If chef Richard Blais looks thinner than he once did, that’s because he’s been working at it.
“I’m a lot more active,” Blais says. “I’ve lost 60 pounds over the last six or so years.”
The former “Top Chef” star attributes his weight loss to “a slow progression of exercising more and eating better and just monitoring.” He now runs marathons and recently returned from “shredding up a mountain on a snowboard.”
That is his idea of a Utah vacation.
Having a wife and family has also changed his perspective.
“It’s important to me. We are working with the Bill Clinton Foundation to fight childhood obesity,” Blais said.
He is not alone; chefs frequently have weight issues.
“We eat all day long. We work really long hours. We finish work, and then we love our craft so much that we eat some more. A couple of pizza pies and a half bottle of wine for 30 days in a row or something like that can really mess you up.”
Blais cookbook signings
Saturday, March 9, 12 p.m.-2 p.m. at Sur La Table, Phipps Plaza. 350o Peachtree Road. 404-973-3371.
Monday, March 11, 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, Georgia Tech. 48 5th St. N.W. 404-894-2515.
He's Atlanta's king of gourmet burgers, hot dogs and foie gras milkshakes, a "Top Chef All-Stars" winner who's been known to gunk up his hair with duck fat and a squirt or two of liquid nitrogen for crunch.
Now Richard Blais — owner of the Flip Burger Boutique chain, haute-dog restaurant HD1 and The Spence — is a cookbook author. In “Try This at Home: Recipes from My Head to Your Plate” ($30, Clarkson Potter), in book stores this week, Blais insists he’s just a regular guy who cooks to make people happy.
“I wanted people to understand that not all of my food revolves around liquid nitrogen and science, and that you don’t have to wear an astronaut’s helmet to cook,” said Blais, the lover of kitchen paraphernalia such as sous vide cookers and soda siphons. “My television work left a lot of people with the impression that my food is overly scientific or complicated, and that’s not really the case.”
At 287 pages, the volume celebrates Blais’ roots as a Long Island blue-collar kid who got his first cooking job at McDonald’s and later honed his skills at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in California and Ferran Adria’s El Bulli in Spain. A mash-up of foods high and low, “Try This at Home” features 125 recipes, ranging from the simple Sri-Rancha (store-bought ranch dressing mixed with sriracha hot sauce) to Lemon-Curd-and-Black-Pepper-Roasted Chicken (which involves brining and twining a bird whose skin and breast meat have been separated and filled with the citrus-y sauce).
Riffing on fast food, Blais makes sweetbread “nuggets” doused in buffalo sauce and served with blue cheese dipping sauce. He tops a beer-battered fillet of fish with a thin sheet of jellied malt vinegar and chunky tartar sauce. He dresses up a burger with candied onions, braised bacon and (optional) cheddar foam.
“I didn’t grow up on a farm,” Blais says, explaining his playful Potato Chip Omelette and Creamed-Corn Soup with optional Cap’n Crunch garnish. “I grew up in the early ’90s, late ’80s and the age of the microwave and convenience food and frozen food and canned food. That’s how my mom cooked.”
Being a husband and father of two small daughters has re-shaped his culinary philosophy “300 percent,” Blais says.
Cooking at home “definitely changed my outlook,” the chef says. “It’s made me a better chef in my restaurants, to be quite honest, because I am not at a point anymore in my career where I am just trying to just make a name for myself or to do something interesting just for the sake of it being interesting. I want to make food delicious and make people smile.”
Developing recipes for a general audience was challenging, though, and writing the book took longer than expected — about two years. He wanted to include food easy enough for “Mary Smith in Kansas” while giving adventurous cooks some of the wildly creative dishes he’s famous for: oysters with horseradish “pearls,” made by freezing horseradish cream with liquid nitrogen; “impastas,” which are noodles that substitute vegetables and proteins for the flour, and ice cream frozen with dry ice.
San Francisco-based photographer John Lee shot the book’s photos at a rented house in East Atlanta.
“We invited a bunch of friends over and cooked out of a loft sort of setting so that we were in a home environment,” Blais said.
In one memorable photograph, Blais and his family huddle at a table strewn with spaghetti, meatballs, wine glasses and sippy cups. As the chef feeds daughters Riley and Embry, now 4 and 2, with both hands, his wife, Jazmin, stuffs an impossibly large tangle of pasta into her mouth.
And no one is wearing a shirt.
The photo may look like a celebrity chef’s gimmicky take on a nude centerfold. “But the story is real,” the author said. After the family’s sauce-splattered Sunday-night spaghetti dinners began to take a toll on the laundry, the Blaises decided to skip the shirts.
The scene took about a half-day to shoot. “We have so many photos that didn’t make the book from that day that are just hilarious. We ate a spaghetti dinner. We cooked a dish and laid it out, and we all went topless and had a good time.”
Now, don’t be afraid to try this. At home.
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