I’m Andrew Zimmern and I Eat Like That

Andrew Zimmern has eaten a lot of food, most of which most of us will never get the chance to taste, but I truly believe he wish we could taste it all. With the stated goal of “promoting cultural acceptance, tolerance and understanding through food,” Andrew’s body of work has a common theme: getting people interested and excited about food and cooking they didn’t grow up with. He’s not a food snob, but he takes it seriously and I was fortunate enough to talk to him about coffee, condiments and ice cream, which he takes so seriously.

Are there any foods left that you still want to try?

Millions and millions. Basically, these are versions of things from other countries and cultures. All of the sweetest, most mind-boggling foods I have ever eaten were those I never knew existed until I got to the last stop on the subway.

I was in Suriname – not many people go to Suriname – I was hundreds of miles down the Marowine River. And in the middle of their rainforest, I walk on a land on which no man has yet walked with the tribes. And we are going in some crazy direction, we have a 12-hour hike in the forest – very, very difficult terrain. In a way, you are truly at the end of the earth. And they hunted different animals there that we ate by the fire that night. But there are turtle species that you didn’t know existed. They translated it to chicken, but it looked like Dr. Seuss’s bird. You can find it taxonomically based on the pictures we took. Delicious, right? You just won’t know until you get out of here.

Let’s talk about your typical meal day. Are you having breakfast?

I love a cup of coffee and then try to eat 90 minutes after I get up. I have to force myself. I’m not hungry until lunchtime. I can drink coffee before lunch. But the problem is that if I don’t eat in the morning, then for lunch and dinner I overeat and I have energy problems.

How do you drink coffee?

Black.

J UST drip coffee?

No. I’m a complete food fan. I have a really expensive espresso machine and I have a transfusion aid. And I buy all these ridiculous and rare coffees that I love to drink – with low acidity, with a strong, chocolatey, nutty taste. I take different types of beans from different parts of the world. I really love Rwandan coffee. I love Jamaican and Mexican coffee – a lot of it has to do with the roaster. I’m pretty picky. I mean, I no longer use drugs and alcohol. I am 29 years old so I take my coffee very seriously.

When you do force yourself to eat breakfast, what do you usually force yourself to eat?

I make a toast, two scrambled eggs. I fry them hard and fast, the butter turns brown, the edges get crispy, and I put it on the toast so that the browned butter goes right into the toast, and then when I cut it, the yolks get wet. before the toast. I love eggs. I will hack them. I don’t take take-out often, but I order a lot. I have a standing order at Russ and Daughters in New York. At least every other day I have a bagel with smoked fish and cream cheese or whitefish salad or whatever. So, eggs – once or twice a week, bagels – two or three times a week, and the second – twice a week, especially on weekends – these are leftovers after lunch.

American breakfast is toxic to humans. It’s all about sugar and carbohydrates. It’s French toast with maple syrup and sugar flakes – I mean, it’s just awful for people. Feeding a child an American breakfast is almost like child abuse. And after so many travels around the world – a Japanese breakfast, for example, where you have a few pickles, and some rice, and a small plate of some kind of broth, and a small piece of leftover fried fish – it’s just such a healthy, tasty, delicious breakfast. So I often eat leftover fried fish, some vegetables, and just make myself a little miniature dinner for breakfast – a couple of each, which is perfect.

What do you usually do for lunch?

I take my food very seriously, I don’t like to waste food, but I’m not a food snob. I keep Feltman’s hot dogs here in the office. We have a big kitchen studio where we always shoot all my food videos and we produce a lot of food, so I usually go and do something for myself.

How often do you make your own recipes and do you have any favorites?

It’s funny what you say because it works like this: I’ll do something improvised at home, and then I’ll do it on video or take a photo, and I’ll bring it in and give it to people. in my office doing this kind of thing. And they say to me: “Where is the recipe? We don’t have this on the site ”. And then I write a prescription. Then they will test it and then it will appear on the website, or we will do it as part of AZ Cooks . There are pasta that I make for my family, which was my dad’s and his partner’s favorite pasta dish, which is a very simple pasta with broccoli. You take a huge amount of leftover broccoli – for example, four cups, five cups – chop it up very well and cook in butter and broth for another 10-15 minutes, until it literally turns into a green thick sauce. And then you stir it in handfuls – for example, two, two and a half cups of shredded Parmesan cheese – and add a little water to the pasta so it is filled to the point that it is juicy and cheesy, and then serve it.

It has been a very typical dinner at my family’s home throughout my life. I never wrote down a recipe, so I made it the other day, videotaped it, and wrote it down. We’re going to post this on my social network. I do not so much cook according to old recipes as I cook what then becomes my recipes.

But it works both ways. There are times because I don’t cook the dish as often as I like, when it was like we wrote yesterday about my shrimp étouffée for Mardi Gras, and I love the shrimp étouffée. I have a recipe that I learned in New Orleans 12, 14 years ago when I wrote the story about étouffée. This is a combination of Poppy Tooker’s recipe and Leah Chase’s recipe. I just made it work for me, and we wrote about it. But I look at my website to remember, “What were the ratios again?” and “What did I do with my tomato product?” I could have guessed, but this is a very accurate recipe. I look at my old recipes because that’s all I love to eat.

