October 30, 2019 • 62 mins
Host Michael Ruhlman explores theme theme of "Water" with Chef Jean Georges Vongerichten, Adam Bosch, & Sarah Kelsey.
To explore the Old Croton Aqueduct in person, check out "The Friends of The Old Croton Aqueduct" and view their upcoming tours:
Jean Georges' new memoir "JGV: A Life in 12 Recipes" is co-written w/ Michael Ruhlman:
https://www.amazon.com/JGV-Life-Recipes-Jean-Georges-Vongerichten/dp/0393608484
Host Michael Ruhlman's new book "From Scratch" is out now!
All of the music on "From Scratch" is by Ryan Scott off of his album "A Freak Grows in Brooklyn". Listen here:
https://www.ryanscottguitar.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm standing in the old Croton Aqueduct, the passageway from
which water arrived in New York City into I'm Michael Rohlman.
This is From Scratch. This episode is water. Welcome to
(00:23):
From Scratch. My name is Michael Rohman, and I've spent
the last twenty years in professional kitchens, writing about and
with the world's best chefs. From Scratches a podcast about cooking.
In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one
non chef about the same theme. The great thing about
the cooking life is that you never stop learning. In
(00:44):
this show, I want to go to the edges of
what I know and then go beyond together with you,
with all chefs, home cooks, and everyone who cares about
food and cooking. Water is perhaps the most powerful yet unwrecked,
agnized ingredient and tool in your kitchen, watered as far
more than we realize, and how it gets to our
(01:06):
tap I find a marvel. In this episode, we'll talk
with an expert who knows every detail of New York
City's water supply, from rain drop to your faucet. He'll
share the surprising details of the gigantic silent service that
is our water supply. We'll also go inside an aqueduct
(01:27):
that was built in the eighteen thirties, before most modern
construction machinery was available, to learn how the delivery of
water to New York City in eighteen forty two transformed
a featied, filthy, disease ridden city prone to devastating fires
into a safe and thriving metropolis. But first, we spoke
(01:48):
with one of the most well respected chefs in the world,
Jean George von Richton. We spoke with him about his
career and his feelings about my second favorite ingredient in
the kitchen, in water. Jo and George is like no
other chef I've worked with. He has seemingly endless energy.
His creativity is ceaseless. New ideas come flying out of
(02:11):
his brain faster than I could write them down. And
in business he's all but unmatched. J G or Joe Joe,
as he's sometimes called, has created a fleet of shining
restaurants on nearly every continent, dozens of them here in
New York City. If you're a chef who came out
of one of his kitchens, you will be perceived as
(02:31):
a badass, unless you prove otherwise. J G. Is in short,
a culinary and business dynamo and the consummate host. And
I feel really lucky to be here with it by
your history and fascinated especially by one specific part of
your history, and that's when you moved from a traditional kitchen.
(02:52):
You did a traditional apprenticeship at Aubert Delille in Alsace
with Chef Paul Helin everything and food on local food.
You don't right now tell us what that kitchen was like.
I mean the kitchen was really you know at the time,
you know, they were not chipping fish for many pestles
and Asasi's the middle of a between Germany and France.
(03:14):
And so the fish, freshwater fish, I mean the fogs,
to eel, freshwater il, trout, before the days of daily
fresh fish deliveries classic French restaurants in all sauce, relied
and freshwater fish, carpet, pike, crayfish, eel and trout. The trout, though,
had to be delivered alive and swam in a little
(03:36):
pond behind the restaurant. The dish he was responsible for
it was the famous tweet Blue, named for the vivid
color the trout becomes when dipped in vinegar. It's slimy
film coating changes color when it hits the vinegar, but
it only works if the fish have just been killed.
Describe what you had to do for trout. Took treat blue.
(03:57):
Had to run as soon as the other come in.
Had to run out, get the fish net, go into
the pound. There was a little pound just for trouts.
While trout that the fishermen were bought. Every day we
got about fifteen twenty trouts. Fish out the trout jumping
around in my net. Had to grab you with a
towel because you can use your hands. Because there's a
(04:20):
kind of a slime on a trout. We should want
you on a remote or had to take it with
a little town on with a wooden spatula behind the neck.
Don't then you have to empty it, you know the
gods and take the guilds out. Then had to run upstairs.
The say party had had a coon ready the water
(04:43):
with the mats. You know. There was carrots and onions
and charatte, garlic, some bailieves some time and I had
to touch the the trout in a vinegar, local vinegar,
you know the honey honey her vinegar. It's called mel
for tos to try and trudging them on and plunging
in there covered right away because it was still you know,
(05:06):
it depends how much I was not that he's still
moving around to move around, so the water was flashing
out so on. I was pushing so that we removed
from from the stove. So I was boiling trout in
the cover. Remove it, patch it for like twelve minutes
and it turns to color when it turns like bright blue,
like a blue like you never see anything like this,
(05:29):
you know, the vinegar on the that slime on the trout.
Did you say, oh my god, that's one out on.
That's nice in the spring and summer, but you have
to running the snow. An important step in Johan George's
evolution as a chef came when he first showed up
at the kitchen, which broke many of the rules of
the more classic traditions. Tell me about the difference between
(05:50):
Louis UT's kitchen at Louisis and I mean I was
totally differently, was like arrive where I with my dusabu,
my shen in front of the rest. On was like
ten o'clock in the morning, a dwarf all night arrive
and there was a couple of cooks opening scallops, some
people peeling vegetables, and there was nothing on the serfash
They probably closed for lunch. You know, it was like
(06:10):
ten ten thirty. So they tell me where to change.
I can come with my my knives on apparent they
give me a jacket on. When I come in the
kitchen and still still everybody's prepping. But it's still nothing
on the sofa. Now it's like eleven fifteen. I said, oh,
who asked the young coming next to me as a
scross for lunch? But a musing and sarces don't know.
