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Executive Chef Michael Stebner shares how to make turkey bolognese, a dish that is both mouth-watering and healthy.
Todd Hartley:
For years Dr. Andrew Weil has been educating people about chronic inflammation. I interviewed him right here on EmpowHER on two occasions and you can see those videos and I even ask him those specific questions.
Now when you talk with Dr. Weil about it, he’ll say that chronic inflammation “creates serious illness including heart disease, many cancers, Alzheimer’s disease,” and earlier True Food Kitchen’s Executive Chef Michael Stebner, who is with me right now, he is collaborating with Dr. Weil on the healthiest recipes, showed me how to make the anti-inflammatory kale salad, it’s a Tuscan kale salad. It’s dynamite! Chef, welcome back!
Michael Stebner:
Thanks for having me.
Todd Hartley:
Now chef, if I wanted to go home and make a Tuscan salad like you explained but I also wanted to prepare an Entrée for my wife, what prevention and wellness meal would you recommend for us?
Michael Stebner:
Well another one of our signature dishes at the restaurant is our turkey Bolognese and it is based on a classic recipe, classic meat sauce, but what we do at True Food is we sort of take a different perspective of health and wellness and we replace the veal and beef and sometimes pork with turkey – ground turkey and we make a very simple meat sauce using ground turkey, lots of vegetables, lots of carrots and celery and onions and garlic, and we’ve even pushed Shiitake mushrooms in there, all chopped up really fine because you want it to be, have that sort of meat sauce consistency and we leave all those fatty meats out and we also use organic San Marzano tomatoes from Tuscany that add a lot of richness to the dish.
The classic recipe would also have milk or cream in it, a touch, and we leave that out as well but I have found that just from this recipe I’ve started replacing beef and pork with ground turkey or ground chicken in a lot of my cooking for my kids and for my wife at home and there’s really the only difference is you don’t get that sort of coating of fat and grease on your palette when you eat it. So, all the flavors are there. It’s just you are left without having a palette that’s coated with fat and grease.
Todd Hartley:
Yeah, and, you know, that sounds like the proper things to be eliminating. Now if I had the ingredients in front of me, step-by-step, can you walk me through how I make this dish?
Michael Stebner:
Yeah, now when you are browning turkey it’s got a lot of less fat in it so it’s not going to brown and caramelize the way a lot of the other meats like pork and veal and beef would brown.
Todd Hartley:
And because it doesn’t have that fat, does it dry up quicker?
Michael Stebner:
It doesn’t have that fat that caramelizes the way those other meats do. So I always normally start with the meat by browning the meat and in the case of the turkey we start by browning the vegetables so we get that caramelization and that sort of sweet depth of flavor from browning the vegetables first in extra virgin olive oil and we put a little bit of fresh thyme in there as well, very very simple though, just cooking and coating the vegetables over a medium high heat and getting a little caramelization, but constantly stirring them through.
At that point, once those are nice and caramelized I will add the turkey and the thing with turkey is it’s pretty… you know it has a tendency to sort of bind up when you cook it, you know, it sticks together so you have to really keep stirring it and stirring it, otherwise it will… you will end up with one big turkey meatball. So really break up the turkey and keep stirring it and as it cooks it will sort of fall apart and it’ll separate from itself, if that makes any sense?
Todd Hartley:
Ahem.
Michael Stebner:
And then we use Lucini San Marzano tomatoes that Andy, Dr. Weil endorses. They are organic. They are the best canned tomato I have ever used and that’s what we use exclusively in the restaurant. Pour your tomatoes over the top and the other thing you don’t really have to do with this is you don’t have to let it cook for two or three hours the way a lot of those stew meats need to cook for a long time. This has to cook for about five or ten minutes so it’s a lot quicker to prepare than the standard Bolognese.
At that point we use a gluten-free penne pasta, it’s a brown rice penne pasta. Again, a lot of people are finding that wheat is causing them to be bloated or it makes them sick. There’s a lot of sort of wheat aversion out there. So we wanted to do, obviously we want to do gluten-free dishes because there’s a lot of guests that want gluten-free dishes, but I have found myself, I eat a lot more gluten-free because I feel better after I eat, especially a dish like this. It’s kind of hardy and one of those dishes that might weigh you down because it’s a heavier dish. But when you use the gluten-free pasta you will find you are more satisfied and less stuffed at the end. So that’s the reasoning for that.
So we toss that gluten-free pasta into the sauce just like you would have normal meat sauce and we finish it with fresh Parmesan on it – that’s it. Very, very simple, just like the rest of our foods it’s driven by the quality of the ingredients, not necessarily by the technical wizardry that goes on in the kitchen. We keep it very, very simple and this is something that I make at home almost as often as I make it in the restaurant.
Todd Hartley:
Chef, I am friends with a lot of professional chefs and healthy cooking doesn’t seem to be important to them, but it is to me and a lot of other people. How rewarding is it to know that you can create some really groundbreaking work with someone like Dr. Weil and present it in a healthy manner to people?
Michael Stebner:
You know I feel I’ve been cooking professionally for 20 years and classically trained to use butter and sugar and a lot of fat in my cooking to add flavor. I have really discovered in the last probably ten years that the quality of the product on its own makes the difference.
So it’s not about enhancing the flavor of a perfectly grown organic carrot; it’s about letting that carrot speak for itself; letting the carrot just like a carrot and I think it is a little hard for a lot of chefs to grasp that. You know, something I have been doing like I said, for about ten years and my food has just evolved into this, that’s why Andy and I have really clicked working together on this project because I think, you know, him coming from the side of health and me coming from the side of just good tasting food and he loves food and I want to be more healthy so we just kind of…
Todd Hartley:
Right.
Michael Stebner:
There’s this synergy there between us I think is really, really good.
Todd Hartley:
You know chef, the last time I interviewed Dr. Weil it was in Phoenix and then after I was just so inspired I decided I was going to go to True Foods and get a quick bite to eat and then when I came in he was behind, I believe cooking with you and he looked at me and he said, “What are you, a stalker?” And I just thought it was hysterical, but he inspired me to go there and well, we are talking with executive chef Michael Stebner. In August 2010, True Food Kitchens opens its doors at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, California.
Chef Stebner, thank you so much for helping us make a healthy meal well, for my wife and also to help improve health.
Michael Stebner:
Thank you.
Visit Chef Michael Stebner at True Food Kitchen
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