Out to Lunch: Chef Ed Porter uses food and music as vehicles for connection
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Twin Cities chef Ed Porter’s work is difficult to categorize. He has worked for high-end restaurants like Marcus Samuelsson's Aquavit. He was on the Netflix cooking competition show, "Pressure Cooker." Today, he's a private chef who blends his culinary talents with musical ones. He released an album under the name Chef Porter and paired it with a 12-course menu. He also has a podcast called “Taste Music Hear Food” where he talks with guests about both artistic pursuits.
In Minnesota Now’s series, Out to Lunch, we meet up with guests in their communities to get to know them better over a meal. This time, Ed Porter let us into his home on a frigid December day and cooked.
The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
Tell me about this dish and why you like to make it.
I think that soup doesn't get the steam that it deserves. My philosophy is, I'm just trying to tell a story of the earth and the farmers, the hands that made these things possible. My job is just not to muck it up. And soup is one of those vehicles that is usually an afterthought, right? Like, just throw it in, it's leftovers, whatever the case may be. But you can develop some truly unique, deep flavors with a little bit of know-how. It's seasoned with berbere spice, which is an Ethiopian collection of spices, some coriander, some cumin, smoked paprika, ginger, so it's a little spicy. It's a hug. This tastes like a hug to me.
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Who first inspired your love of cooking?
The women in my family, the reverence they garnered. I wanted that power. I was in awe of the fact that they can do that. And so I would — resident house cheese grater — during the holidays, peel the potatoes and all the different things. And I just fell in love with the fact of being able to make people feel good.
When you are working with a client, what kind of research are you doing on what foods work for them?
I am always trying to search for things that they like and less the things they say [they like]. Most people have a typical box of things that they like, meaning textures and different flavors. But my favorite game to play is to make people things that they say they don't like. So not that you're allergic to — no hospital involved. But usually when people say they don't like something it's a textural thing, or it was not prepared in a proper manner. When somebody says, ‘I don't like mushrooms,’ is a good one. There are so many varieties, there's no way you've tried them all — and then the different ways you can utilize them. So I've been known to make meals top-to-bottom mushrooms. [I say,] ‘I thought you didn’t like mushrooms.’ [They say] ‘Well, I thought I didn’t.’
One of the coolest things you are doing these days is combining two things you love, food and music. How did that happen for you?
I actually got into food to pay for studio time, so music came first. I fell in love with music, I guess in the womb, I don't know. My parents had a extensive vinyl collection and I would spend hours on end just looking at the covers. I was amazed that they got all this sound on this piece of plastic. It just was like magic to me, like the same thing with food.
The pairing — that's actually fairly new. The two guys were never in the same room at the same time. Either you knew me for food or you knew me for music. In the food business, at the level that I came up in, you had to be all-in or you were not deemed worthy to be in the room. You didn't have the space to say you dabbled in something else. It wasn't until the Netflix “Pressure Cooker” show where the two worlds collided. On the show, I came up with a chorus for a song.
My three pillars finally collided: food, music and culture. Everything I do is tied in there. I'm in the business of making people happy, like I have the best gig on the planet. It's not heart surgery. I don't take myself too serious, but I do have the power to shift moods. I tend to want to use all of those vehicles and all of those talents to do such in a positive way.
The Last Bite: Since you nourish other people, what are the ingredients to nourishing your own soul?
There's a give and take situation, right? It feeds me having that connection. The one thing that COVID taught me is that this interaction is not only valuable, but it's necessary. When we could not convene, I just longed to go — like, I would love to sit in traffic today. Any connection would be a good one, right? I think the things that feed my soul are being around people that that have a zeal and zest for life and being useful to people, not misused. Everybody needs to feel needed, but there is a fine line between being useful and being misused. I just want to use all the tools in the toolbox to do good things with good people, and that's pretty much it.