We open the clock. So there we have eighty people
(06:33):
for lunch. I say, is everything on? So there was
a culture shock because I have and I you know,
we started everything. The whole store was filled in the
morning with that stock on sins worthing you know on
so there was like a anti misson plus an anti
music plus you know. Also it was all about opening
(06:55):
scallop on you know, everything was cuts on every herb,
every you can you could parsley and sation you had.
You know, even the fish was cut. You know, it
was phil but not not Poh. Chef von Richton has
been an innovator of lighter cooking for many years, as
(07:15):
far back as his days as executive chef of Lafayette
in the nineteen eighties, he noticed New Yorkers wanted less
butter and cream, and so he created a new kind
of French menu reliant on vegetable juices, vinaigrettes and brass.
And of course water, which he found at Louisis was
considerably important as it chef did not rely on veal
(07:37):
stock and demi glass, which can take days to make
and which was ubiquitous at the time and fine dining restaurants.
Why is the water important? Why not reveal stock? I mean,
you know, he didn't believe that. He didn't wanted that
sticky flavor of you know, sort of France, so you
don't need as much calorie to do squub hosts, juice,
(08:01):
pung juices instead of a stock, which we had. We
never had a piece of broad breast meat on the menu.
We had a lamb, shank, vilhank, you know, different parts
of the animal breast, you know called way open. You
want a happier food sins to your guts France, he
was all about blackness on them from Muthier j g.
(08:23):
Went to the father of modern French cuisine and perhaps
the man who turned chefs into celebrities, Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France.
Nothing yet Baucus by then had his signatures the truffle
consume and the chicken all vse chicken stuffed in a bladder.
But there he learned new skills before being lured to
(08:44):
Aubergine and the youngest three star chef ever Eckhart Witzigman
at Aubergine in Germany, where he learned a whole new
form of our minute cooking. Witzigman wouldn't post a menu
for the nights one covers until late after and then
you got a call from your old mentor Louisa. Then
I got a call from Luigia on try. He called
(09:06):
me for three months to try to convince me, at
twenty three years old, to take over the He became
consulting for the Orient hell Tell in Bangkok. The normally girl.
He was normally grilled and if you changed to normal normaldy,
it's gonna be the chef there cooking his food on
I can't never been a chef, never been a chef.
(09:28):
M want me to runiversal I can't so on an
thinking about it. Thailand exotic, I don't. I read about it,
but then never can talk to anybody. I've never heard
about anybody who went there on you know, I don't
know what you say. Yes, when one mon night I said,
(09:51):
you went, maybe went too many beer or two with
the carter after work on the next morning, I should
have if I fell over there, and what's what's come
happen to me? Right? I'll come back, right, you know,
I come back. I've been now in the kitchen for
seven years. I know a little bit of how how'd
you go along? I always gonna get a job, so
(10:12):
I don't back my three case. Let's go. After six
months of training and preparing the menu, join, George took
the first long distance flight of his life. Tell me
about your arrival in Bangkok and that because we're gonna
get yes. So I arrived in Bangkok early December nine,
when I was like, you know I landed at the time,
(10:34):
you know, it was like a flu entire airways. So
I got a little sense of you all of you know,
the hospitality that they do. Then you know, everybody's so
nice on the plane. I was like, Wow, that's a
bit different than France when a company have been on
I wouldn't flew that much, you know. That was my
probably my my third flight in my life twenty three.
(10:56):
You know, at the time, you don't you know, was
driving everywhere. So I took a flight once to London,
once uh to Spain, but I never flew that far away.
You know. The longest flide I took was probably, you know,
two and a half hours, right, So it was my
first flight. You're on the other side of the world,
twelve hours with a stop in h was a stop
in Karashi, Pakistan. So at the time they flew the
(11:20):
plane were not flying more than a ten hours, so
there was a twelve hour flight. So we stopped in
Karashi because I was what's going on? We still on
the plane. It was just a rifuel and then we're
riving bankok it. You know at the time when they
opened the door, there was no there was no tunnel.
You had to walk down the stairs. Some do open up.
(11:43):
It was like I could smile. I was like, wow,
this is different, this is like a different I don't know,
it was like a mix up. Giant lemongrass jungle, a
little pollution, a little coconuts, a little uh, a little
bit of everything, you know, so it's a blend of
all this. I was like, wow, this is a bot
(12:04):
in Paris. You know, Persian smell on an the arrival
and it's like a hole to different road mine in
the air already. So I was like, wow, that's like
an adventure. So I was ready fully, I mentioned so
when all of the of the airport and I took
a cab to go to the hotel, can only give
me the address? You know, I was you know at
(12:25):
the time, I was you know, nobody was calling for
there was nobody was calling for a car for me.
He was kind of a you know, I was jumping
a cab and it was it was so hard to me.
It was like ninety to degree and it's very hot
in Thailand, so why do we you get off that plane?
You're like, whoa, it's like a you know, a wall
of a heat. And then in a cab condition window
(12:47):
open on a it was amazing, and it was like
elephant on the road. There was like a chicken running everywhere.
There was a you know, people on horses, people on
on took two. You know, there's a three wheel. I
was like, oh my god, it's like and I was
arriving to like a palm tree. I mean it was
(13:07):
and with the heat and everything on a at the
time was a highway, was like fallen going to the city.
But it was not not much traffic. You know. When
I arrived in the banking nteen a d was maybe
three four hotels, you know. Myn hotel was the Audienceell Hotel.
There was Dozy Tanny, a local hotel, and then I
was a Continental. There was no it was the only
(13:27):
the Ontel was the only hotel on a river on
you know. I saw all the market, merchants, markets, I mean,
the life is in the street, you know. And so
from the airport to the hotel it was probably an
hour drive. I stopped three times. I just stopped talking
about the first time the first driver. I need to
see the two cities as so I work around. You know,
(13:47):
I was gonna you know before, you know, on no
cell phone, so there's no picture, there's none, you know,
just memory, I said. I did to stop. So I
was hungry. So I got to Mango. When I got
to this woman who did put soup together, tell me
about the soup. Let's go. Nobody speak English. So the
driver the taxes are just Speakinglish. I say, what is this?
