A Kitchen Clod Takes a Cooking Class in Santa Fe
Chef Johnny Vee stood in his test kitchen, welcoming a dozen students to his “New Mexico Combination Plate” class and trying to explain how the list of dishes we’d be preparing had grown so-o-o long.
“I don’t smoke pot,” he said, “but it looks like it – like I’m going, ‘Maybe we should make enchiladas. Yeah, and let’s do carne adovada. Oooh, and chile con queso! Chile rellenos! Beans! And sopaipillas with honey for dessert!”
The chance to tackle cooking all these dishes – basically the classic “combo plate” served at any respectable New Mexico restaurant that’s worth its weight in chiles – is what drew me and my wife, Merry, to Chef Johnny’s kitchen. (Other Santa Fe cooking classes tend to focus on a single dish.) Our instructor was relaxed and full of hilarious stories, so if we’d felt stressed about cooking in a group of strangers, he immediately put us at ease.
Taking a cooking class when you travel is a great way to explore the local culture – in this case, the unique place food holds in the history and life of New Mexico. You learn to cook new dishes, and at the end – you get to eat your homework!
Having so many courses for us to prepare, Johnny’s strategy was to divide and conquer. With an experienced eye, he assessed our individual kitchen skills and split us into small groups, each with a single dish to prepare. Perhaps surmising that I am a guy who, at home, doesn’t know where the kitchen is, Johnny assigned me to make tortillas.
Merry, who’s a good cook, did the heavy lifting. She mixed blue corn masa and water into dough of just the right consistency – not so moist that it would stick to the tortilla press, not so dry that the tortillas would fall apart. It was my personal zero-skill job to place small balls of dough on the hand press and push down to flatten them into disks.
Luckily, even if we messed up our tortillas, they would be disguised in the creations of other teams who were busy making green chile chicken enchiladas, carne adovada tacos, and blue corn chile rellenos. Various students were rinsing beans, roasting chiles, shredding chicken, and combining fifteen separate ingredients to make the world’s best chile con queso. (Previously, I’d only had the Velveeta style served at friends’ parties.)
Chef Johnny – full name Johnny Vollertsen – told us a little about himself. “I’m from New York, so there’s no reason to pay attention to anything I say! I grew up in Rochester, went to college for restaurant management, and moved to Manhattan to be a chef, peeled a lot of potatoes.” Soon Johnny was working in top New York City eateries; then he helped open a chain of Southwest-flavored restaurants in Australia. To entertain the customers, he and the waiters would do line dancing in the dining room to “Achy Breaky Heart.”
“Down Under, they never quite got Spanish pronunciation,” he added with an eye roll. “So a jalapeno was a ‘jah-LAP-a no’ and quesadillas were ‘kaysa-DILL-uhs.’”
Jovial and puckish, Johnny made the class a blast. He’s also efficient; his assistants had already done lots of the prep work (peeling, dicing, measuring), so we students could get right to putting together our dishes.
Chef Johnny Vee’s Cooking Classes
Classes are taught in a well-equipped kitchen at Las Cosas, an upscale kitchen shop, and are listed online at www.lascosascooking.com/pages/cooking-with-johnny-vee.
Here’s a sample: “Sabor Santa Fe, a hands-on class featuring Banana Leaf Guacamole Boats with Salsa and Corn Chips, Mexican Beer Soup with Cheddar Cheese, Mixed Baby Greens with Lime Dressing and Toasted Pine Nuts, Mexican Chicken Piccata, Green Chile Polenta, and Homemade Dulce de Leche Ice Cream with Red Chile Caramel Sauce.”
I suggest choosing a hands-on class like ours, not a demonstration class – way more fun and useful.
(Photo: A class full of students hungry for cooking knowledge and the fruits (or chiles) of their labor)
The chile pepper is the linchpin of New Mexico cooking, and Johnny gave us a rundown on some of the 4,000 varieties on the planet. Most of the world’s cuisines use chiles, especially in countries near the equator, perhaps because chiles make you sweat, which is good air conditioning.
When New Mexico green chiles ripen and dry, they turn red. Visitors to Santa Fe see strings of clustered red peppers, called ristras, hanging from porches all over town. “You can cook with them if they haven’t been bug sprayed or shellacked,” said Johnny. He once thought about contacting Santa Fe mystery writer Anne Hillerman, a friend, to co-write a murder mystery in which a woman slowly kills her husband with red chile sauce made with bug spray. “I said this one day in a class, and a woman sitting next to her sister said, ‘What a great idea!’ And the sister said, ‘Is everything okay in your marriage??’”
Scientists use a scale to grade the heat of various chiles, measured in “Scoville Units.” A bell pepper is zero, or no heat. A jalapeno clocks in at 3,000 units. New Mexico’s hottest green chile, the Hatch, scores 6,000. A Habanero clangs the bell at a mouth-searing 300,000 units.
At a kitchen counter poblano chiles were being chopped and cheddar cheese grated by two local men on the chile con queso dip detail, who had taken Johnny’s classes before. Meanwhile Johnny passed around spices for us to smell before they got added to the dip, among them – toasted ground cumin seeds. (“Toast your spices to get more bang out of them.”) The end result would be scooped up later with fresh-baked tortilla chips. (Merry and I decided to make chile con queso back home; it freezes well and doesn’t separate when left in a fondue pot over a flame on a dinner table.)
The carne adovada team was measuring out caribe chiles, found only in New Mexico. This variety isn’t ground to powder but crushed into coarse flakes. “They smell like sun-dried tomatoes or tobacco,” said Johnny, “and they create the distinctive flavor of carne adovada; the meat absorbs the red chile flavor.” Another duo was making Drunken Pintos (Frijoles Borrachos) with cilantro, bacon, and tequila (!).
Meanwhile Merry and I were cranking out the tortillas – some successful, some laughable – and passing them to the duo making chicken enchiladas. In New Mexico, enchiladas aren’t rolled but stacked. “Nobody really knows why,” said Johnny. “Texans say it’s because we’re lazy. But hey, if you go through the process of handmaking your own tortillas and they get stale after a day or two, you don’t want to throw them away. So you just dip them in yummy sauce to soften them up and refresh them. That’s how enchiladas came about.”
As the three-hour class came to a close, our creations were laid out on the kitchen counter, and everyone dove in. By now we’d all been chatting and joking and getting to know each other, making the class more like a good party. We all had something in common – our time cooking together – and now we were celebrating what we’d made.
We all headed out the door with good memories, detailed recipes to use back home, and – most important – leftovers!