Do you have any new favorite recipes or cookbooks that you love right now?

I get books in the mail, and if I love a chef or a style of cooking, then I’ll cook from this book for weeks – every other day I’ll do something from a book. There is a book that Hawa Hasan has just released – recipes from grandmothers from different coastal African countries called Bibi’s Kitchen . I cooked a lot of it. There is another book on Indonesian food by Lara Lee called Coconut and Sambal . There’s an old old book that I got a reprint of, it’s called Carolina’s Rice Kitchen by Karen Hess, which I cook from. Nick Sharma’s The Equation of Taste – I’ve cooked a lot of that.

Are you stocking up on instant or frozen foods?

Yes, Totino pizza rolls. I have all sorts of habits with them – it sounds very intrusive, but I will take a very small amount of marinara sauce and freeze them in small, two or three ounce portions in zippered bags so I can defrost them under running water and warm them up. in the microwave so I can dip. There is never sauce in pizza rolls, so I prefer to cook rolls in sauce. I’m obsessed with ice cream. I order ice cream online from Jeni’s, Graeter’s, Salt & Straw, all the stingy stores I like. I love hot dogs lately. I’m Feltman’s boyfriend with the original Coney Island dog. Helados Mexico, a Mexican pallet company now sold in most supermarkets, I love that.

I cook a lot of Chinese food and a lot of different Asian cuisines. This is my favorite dish that I cook at home. We have some really great markets here in this part of the world and in our sister cities. I collect almost every instant ramen I can find because you never know when you will find one that you really like. The other day my child looked at the shelf and asked, “What the hell is going on with you in ramen?” I love instant ramen. It is so simple. And you can fix it. You have the green onions, you grate the carrots, you add some leftover fried chicken and make instant ramen – I just love it! I really love some of the Korean companies that make these instant noodle bowls.

What seasonings do you have?

Ah, this is absurd. I love to go shopping and I think that food waste is a problem of the crisis in our country. One of the problems with food waste is that people started buying oversized refrigerators and people said, “Well, now you can shop once a week and load the refrigerator!” and then you have a lot of food waste because something happens, food is delayed, food does not happen. This is a catastrophe. So, I have a European refrigerator in my house, very small and narrow, and it takes away my incentive to shop once a week. If I want to cook pork chops tonight, I’ll go buy pork chops and then stop and buy some vegetables or something. And then everything else I have at home, like potatoes, onions and eight million spices. I have 15 different types of soy sauce at home. I have a hundred types of olive oil and vinegar. I have at least a dozen mustards.

What about ketchup?

I have two types of ketchup at home: Heinz ketchup and Sir Kensington’s ketchup. I use them for different purposes. In the hot sauce section – I’ll just go hot seasoning because I have a can of Walker’s pasta. I use this as a condiment unless I do the dash myself. This is a really great product. I have 100 of these items. I have eight different types of Korean gochujang at home. I have eight different types of Sichuan dou bang – a paste made from fermented chili beans. One of them is very dear to me. He is 25 years old. It was gifted to me last time in Chengdu by a chef friend of mine, and it’s in an earthen pot and you know it will last forever, right? I have a red tahini from the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem from a tahini maker who roasts sesame seeds every day to order in a wood-fired oven and then grinds them between stones. This family has been making tahini in this workshop for a thousand years. These are the things that I collect and bring home.

I have all these shelves – they really seep into the second refrigerator, into other rooms, because it’s all about what you have at hand. I have mustard that my family constantly wants me to throw away. I’m the only one who eats it. This is Russian mustard. Cyrillic label. If you do not read Russian, you will not understand it. But they call it mother-in-law mustard because it is so strong. But horseradish oil is added to this mustard and it is the wasabi blast mustard. I only use it for liver sausage sandwiches. I tell everyone, I’m not going to throw it away. You can’t throw it away because when I buy liver sausage and want my liver sausage and onion sandwich, I have to have it on that bread, right?

I look at a bottle of olive oil that has no room at home. It lies on my desk. It’s wonderful, because – again, I have no business relationship with any of these people – but that Palestinian olive oil first cold pressing . It’s from a mill in the West Bank, and the taste – I mean, I just drank it every day. I may never be able to take him home, because perhaps he is finished. Someone sent it to me because they knew that I love Palestinian food and food from the Levant, and that I am very supportive of various communities around the world. For people who know little about the geopolitical, socio-economic and historical struggle of the peoples living in the territory, which is collectively referred to as the “Middle East”, they make a lot of assumptions. There are many myths at play here because people are not aware of the real issues, and I believe food is a great unifying factor. I want people to eat food. I want people to eat Palestinian food, because if you were eating Palestinian food, you would not demonize the Palestinian people. And I’m a religious Jew, you know, it’s a struggle. The problem is that we need more patience, tolerance and understanding in the world. If we can do this by eating each other, I bless it. This was my mantra.