Rocco DiSpirito: The Science of Flavor
And What You Don't Know About Celebrity Chefs

by Lisa Snider
findingojai@aol.com

“Find your inner chef!” encourages a voice from a stage at the recent Santa Barbara
Arts Festival. The stage, set between the Courthouse Sunken Gardens and Elements Restaurant, is surrounded by luxury cars and a ravenous crowd. The voice is celebrity chef, television personality and cookbook author Rocco DiSpirito, in town for the Lincoln Savor the Dream tour, and he’s spending the afternoon hosting food demonstrations.

“The palate is the most important cooking tool,” DiSpirito tells the audience while preparing his recipe for Shrimp Sate Sauté (see below) and doling out samples. His books, Flavor and Rocco’s 5 Minute Flavor, detail his philosophies surrounding the taste buds. Best known for his NBC reality television show, The Restaurant, DiSpirito is currently on a cross country tour with Lincoln and starring in a commercial for their new MKX crossover SUV.

Lincolns and chefs? What’s the connection? “Their demographic appreciates food and entertaining and the good life and chefs are an access point to that,” explains the 40-year-old DiSpirito.

Accustomed to the technical aspects of being a celebrity in front of cameras, getting out and working in front of an audience is a welcomed change. “What’s great about it is that you’re interacting with people and you’re teaching them something which are the two most important things a chef can do,” says DiSpirito. “It’s much more personal than a TV show.”

The native New Yorker has had an affinity for entertaining with food since childhood. “What I fell in love with the first day working in a pizzeria at 11 years old is the interaction with the people.” The experience stuck and at the young age of 16, DiSpirito entered the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating, he pursued a business degree from Boston University. DiSpirito then went on to become a restaurateur, most notably as chef and owner of the former Union Pacific in New York City’s Gramercy Park. In 1999 he was named Food & Wine’s Best New Chef, which thrust him into the limelight with multiple television appearances, a radio show and three cookbooks.

Rocco’s flavor philosophy…
In recent years, DiSpirito’s focus has been all about flavor. Thumbing through the pages of his beautiful first book, the James Beard award-winning Flavor, it’s easy to grasp his concepts. “The world of ingredients breaks downs into four basic flavors the same way the
world of colors breaks down into three basic colors.” DiSpirito says those four basic flavors are sour, salt, sweet and bitter and encourages home cooks to find a balance among the tastes. Tapping into the basics was a “huge epiphany,” which came to him when he got out of his well-stocked restaurant kitchens, started cooking at home and quickly realized there had to be an easier way. “For me it was cracking the code to
flavor, discovering the algorithm.”

Wanting to make the concept accessible to the home cook, DiSpirito broke down his philosophy and built recipes around those four flavors. His most recent book, Rocco’s 5 Minute Flavor, stretches the concept even further by promising dishes utilizing just five ingredients in five minutes for five dollars. That’s putting the 30-minute mealers on notice, but for DiSpirito, it’s simply “a strategic combination of fresh food and shortcut food.” Those shortcut foods, grocery store convenience items such as bagged salads and pre-chopped vegetables, are combined with other
fresh ingredients to combat the everyday challenge of what to make when you’ve got no time, little money and few ingredients.

DiSpirito’s passion for flavor is largely inspired by his Italian immigrant family’s roots. “I watched my grandmother make food with all the wrong cookware, yet her food always tasted good.” His mother, Nicolina, a school cafeteria chef who many will remember from his TV show, taught him the fundamentals of great Italian cooking, always relying on her most important tool. “She counted on her palate.” With only the slightest hint of eye-rolling cynicism, DiSpirito admits she is still a huge influence in his life.

Rocco dishes the misconceptions surrounding celebrity chefs…
One major misconception about celebrity chefs, DiSpirito says, is that they cook a lot.

“Celebrity chefs are running in many directions and each chef has to decide how to strike a balance between creating product and marketing product. If you’re on the road doing demos and appearing on TV and writing cookbooks, it means you have less and less time to cook in a restaurant, so what people don’t know is that chefs are really managers and administrators.”

Another misconception is that chefs are out of shape and overweight. This writer has always said, “Never trust a skinny chef,” but that doesn’t
apply here. “I’m the only exception!” And that’s only because DiSpirito, sporting bulging biceps and chiseled calves, is a tri-athlete. Knowing all too well the unconventional lifestyle of a chef - the eating, the drinking, the late nights - DiSpirito admits it’s tough. “Nutrition and all the issues of health weren’t a top priority for me as a chef.” Training for the Iron Man in 2008 is yielding new creativity in his kitchen now. “I’m very aware of what you put in your body and how it affects you. There is some change going on in the recipes. I think my next book is going to have a lot of that influence manifested in it.”

Rocco on wine and the holidays…
DiSpirito doesn’t fuss too much over wine but realizes its importance in cooking. His advice? “Don’t worry about the label or how much it is.” He’s not pretentious, either, declaring, “There’s a food that will go great with a Three-Buck Chuck!” But he does admit to being partial to Pinot Noir, a Santa Barbara favorite. “It’s got everything you love about red wine, it’s lighter, it’s fruit forward, it’s got lots of acidity and tannin and it doesn’t obliterate food.”

With the holidays just around the corner, DiSpirito doesn’t plan to bring anything new to the dinner table. That’s because in the DiSpirito household, it’s all about his family and their traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner, The Feast of the Seven Fishes, popularly thought
to represent the seven sacraments. This meatless meal, a bounty of seafood and pasta dishes, follows the age old traditional observance of “La Vigilia Di Natale,” - the wait for the birth of Christ. But for DiSpirito, it simply means family and good food, “I have nothing to add, it’s the perfect meal.”

Look for Rocco’s books and recipes on his website www.roccodispirito.com.

Lisa Snider is an Ojai resident and local freelance writer. Her other columns are featured on her website, www.findingojai.com.