(14:08):
I said, Tom, I'm all right. So she puts her
pots a couple of caps of water, and the water
was not clear that he wasn't but I wasn't truck
about that. But then she put a tash shell in there.
She put her lemongrass, lime leave. But did you didn't
(14:29):
know what these things? I have no idea. I smelled
everything and have no idea. And it was one, trust me,
it was. It was a limited sanitation. But I wouldn't
get a prop, wouldn't get an a, but even an
air for fever on. So she put all that together
on and see married for like eight ten minutes, just water, lime,
(14:50):
but the freaking coming out of that lime leaven, lemoras on.
Then she was a mushroom in there. Then she she
put a shrimping now on field on, not even nothing,
just shrimping there. And then she squeezes in some nime.
You know. I like the way they cut the limes.
You know, they don't catch in half like a lemon,
(15:11):
because you don't get the much shoes that corner the
three you get the three and three. That's where you yeah,
that woman on Fish shows, she had no idea what
he was. You know, at saw his source months in
a us to you know, I saw in about in
a package in the supermarket, but I never had the
Asian food in my life. On when she finished with
(15:35):
the Fish Shows and she was testing it on, I
got a ball, but I bought the ball for the
you know, it was popularly like fifty cents for shrimp,
beautiful brol She gave you a little ball of rice
on the side. It was the best arriving paddads. It
was like, wow, another water stock, but with flavor fragrance
(15:55):
I never had before. H So it was a whole.
It was a culture shock. Was like my god phone
from the dirty water. She made something amazing, amazing you
know on and got stuck in my head forever, and
I could I could we do the movie step by
step the way she she did everything, and it was awesome.
When it was so hot, it was like sweating on
(16:16):
my eyes, you know. The cab driver, I was like
getting it like it's a you know, whatever it is,
you know, like something like porridge. I was drinking like
a every spoon was like so hot and so but
you could meet on somehow, you know. Then I went
back to the continuing my journey on stop a couple
more times for fruits, for other things. Right on, you
(16:39):
would basically take that that that that powerful arrival in Bangkok,
and it would transform you as a chef and your
career in New York City absolutely help guide you. They
put me to a different direction of my life. You know,
that's one of the I think one of the twelve
steps absolutely changed my life. So I think you really,
(17:01):
you know, it was really not to say, my god,
this is like I'm gonna learn so much in this country,
and you know, I'm gonna show them what I know
and I'm gonna learn absorb whatebout Thailand. That's who do
you give me? And people are gonna have to read
how you did that In your new memoir j g
V absolutely recipe life in twelve recipes, yes, and it's
(17:21):
a book. Later on, Jean George will cook us Tom
Young Kung and demonstrate the power of water and cooking
all a minute. But before that, we're going to find
out precisely how is Jean George, his fellow chefs and
everyone in New York City gets their water. Adam Bosch
(17:59):
is the director of Public Affairs for New York City's
Department of Environmental Protection, And if that sounds like a
made up job title, it might be because Adam created
it himself. But this wasn't to pull one over on
the Department of Environmental Protection. They're actually lucky to have
someone as passionate and articulate as Adam is in this role.
(18:20):
He's taken it upon himself to become the leading expert
for all things New York City water, from the historical
dilemmas to the problems of the future, from the folklore
to the scientific to his own chicken soup. But as
a curious home cook, I had to first know where
exactly does the water from my tap come from. The
(18:41):
water that comes to your apartment in Manhattan will have
started as a rain drop or a snowflake, uh coming
out of the sky, landing somewhere in the Catskills, and
when it makes its way down a hill or melts,
it will go into one of the streams, rivers, and
creeks that needs are reservoirs. If you were to look
(19:02):
at the farthest drop of water away in the farthest
reservoir away, it could take as much as two years
to get to the city. Okay has to get all
the way across the reservoir. It eventually gets into a
a tunnel or an aqueduct that feeds what we like
to call one of our terminal reservoirs. Our terminal reservoirs
are reservoirs that, under certain operational configurations of the system,
(19:24):
can send water directly into the city. Okay um from
the cat Skills. It's going to go through one of
one of two aqueducts. It's either going to go through
the Catskill Aqueduct, which is a ninety two mile aqueduct,
The original aqueduct that was built in the Catskills delivers
water from a Choking reservoir all the way to the
hill View Reservoir, which is in Yonker's right on the
(19:45):
northern border of the Bronx. Or it's going to go
through the Delaware Aqueduct, which is an eighty five mile
long tunnel. It is the longest tunnel in the world
delivers water from Rondout Reservoir to Hillview Reservoir, which is
the start of New York City's just Atribution system where
there will go into one of three large tunnels that
deliver water into the city, up into what we call
(20:08):
trunk mains, which are the larger mains, into mains in
the street. They're about seven thousand miles of water mains
under the streets of New York City, and then eventually
into your home where you'll be able to use it
for all the things you use water for, whether that's flushing, washing,
making coffee, or even cooking. One reason that Bosch may
be able to quote so many details is that he
(20:30):
worked as a reporter and taught journalism for ten years
before his current role working for New York City. In fact,
it was while reporting on a lethally boring city government
meeting that he accidentally discovered the critical nature of water
for growing communities. And early on in my journalism career,
this was hammered home to me. I covered some very
(20:51):
small communities in the Hudson Valley and there was one
community that was very popular and projects wanted to come there.
And I remember sitting at a planning board, which is
sort of like, you know, the dull drums of covering
local government, but you have to do it. And I
remember there was this great company that wanted to bring
a hundred jobs to the small community in Orange County,
(21:11):
and the project was turned down. And the project was
turned down because that community happened to sit over top
of a very small aquifer, an underground pocket of water
that was essentially tapped out, and they didn't have any
more water left to support growth of that community. And
it was just an early reminder, at least in my career,
that you can survive or thrive without a source of water.
