Ingredients available to home cooks

[vengroff]

Dear Chef Ripert,

Thank you for taking the time to join us on eGullet.

I understand that in preparing A Return to Cooking, you travelled to different regions of the country and prepared meals in home kitchens with seasonal local ingredients. At Le Bernardin, you have access to some of the best raw ingredients from top suppliers. I was hoping you could compare and contrast what is available to the dedicated home cook, versus what fine restaurant kitchens are able to source. Feel free to comment on both quality and variety as it applies to seafood, produce, meat, dairy products, herbs, and/or whatever else you think would be particularly interesting or insightful to us.

[Eric Ripert]

For the book, we bought most of the food in local markets or butcher shops and occassionally in fish markets. I find the quality pretty good in general. Le Bernardin ingredients are better because we have long time relationships with our purveyors, farmers, etc... I am sure that if we had spent more time on each trip, we would have found the same quality.

Once (only) we visited a supermarket (during the trip) and I was shocked by the mediocrity of everything. We just bought marshmallows and left...If you have bad ingredients in the beginning, even if you are a genious cook, you will have a poor quality dish. It's worth it to take the time to search for the best. Never forget that sometimes beautiful to the eyes, doesn't necessarily mean beautiful to the palate.