by Joleen Zanuzoski, Editor
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| Chef Sara Jenkins |
She may not be native Italian, but Chef Sara Jenkins' understanding of Italian food and tradition makes her just as Italian as her olive farm in Tuscany. Yes, she has 150 olive trees in the hills behind Cortona, she is fluent in Italian and started spending summers in Italy when she was eight. Her knowledge and love of Italian cuisine and culture is reflected in every morsel of pork roasted at Porchetta and every bite of pasta served at Porsena. This summer, Jenkins will open Porsena Sinistra, a lunch counter and wine bar next door with the help of Chef Sebastian Jaramillo. Her budding Italian empire is just beginning and oh how delicious it is.
Despite her love for Italian food, cooking for a living wasn't something she considered until a few years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied fine art photography. It was cooking in the kitchens of Todd English and Barbara Lynch in Boston she realized "this is what is going to get me out of bed in the morning - this is what I'm supposed to do."
She moved to New York and gifted the East Village with Porchetta and Porsena, piling both restaurants high with accolades including four stars from
New York Magazine (Porsena & Porchetta),
10 Best Things to Eat by
Time Out New York (Porchetta), Eater's
12 Epic Pastas to Eat Before You Die (lasagna al forno, Porsena) and a nod from the James Beard Foundation in 2011, nominated for the award of Best Chef: New York City. Also, it doesn't hurt that Mario Batali sings her praises, saying "she is one of the few chefs in America that understands Italy and how Italians eat." She's the real deal - genuine, affable, intelligent and savvy. Oh, and her food is insanely delicious, too.
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| Lasagna al forno, Porsena |
Jenkins opened Porsena in January 2011 with the intention of creating a similar experience as the restaurants in Rome that "feel like an extension of your own dining room table." She believes the easiest way to understand a culture is through the food, and the easiest way to make friends is through breaking bread. She is robustly poetic when she talks about her childhood summers in a small Tuscan village made up of peasant farmers and had yet to be introduced to running water. "There was a village donkey and electricity had just arrived," she muses. In this small village, Jenkins was introduced to Italian cooking by her "adopted Italian grandmother," Mita Antolini and that is when her love affair with food began.
When talking about dishes that remind her of growing up in Italy, she talks about Antolini's gnocchi with ragu. "If she had a signature dish, that was it." I had to ask what was the secret to perfect gnocchi? "Don't get the potatoes too wet. I bake the potatoes because that way, no matter what, they don't absorb too much water. If the potatoes absorb too much water, then that's when you have to start adding flour and then you get heavy, gross gnocchi." Well, that explains why my gnocchi has the density of rocks and tastes like a day-old baked potato from Wendy's.
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| Porsena 21 East 7th Street nr. 2nd Ave. |
Jenkins had no formal culinary training besides learning at the source in her neighbor Mita's kitchen and working in a kitchen in Florence for three years. "Italians are very rigid [chefs]. I had great years really absorbing the food there in a way I didn't necessarily do as a kid, but I wanted to learn more about the variation." And that she did. She doesn't think cooking school is necessary to be a chef and one is better off learning through travel and experiencing the culture first hand.
"I'm staggered at how expensive cooking school is. I've always thought [young chefs] are much better off taking the money they would spend on formal [training] and going someplace like Bangkok and eating the food and renting an apartment and cooking with all different kinds of ingredients, or finding a farm and working on it." Also, Jenkins believes a true appreciation for ingredients can only be learned by experiencing the culture and cuisine first hand. "It's taken a long time for culinary schools to get on the bandwagon about ingredients. They couldn't get their head around the idea that an eggplant was not just an eggplant - there is a difference to how and where that eggplant is grown."
Chef Jenkins is not only a talented chef but incredibly media savvy, frequently updating her Tumblr page
Teverina Dreaming with pictures of her travels, upcoming tastings at her restaurants and some truly mouth-watering food writing. Her father, Loren Jenkins, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist so not only has Italian cooking always been a part of her life, so has writing. Jenkins is a contributor for
The Atlantic, writing about everything from cooking with olive oil to not fussing over fresh pasta (dried is just as good, sometimes better). She is also active on Twitter -
@porchettanyc is filled with her ruminations such as how she hates missing poppy season in Tuscany (don't we all) to her love of the whitefish salad at
Mile End Delicatessen in Brooklyn. She frequently exchanges twitter love to Chef Marco Canora (
Hearth), a chef she greatly admires and tweets about memorable meals at restaurants in and around her home in Williamsburg. She's "dazzled" by
Isa, calling it "a grown up restaurant for Brooklyn," mentions
Fatty Cue as another favorite, thinks
Diner has "set the bar in so many ways" and tips her hat to Chef Nate Smith's
Allswell.
Other New York City-based chefs she loves? Cesare Casella (
Salumeria Rosi) and April Bloomfield (
The Spotted Pig,
The Breslin). "Every night I sell ten orders of salt cod, I bless her because ten years ago you couldn't sell ten orders of salt cod to save your life. I think she's done a lot to [promote] the whole meat-centric, nose-to-tail kind of thing. It's shocking to me that the ten years I've been cooking in this city what we can get away with serving people now and what they are willing to order. I have tongue on my menu and I sell enough of it that it's worth my while."
In addition to some nose-to-tail offerings that sporadically pop up on the Porsena menu, Jenkins ensures it's consistently about the pasta. "One of the things that's really interesting to me is two of the dishes I insisted be on the menu are really the most boring - spaghetti and tomato sauce and spaghetti and ragu. They are the backbone of Italian cooking and it says in a way, it's always about the pasta just as much as it is about the sauce." That is the fundamental difference of pasta in America versus pasta in Italy - Americans load up their pasta with tons of sauce and in Italy "they have an entire mantra that if there is more sauce in the bottom of your bowl that you can't easily wipe up with a piece of bread, then there is too much sauce on the pasta." That's the model her ragu is based on and it's what makes the pasta at Porsena consistent each and every time.
Now that she has the roasted pork sandwich and perfect pasta dinners on lock down, what is next for Chef Jenkins? She is working on an Italian pantry app that will suggest combinations for dishes based on the ingredients you have available. "I always feel like one of those tricks of cooking spontaneously is having a really good pantry." Ingredients that are always in her pantry? Pasta, a good extra-virgin olive oil and garlic, of course. In the refrigerator? "Lots of condiments, hot sauce, sheep's milk yogurt and a lemon and lime." What she whips up in a pinch? "I love having those
Satur Farms cooking greens on hand and I'll mix it in with some left over rice from Chinese takeout and I'm set." I tried this shortly after speaking with Jenkins and let me tell you, never have I been so satisfied with my leftover Chinese takeout rice. Now I just have to get the moisture out of my gnocchi and I'll be set for life.
