Colours channel and Cignal Digital TV recently brought the culinary icon Geoffrey Zakarian to Manila for a special fundraising event: a five course dinner gala at Sofitel called Feast of Colours last March 20, 2014. Proceeds of the gala dinner went to the Philippine Disaster Recovery Foundation (PDRF), the country’s first permanent, year-round private sector organization for disaster management.
At a press luncheon before the gala dinner, the Iron Chef shared to the media his thoughts on Filipino food, and put on a cooking demo of his rendition of adobo. Read on to know more about the chef, restaurateur, television personality, and author in this feature.
On his impression of Filipinos (he shares he has Filipino staff at his restaurants on a cruise line):
"It struck me that everybody is incredibly happy, which I get right in the first meeting. And they just kept smiling the entire time in our sort of 'getting to know you' session.' And it never went away. And it's generally, what I've come to believe, this is really who you guys are. And it's amazing, because on my ship I have nothing but smiling, happy employees. They come to work happy, they go home happy, when they're working they're happy. They're so knowlegeable, and they love food, and they ingest information like incredible. So I'm blessed to have that situation. So coming here was to me very natural. I'm grateful that I was brought here."
On his other Filipino connection:
"I have another Filipino story: my two children have been raised by a wonderful woman named Anna Cruz, who has four sons and they're all surgeons. Isn't that amazing? And she lived with us, for each of our children, and showed us how to raise our baby. And our babies are calm, they sleep at night, they eat well, and it's all because of Ann. And she cooked every single day at our house, and she cooked adobo. And she had like a huge array of recipes, but the two ones that I liked the most was the pork and the chicken.
Basically my two kids have been raised by adobo. That's like a weekly special at my house."
On serving Filipino inspired dishes in his restaurants:
"Right now, no [we don't]. But we do a lot of things [in the restaurants] that you do here in this country. We use a lot of balancing of herbs… And what I sense when I come here is vinegar, onion, garlic, bay leaf, all that. That summed up my palate, I really love that. Even though I'm not directly using it, you'd definitely feel at home eating at my restaurant."
On his take on the adobo, served at the press luncheon and at the Feast of Colours fundraising dinner gala:
We're gonna do an adobo spiced pork belly, which is our version of a pork belly. Basically, it's the belly and we cooked it seventeen hours. We cooked it, sliced it, and then we glaze it in an adobo sauce. In the adobo sauce, we have tomato, cider vinegar, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, cocoa, and chili. I would like to say that it's sort of a Filipino version of a barbecue sauce. And what I noticed from eating here is the incredible range of vinegars that is used here. And I love vinegars. To me vinegar is balance; if you have fattiness, you have to have vinegar. So I really appreciate vinegar, you can really smell it. It's so fragrant. So we cook it really low and slow 178 degrees, it slowly cooks the meat and it stays soft. If you cook it too fast, what happens is it shrinks, right?
Adobo Spiced Pork Belly with endive, pickled mango, kalamansi limeI like endive, because I think endive is something that for me has that bitterness. And what we do to sweeten it up is we put it in a bag and we cook it really really low and slow with butter and some spices. And what we're gonna make is our own version of a salad. And we put a little of this crunchy rice on this soft pork… And so what you have here, it mimics this crispiness of skin without having the skin. And then my favorite, we're gonna have a little of pickled mango. We have sweet, sour, crispy, crunchy, and we're gonna add some lightness to it with the salad, the endive, and some citrus.
Does the Iron Chef find a particular dish the hardest to cook?
What dish that I find hard to cook? The dish that I don't know, so I have to make it up. That's a tough question. What I do is cook, so if you give me some ingredients, whatever you give me, I can make something. And you could probably eat it, I can assure you that. It might not be perfect, but I am pretty confident on that level.
On other cuisines around the world he has yet to explore:
Fortunately I live in New York, so I put my toe in the water for most cuisines. But I would love to go to Vietnam, I love Vietnamese food, I would love to go there and try it. And I have not spend enough time in Japan although New York City is probably close to pretty much a lot of Japanese food. Those are the two that jump out on me.
On what convinced him to visit the country to hold the event:
"Well, Yolanda, what's happened here. Manny [Pangilinan] generously set up this incredible dinner for seven hundred people, so it wasn't a hard decision."
On his personal advocacy, City Harvest, where he is the Charmain of the Food Council:
"It's a New York based charity, it's 100% private, no tax dollars are used whatsoever. A lot of people are left hungry, believe it or not, in United States and in New York. So what we do is we gather companies, organizations, supermarkets. We gather all the food and we give it away in a smart and efficient way… Last year I think we gave away 65 million pounds of food; it's really incredible how many meals that is. What's really wonderful is that all of the food is not processed, we don't take foods that are processed or have a lot of sugar on it. It's vegetables, it's health bars, it's coconut water. The companies love this sort of thing because we take these off their hands and they get a tax deduction, and we feed people."
On eating sigarillas (winged beans) for the first time:
"It was amazing! I had it at lunch yesterday. It was a cross between a string bean and a Chinese bean, and sort of like that. It's really amazing."
On eating Philippine mangoes:
"When I arrived here, Chef Eric was kind enough to send up some mangoes that were just so sweet, it's amazing! I mean, we don't get these kind of mangoes in the States, when you eat it it's like eating pure honey and sugar. I have them every morning, and I'm like, I'm gonna just get as much as I can because I'm not gonna any when I get home."
On having lunch with Manny Pangilinan (it was the chef's personal request to meet MVP):
"Manny was delightful. He invited me and he had a woman named Margarita [Fores], he cooked for us. She cooked an amazing lunch. It was about I think twelve or fifteen of us. And Manny, I didn't realize, he was a real foodie, he loves food. We had a wonderful prawn, ulang prawns. We had a beautiful beef dish, we had a barbecued milkfish, fillet with onions, and those beans [sigarillas] that were just incredible. And a beautiful mango sorbet with coconut milk. Just a lovely delightful lunch, and Manny is a very funny guy, and very generous."
His thoughts on #foodporn, a.k.a. people taking pictures of dishes they order at restaurants:
Well, if you wanna take a picture in a restaurant, and you're paying for it, you can take a picture! My phone is 3,500 food photos, that's all I do. What am I gonna do, why have an iPhone? What's the point in that? Yeah, obviously, it would be nice if you didn't use the flash, and disturb the other guests, that's just decorum, like yelling on the cellphone, you know? If you're polite [about it], I think it's wonderful. I mean, imagine you can transport a photo over Twitter and social networks to millions of people. And all those people would say, "Where's that? It looks great! I wanna go there." That's gold for restaurateurs. Why won't you want that to happen?
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Follow the Iron Chef online: Like his official Facebook page (/GeoffreyZakarian) and Follow him on Twitter and Instagram (@gzchef). Visit www.geoffreyzakarian.com
Colours, the living magazine channel, is available on Cignal HD Ch. 27 and HD Ch. 101, and in other cable operators nationwide.
