David Chang: ‘Cooking Doesn’t Come Naturally To Me’

Everyone’s favorite badass chef, David Chang, is on the cover of this month’s Wired. It’s the August food issue, and he’s sharing for the first time ever, in his own words, what he calls his Unified Theory of Deliciousness. Sound crazy? It might be. Chang thought you might think so, and that’s why he hasn’t shared it until now. He says, “I’ve struggled to put this into words, and I haven’t talked to my fellow chefs about it, because I worry they’ll think I’m crazy. But I think there’s something to it, and so I’m sharing it now for the first time.”

Among his conclusions about food are that bolognese is mapo tofu and that foods should at once be too salty and too bland. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. But David Chang has single-handedly changed the way people eat and the way people think about food, and we mean that in a good way, so we should probably listen to him.

Here are our favorite lines from the piece:

• “A great dish hits you like a Whip-It: There’s momentary elation, a brief ripple of pure pleasure in the spacetime continuum. That’s what I was chasing, that split second when someone tastes something so delicious that their conversation suddenly derails and they blurt out something guttural like they stubbed their toe.”
• “I’d ask, ‘Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for? If not, it’s not what we’re after.'”
• “Cooking, as a physical activity, doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has. To compensate for my lack of dexterity, speed, and technique, I think about food constantly. In fact, I’m much stronger at thinking about food than I am at cooking it.”
• “When you eat something amazing, you don’t just respond to the dish in front of you; you are almost always transported back to another moment in your life.”
• “Different cultures may use different media to express those base patterns—with different ingredients, for instance, depending on what’s available. But they are, at heart, doing the exact same thing. They are fundamentally playing the same music. And if you can recognize that music, you’ll blow people’s minds with a paradox they can taste: the new and the familiar woven together in a strange loop.”

Click here for the full story.

[image:Kiernan Monaghan + Theo Vamvounakis/WIRED]

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