(21:35):
Let's go back to the early days of New York City.
Described a situation where were people getting into water? What
was it like, what were the problems? Sure, so, the
earliest days of New York City, if you go back
to the seventeen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds, New
York City was really just Manhattan Island below fourteenth Street,
and there were about, up until the early eighteen hundreds,
about two hundred to three hundred thousand people living there
(21:57):
at the peak, and they were getting their water from
what we would cannsidered to be very primitive means. So
we're talking about things like ponds and open pits and
shallow primitive wells, and that worked okay, for a period
of time until the early eighteen hundreds when those sources
became contaminated, and they were contaminated not only by human waste,
but you gotta remember there were also a lot of
(22:17):
animals on Manhattan Island this time, there were a lot
of barn yards and things like that, and uh, that
small water supply that those small sources of water um
led to three big problems. One problem was disease, so
that contaminated water was leading to outbreaks of things like
cholera and yellow fever, and that was killing hundreds or
thousands of people a year. The second big problem was fire,
(22:41):
so they didn't have pressurized firefighting the way we think
of it today. All they had were bucket brigades, where
if there was a fire, and there were many of them,
some guy would run to the local contaminated pond, scoop
up some water in a bucket, pass it on down
the line until the next guy was staring at a
fire that was gobbling up mull sutiple city blocks and
(23:01):
just sort of go we and toss the bucket of
water onto the fire. And as you can imagine, that
was not very effective. And the ineffectiveness of that method
was highlighted during something called the Great Fire of eighteen
thirty five, which gobbled up something like thirty entire city
blocks in one fire. Um. The last problem was just
general filth. There are some really great newspaper editorials from
(23:24):
back in that time that described New York City as
having filth that was ankled deep in the consistency of
bean soup, and one of my favorites said that if
you wanted to cross Broadway, you had to have the
bravery of a desperado because the filth was just so
gross a deep um. So it was really with that
in mind, disease, fire and filth, that the leaders of
(23:45):
New York City said, if we're going to be able
to once again survive and thrive, we really have to
go somewhere and look for a source of fresh water
that can be tapped and brought into the city to
sustain this popular not only the population they had, but
the population they hope to have as the city grew.
And it was during that time that they looked just
north of the city here to where we're sitting now
(24:07):
in Westchester County, and they decided to develop what's known
now as the Croton System. The very first parts of
the Croton system. So in the eighteen thirties they set
out on an ambitious plan to build a single reservoir,
Croton Reservoir and a single brick line tunnel that would
deliver water from the Croton River into Manhattan. But that
(24:30):
original system had a brick lined aqueduct that changed in
elevation thirteen and a half inches per mile. So you
think about that, that's very precise construction, right to maintain
the flow of water by gravity alone to the city,
and gravity alone, we had to see this. We'll hear
(24:50):
more from Adam and a bit, but first we wanted
to head to the source and go inside the old
Crowton Aqueduct. And Sarah Kelsey was a perfect person to
show us. I'm Sarah Kelsey. I am cohed of walks
and tours for the friends of the Old Croatan Aqueduct.
The sound here, yeah, isn't it grain yea almost makes
(25:14):
you want to sing. You should use if you have
any voice at all, you should sing a little something.
Someday when I'm off, when the world is cold, I
will feel a glow just thinking of you and the
(25:34):
way you look TONIGHTE what's your fascination with the aquaduct. Well,
for me, it's a combination of things. That's one thing
that's great about the aqueduct is their whole range of
interests that can be satisfied. So for me, I love history.
(25:59):
I love the history of New York City, especially in
the Hudson River Valley. H But in addition to that,
I love engineering. I love to know how things work,
and it's really interesting to find out how this was built,
how it works, and realized that the entire very large
(26:19):
water system that New York City has now is built
on exactly the same principles. An engineer named David Douglas
was the first man on the job the contours of
the land and how it should go. He came up
with it should be gravity fed. So that was the
first guy, David Douglas. He was the one who said,
(26:40):
David Douglas said we're gonna let gravity do the work
and pull this water down. And then and then they
fired him because he was a slow because they thought
he was moving too slow while he was doing all
of this, and it involved a lot of surveying, and
of course nobody gave him enough staff. It's always the way,
right but there was a major epidemic, and then in
(27:06):
eight five there was a major fire that you know,
eliminate a large proportion of New York City. And so
they said that's it. Times we need water, we need
pressurized water. Yeah. So so then they hired John Jervis.
John Jarvis succeeded in setting up the Crotton Aqueduct system
that began the succession of clean water that hasn't stopped
(27:29):
flowing into New York City since it was turned on
in eighteen forty two. And along the way on his
original aqueduct there were structures called weirs, and that's what
Sarah took us inside of. It's a big brick, square
structure with a door that opens to the top of
a staircase. And the purpose of the weir is basically
(27:51):
two damn up the old Crotain aquity duct tunnel so
that they could stop the water from going in south
of here and do repairs if they needed to do repairs. Also,
at the top of that staircase is a giant black
piece of iron. It's probably more than ten feet tall
and eight ft wide. What does this to remind you of?
(28:13):
It's like a gear team. Yeah, and they lowered it
by pollice. It was all done by hand, no machines involved.
They lowered it down until it covered the face of
the tunnel. Then the water was diverted across here through here.
