♪♪
-Hey, what's up, everyone?
I'm J.J. Johnson.
I'm the chef and founder
of Fieldtrip in Harlem.
I'm making West African peanut
sauce with some udon noodles.
It's gonna be super delicious
and you're gonna want to cook it
for everybody you know.
I'm going to make
the peanut sauce.
Small dice on the onion.
I'm going to use
half of this onion.
So, listen, there's five
mother sauces right now.
Tomato, bechamel, veloute,
espagnole, hollandaise.
And that's how you learn
the cuisines
of those regions of the world,
through the mother sauces,
in culinary school;
I want culinary schools
to add
the West African peanut sauce
and then culinary schools
from around the world
will be learning what
West African food is all about.
And that's where it starts,
right with the mother sauces.
I don't like to peel my carrot.
I like to taste a carrot
before I peel it.
If it tastes nice and sweet
with the skin on, it's great.
I'm going to small
dice these carrots too.
And the flavor here is gonna be
a little bit spicy,
a little bit sweet.
You don't need them
to be the perfect size
because you're gonna blend
this all up at the end.
So, some oil.
Onions --
have my pan at a medium heat.
And add some salt just cause
I don't want to get
any color on my onions.
Sweat those out
for thirty seconds.
I'm gonna throw my carrots in.
I'm gonna add salt again.
I'm gonna let these go.
-Smash my garlic.
Gonna small-dice
this here too.
Normally I would
add garlic in first,
but I want the garlic
just a little bit of heat
because I want the spiciness
in the garlic.
When you talk
about mother sauces,
they come from a specific region
in the world.
And none of the mother
sauces include Africa,
which is one of the largest
continents in the world.
You learn cuisine
through mother sauces
so if there's no mother sauce
that is taking us
through West Africa,
then how can
you understand the food?
So a little bit of celery,
gonna sweat this down,
and add a little bit more oil,
a little bit more of salt.
I love seasoning in layer,
so everything is
getting seasoned evenly.
So I seasoned my carrots,
my celery, my onions.
Nobody's being disrespected
in the pan.
Tomato.
Again, another medium dice,
or small dice.
I want the seeds and the guts.
I want everything from
the tomato in there
for that flavor.
Plum tomatoes are good,
good balance of water
and sweet flavor.
And then add some cumin,
not powdered cumin, cumin seeds.
I went this cumin,
the seeds to pop,
and you get all that nice flavor
from that fresh cumin
when it hits the oil.
This is really smelling amazing.
So good.
So a couple of keys here.
I'm going to add in
the tomato paste first
and I'm going to pincage this,
and you know
pincaging means
separating the oil in the fat,
but really cooking the paste
to ignite the flavor
so it doesn't taste
like canned tomato paste.
I'm gonna let that cook
for a couple minutes.
I'm gonna get
my peanut butter ready.
Unsweetened peanut butter.
And it's okay if the oil
separates on the top.
That's some good peanut butter.
If your peanut butter
doesn't separate,
you should question
the peanut butter maker,
because peanut has oil in it
and it should separate
because it's...
[ Laughs ]
...it's a liquid.
Now, I'm going to add
in my peanut butter.
My history with the sauce is
I cooked in Ghana in 2011.
That's where my inspiration has
always come from.
I look through food to
the West African lens
everywhere I go when I travel.
The next largest
population of West Africans
in the world is Brazil.
And in this certain region
in Brazil,
the Japanese
and the West Africans
live together and they eat
stewy meets
with pasta or noodles.
So this was my inspiration
of, you know,
doing research and really seeing
that these cultures really have
an influence from West Africa
from a food perspective.
And that's what I celebrate.
So you can start to see
the peanut butter
and the oil
starting to separate.
That's really good stuff.
I'm going to turn this down
so we don't burn
the peanut butter.
I'm going to add in the tomatoes
and add in a little bit of
my stock.
I'm gonna stir this up, bring it
to a simmer, as you can see.
I'm gonna add the rest of
the stock,
or a little bit more stock
just to see
when it reduces.
Gonna add a bay leaf.
I'm gonna cut this
bird's eye chili in half
for some spice,
with the seeds and the stem,
because the stem is
the spiciest part of the pepper
in any pepper --
I learned that
from a grandmother
in her kitchen in Ghana
when they were making
their hot sauce.
And when she would add the stems
in and blend it up,
the fragrance and the aroma
and the spice
would just be at another level,
so...
Okay, let me add in
the cilantro.
Give it this nice,
herbaceous flavor.
I don't like to take
the stems off.
I think a lot of us remove
the stems from our herbs
and the stems
have really great flavor.
I'm gonna add that in.
Gonna bring it
to a hard simmer.
Let it go for about
10 to 15 minutes.
I'm going to make
the udon noodles now,
or the base for
the udon noodles.
So this time
I'm using a yellow onion.
And a little more oil here;
salt.
Okay, carrots.
The food past of
West African food
around the world
doesn't come from
a celebrated moment in life.
There was West African slaves,
they were taken around
the world.
When they didn't want
to do the work,
then there was other cultures
that came in --
so you had the migrant
Chinese workers,
you had the migrant
Vietnamese workers,
the migrant Japanese workers
that filled in
to do the work
because West African slaves
refused to do it.
I researched those places
and I figure out
how to make super crave-able
amazing food around it.
Let me check this West African
peanut sauce.
Ooh, yeah, look at that.
It's coming together nice.
I'm going to blend this sauce.
[ Blender whirring ]
I'm gonna blanch off
my udon noodles.
So you'll just drop them
into some hot simmering water,
doesn't need to be like
a hard boil,
for about two minutes.
At a young age
my grandmother
injected DNA --
like, food DNA into me,
like, I didn't watch cartoons
at a young age,
I was, like,
in the kitchen with her.
I don't know
if I was really cooking.
I was there peeling carrots
and onions, supposedly.
My kids, they're in the kitchen
with me all the time.
I believe that if you cook
with your kids in the kitchen,
they will eat better because
they feel like they're involved.
You're able to teach your
children the world through food.
So, some udon noodles here,
some peanut sauce.
Ooh!
Look at that!
Little salt...
Black pepper.
The final touches --
some edamame.
♪♪
Just going to add a little bit
of fresh lemon juice here.
Brighten it up.
All right.
Let's plate this up.
A little bit of these
edamame on top.
♪♪
Some Thai basil,
little bit of mint,
a little bit of basil flavor.
It's going to be creamy.
It's going to be like, goodness.
Good. Great nutty flavor.
You get a little bit of
the cumin,
a little heat
from the bird's eye chili.
And the basil goes
so good with the peanut butter,
get a little bit of that
mint flavor,
a little bit of the --
that nice sweetness.
So good that you need
to click the recipe below
and come uptown to Fieldtrip
between 115th and 116th
on Malcolm X Boulevard,
right in front of
the 2 and the 3 train,
and you can see me there.
♪♪
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