Choosing Real Ingredients
a call for character and common sense

Faced with so many calls for woeful ingredients (dried chopped onion, celery salt and the like) I decided that you might want a few words on the ingredients real restaurants (Chinese and otherwise) use.

Nine times out of ten, the food that comes in the back door of a restaurant is different than the food you get at the grocery. The reasons are many, most of them good:

First, the restaurant buyer buys in quantity, and the supplier knows that if he sends wilted lettuce today, the chef will send it back and buy it from another supplier tomorrow.

Second, the chef knows good food from useless hype: he's not interested in (or fooled by) "organic" vegetables at sky-high prices, but he is very interested in freshness, in value for his money, and in the kind of quality that produces a superior product on the plate.

Third, the chef knows about some materials that are usually not offered to the public. For instance, sauce bases. Bases are not "artificial flavors," they are extremely condensed sauces made from quality ingredients, meat essences for the most part, produced exactly as you would if you cooked the meats all day but without all that water (all are unbelievably salty.) Every chef uses them on days when his stock just doesn't taste strong enough, and many chefs use them instead of making stocks themselves. They're available to you on the Web. They cost a good amount of money, and if they suit your needs, they're worth every penny.

Many restaurant ingredients and even more commercial-product ingredients are not on your kitchen shelf or mine. Sometimes it would be helpful to have them in your kitchen (concentrated broth base, for instance) and sometimes it would be a very bad idea. For instance, if I want to produce this famous stuff just the way you find it at the restaurant, I'd have to have:

McDonald's Sweet 'n Sour Dipping Sauce

22 ingredients in all (more if you count "spices" and "natural flavors" as unknown multiples. I stock exactly 9 on my shelf. But what was the original idea behind the product? It's Duck Sauce, the sweet fruit sauce you get with egg rolls, an easy Chinese recipe that takes about 5 ingredients and goes together in maybe 10 minutes on my stove and tastes a lot fresher than the stuff in the little tubs at McD's.

Which brings us to what happens when the good chef's "evil twin" steps in. All of the reasons I gave above for why restaurant food is different can be perverted into excuses we have been trained like sheep to accept. Let's take a moment to look at the darker side.

The restaurant buys in quantity, which sometimes leads to buying the wrong thing. The corporate buyer who never sees the inside of a kitchen, or the manager of a restaurant where you will never go again because it has no regular customers (or is an inch from failure) may be tempted by the cheap product, the one that is artificial and tastes like it, but which saves on labor … besides, in an hour you'll be 50 miles away on the interstate. I remember a New Year's Eve when my (then) girlfriend suddenly insisted on eating out. We found a spot at a restaurant in a motel (mistake #1) where we could actually get a seat … in fact, we were almost the only diners there (mistake #2). I ordered fried chicken. What I remember about it was … well, I guess it was supposed to be a drumstick: a brown object so utterly uniform in shape that looked like it was turned on a lathe. Under a heavy coating of breading was a bit of meat, it might have been chicken or dog or anything else. I failed to object (mistake #3) and ate it (mistake #4). She didn't understand why I should be upset ("WARNING! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!") And I kept dating her for a good while (mistakes #5 through #37) — I have no explanation for that other than that I was young and stupid and that good sex will keep you stuck in relationships where you really shouldn't be at all.

Moreover, the chef is bombarded, daily, with strong financial temptations to serve items that will "get by" while saving money: artificial flavors, pre-packaged frozen stuff to pop in the Fryolator and slap onto your plate, an amazing array of junk. Do YOU have to make everything from scratch? No! But you shouldn't sacrifice quite so much quality for a bit of convenience. Maybe you can get away with using bouillon cubes instead of stock, but if you do, some people will taste the difference. No, you can't fake it entirely with soy sauce or whatever, or everyone will notice but (the saddest thing) they'll still probably be polite and compliment you — and you, poor thing, will be led to imagine you've done well. Yes, you can use dried spices in many places and few people will taste the difference. No, you can't use dried spices absolutely everywhere because, like it or not, freshness really counts in some applications. And you can't use dried chopped onion anywhere. I'm not going to come to your house and take the jar out of your hand, you'll just have to discipline yourself. UNLESS, of course, you're trying to achieve with dried chopped onion the same artificial taste your local restaurant has allowed itself to achieve with dried chopped onion, at which point you and I part ways.

Finally, a word to the "health nuts." I write this with the full acknowledgment that my own health is far from perfect; I'm fat, weak and out of shape and it's my own fault. There's the photo, for what it's worth. But it's not because I have rejected "health foods." It comes from a lifetime of overeating and under-exercising, to name just two of the bad lifestyle choices I am regretting now that my health has been affected.

I state, with full conviction, that if you want to substitute artificial ingredients (soy milk, Egg Beaters and  … oh, I can't go on, just STOP THAT! ) because you think they're somehow healthier, you will be making compromises. Maybe you can live with those compromises, but there is a cost: you sacrifice the flavor and enjoyment that come from food cooked to its full potential. You will taste the difference! I have offered some suggestions for calorie-saving alternatives where I have found them, with the acknowledgment that they are compromises I can live with. Other ones, I can't. And some are simply stupid. I remember volunteering to cook a Chinese dinner for about 100 at church years ago. Planning the meal, we decided we'd like to start with egg-drop soup. Up stands one old gentleman and objects loudly to the idea; eggs will kill you, you know, and we really MUST use "Egg Beaters", the no-cholesterol egg alternative. Figure 100 portions of soup, possibly a dozen eggs in all, and he's gonna croak if he consumes 1/8 of a real egg! Food is not medicine, nor is it poison, but a lack of integrity in cooking, as in every other choice you make in life, will kill your soul long before it harms your body!

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