This week, at a glance:
- Hot Take: 10 Takeaways from Chef Wylie Dufresne
- Listen: Fireside chat with Chef Wylie Durfresne - Part 1 and Part 2
- Cook: Dijon - Poppy Seed Butter
🤔🌶️ Hot Take
10 Takeaways from Chef Wylie Dufresne
1. You can't teach creativity. And "you can't plan to be creative, but you can plan for creativity."
This came first from Wylie's mother. She said, "You can't just wake up and decide today I'll be creative." BUT: "You can hunt for creativity and go after creativity." He doesn't describe himself as creative. He describes himself as somebody who asks a lot of questions, and gives his parents credit for making that okay. My takeaway from this: If you want to build a business with innovation as a core competency, then find people who are first and foremost insatiably curious, then find as many ways as possible to motivate your them to stay curious. Build it into your daily lineup, your weekly standup, or all hands meetings. Always follow up with more questions so the team is constantly reminded to ask why, and never accept the status quo as the reason. Creativity is a muscle, not a talent. And it atrophies quickly.
2. Creativity is a team sport
"No great creative endeavor in the history of the world is the work of one person....There were four Beatles. One guy didn't paint the Sistine Chapel." Iteration means every team member has a voice. He recalls a cook who wanted to make Bagel Ice Cream. "Great, that sounds amazing, why didn't I think of that," says Wylie. Another cook suggests "...If we take the ice cream and we put it in a tiny little mold that's round, it'll look like a bagel." And yet another reminds Wylie of the airbrush they had been asking for that could spray brown and black to make it look like a bagel. Another cook remembers the cream cheese that they dried to make crunchy. Another cook says "Remember that salmon emulsion you had to stir for like 7 million hours? Can we please not put that on this dish". The culmination after improvements is a bagel that's creamy, with cream cheese that's crunchy, and all of which somehow is still both delicious, whimsical, and no one person is responsible for making it happen.
There is always ultimately still one arbiter (or a few) that make the final decision. Not every idea is good or complete. Experience helps to take the idea and turn it into something that works. But at the end of the process, everyone feels a part of the creation.
3. Build an environment where it's ok to talk shit to the chef
What this really means is making it ok and safe to share ideas, and being ok with failure. This not only enables you to create a culture of innovation, but it doubles as the best way to uphold your standards when you're not around. That bagel ice cream would never be possible if the cook was scared to share their idea. Just as important, your team cannot be scared that a risk will always result in punishment if it doesn't work. Elon Musk shares a similar sentiment: If you punish failure, your team will respond accordingly, and the innovation you get will be incremental at best and no one will try anything bold for fear of getting fired. Wylie shares a fun story in the episode about racing his team around the block. His premise, related to upholding standards, is that the team has to share the same ground truth for what 'good' is, no matter their rank. That level of ownership is what creates the intrinsic desire to uphold your standards.
4. Let your frontline team improve the food & service. They will do it faster and better
Wylie shared that the best iteration often came from his cooks. One of his most famous dishes is the deep-fried mayo (and the deep-fried hollandaise). The fried hollandaise kept blowing out in the fryer. The cook was getting hammered every night, having to continually refire them. They tested triple breading and freezing. Freezing worked. The dish was never designed that way but it worked great and became scalable because of direct feedback from the one who was living and breathing the execution daily. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Ron Parker, former COO of Union Square Hospitality and the Jose Andres Group, about the design of new location build-outs. Ron shared that it's a huge miss if they don't get feedback from their frontline team on the kitchen line design, the service floor, etc. to learn what slows things down or speeds things up during service. And all of this requires trust and the other lessons shared above.
5. A great idea you can't execute isn't a great idea.
He mentioned a really cool technique with egg whites that created an unreal texture. But it took like 3 hours to make 5 of them pre-service. He recalled working with chocolate company Mars on some innovation, and asking them "...wouldn't it be neat if you could make a liquid center? Wouldn't you want an M&M that was liquid?" Their food scientists responded "...oh yeah, we can do that, we've already tested it." Wylie: "Well why the heck don't you do that? People would love it." Their answer was basically, "...we can't sell X billion units of it, so it's not worth it." The takeaway: an idea that can't be executed on your actual line by your actual team consistently every day isn't creativity, it's a hobby.
6. In cooking, percentages are how you control the outcome.
When something is used in miniscule amounts, and the recipe calls for, for example, "a pinch of salt" or "a pinch of xanthan gum", you not only cannot control the consistency, but you have no idea how to change the end result based on the impact of those ingredients. An ingredient like xanthan or even just salt works in a dish at as low as 0.2%. Same argument for hydration or really anything functional. "If you don't know how the ingredients play to each other, how can I possibly intelligently play a part in controlling the outcome?" This gets especially complex as the ratios change as your batches scale. Cooking is far more scienctific than we give it credit for, however humbling that is for chefs when we're cooking from intuition. Which is perfectly fine on any given day, it just doesn't work once you have a team and a business.
7. Don't just accept that rules can be broken. Actively seek to break them if you want real innovation.
Wylie admitadly loves xanthan gum. It's essentially a bacteria that is scraped off cabbage and dried and it's used as a thickening/binding agent. Unlike typical thickeners like starch/flour, it does not need heat to activate. But there are precise ratios for it to thicken properly without turning things to overthick gobs of goo. Typically a ratio of ~0.2% to 0.3% xanthan to the total weight of the sauce. Wylie leans into this and tries to find opportunities to see what happens when you take something WAY too far. He put 2% into coconut milk (10x the normal ratio). The result was a texture no one had ever experienced with coconut. If you want to innovate, you not only need to do something different than those before you have done, but often times you need to go an order of magnitude further in order to make a step-function change.
This applies to tools and equipment too. There is a famous technique originated by Chef Ferran Adrià. He found that sodium alginate, when exposed to water and calcium chloride, creates these really cool little balls. Add any flavored liquid to the alginate, say mango puree, and you get 'mango caviar'. I have been on a station in a kitchen where we made this, slowly adding little drops of passionfruit into a pint container of water and calcium. It takes a long time! Wylie decided that this might be a great use for a parestaltic pump (the ones you see in hospitals). He stuck one in the corner of the kitchen and had it dropping coffee caviar for him all day long. These were the coffee lentils that were served with Foie Gras. It never would have been possible withouth thinking about what equipment can be leveraged to do a job, even if it's never been used in a kitchen before.
Any time someone tells you that you shouldn't do that, or that it's how things have always been done, or that it's just not possible, that's your best opportunity to innovate.
8. Be Nice. And buy things from nice people.
"I've got to a point in my life where I only want to buy things from nice people. I can buy olive oil from anyone. I can buy a carrot from anyone. I just want to buy things from people that are nice. I want to be nice, and buy things from nice people"
A good reminder that none of us are curing cancer here (if you are, my data says there's a high likelihood you're not on this email list, though I'd love to have you). At the end of the day, life is short. We all want to have an impact. We all want to succeed, do great things, make money, and run a long-lasting and sustainable business. But never forget that when it's all said and done, what matters most is not what you did, but who you helped along the way.
🎙️ The meez Podcast
Check out the fireside Chat with Chef Wylie Dufresne (Parts 1 & 2)
Recipe:
Dijon & Poppy Seed Butter
Short story long. Wylie developed this recipe on a project we did together a long time ago. It's fantastic on a grilled ham and cheese sandwich or just some grilled bread with prosciutto. Very simple, surprisingly delicious.
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