Ask Chef Dennis Littley

David Yakir (0:11)

Hey, what's up, everybody, I'm David Yakir, and you're listening to YAK ABOUT TODAY, where you never know where the show will go. So get up, put your headphones on, go for a run, but listen to what we YAK ABOUT TODAY.

Hey, everybody, thanks for listening. I am David Yakir, and a little housekeeping before we get into our guest, Dennis Littley, the famous chef that everybody apparently knows, at least the million people who follow him know. Anyway, a little housekeeping here. For those of you who've been listening to the YAK ABOUT TODAY in film, that will continue and we will broadcast live to Facebook every Thursday. And for those of you who remember YAK ABOUT TODAY in its original form, we are back and I'm really happy to have, as my first guest, Dennis Littley. And Dennis, famous, famous chef. At least, every time you research you, you know, you can look at you and say, God, I want his followers. I want how he reaches people. Let's start from the beginning, okay? Chef, I'm sure.

Dennis Littley (1:28)

Yeah, well, I started chefing back in 1984, I guess professionally. Up to that point before, I just been doing a multitude of other things, food service industry work. But my calling, you know, I think I was just waiting for that opportunity where I had to get into a restaurant and see what I could do. And I trained the old way as an apprentice and learned my craft over a course of a few years, although I got thrown into the fire after a couple of months of actually running the kitchen, cooking, not running it, but cooking all of the food that was going out. Because I paid attention a lot and I don't say it, I try to say it as humbly as I can, but I was given a gift and that gift was creating delicious food.

David Yakir (2:15)

So you didn't have to go through all the chef schools and the culinary institutes and all that?

Dennis Littley (2:21)

No, you know, I wish I had, but no.

At the time, I had some training in hospitality. I had an associate in food science. I had learned, I worked, actually worked at a nursing home for four years as food service director, with a very talented retired person who talked a multitude. And I had had some training from an old family friend early on in my late adolescence. And I learned how to, she always said, you have to listen to food. You have to listen to food and it will tell you what it needs. And that was probably the most practical bit of training that I got or getting out some of my gift to that extent. And then I started cooking in the 80s, and it's just been one wild ride since then, a lot of it in turmoil and chefs don't lead the best lives. And I was down that road quite often, and the only thing that kept me afloat was my ability and what I could do in the kitchen.

David Yakir (3:26)

Do you know what you can do? I've always been curious about this. So when people go to culinary school or in your case, you work hands on at a place, you follow recipes or you follow other people's, I guess, recipes or how they prepare things and how they do things and all that. I've always been interested in the transition from cooking. You open the book and it says a quarter cup of this, a quarter cup of that, and time it to eight minutes, that type of thing. And then one day, what happens when all of a sudden you go, you know, I have an idea. I can do something. I can recreate this or recreate it in my own way. Tell me where that transition takes place.

Dennis Littley (4:14)

Well, I think for the home cook, the transition takes place when they have made enough dishes with the cookbook that they are confident enough in their ability to just start to kind of, you don't want to say wing it, but basically that's what it is. And part of what I teach in my blog is like, I have recipes and I always tell people they weren't etched in stone, they didn't come down from the mountain. And the biggest problem people have when they're following cookbook recipes is they feel they have to stick to them 100 percent.

You really don't. In baking, it's a little more critical because there's chemistry involved, but in just cooking, your entrees, your side dishes, your vegetables, and making salads, anything that you make that you're going to consume that does require chemistry, it should be predicated on what you like and what makes you happy.