Watch This Now
WHAT’S IN OUR WALK IN?!
Ever wonder what’s inside the refrigerator of a professional kitchen? Hint: it looks nothing like your home fridge. At TCE, the ingredients in our walk-in refrigerator are always changing depending on our client’s needs. Today it’s vegan ranch and many, many more vegan alternatives…
HESTON [CUE] HEARS A WHO!
Our friends at Heston Cue were kind enough to come in to TCE and let us tinker with their next level cooking technology! Watch us seamlessly make seared scallops with an apple brown butter sauce using the Heston Cue induction burner, skillet and app.
DATE SHAKE FAIL
Few things make a summer day better than a stop for date shakes at Hadley’s Date Orchard just outside of Palm Springs, CA. But when you’re stuck in downtown SF and you’ve got that craving, you have to take things into your own hands…
DATE SHAKE, TAKE TWO
We take a second stab at making date shakes — this time with a bit more patience, the *right* ingredients and actually following the recipe.
Read This Now
TCE’s Insights into the Pressing Issues Facing Our Industry
Why the impossible problem is truly impossible.
Why the impossible problem is truly impossible
This week must have been a stressful one @Impossiblefoods, the super hyped non-meat burger startup facing some tough questions.
The mission of Impossible Foods is no small undertaking. They are trying to solve the biggest problems they can, water use, land use and pollution (as a start), while still allowing us to keep all the habits and comforts of this world. They have quickly run into a question that will surely not go away: “is it good for you?”.
We at TCE ask ourselves these same questions about these burgers. But we ask these questions everyday, about everything.
It is interesting to us when and how people choose to ask this of our food. Are people up in arms daily about GMO’s, pesticides or the mysterious flavorings, binders and additives that allow our foods to be super tasty, super crunchy and long lasting? Maybe folks are not asking these questions enough.
The reality is that the Impossible Burger is a processed food. It is just like the million of other processed foods you eat everyday, only the mission of this one happens to be a cleaner planet. If the mission of all processed foods could be half as noble as this one, we might be in a much different place.
The real reason your kids menu is a failure.
Who in the world are you selling to on your kids menu? In 2017 what makes up a kid?
What makes up a kid who would eat off a kids menu? What their understanding of food?
No restaurant would ever put things on their menu and not understand who it was for, but to generalize, here we have an entire category of mediocrity that is for no one in particular. So lets ask different questions. Are we aiming to provide smaller, cheaper portions? Is the form or flavor of your food challenging and we are trying to make it approachable?
Are you trying to increase nutrition? What 2 year age range are you shooting to support and why?
To what “adult menu” foods are kids menu items attaching? Who is using your kids menu today and how often?
Every trend report worth its salt is talking about a new food informed childhood. Lets keep up. So we ask : Who do you think is doing this well today?
Snack Bites
Q&A with the The Culinary Edge team.
- WHAT’S
- YOUR MOST
- REFERENCED
- COOKBOOK?
Jenna
PROJECT MANAGER
A Modern Way to Cook by Anna Jones. It’s always a struggle to figure out how to make vegetables more interesting and this cookbook is filled with unique, easy to follow recipes that solve that problem!
Jeff
CULINARY DIRECTOR
La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy by The Italian Academy of Cuisine. 1000 pages of recipes that cover all of Italy’s regional cooking styles.
Nicky
STRATEGIST
Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. The book is stunning and the recipes are foolproof and always turn out delicious.
Michael
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
These days it’s Franny’s: Simple Seasonal Italian, an ingredient-driven cookbook by Andrew Feinberg, Francine Stephens and Melissa Clark. We in the Bay Area are fortunate to have the ability to cook like this year round. Plus Melissa Clark is an amazing writer and cookbook author.