 So I'm going to talk a little bit about ingredients and culture. So if you talk about like food and culture, like the one thing to keep in mind is we went through many years that no one cooked fresh beets. It just didn't exist. So you grow up eating sliced beets, they're not that nice. I was kind of lucky though. My grandmother is originally from Russia and so I grew up eating a lot of real food too and one of the things I grew up with was borscht. So I kind of had these two ideas about beets. One is that they come out of a can and one is that they turn into this soup that had a lot of meaning to me and what it started out as in our country is just one kind and then you can see in 1824 kinds and then by now we have about 15 kinds. So one of the things that happened in the industrial revolution is that they did more than take away kind of the variety. They took away our memories of everything that had been grown. So we've got this guy who comes to us and he's a seed preservationist. He has a little farm, two acres. He doesn't grow professionally, he just does it for himself and he comes all the time with things that haven't been grown for a hundred years. And so the seed company has 15 kinds of seeds now. That used to be in the turn of the century when everyone was saving their own seeds. There was hundreds of kinds of beets but you wouldn't have known it because people were saving them and they were developing their own flavors individual and now what we have went through a long period during the time that we were aggregating farms. One of the things that happened is the seed company started dropping all of their seeds. So it's now starting to rebuild and we get this is a local California place that's starting to gather again the old varieties of seeds and starting to grow them. The other thing about beets is that they're a crop that's meant to be held over the winter and one of the ways it's held just as a whole storage bead and then the other is that they're preserved in all kinds of ways. So beets have a lot of meaning as a preserved and kind of something that you grow in the summer that you have all year long. So this is a beaten goat cheese salad. So when you start to talk about the meaning of beets in my area, kind of going back to that idea of the pickled beet, this was introduced I don't know probably 30 years ago and somehow if you can kind of put your mind back to the time at which in America there was really no fresh beets being cooked. This was a revelation. So they took something cooked it simply it had this great fresh flavor goat cheese which didn't even exist in the United States until 1977 when Laura Chanel started making it she went to France she came back and she made some cheese because she was just she was so excited about it. She brought it to Chez Panisse Alice Water said, ah it's great I'll take 40 of them and then they were off and running. Now goat cheese is very common in the United States. It's hard to imagine that it only has been produced for like the last 30-35 years. But the beet salad, beaten goat cheese salad, what happened was it became something more than just a salad. It became emblematic of a way of looking at the world and it became something and I don't know how this happened but it's on every menu and so what I did was I went out and I went around to seven different restaurants and I asked for a copy of the menu and so here's a few just this is on one day about a week ago there's a beaten goat cheese salad that's another beaten goat cheese salad this is also a beaten goat cheese salad this is a beet and goat cheese salad they got a little crazy at Zuni they made an arugula beet salad with a goat cheese toast and just you think I'm innocent in this that is my restaurant where there is a beet and goat cheese salad so we've come to this place where this ingredient which has all of these traditional roots in a lot of the cold growing places all over the world it's become meant come to mean something to us in California beyond what it is is a vegetable it's come to mean kind of a way of life and a way of looking at the world and it's become so ubiquitous that it's almost like what do you do how do you even use something that has it's like a word that's been used so much that it doesn't mean anything anymore so I think you know one of the things that we look at is we kind of it's easy to go out and find something new that no one's ever seen before and you get that that shock of the new that rush of discovery how do you create that same rush of discovery through something that is that someone sees every day how do you use something which is so common as a vehicle for self-expression so a qual one of the things people don't come there for the same thing that they have everywhere else we do things a little differently but at the same time what it means to me is that there's an emotional value contained within this very common thing so if I can do something different and then at the same time have contained within it that sense of familiarity that's a pretty exciting combination so I'm going to show three dishes that are different things we do with beats that hopefully a little interesting so this first dish is actually from an event that I did in Finland with a bunch of the guys and the cooking conditions were kind of primitive so this is how I cook the beats for six hours in a big fireplace I've never done this before and I do believe that I actually had a a bet with Claude Bozi for dinner that they wouldn't be done in time for dinner so I think I'll probably stop in London on the way back because they were done in time for dinner but six hours and I put them in containers and then took them out of the containers and then just you can see how hot the fire is kept rotating around rotating around you think they'd be all desiccated inside what we did was repeal them and then just left them warm when we went to serve them we just broke them apart with our hands they were so juicy that our hands were covered we looked like like murderers or something so then the the rest of the dish basically you see it just broken pieces of beet lingonberries half dried by the fire sheep's oral from around the area and the sauce is pretty excited about it's reduced beet juice local berry vinegar wild juniper and then it was thickened with reindeer blood so there's no thickening agent besides the blood so kind of sweet kind of sour kind of savory the beats tasted like nothing had ever tasted before they weren't super smoky they were incredibly sweet basically everything we had in in Finland because I don't know the soil or the the climate were incredibly sweet and I think everyone