(28:33):
And you can you can still, you can still use
this gear. It's and it's still work a blow. So
I say to people, children and people with an inner
child can now work the gear. And everybody rushes to
work the gear. That wheel would divert incoming water to
the nearby Hudson River when they needed to make repairs
(28:54):
inside the tunnel, and the men making those emergency repairs
they were called the keepers. There were six keepers who
lived in houses along the aqueduct, always ready to repair
any leaks as they occurred. The friends of the old
Crotton Aqueduct have recently refurbished a keeper's house which now
serves as a permanent exhibit for the history of the
(29:17):
Crotton water system. They had about six keepers houses along
the trail and they were the people that maintained and
kept in working order the aqueduct tunnel. So if there
was a leak, that guy had to figure out how
to fix it um and they had all sorts of
ways to fix that they had. They had entry ways
(29:39):
in those conical um structures that are called ventilators. They
had iron plates and brick openings along the way that
nobody noticed in as they walking down the trail. They
had a number of different strategies to get in as
close as they couldn't and they had um weirds like
this along the way so they can isolate the part
(30:01):
they needed to work in and get it dry fast.
Because New York City was so dependent on this water
that if there was a little leak and they had
to close it down to repair the leak, the water
was being so consumed so rapidly in New York City
that the reservoirs would be going down, down, down while
(30:24):
they're busily trying to repair at the leak. Then they
repaired the league be able to start the water again
and then raise up those reservoirs in New York City.
So it's very dramatic. You could actually see the water
disappearing while they were doing repairs. Yeah, in the reservoirs
in New York City. Yeah. Yeah. What happened originally is
(30:48):
when they first built this old Croton aqueduct, they thought
it would be enough water for New York City for
a hundred years, but no way because New York City
completely changed all of its habits. Yeah, because it was
an interaction. You can see still in the tunnel the
(31:10):
water line for how high the water got, which was
way higher than it was built for. UM. The way
around tunnel like this worse. It's sort of a horseshoe shape,
and the part that's perpendicular to the ground that's very strong.
Once you get into arch, it's a lot weaker. You
(31:33):
can see that it started getting into the arch. So
the original builder engineer of this was jumping up and
down saying, this wasn't built for this man water. You
have to build more aqueduct. So they did well. The
crowding system was deemed insufficient after only twenty years. The
(31:54):
current day system that provides water to millions uses the
same principles of the old Crotton aqueduct. It was an
engineering feat unlike anything that had ever been accomplished in America,
and um there were a lot of engineers who turned
it down. They didn't think it could work, and in fact,
the first damn they tried to build failed. UM. So
(32:15):
it wasn't without hardship, but ultimately they build something that
is widely recognized as a marvel of modern engineering, and
so is the system we have now as they expanded.
Sort of the concepts that led to it being labeled
a marvel of modern engineering extend throughout the modern day
system as it grows and grows. Okay, so you've got
(32:38):
a great system that just works. But what do those
responsible for the water supply due to keep busy? Well, first,
changing valves. We're at a point now where almost every
single part of the water supply is at a hundred
years old or more than a hundred years old. So
we're in a cycle now where we're doing a lot
of very large projects just to give everything some some
(33:01):
some TLC, some rehabilitation. So over the next you know,
twenty thirty fifty years. You know, New Yorkers won't see
a difference, but just know that we up here are
doing a lot of very big projects to make sure
that the dam's aqueducts, all the infrastructure exactly is in
a state of good repair. And that includes things that
(33:21):
seem kind of mundane, like if a valve has been
in the same place for a hundred years, it might
not turn the same way I did back in n
you know, so we got to go in and swap
these valves out. But each of these valves is like
as big as a school bus. You know, they're huge. So, uh,
they're really big, complex projects. And what happens to New
York City water in the treatment stage? Sure, so New
(33:45):
York City's drinking water is by and large treated by
just two things. Um one is chlorine and one is
ultraviolet light. Just a quick note here. Chlorine is one
of those special chemicals that's either helpful or poisonous depending
on These cooks know this to be true. For bleach,
they measure a bleach and water solution with precise ratios,
(34:06):
which serves as a sanitary solution for cleaning cutting boards
and other equipment. I mean, the chlorination of of drinking
water is considered one of the great advances in protecting
public health and the history of mankind. Once again, the
idea is being able to knock out, uh and disinfect
the water for those little micro organisms that can cause
(34:27):
your stomach illness. So we're talking about things like garda
and cryptospridium and these little tiny micro organisms that are
just naturally occurring in water. And you have to make
sure that they're they're knocked out. One of the great
technological advancements is the use of ultra violet light. Yeah,
ultra violet light is really effective at disinfecting water for
(34:47):
these little micro organisms. And I'll explain sort of what
it does. Um ultra violet light in a very specific
wavelength can actually genetically neuter these little micro are chanisms
so that they cannot reproduce. And the way it works
is this cells can only replicate when the double helix
and the d NA splits binds with new bases and proteins,
(35:10):
and that's how cells replicate. Well, what UV light does
in this very narrow wavelength is it takes two of
those bases in the genetic code of these micro organisms
and it glues them together. It is essentially like genetic
super clue. And if those two bases are stuck together,
the double helix can't split, and if the double helix
(35:31):
can't split, the cells can't replicate. And if the cells
can't replicate, they can't get you sick. So this was
discovered in the ninety nineties in scientifically, but it has
probably been at work in water supplies going back to
the great Ancient civilizations because their aqueducts. When you go
back to uh great civilizations in the Middle East or
(35:54):
even in Rome, their aqueducts were open to the sunlight
and they were open air aquity. It's not underground aqueducts.
And when the sun shines on water, it produces many
spectrums of light, but it does produce this narrow spectrum
of UV light that is effective at disinfecting the water. Okay,
so we are taking that process and essentially we've put
(36:17):
it in a gigantic canisters with very very bright light
bulbs and computer systems and workers that can monitor to
make sure it's in that very specific wavelength. We think
of it as a treatment dose, but it's really a
wavelength to knock these micro organisms out. And the great
news is because we have UV light, we're now able
(36:37):
to use less chlorine. So we're adding less chemical treatment
to the water and doing it with ultraviolet light instead
and it's equally effective. Let's start happening. Uh So, the
UV plant that treats New York cities drinking water was
turned on in In fact, it was turned on about
a month or a month and a half before Hurricane
Sandy hit hit New York UM and it is the
(37:00):
largest ultra violet facility in the world, and it is
larger than all the other ultra violet facilities in America combined.
