OUR GORGE : LOCAVORE
Cooking Fresh & Local Celilo’s Ben Stenn shares his culinary skills in a hands-on class STORY BY RUTH BERKOWITZ • PHOTOS BY BEN MITCHELL
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hef Ben Stenn greets me in the back corner of Celilo Restaurant, where I’ve come for a cooking class. The restaurant is closed on this night, allowing 14 of us to congregate in the Celilo kitchen and learn from the master chef. As co-owner of Celilo, Stenn is known for using fresh, local and regional ingredients on his ever-changing menu at the upscale Hood River eatery. Tonight, we’ll be emulating what he does every day at the restaurant. “It’s a lean time of year, so we have to embrace what we have,” Stenn says, adding that even in winter, it’s still possible to gather fresh ingredients. Tonight we will create four dishes: Mediterranean mussels, braised short ribs, massaged winter salad and milk-poached parsnips and cauliflower. “Tonight’s cooking is about smelling your food and tasting things over and over,” Stenn says. “I want to introduce you to ideas so you can cook this at home.” We look over the pages he has given us, which are not recipes with specific measurements but rather guidelines for the dishes. “Because my menu is ingredientdriven, I have to work in the opposite direction (of a recipe),” says Stenn. Our first task is to truss the ribs. (Some of the food was prepared in advance for tonight’s class—including the ribs, which were cooked at 300 degrees for six hours.) Stenn demonstrates looping the cooking twine around the meat to give its shape conformity and allow the heat to penetrate evenly. Next we prepare mirepoix, a combination of chopped onions, carrots and celery that forms the base for a variety of sauces and stocks. Stenn integrates many of the techniques he learned at the Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in France, where he studied and worked for two years. That experience, combined with working at the famous Bouley Restaurant in New York and a decade at Hood River’s 6th Street Bistro, gave Stenn the skills to open his own restaurant. We move on to the mussels and prepare them two ways so we can compare flavors. “Mussels come from the sea and the challenge is to keep them cold,” Stenn says. These mussels are from the Washington
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coast and were cleaned ahead of time. A few of the students try the mandolin slicer to finely shave the fennel, shallots, onions and garlic. The first method for preparing the mussels is steaming them in a pot with wine, fennel, onions, garlic, shallots, sun-dried tomatoes and olives. We sample the shellfish and most of us find that they taste good, but are not dazzling. The second technique, which comes from Celilo’s menu, is a homerun. The mussels are cooked in the oven in small cast iron skillets coated with olive oil and topped with fennel pollen, garlic and chili flakes. The high heat combined with the licorice taste of the fennel pollen brings the mussels’ flavor to the forefront. I love how the crispiness of the fennel and onions contrasts with the slippery texture of the mussels. “Less is more,” Stenn says to describe the plate. “It’s all about the mussels, with a little fennel, red chili and garlic backing it up.”
Stenn views his cooking as an art form, and his food a vehicle to invoke memories. He enjoys watching the wait staff take a hot bubbly skillet of
SPRING 2016 : THE GORGE MAGAZINE
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2/25/16 9:42 AM