Tyler Florence - Tyler Florence Fresh

Copyright 2012 by Tyler Florence
Photographs copyright 2012 by John Lee

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Florence, Tyler.
Tyler Florence fresh / Tyler Florence.
pages cm.
1. Seasonal cooking. I. Title.
TX714.F6364 2012
641.564dc23 2012028181

eISBN: 978-0-385-34454-8

Jacket photographs 2012 by John Lee

from Tylers Ultimate by Tyler Florence. Copyright 2006 by Tyler Florence. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

from Eat This Book by Tyler Florence. Copyright 2005 by Tyler Florence. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

from Tyler Florences Real Kitchen by Tyler Florence, copyright 2003 by Tyler Florence. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

v3.1

To my beautiful wife, Tolan,
and our three amazing children,
Miles, Hayden, and Dorothy.
You are the loves of my life.

ALSO BY TYLER FLORENCE

Tyler Makes Pancakes! (with Craig Frazier)

Start Fresh

Tyler Florence Family Meal

Stirring the Pot

Dinner at My Place

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* Click through for a sample recipe from the available ebooks from Clarkson Potter

I love writing about food as much as I love cooking. Its my mission, as well as my passion, to push myself and my team to discover the truth of flavor, a naked honesty that reveals itself once you start to understand the soul of the ingredients in front of you. The image your mind produces when you taste something amazingsay, a fully ripened heirloom tomato in the third week of August or the funky earthiness of white truffle in Novembersends a crystal clear signal from your palate to your brain, a high-def sensation that fully completes the flavor experience. That is always the highest goal of cooking. Im consistently fine-tuning my cooking techniques so that the signal of pure flavor and the integrity of fresh ingredients shine through. I love turning the subtle nuances of great flavor into moments that truly affect you. My goal is to give you tastes youll never forget.

Cooking is more about understanding ingredients than it is actual technique. The more I cook, the more deeply I understand that less is always better. Fewer but better knife cuts, quicker more focused cooking applications, better ingredients presented in a natural statea genuine respect of the glorious fresh foods that nature has provided, a respect that is one step closer to the truth.

This book is a celebration of those magnificent ingredients, the true heroes of Fresh cooking. It is also a reflection of where I am today, as curious and hungry as ever. Hungry to learn, hungry to push the conversation about our food supply forward, and hungry to share ideas. So if you take anything away from this book, I hope it will be an understanding of how vitally important it is to choose fresh ingredients when cooking for yourself and those you love.

Fresh is not just a sell-by date, its a path toward a long and healthy life. Of course to get there, you need to make a conscious decision to eat fresh, and its a choice you are up against at least two dozen times a day: fresh vs. processed. And the showdown between healthy, nutrient-packed, wholesome ingredients that have been simply prepared and so-called convenience foods is a battle we seem to be losing.

America eats 31 percent more packaged foods than any other country, everything from nondairy creamer and sweetened, stabilized salad dressings to frozen pizza and microwavable snacks. Nutritionisms, the glitzy claims touted by makers of packaged foods, speak directly to your desire to do the right thing for the health of yourself and your family. All those marketing dollars are effective. Natural foodsthat is, foods your grandmother would recognizeare being stripped of their nutrients, vitamins, and fiber. The results are pink slime burgers and chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs vs. fresh ground beef and roasted chicken.

Ninety percent of the money America spends on food every day is spent on packaged and processed foodfood that tastes good but is filled with fat, salt, and sugar and has very little nutritional value. It also makes us fat, gives us diabetes, high-blood pressure, and heart disease, and litters the planet with excessive packaging that takes centuries to decompose, yet we love it. A lot of it.

The end result? Were fat and were sick. Our bodies are being exposed to chemicals and additives, unnatural lipids like trans-fats, and sodium levels many times higher than what exist in the natural world. Our bodies are not adapted to handle fast-acting carbohydrates like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the supercheap, high-profit sweetener found in so many processed foods. Genetically modified foods such as corn, soybeans, peanuts, and wheat, once considered wholesome staples, are producing toxic and allergic reactions that human beings have never before experienced.

HFCS, developed in Japan in 1966, was introduced into the U.S. marketplace around 1975, when the commodity price of raw sugar had soared 600 percent in just two years. This cheap sweetener was considered a huge advancement in biochemical science and an economic boon to the industrialized western world just getting its feet wet with modernized processed-food production. Food processors looking to stabilize their costs needed a reliable sugar substitute. In 1976 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with minimal clinical trials, classified HFCS as GRAS, generally recognized as safe.