 Nero Wolfe books, and someone pulled all of the recipes out of them and made a cookbook out of them. I really, really love that one a lot.

Ned Baldwin:                  I was just reading It's Not a Cookbook. But, we have a group out here on Sunday evenings. Somebody picks a text, and we Zoom together and take turns reading the text. So, I had remembered a Jim Harrison essay. I think he was in Michigan, and got caught in just the storm of all storms, and kind of dug a hole with his hands and got in the hole. It's a really beautiful piece, and sort of makes me feel a little bit about some version of how our psyche's feeling at the moment. For those who don't know, Jim Harrison's an outdoorsman and a food writer, and he wrote some movies. He died a couple years ago. And he just writes amazingly about food.

Ned Baldwin:                  You know, I couldn't remember where the heck that passage was about him getting caught in the storm, so I ended up reading two of his books over the last couple of days. And just, I mean wonderful food story after wonderful food story, and half of them are him at home, making pozole... He's like a super rustic cook... and half of them are him at some three Michelin star restaurant, eating woodcock and drinking magnums of Petrus. So I like him a lot, too.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Ned Baldwin:                  My website is housemanrestaurant.com, and I have Facebook, but I don't really use it, and I have Twitter, and I don't really use that, either. But I do use Instagram quite a bit, and my Instagram is also just Housemanrestaurant.

Suzy Chase:                  Judith Jones wrote in Eater, "To me, cooking is an art form, and like any art form, you have to learn the fundamentals. Well, this cookbook is a good place to start." Thanks so much, Ned, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Ned Baldwin:                  Thank you for having me. It's a lot of fun.

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