who had them like they had this ingredient that was so common but it was it was cooked in a way that made it seem kind of new so this is a dish we did earlier this year we're thinking about a dish and to be honest we usually have beets on our menu and because I like them in addition to there's something that people can kind of grab ahold of and so they said why don't we do beet and rose and then I just kind of locked in my mind when we do a beat that looked like a rose but I didn't really know how to do that so this is kind of a video of what this looks like with rose petal ice and aerated yogurt so this is the ice it's just rose petals hot water honey and lemon and we basically take roasted beets the interior we peel and then the petals we make with basically we stamp them out and then slice them everything's done by hand no gel no no binding agent and then we we compress them with reduced beet juice a little bit of rice wine vinegar everyone talks about like like a simple dish like not too many ingredients there's like five ingredients in this dish it's not very simple so the the interior which is the basically created with with a peeler and then these you can see there's different sizes of beet they're dipped in a puree of beet juice reduced beet juice and beet and then we just keep doing this and I think he actually speeded me up because I move much slower than that and you see how tedious it is it is one of most pain in the ass dishes we've ever done and and it's a little bit about to like I got tired of everyone saying how you know I got tired of everyone kind of copying everything and then and then people coming along and saying you can do the same thing aqua for much less money somewhere else and basically there's my way of saying no you can't because no one is going to be stupid enough to do this for a night that we did 60 covers they would take 15 hours of labor to make these and so then we we basically compress it inward and then and then turn it out you see it's like a totally handmade process and then and then you kind of trim around the edges a little bit to figure out like if there's any missing and then a beet puree on the in the bottom of the bowl aerated yogurt on top which is just yogurt with a little bit of salt and lime juice the the rose petal ice goes around it and then the the beet rose in the middle so one of the things I like about and so that's the finished dish so one of the things I like about beets is that you have to do something to them you know you can't some ingredients are wonderful on their own a perfectly ripe piece of fruit fig or something you could just serve and it's perfectly good you can't do that with a beet you got it yeah so it's it's something that actually no matter what you do involves cooking so even a beet and goat cheese salad involves cooking but I think as long as you're going to cook it you might as well cook in a different way so this is a dish where basically is just showing like how we treat the beet is so so simple it's basically just wash it we toss in a little olive oil and salt and roast it with a little bit of water so in that sense there's nothing really particularly special about it but then we do two different sizes we do a smaller size and the larger size the larger size we turn into roasted beet juice and then we make a gel out of it with agar and gelatin and then glaze the top so beet candy that was what someone called it we've called them shiny beets we this is from a dish we did three years ago that I thought would be kind of fun to to do so basically the the beet juice that you get out of the roasted beets is very very little so it's very product intensive and we just hydrate in a little bit of agar boil it and then add gelatin so it's got it's it's stable at room temperature and then also it's got a nice mouth feel and then we line the the slices up on a on a sheet pan one of the things you'll notice is as we're glazing them some of the the gel drips down through and it kind of creates those little things at the bottom so one of my cooks said they look kind of like gummy beets and then I thought well why not make gummy beets and so so that kind of will lead to the next thing and then basically this which is this is kind of the finished dish it's a little oil pureed with kind of a fermented spice mix that we make and we serve it's a little bit sweet so we serve it in between meat course and the and the desserts where the cheese would normally go and then this is my pastry chef so this is the recipe is he started a week ago and I think on a second day I said well let's make gummy bears out of roasted beet juice and he didn't like run away so I'm pretty happy about that and not only that the the recipe is pretty amazing so there's three kinds and then because we have a bunch of cooks here I thought maybe you'd want the recipe so the interesting thing about this is kind of talking about like the meaning of food and and and kind of the the emotion that comes along with it so I grew up with gummy bears and then obviously it's kind of a culturally common thing and Scandinavia and what I grew up with is like I went and had one it was something about that chew and the way it breaks down in the mouth we wanted to create but we didn't want to have it's just something that was we don't want to have something to taste it a little bit more interesting and in order to do that we use slow set pectin which allows us to cook it and then at the end season it a little bit so if you think about it it's just basically a patefui and patefui's are usually kind of boring because you cook it out you pour it at 104 degrees and that's it well in this case you know it's a this recipe is basically something you can do to basically pour it into anything and if you vary the amount of pectin and and gelatin then you can get something a lot more yielding but we wanted something kind of chewy so basically it's just the roasted beet juice the the gelatin bloomed everything dispersed into a cook 201 pour it out into the molds molds are dusted with corn starch we put some corn starch on top freeze it pop it out and then we let it sit at room temperature a little while we were making these like right up until I think about four hours before my plane took off so what you're getting is very much a beta version I think the the texture is great and I think the probably the seasoning we're still kind of working on it a little bit but it seemed like something that's kind of fun and I love the rustling of all of the the plastic and so I think there's something kind of awesome too about going from that to what you're eating now so thank you thank you very much