While Bouley did, indeed, cook in Girardet’s kitchen, he says his motivation to cull down dairy and starches and cant more heavily toward vegetables came when he opened up the French restaurant Montrachet in the 1980s. He wanted to make lighter, healthier food for his clients, and also stock his kitchen with elements that could be combined in countless ways to create a myriad of final products, so that tasting menus could come together easily and be as varied as the guests who’d be eating them. To this day he keeps upward of 100 purées at the ready in his walk-in. Of course, he doesn’t think home cooks need to have that many on hand, but a few in the freezer, that can be broken off and thrown into a saucepan with pasta or soup? Why on earth wouldn’t you stock that, just as you do butter and lemon juice? And so I dutifully go home and roast shallots with wine and port in the oven, low and slow for a couple hours, to make one of his favorite purée combinations. As the shallots collapse in the oven, and the wine-port mixture reduces, I find myself inhaling the air, open-mouthed. When the time comes, I push everything through a tamis and throw the burgundy mush into the fridge, where it sits. And sits. Maybe I forget about it. And then, one night, with friends in town, I am over the stove stirring that same simple pasta sauce and decide to add in a few spoonfuls of that red wine—shallot purée instead of cream. And just like that, I layer on a deeply complex, extremely satisfying note, sweet with the softened shallots, rich with the wine, that makes it taste like I’d simmered that sauce for half a day, instead of just an hour. A few nights later, I throw some into a jarred (gasp) sauce. Same amazing transformation. And then into a quick kale sauté. Everything it hits, it improves. “They’re like pigments,” Bouley told me. “You paint your own design, sure, but you have to have quality pigments. And the better the pigment, the better the result of your work.”
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