20 Chefs Answer: Their Secret Weapon Ingredient

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My secret weapon ingredient at Oxomoco

is cilantro vinegar.

So cilantro vinegar is basically all the stems,

and we infuse them with apple cider vinegar

and white vinegar.

And we use this vinegar to season basically everything,

sauces, purees,

just like anything that needs acidity

and the freshness of the cilantro.

The longer you leave it, the more flavor it will have.

My secret weapon ingredient is these Thai chilies.

This is definitely one of my favorite things to cook with.

It adds a ton of flavor.

It's not just heat,

it adds like a whole lot of fruitiness as well.

As you can tell, I'm super, super into Thai chilies.

My secret ingredient is MSG

because it makes stuff taste good.

Literally have it everywhere.

Our first out MSG, our MSG,

got backup MSG,

got more backup MSG,

all right next to our salt

because that's how important it is

when it comes to seasoning our food.

I always say salt, sugar, MSG

is like the Chinese trinity of seasoning,

and I think that really helps balance dishes out

when you use it properly.

We put MSG in almost everything we make here.

You find it in our desserts, not just our savory foods.

You'll find it in our drinks as well.

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Our secret weapon ingredient is pickled summer peppers.

In like the dead of winter,

when it's really hard to kind of get produce

that you're excited about

or kind of dreaming about spring and summer,

being able to have something that you can like tap into

from your walk-in

that kind of gives you

a little bit of like that energy blast,

that kind of like keeping creative

and keep pushing the menu

is really nice to have.

So these are habanadas.

They are a crossbred between habanero.

They're not spicy at all,

but they take on those fruity floral qualities

that habanero peppers have

but are usually harder to taste sometimes

because of how spicy they are.

These are aji dulces.

They are very similarly non-spicy, sweet,

you know, complexity from florality

and some fruit characteristics.

We've used them for like mignonettes before for oysters

and stuff like that.

Our secret weapon ingredient here at ILIS

is our wall of fermentation that we use on a daily basis.

Everything here is kind of an active item in our larder.

It's the fermented,

it could be pickled,

it could be some type of sauce.

And so this is a way for us to grab something quick

that can make a big difference in a dish

that wasn't there before.

One really, really cool one right now

that we've been utilizing is these young pine cones.

We forage them in the spring.

They're much smaller

than the pine cones you would get right now,

so they're a little more tender

and have less of that tannin that you would get

from a normal pine cone.

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Our secret weapon ingredient at Di An Di are pickles.

We put pickled things, acidic things, with our fatty foods

and it balances it out.

So we make a pepper jam that is going on as a drizzle

over our root vegetable pancakes.

Then we also drizzle some shallot aioli,

so like the fatty and the acidic and the sweetness

all kind of goes well together with a fried pancake.

The secret ingredient weapon at Sobre Masa is corn.

It's the backbone of Mexican cuisine.

We like to celebrate the diversity of corn

by using as many different varieties of corn

with as many different uses.

This one here is called cacahuazintle,

and it's made for pozole

And we also like to grind it very fine

and use it for batter like for a fried fish taco.

And it's very high in starch.

We like to mill it into a really fine flour

and we'll use it as batters or for cookies

or, you know, things of that nature.

And this blue corn were right here,

it's cook, part of its soaking process.

This is the Conico, also from the state of Mexico,

but this one's really good for tortillas.

It makes really, really nice tortillas

with really, really beautiful color.

As a pastry chef at Kellogg's Diner,

the most important ingredient that we have is probably salt.

We use salt pretty liberally here.

We use a pretty typical salt that most restaurants use.

We use Diamond Kosher.

A lot of times I feel like when you eat diner food,

you're pretty full,

so it's difficult to indulge in like dessert

that might be too decadent.

The balance of salt is super important,

especially in desserts,

because I think it gives you the bandwidth

to explore different textures.

The salt actually, to me, brings out the sweetness.

At Saigon Social,

our secret weapon ingredient is nuoc mam, fish sauce.

Basically fermented anchovies and salt.

Depending on the brand, sometimes there's more additives

like sugar and, you know, different, like, spices.

About 80% of our menu uses fish sauce. [chuckles]

It's incredibly potent to the nose,

incredibly powerful as well.

A little bit goes a long ways.

Think of it as kind of like your flavor enhancer.

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Our secret weapon ingredient at Cozy Royale

is definitely this guy right here,

ground beef.

The Meat Hook, which is our sister business, butcher shop,

works directly with one or two farms

really for our ground beef.

Ground beef is very important at Cozy Royale

because we sell a lot of cheeseburgers.

And we're gonna sell between 60, 80 pounds

of ground beef a night on weekdays

and much more than that on weekends.

If you come to Cozy

and you have a burger at five or six o'clock,

the overwhelming chances are that that ground beef

was a part of a whole animal or part of an animal

10 or 12 hours beforehand.

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As head chef at Kellogg's Diner,

my secret weapon ingredient is sazon.

I put it in everything.

We use it in our Spanish rice, I put it in soup.

So it provides a little bit of color, depth of flavor,

'cause it's pretty much just MSG.

The one with cilantro is actually my favorite.

This is my second favorite.

My secret ingredient is nutmeg.

It cannot be pre-ground.

It has to come just like this.

And I love it

because it sort of has the, like warmth of cinnamon,

but it's a little bit spicy.

We put nutmeg in everything.

So from our cinnamon buns to our molasses-spiced cookies,

the sour cherry pear pie,

lots of nutmeg.

Probably most famous

for being sprinkled on top of the banana cream.

My secret ingredient in my restaurants

would probably be leche de tigre.

Leche de tigre is our base of all our ceviches.

So it's a mixture of lime juice, fish stock,

different aromatics, pieces of fish.

We blend it all up and strain it,

and that's what we use for all our ceviches.

I find myself putting it in a lot of things,

to add acidity,

to add a little more depth to the food.

When you blend everything up,

because of the proteins,

it looks milky.

So that's why we call it leche.

The reason for tigre is because it's like very zippy

and very like, you know,

it's supposed to like kind of like,

you know, energize you as like a tiger, in a sense.

At Hamburger America, our secret weapon ingredient,

unquestionably, is Lawry's Seasoned Salt.

It adds just enough to the burger that goes beyond salt,

obviously.

It's very flavorful. I love it.

Ah, it smells so good.

You know why it's so good?

It's because it has sugar in it.

Salt, sugar, it has turmeric,

that's the color, obviously.

It has paprika, it has garlic,

and those are really good things

for flavor profile of a burger.

Really good.

Not much, just a little bit.

Not much, little bit.

Ah.

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So our secret ingredient at Simple is ras el hanout.

It's the head of spice.

And we make it once a week,

and we use probably as much as we can

because we are addicted to it.

Process is we pick whatever spices that we have

and we do a mix.

So it's called the head of spice

because it's whatever I want to be.

The translation is the head of the shop.

We use ras el hanout for probably about 10 dishes.

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One of our secret ingredients here at Golden Diner

is the nutritional yeast.

It provides lots of umami, some nuttiness,

and it's really good for making nacho cheese.

Our secret weapons at Chino Grande

are our homemade spice blends.

So Chino Grande is an a fusion restaurant

between Chinese and Latino food.

The adobo is used for the Latino side.

We use it in our chicken mix and a bunch of other dishes.

It has a lot of oregano, thyme, garlic, onion.

It's really nice.

So we use the sazon for a lot of our sauces.

I don't buy the pre-made sazon.

It's 'cause of salt.

They're mainly very salty.

We can control the salt when we make these.

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