For Olivia Tiedemann, Rich People Food Comes Down to the Right Moves
The Dinner Plan
In this episode of The Dinner Plan, private chef Olivia Tiedemann discusses her new cookbook, Eat Like the Rich, sharing insights on how coo
Key takeaways
- The most important factor in creating a great meal is not the cost of ingredients but precise cooking technique.
Main topics
- Private chef life and challenges
- Importance of technique over ingredients
Notable quotes
"It's not about how much you spend. It's about how well you cook."
Conclusion
Olivia Tiedemann's journey from restaurant kitchens to private chefing underscores that excellence
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) Before we get into my conversation with Olivia, I want to make sure you all know about the Dinner Plan September giveaways, which you can enter right now on our newsletter. Prizes include an oven-to-stove top tri-ply roasting pan from Heston, wooden cooking tools from Earlywood, a burr grinder for your coffee from OXO, superlative canned tomatoes and jarred sauces from Bianco di Napoli, Szechuan pepper oil, and tingly snacks from 50 Hertz. organic rice and rice noodles from Lotus Foods, and a giant, truly giant collection of new cookbooks and baking books. Get all the details and enter now at thedinnerplan.substack.com. That's thedinnerplan.substack.com. Speaker 3 (0:49) Welcome back to The Dinner Plan, where we start every week with fresh cooking inspiration. I'm Maggie Hoffman, and this week on the show, we have Olivia Tideman. The first time I saw one of Olivia's videos on TikTok, I immediately sent it to a bunch of friends. Olivia's worked in restaurants, and her private chefing videos show that she knows what she's doing in the kitchen. It doesn't hurt that the music's great and there's attitude to spare. Olivia's new book, Eat Like the Rich, focuses on the techniques that really matter when you want to cook a great meal. Olivia, thank you so much for coming into the studio Speaker 1 (1:25) today. Thank you for having me. What have you been cooking lately? I told you I'm going to be honest today. So what I've been cooking lately. on the precipice of this book coming out has been nothing super extravagant. Haven't had a ton of time to be cooking. And I've been eating a lot of quesadillas, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crackers, whatever's nearby, because I don't really have a ton of time to be like home enjoying myself just cooking. But I mean, it's the end of the tomatoes. So I do eat a lot of those. How do you eat them? One of my favorite things to do with really good, like, end of the summer tomatoes, I mean, obviously besides just, like, putting a little olive oil, marinating them, a little bit of, you know, mozzarella, stracciatella, that kind of thing. I really like to blanch them, peel them, crush them up a little bit, and just barely cook them in a pan with a little bit of garlic, a little bit of olive oil, and then, like, half cook some cavatelli or a different pasta and finish cooking them in the tomatoes. You know, just, like, they're barely cooked and it just tastes... Honestly, purely like tomato. It still kind of has like a freshness to it. Some basil in there. Some salt. Really good olive oil. And anchovy sizzled with the garlic maybe. That's one of my favorite end of the summer things, I would say. I feel like I will peel a tomato maybe once Speaker 3 (2:43) this summer. That's pretty serious. Speaker 1 (2:45) Well, if they're big ones and you're already boiling a pot of water, you know, you just score it a little bit. You drop it in there and take it right out. It comes right off, you know. And if you're cooking for yourself, we're talking about two heirloom tomatoes. It's not that hard. And then it doesn't have stringy bits. There's a reason to do Speaker 3 (3:01) it. Speaker 1 (3:01) I hate the tomato skins. I will always do the thing that will make it a step better, you know? Speaker 3 (3:07) I mean, that's kind of what this book is, which we will get into. Yes. And what have you been cooking lately? I'm cooking a lot from all the new books that are coming out this fall. And the other night I had some people over and I made this little snack from Ryan Bartlow's new book, which he wrote with Lori Woliver. I'll link to the book in this week's newsletter. The dish that I made was really intense and really tasty. You whip some Roquefort until it's creamy, spreadable. So blue cheese, and it goes on a little toasted baguette, and then gets an anchovy on top, good anchovy, and then a drizzle of a syrup that you make from cooking down PX sherry. And it's thickened with like a little bit of cornstarch, so it really is like thick enough. And you cook it down until it's like honey thickness. And PX sherry... if you haven't had it, is this sort of like raisiny, sweet, nutty sherry. And the combo of that like very salty, pungent cheese and the anchovies, so like salt on salt, and then this sweet, raisiny, nutty drizzle was pretty awesome. That sounds really good. Wow. So what drew you to cooking initially? Speaker 1 (4:17) I mean, my mother is a chef, so I grew up with a really good cook for a mother. But when I first finished high school, I wasn't really thinking that way. And, you know, as any teenager, it's not like we got along super well. It wasn't like I want to be just like my mother. But I finished high school. I knew I did not want to go to college. And I kind of just had to start working. And restaurants will always hire you. And so that was that was the job I ended up getting. I was a food runner at a restaurant and the chef just happened to be like a really cool like. really inspiring guy. His name is Tristan. He just won Top Chef, actually. He's like the coolest. So creative. And I just got so lucky that that was my very first stop at a restaurant. Happened to be him because he was very, very inspiring. And I just wanted to follow him around. And that's kind of where my interest in the kitchen began. It was like the first time that I saw it. And he told me he wouldn't let me work back there unless I went to cooking school. So then one day I had to tell him that I was going to cooking school. And then he was very disappointed that his food runner was gone. And yeah, that's kind of how it started for me. After that, I just, I kept working in restaurants and I really loved it. It makes a lot of sense in my head. Speaker 3 (5:24) What was it that you saw him doing that you were like, oh, I