It is a massive facility. Um. There are more than
eleven thousand, seven hundred light bulbs in it. Each light
bulb is as long as you and I are tall,
so they are very very large, very bright. And they
do a great job at disinfecting New York City's water
(37:22):
so that we know we're delivering water that is safe
and wholesome to our consumers. That's amazing. Yeah, I didn't
know about that. It has been written about, yeah a
little bit. Yeah, another surprising program that helps with water quality,
farming consultation and improvements. The first thing is our partners
from this nonprofit which is run by farmers, and we
(37:44):
should mention all of this is voluntary. Uh. We'll go
to the local farm and they will sit down with
the farmer and understand fully how that farmer operates his
or her farm. Where do you spread manure or fertilizer
in which field? In what season? You know? Where do
your where do your livestock graze? Right? Um, where how
do you manage manure? Right, where do you milk all
(38:06):
that sort of stuff, and they will sit down. They
will put together with that farmer what's called a whole
farm plan, which is a way to change their operations
in a way that's protective quality of water quality. That
could be something simple like, hey, you know, instead of
spreading manure in the spring on the field that's near
that creek, spread it on the one up the hill. Okay,
(38:28):
They're gonna go in those farm fields and test those
fields for nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, which will tell
the farmer what's sort of crop yield they're gonna get,
and if it's higher than it needs to be, then
they won't be allowed to spread in those fields. Uh.
And maybe they can sell some of those nutrients or
not have to buy fertilizer, sell some of the manure
off the farm, things like that. Um. The idea there
(38:50):
is that an excessive nutrients in the field, right, phosphorus,
nitrogen then get washed off the fields and into the streams,
creeks and rivers, and that is the fuel that al
gen needs to grow. It's the fuel that causes taste
and odor problems in water. Right. And New York City
has a great reason to clean up water at the
sourus rather than towards the end of the supply chain.
(39:11):
Cost to build a filtration plan for New York City's
water supply would be the largest public works project in
the history of New York City. You're talking about a
facility that will cost about twelve billion dollars that's billion
with a B to build, and will cost about two
fifty million dollars a year in electricity and chemicals to operate.
You know, we don't want to have to do that.
(39:32):
We want to protect the water where it is and
deliver it to you free of contaminants, clean, pristine, wholesome,
and safe the way it's been since we built the
system to start with. Do you guys worry about terrorism. Absolutely.
One of the interesting things about security, or perhaps one
of the frustrating things about security, is part of the
way we keep you secure is by not telling you
how we do it, because because you don't want to
(39:54):
give people a playbook. But I'll give you one example.
A representative sample of New York City's water supply is
run through a very large fish tank that is filled
with minnows uh twenty four hours a day every day
of the year, and we have a system that monitors
the respiration rate of those fish and how often they burp,
(40:19):
and that system allows us to see if those fish
are in distress, and if those fish begin to show
signs of distress, it could be the very first signs
of some sort of contamination we would want to know about,
and then we begin to investigate. It is that it
is the canary in the coal mine water supply edition. Um.
But but that is just one example, and there are
(40:42):
many many other examples throughout the entire water supply and
throughout the city where we either have biological monitoring, technological monitoring,
or humans monitoring the water supply in a lot of
different ways in a lot of different places to protect it.
Let's talk about the qualities of water from New York.
You know, there's all kinds of myths about bagels are
better in New York because of the water, pizza crust
(41:04):
that are well. That tell us about the chemical composition
of of our water. So it is a little bit
of a history lesson. So when they build that croton
system and turn on, of course it takes care of
the problems of filth and fire and disease but one
of the problems that did create is the water from
here in the Hudson Valley is what we would call
moderately hard, and that means that that that the water
has some calcium and magnesium in it, and that's naturally
(41:28):
occurring from the underlying geology of this valley. There's limestone
in this valley, and so as the water goes through
the ground, it interacts with that geology and it it
puts calcium into the water. The problem with calcium in
the city was that it was causing a build up
of scale on pipes, but especially on industrial equipment and
on steamships. And this scale was very labor intensive and
(41:51):
costly to get off these machines so they would work properly.
So as New York City looked to expand its water
supply in the early nineteen hundreds, it had a lot
of criteria was looking for right want of water that
was clear, cool, didn't have microorganisms in it, wasn't liable
to corrode pipes. But perhaps the most important feature they
were looking for was water that was not too hard,
(42:13):
water that didn't have a lot of calcium and magnesium
in it. So when they go to the cat Skills.
They find some of the softest water in the world
because the underlying geology and the cat Skills is essentially
void of limestone. Um, it's shale, it's shifts, it's bed rock.
The mountains are are are pretty hard landscape features, and
they decided to build a water supply there and then
(42:34):
they bring this incredibly soft water into the city. And
it is that quality of the water, uh, that softness uh,
that many say is responsible for the great dope products
that you get in New York City, as you mentioned,
pizza across bagels, things like that. Now, I have seen
that debated over the years, but but you know, by
(42:55):
and large that's uh, that's my understanding of the role
that the saw this, but also perhaps the alkalinity plays
in creating those dope products. It's worth mentioning the very
scientifically articulate food writer Kenji Lopez Ald has done a
small scale study on this phenomenon. I won't spoil it here,
(43:15):
but will link to his blind pizza taste tests in
our show notes. And even if we can't be sure
that stable foods like pizza and bagels are objectively better
because of the exact chemical makeup of the water. There
are several solid facts to be glad about. For starters,
the water supply generates two and a half times as
much power as it uses. One of the great unknowns
(43:38):
about New York City's water supply we talked about how
it's all fed by gravity, is we have four hydroelectric
generating facilities on our water supply. New York City's water
supply generates almost two and a half times the amount
of electricity that it uses, So we're we are sort
of like, uh, the original green infrastructure, if you want
(43:59):
to think of it that way. What do you like
about water best? And what do I like about water? Well,
we talked about that idea that you know, people can't
survive or thrive without it. But I think one of
the things that I find most interesting about New York
City's water supply is it's sort of the silent service, right,
so you wake up in the morning, you turn the
faucet on, and you really never question whether it's going
(44:20):
to be there or not. UM. I talked about this
from time to time. We turned on the water supply
in eighteen forty two. Uh, there's not been a day
since then that New York City has gone without water
through the biggest storms in its history, blackouts, terrorist attacks.
