The Lady Gaga of the Kitchen
All-star chef Anne Burrell brings her zesty wit and personality (and her special risotto) to Ko Olina this weekend for the Hawaii Wine and Food Festival
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open wood fire and created flavorful menus inspired by countries around the Mediterranean.
“I have a real love of rustic food made with pure and simple ingredients with intense flavors,” Burrell says. “Cooking is such a daunting task to a lot of people and it doesn’t have to be. It’s not really rocket science. When folks don’t know how to do stuff, they wing it. That cracks me up.
“I want to help people understand that they can do restaurant food at home. I want to take the fear factor out of cooking.”
She has done that well, both on her Food Network shows and in the classroom. She taught for three years at the Institute of Culinary Education before returning to the restaurant business as executive chef at Lumi Restaurant. Other opportunities led to BataliBastianich’s Italian Wine Merchants and eventually to becoming Mario Batali’s sous chef on Food Network’s Iron Chefs.
As executive chef at New York hot spot Centro Vinoteca, she served her “creative authentic” Italian menu of small plates (piccolini), antipasti, pastas and main courses accented by her trademark bold, pure flavors.
But her venture into the Food Network’s world of 9 million households is where she’s firing on all burners. Burrell landed her own show in 2008 and now shares her stock of insider secrets from years of training and restaurant experience.
In 2010, her new show, Worst Cooks in America, debuted as the highest rated, most watched night in Food Network history, attracting 4 million viewers for the first episode.
She and co-host Robert Irvine put 12 hopeless recruits through a culinary boot camp and convert kitchen zeroes into kitchen heroes.
Tasting the contestants’ dishes in a preliminary round was especially painful for the two pros. When Burrell bit into a pound cake that tasted like dust, she emphatically declared, “You’re a goner!”
Her advice for fledging home cooks is, “Read the recipe from start to finish.”
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“When I was learning how to cook, I never wanted to read the recipe, but now I see how important it is because you can start doing what I call ‘crap detecting’ where you filter out extra steps. Basically, you modify the recipe to get rid of the crap,” she says.
Her favorite kitchen tip? “Use salt! It’s a flavor enhancer. Taste everything as you go along,” the star-chef says.
Burrell’s “holy trinity of cooking” is salt, olive oil and bacon. She claims these work wonders in most recipes.
Notice pepper is not mentioned. Some say she doesn’t even have it in her kitchen.
“Not true,” she responds. “I use black pepper as an ingredient, not as basic seasoning or automatic pairing with salt.”
The multi-tasking New York-based chef has plenty on her plate these days. Besides taping her regular shows, she will serve as one of the judges for The Next Iron Chef series that premieres Oct. 30 on Food Network. Her first cook book, Cook Like a Rock Star, will be released by publisher Clarkson Peter on Oct. 4.
“It’s based on the TV show,” Burrell says. “It’s about empowerment in one’s kitchen.”
As for food trends on the horizon, Burrell is philosophical.
“Everything’s so cyclical,” she says. “Trends go back and forth. But we’re getting out of the mac-and-cheese thing, and molecular gastronomy is calming down.
“We seem to be going back deep to the heart of big cookery. The trend will always be wherever there’s good food.”
We couldn’t have said it better. Rock on, chef.
Tickets and more information on Hawaii Wine and Food Festival May 20-21 at Ko Olina Resort is available at hawaiifoodandwine.com.
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