Improvisation and the Rule of Yes

Improvisation and the Rule of Yes

We further explored improvisation in the kitchen over this past weekend. We had the pleasure of conducting an exploration of tastes and flavors (a cooking school) with one base rule: we would say yes. Aki and I believe in an intimate setting with limited numbers, where inspiration and improvisations are woven together.

In order to facilitate our process, we began with a few base recipes: egg yolk pasta dough, Guinness bread, and pizza dough. After working through these basics, the kitchen became an interactive performance with ingredients and methods of preparation. Only one element was constant: the word yes. By saying yes and traveling down rarely visited culinary paths, our kitchen became an improvisational theatre. And, at the end of the day, it was Aki and I who learned the most.

We made, created, were exposed to, or discovered with the help and influence of our cooking contemporaries: stinging nettle and almond pesto agnolotti with animal farm ricotta cheese (thanks to Diane and the cows), vanilla-soy and Meyer lemon soft boiled egg mayonnaise, chorizo-black trumpet mushroom-aged gouda pizza, artichoke eggs benedict, smoked tomato-mushroom ragout, whole fish grilled on a bed of sugar cane, and fig and dried cranberry compote with extra aged gouda.

There is and was more, but at the end of the day, our success came by saying yes.