I mean, you name a natural or man made disaster,
and there has not been a single day during those
(44:41):
that the city has gone without water. That's in part
because of the genius design of the system, but it's
also because there are a lot of people who are
working literally twenty four hours a day to make sure
that we maintain that perfect batting average, right, And there
are more than a thou and employees who are New
York City employees that work north of the city doing
(45:04):
that work. And you know, we're only here for a
short period of time compared to the lifespan of the system.
We're only here for twenty to forty years, you know,
depending on how long someone's career is um But during
that time, when we are the steward of this water supply,
it is on us to maintain that perfect batting average
twenty four hours a day, every single day for our
(45:24):
entire career. And we take that really, really seriously. And
that's just to say an awful lot of work goes
into getting that water to New York City, whether it's
monitoring the reservoirs to understand where the best water is
if we see overnight that the best water is no
longer at the top of the reservoir, but it's at
(45:45):
the bottom. There are people who get up at two
thirty in the morning and go operate cranes to move,
you know, massive iron gates that are twice as big
as you are tall and weigh a heck of a
lot more to change the elevation of that draw from
the reservo are to make sure it's sent to the city.
There are people who are sitting in front of computer
screens and monitoring thousand, thousands and thousands and thousands of
(46:08):
alarms that could go off for different things around the
water supply, to make sure that we're watching the valve
chambers and the dams and the aqueducts and all the
things that actually make it work, the mechanical portions of
the water supply. There are people who are working in
the treatment facilities making sure that the UV doses proper
and the chlorineum doses proper. So all of the stuff
(46:31):
happens um twenty four hours a day, but nobody knows
about it because it's the great silent service that has
always been there and knock on wood always will be
there so that New York City can survive and thrive. UM.
Last area of questions that I have for um, do
you cook? Do you like to cook? I love to cook?
UM tell me do you have a greater appreciation for
(46:54):
water than your average cook? Or how do you What
do you think about water in the kitchen? Do you
think about it at all? I think about it from
time to time? You know? I? Well, you tell me
is what are more important for cooking or for baking?
Water is universally important, period, But I think that cooking it,
I mean, there are other there are other liquid supplies. Uh.
(47:15):
For baking, you can use the milk, you could use beer, um,
whereas you can't make a stock really with milk, you know.
And what I love about water is that. Um, here's
what I love about water. Uh. It's a flavor extractor.
It pulls flavor out of bones. It it dissolves UH
(47:35):
collagen into gladin the cartilage, and UH pulls connective tissue
apart to give us body. Um. Uh it's a natural thermometer.
It won't go above two hundred twelve, so you're always
cooking things below browning temperatures in water. UH and it's
a it's a heat extractor as well. You stop food
from cooking if you put it in cold water. It's
(47:55):
just powerful, dense uh element. So that's what I love
about what are so many different facets of its usefulness.
You've jogged my memory because this is the time of
year when I'll start to think about water and cooking
more than perhaps other times a year. Because one of
the things that I like to do is we get
deeper into the falling into the winter, is cook something
(48:16):
that we can have for multiple days. So yes, absolutely,
that's very important people to realize that it is. And
so and so it tends to be the things you
cook in a big vat of water that are most
important for that. And our favorite at home is is
homemade chicken soup and getting uh you know, we're lucky
to live amidst a lot of local farms and we
can get very good whole chickens and put it in water,
(48:41):
cook it with parsnips and carrots and celery and all
the other things you want to have in a in
a in a good stock. And the thing I always
think about with the water is not only obviously making
sure it's there, but it's always making sure I have
enough of it, so you don't you don't want to
boil off so much that then man, I didn't make
as much as I wanted to. Know, I only have
three days worth instead of five days worth, and that's
(49:03):
a real pain in the rear end. So you know,
we're getting into the season where I think I cook
more with water during this time of year than I
would do this summer. Interesting to the spring. Interesting Why
didn't I tell this water expert that when you cook
too much water out of your stock, just add what
you cooked out of it water. When we come back,
(49:26):
Jean Jorge wants to cook his Tom Young Kung soup
main ingredient New York City water straight from the tap. Okay,
(49:54):
so we were in the Gangs kitchen is one of
the most beautiful kitchens in New York City. Um, and
therefore the world. We have before us a little um,
a pan of shrimp cilantro, two tight chilies, some beautifully
cut limes, a variety of mushrooms, and we have fish
sauce and lime leaves. So that's that's actually the lemony.
The fish choice is all really all seasoning. Uh huh.
(50:16):
This is the salt. This is the salness. The salt
is fish sauce. Acid is a lime aarra. Mats are
the lemon grass, lemon grass, lemon grass, let me wrap.
It's just said, it's so fragrance, so lemon me so fresh.
You've got to realize that Joan Guorge comes alive when
he's cooking. He cracked the lemon grass in half and
(50:37):
holds it to his nose, closes his eyes inhales, and
when he opens his eyes they are twinkling. As he
puts the lemon grass to your nose. It makes them
so happy. So okay, we've got a picture of water
going into a gorgeous um SACI a copper saucy. A
(50:57):
good About what two cups are treat caps at three cups,
it's about a cup. They're gonna have some lime leaving
there right away, right away. This is the infusion. So
about four or five linleaves go in there, the double
sided limeleaves. You're throwing all of them in there. You know,
in time when you use the soup, they leave everything
(51:19):
in there. They leave the line. Maybe we cannot we
can actually can you cannot eat it? The lemon glass
is very hard but you have to pick up on
it as a way they do the soup on the stew.
