Q. What’s a typical day like for the DOE’s top chef?
A. I start my day by meeting with my staff. We’ll discuss the main issues that we’re dealing with and how we can prioritize. This week, for instance, we finalized all the menus for December (they’ve already gone out), and we’ve started to work on January’s menu. One of my staff members is responsible for writing the menus, and we’ll sit down together and discuss what food we want to highlight and what initiatives we want to push for each month. So, a large portion of my day has to do with timelines—I guess everyone has those.
Q. You didn’t say that your day starts with breakfast. Do you eat breakfast?
A. Good point. My staff knows that it’s probably not a great idea to start talking to me until I’ve had my whole grain cereal with skim milk and a couple of bananas. I’m very much one of those folks that needs to eat. If I don’t eat and I’m hungry, I can get a little cranky. So, yes, definitely, my day starts with breakfast. There’s no doubt about that. Then we start to get into it. And like I said, it could be any number of themes.
My office is responsible for all the menus for the City, the product procurement, product testing, and recipe development. We’re also, to a large degree, responsible for training kitchen staff. We have a chef for every borough. All of what they do, day in and day out, is train kitchen staff. It’s a big system, and there are always new products that people need to understand how to use. We are trying to move the system more and more toward a scratch cooking scenario, so we’re continuing to train folks in how to prepare and present food. Some of it is very, very basic.
We also have a chef who is our point person for local procurement and garden café initiatives—taking the product from a neighborhood community garden and working with community members to involve the product in school menus.
Q. How much time do you spend in the kitchen?
A. Unfortunately, not a lot. I visit schools often, but not as much as I’d like. My job is really one of administration. When you look at restaurants or hotels, the executive chef is not behind the line. It just doesn’t happen that way because you need someone to chart the course.
Q. What did you do before you came to the DOE? How long have you been with the DOE?
A. Before I joined the DOE, I was a culinary instructor at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vermont. My family and I lived in Vermont for 10 years, and that was quite an experience. This is my sixth year at the DOE.
And, in the last six years, School Food has made incredible strides. We’re not only the largest school district in the country, but we’re also one of the real leaders in the world of school nutrition. That’s been pretty well recognized. In fact, we were just awarded Whole Grains Council of the United States’ top award for large school district advancement in introducing whole grains into menus. We got rid of all the white pasta. This year, New York City public school kids have only whole grain pasta on their plates.
Q. Where are you from originally and how did you become interested in a career in food?
A. I was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1950. After high school, I studied journalism at Temple University at the School of Communications. While I was there, I worked part-time in a restaurant to make a few bucks, like many students do. It was at that restaurant where I filleted my first whole salmon. The owner of the restaurant—it was an old-school, fish restaurant up on Broad Street in northern Philadelphia—plopped a salmon down in front of me. He told me, “This costs a hundred dollars. Don’t mess it up.”
Ever since then, I’ve gravitated toward the food industry. I don’t know exactly what happened. I remember, one day I was at City Hall in Philadelphia covering a criminal case for the paper and I thought, “I really want to go to culinary school.” At that time, Philly was a real hotbed of culinary advancement. People forget that, but back in the late 70s, it was really a hopping place, in many ways ahead of New York. So I went to culinary school. I went to the Culinary Institute of America. I moved back to New Jersey, where I grew up, and worked there for a year and got accepted at the CIA. The rest kind of just unfolded.
Q. What is your favorite food and what is your favorite type of cuisine to prepare?
A. You know, it’s kind of evolved. I’d have to say that clearly my favorite foods are Cuban foods—it’s my heritage, my culture. I just came back from Miami Beach, and I’d have to say that the best meal that I had when I was there was at my aunt’s house. We had a great feast, and today it really is my favorite food. Rice, beans, fried plantains, all those kind of, really home-cooked meals.
What foods do I love to prepare? For the last year, I have been really enjoying preparing Thai food. I love coconut milk, and I love the citrus notes and that whole quality and the heat that you get from Thai food. I love how it hits all of your senses, from the hot spice to the richness of the coconut milk to the citrus high notes to the use of soy. I love all that. One of my dreams is to go to Thailand. I haven’t been there yet. I love making Thai food. I love eating Cuban food.
Q. How do you come up with recipes? Will we see any new Thai or Cuban recipes on the menu?
A. We have a lot of ethnic diversity in our menus now. We’re writing menus for a million students. Part of our strategy for success is to allow school managers menu flexibility so they can meet the needs of their school communities. Remember, one school on one side of the street could be completely different from another school on the other side of the street. We give our schools a lot of freedom in terms of the products that they can use. One of the things we developed with a company a couple years ago was a guisado sauce. Guisado is both a cooking term—it means stewed—and also a traditional sauce that is made in Cuban and also Dominican homes. It’s kind of tomato based, with lime and garlic and cilantro. We put that product on the menu; it comes prepared for schools to use. So there’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to what schools can prepare. We have some beautiful ripe plantains. It’s a frozen product. They come from Columbia, and that’s one of the most popular vegetables that we have on the menu.
We now have a pork product. One of the things that surprised me when I first came on was that there was no pork in the inventory here. I made it my business getting a pork product on the menu. And we have that now—it’s available to all of our managers. The pork is spiced in a Cuban way. The Latino population in New York City is one of, if not the most, significant cultural ethnicities in the city, so it only made sense to me that we have pork. Latinos eat a lot of pork, and our Asian students do too. It’s a very popular menu item. We also have recipes for different variations of sofrito, which is a flavoring base that is used for rice in Cuban and Latino food. As far as Thai-food flavor, we have basil and cilantro available. Those flavors are ubiquitous to not only Asian food but to also Latino food.
As for coconut milk, that could be a little challenging. Finding a low-fat coconut milk out there that we could possibly make available to schools might be difficult. That’s still in the developmental stage. I do think it’s a product that would be much appreciated in our Caribbean community—a whole host of communities would appreciate that. So it's something we’re working on.
Q. What did your family do for Thanksgiving? Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving dish?
A. We have always loved to brine our turkeys. That’s something we started to do when we lived in Vermont. It was easy because there was a lot of room to brine in the barn. It was nice and cold, and we had some nice sanitized buckets that we could put our turkey in. The brining process is a little more difficult here with the refrigerators. So, we like to brine our turkey before we roast it.
Our Thanksgiving table is pretty traditional. My son grew up here so he likes a traditional type of table and that’s what we try to do. We may try to roast the sweet potatoes in a different way, bring a different herb to the dish, but, in general, we’re pretty traditional when it comes to Thanksgiving. And, my wife is a great baker so we always have something with apples and pears. I love to roast pears—that’s one thing that I really like to do. As a side dish, roasted pears with some walnuts or something like that. Very nice.
Q. What is in your refrigerator at home? What are some of your must have staples?
A. In my fridge, herbs, organic milk, organic tofu, diet soda for pizza Fridays, butter, probably some wild caught salmon. In terms of my staples, I’d say virgin olive oil, almonds, farm-raised pork chops in the freezer, and bacon. That about covers it. That’s a pretty honest appraisal right there.