clearlake >> The popping of sizzling skillets, the beating of a whisk, the precise clicking of a knife in action — all telltale sounds of a busy kitchen — filled the Aroma Cafe at Woodland Community College Wednesday afternoon. Trays were laden with an array of bright dishes, a daisy-yellow tofu egg salad, an orange and green swirl of mango and jalapenos, the blushing pink of a tender cut of steak. It was all prepared under the guidance of Master Chef Brad Barnes. And it was a very big deal.
Becoming a Master Chef is no small feat. According to Robert Cabreros, the school’s Culinary Arts Chef Instructor, there are about 50 in the entire country, and the test required to join the ranks of cooking’s elite has a fail rate of somewhere around 90 percent. A Master Chef to a cook is like a movie star to us common folk.
“That’s top tier,” Cabreros said, looking a little bit like a kid on Christmas morning. “So to have that come to our campus and then to be able to work with my students — for me to be able to work with him — that’s just a huge honor.”
So when he was approached with the opportunity to bring Chef Brad into the classroom, Cabraros jumped. “I’m always trying to put my students in a position to better themselves,” he added.
Wednesday marked Barnes’s third visit to Lake County, but the first time he’d led a hands on class for local chefs as well as students at Woodland Community College. He was here through a grant — Partnerships to Improve Community Health — funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and facilitated by Xtreme Envisions and North Coast Opportunities (NCO). The goal: to teach local restaurants about offering healthy options in their establishments.
“For a business owner, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to take a step back from your business and do additional education,” said Caroline Radice of NCO. “This is a nice way to have that opportunity to take some time to learn some new things.”
When Barnes first came out to Lake County from his home in New York, he and Rachelle Damiata of Xtreme Envisions drove around the lake, stopping in every restaurant to scope out the food scene. “If you look across Lake County at all the restaurants they all have the same menu,” Barnes said. “That’s not to say it’s a bad menu, but it is all the same and it doesn’t offer all the options for people to eat better than burgers and fries and nachos and cheese sticks.”
So they invited chefs to the Aroma Cafe in Clearlake to receive training from Barnes, who has a simple philosophy when it comes to cooking — it’s all about exposure. With more than 40 years of experience to his name, Barnes has traveled across the globe, learning the art of cooking. Many times he’s had the opportunity to learn from mothers and grandmothers, who’ve taught him the origin of different dishes.
“So once you do that you have a benchmark for what excellent is,” he said. “And that’s where cooks fall behind because they don’t realize what excellent is, because they have no benchmark for what that is.”
He compared it to driving. When you spend your life behind the wheel of a Volkswagen, the car is perfectly fine, with comfortable seats and a shiny coat of paint, but the moment you get behind a Maserati, your old car doesn’t look so hot.
It’s the same in the kitchen. “Until you have made something to the best it can be, you believe that what you’re working hard at is the best it can be,” Barnes said. “So that goes back to the exposure message.”
With that idea in mind, many of the dishes Barnes brought to Woodland Community College were not something you’d likely find in a Lake County locale, such as salads made of grapes and cheese and peanuts. And that brings in the second part of Barnes’s philosophy — good food is also about complexity.
Dishes are often laden with salt. It’s what we’re used to. Popcorn without salt just isn’t the same. But Barnes explained that when french fries are missing the mineral, it’s not actually sodium that we want — we want complexity. Add a different flavor to the fries, and suddenly we’re happy again.
That’s how Barnes makes low sodium, whole grain recipes taste interesting. For example, salad is all about timing. On Wednesday he had students mix barley in with the dressing when it was warm, but the vegetables weren’t tossed until right before the dish was served. The barley tasted quite a lot like the dressing, while the veggies retained their own flavors.
“You create dimension inside of one dish,” Barnes explained. “A lot of it is very subtle, but a lot of cooking is very subtle.”
Some might believe that cooking healthfully will hurt their bottom line, but that’s far from the truth. Customers have been demanding more nutritious options for some time now, and restaurants offering them will only increase their profits.
And tourism isn’t unrelated. As Napa and Sonoma begin to grow, Barnes thinks Lake County is poised to become a destination, but if visitors don’t have the type of dining establishments they’re accustomed to, they won’t want to return. “Tourists don’t live here,” Barnes pointed out. “Tourists have different expectations.”
Fortunately, Woodland Community College’s culinary arts program has been flourishing under Cabreros, new restaurants are popping up, such as the Twisted Sisters on Main Street in Lakeport, Lower Lake High School just hired on a new chef instructor. And with the help of funding like Partnerships to Improve Community Health, the future of the Lake County restaurant scene is looking to be an optimistic one.
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