want to do this? Speaker 1 (5:27) I mean, I've always been a pretty creative person. Like I really like a lot of different types of modes of expression, art, whatever you want to call it. Really like working with my hands, painting, sculpting. And that's been a big part of my life and like something that I do. I get really focused on things and I like to be kind of inside of a project or inside of a task. And I just saw that in him when he was like making his little things, like it just seemed like his head was actually quiet and he was working on things that he enjoyed and putting a lot of effort and thought into it, which is kind of unusual to find in other people and maybe any profession. A lot of people, a job is a job, but he really loved his job and it just resonated with. things that I like to do. Speaker 3 (6:10) So then you worked like crazy in restaurant kitchens, some very impressive restaurant kitchens, which can be rough environments. When you first heard about the gig of being a private chef and you started doing it that first summer, what was appealing and different about that? Speaker 1 (6:26) I had kind of always in the back of my head been interested in being a private chef. That always seemed like the ultimate goal. of any cook, any chef when you're working in restaurants. Imagine having just like one person or a family to cook for where there's no budget, there's no restaurant world of things to think about and you can be super creative and you can cook a smaller amount of food and then you can really make it exactly how you want it to be. So that was always kind of a dream to me on the back burner of my head. But it's a really hard world to get into. And I just, I kind of got really lucky that somebody that I knew through somebody else. just heard that I had just left the restaurant world and they had an opportunity and it was like I won the lottery. Speaker 3 (7:08) So is it the dream? There must be some hard parts about the private chef job. Speaker 1 (7:13) There's definitely hard parts about a private chef job. I think it kind of is a person to person thing. Not everybody that can be a really great chef is going to have a super easy transition to the world of private chef. And like you're dealing with people really directly as opposed to in a restaurant kitchen. You can kind of hide. from a lot of people. You don't have to be front-facing. But in the world of private chefing, you do have to be front-facing. And you are kind of running your own kitchen yourself. So like, let's say I've never liked to do dishes. Like in a restaurant, there's a dishwasher. Like you move over, you're kind of in control of everything. And you have to be personable. You have to understand the environment that you're in and how like people who can't afford private chefs, how they like to operate. There's a level of privacy. There's a level of... respectfulness. There's levels to it. And you got to be able to kind of flow within that environment a little bit, deal with some personalities. Speaker 3 (8:05) It depends what they want to eat too. Speaker 1 (8:07) Yeah. And what they like and don't like, what their friends like and don't like, who's gluten-free today, you know, who doesn't eat anchovies, who doesn't eat onions, who doesn't eat dairy. And there's 12 of them and they're all there at one time. How am I going to contort this same entree seven different ways? So, you know, there can be things like that. But overall, I would not trade it for the world ever. It's the problems are much smaller than the problems in working in a restaurant. Speaker 3 (8:37) So most of the people listening are home cooks. If you could just convince home cooks to do three things differently in the kitchen when they're cooking, what would they be? Speaker 1 (8:48) First thing I would say is taste everything, which seems really obvious, but actually taste everything. It's like one of the most common mistakes that people make is like, you know, they're putting everything together. Taste it as you go. Taste it at every step of the way. Like add a little more salt. Like think about what it needs. When you're putting together a dish, like everything kind of needs to make sense as one thing, as one bite. So definitely tasting, thinking. The second thing I see maybe going wrong is like having patience. You know, like take the time to understand the process of what you're doing, what's in front of you, what you're cooking. Like don't rush it. Don't turn up the heat. Sometimes to make something perfect, you actually just have to slow down and you have to let it do what it needs to do. And don't really rush the process too much. And another thing I would say is to get really in touch with your senses. Like I think that's one thing that helped me the most. to like learn faster, to like grow skills faster and better. Being really patient and also like listening, hearing what's happening in a pan, your taste, your smell, your eyes, like involving every part of your body. And then it just becomes like the sixth sense. Like when something's in the pan, like I could turn around probably and kind of know what's happening in the pan based on where I left it, what I'm smelling, what I'm hearing, when the oil's popping too high or You know, once it starts to smell like something's on just the cusp of getting too dark or things like that, like the texture of things, like using your eyes, using your hands, just like getting really involved in the process and being really immersed, having patience, being focused. And then before you know it, a lot of these skills will feel like second nature. I Speaker 3 (10:32) think so many people sort of think like, oh, I got this recipe and I'm following the recipe and they're not engaging. Right. Speaker 1 (10:38) And Speaker 3 (10:39) like you can screw it up. Speaker 1 (10:40) Right. Like following the steps is one thing, but learning and understanding like why something works or doesn't work, that is what makes the difference. Speaker 3 (10:48) Okay. So if you could convince home cooks to switch three ingredients that they buy, what would make the most difference? One Speaker 1 (10:57) thing I would definitely say, and this is like high on my list, and this can be on, you know, on the verge of a budget thing as well. But when you're buying meat or you're buying seafood, do not buy it. from the shelf in the grocery store. Just go to the butcher counter at the grocery store. Look at it. You know, that's like