They only leave in the lemonglass. They leave everything in
the hole and it's for you to pick it out,
you know, all right, So you're gonna smash that. So
this I gonna cut them in a have you seen pieces?
(51:45):
What's important is to uh, I take the back of
my knife. He goes right in. He's cut a long
lemon grass stock in the four inch pieces, and it's
whacking them along in the length with the act of
his knife to help them release their flavor into the
water in the same way that he crushes with his
(52:06):
fingers the lime leaves. You gonna cover it up, so
he goes a little faster. Okay, you've got it on
a graduated flat tap, so it gets very hot towards
the center there. That's right. Don't we gonna let this
boil on refuse probably for six million minutes the meantime,
I'm gonna so mush home up to be clean. Cutting pieces.
You can almost do this while the bottle. You know,
(52:27):
you can always you could prep this. You can sell
the water your while your water is wiling. It's that fast,
I mean you can't do this ahead of time and
then just push your string. But you mushroom last minute season,
last minute, so can you You could pull that, You
could infuse it for a ten minutes, pulled off the heat,
and then when you're ready to go, just bring it
back up the heat. The chili is just gonna keep
it together up. But I gotta cut it. So he
(52:47):
releases a favor. Uh huh am I leaving the sheety
as well. And now, okay, so stem on Withdrew, Yeah,
level level, you don't slice, you don't slice him. No,
I didn't want to get home just to infuse, okay.
And then Solantro. Silantro is another one. Now, Silantra is interesting.
You told me you're one of those people who tasted
(53:08):
soap when you the first time you're annoying only pastle
a rosemary time on a basil. I living Talian. For
some attested the clant It was like, oh my god,
this like soap base hope you know, so at this
we're gonna chop it, but really not fine, not fine,
you're leaving the stems in there. And yeah, well I
(53:30):
was just qu that's gonna go the last minute in
in a last. So it's just gonna Wilson Mountain. You
have a line of a fishers and I love how
you cut the line, so there's no none of that
core in there, so you get all the juice from
the lime. Absolutely, so it's fairly it's almost ready. You
(53:53):
start to wait for the infusion and everything goes in there. Yeah,
one in the seasoning. Now you're very big in the city.
I gotta see detailing my palette from my mom all
our salads. You know, we were always we agree, you know,
not too much lemon because we don't just doesn't growing
as us. But more vinegar, mostly vinegar. You knows good
(54:17):
on you boys are just removed a couple that the
reviews this is all kind of cooking two seconds. So
how do you how do you how do you teach
someone How would you teach someone at home to use acidity?
How how far should they take? How do you know?
Because they can't be here with you saying you can
say this is now it's on the money or Morris.
(54:40):
I think cooking is personal. So some people are good
more I citytail than others. But I know I'm looking
at it. Sometimes people put a lemon on the side
of a dish, start eating it on the squeeze at
the most piece. All the more your pilot gets. You know,
after a couple of bytes you get to you want more,
You want more, you want more than heat. You want
(55:00):
more of that. You know, fragrance flavor if if after
two bites boring, put on images. So what's the order
going to be. We've now got a pan of water
swimmering with lime leaves, chili peppers, and lemon grass. Then
the order is gonna be. You're always gonna be much
(55:22):
home which you're gonna release her own flavor. One flavor,
so that's gonnafuse another again, another dimension to the soup
that prettys Google mommy flavors to it. That's right. Then
I'm gonna season it nanea lime juice last minute the
stream because they're gonna push very quickly. When I know
the point done too easy to Yeah, I know it's
(55:45):
we need good water on New York as the finest water.
Yeah we're talking about that. Yeah, I mean I learned
that he can the New York water can it says
the best in the country. But because he comes from
a hundred seventy five lakes, upset New York, so natural,
so you know, handmade my maid on and he goes
via dukes all the way to the city and and
(56:06):
of course he's treated. But it's it's all from lex
so it's you know, it's pretty amazing. Some other areas,
you know, they have to use take the salt to
take seawater, take the salt water. Some other areas they
have couldn't collect from rains. I mean there's a lot
of rain water too, but from les so here we
are am I name my mushrooms. It's about a minutes
on infusion when you can see the water tunes a
(56:29):
little greenish. Yeah, this is cooling, and the lads returning
a little brown nash lun juss fishers. I'm'm gonna put
it all because I want to test it to make sure,
right than sure it's good on. The most important is
(56:50):
not to to reduce this. Why why is that you
know he gets very salty with it's but it's very
up with lime. Yeah. Yeah, and you added the rest
of the you held back on the fifth sauce and
then put the rest in there. Now the shrimp's going in. Yeah,
that's what I'm thinking. To a nice, nice, nice bro, Now,
(57:13):
why don't you want it on the center of that
waut the first time there was a vein and the
van the shell head on everything, so which be nice too,
but to the more work, Well, super am I eating
my stream? You're the fault. So I noticed that you
(57:34):
it's it really has not reached a hard will just
just summer sun up. I mean when you went infusing,
you have you left to bring it to a boy
like a tea on and you remove it similar little bit.
I know I'm a stream to be cook, but not
to you know on and beautiful slaunch talk that's gonna
(57:55):
bring that green glasses launch and slam. Was all going
into the pot. Ye can see the shrimp almost done,
almost cooked. So you want that cilantro to infuse a
little too, You don't use it as a garnish. At
the end, after we wait it in there, I'll show
you the way I had it in the street the
(58:16):
first time. You see the color has changed. You see
what the has changed with water soup, it's refreshing and
so so yeah, some jasmine rice, which is pite an investment, beau.
(58:36):
So they often eat eat rice with soup. They'll take
a bite of soup and then a bite of rice.
It's usually the you put the rice in a in
a ball on a new When you eat it, you
cover on the fragments of the rice. Is really jasmine
is really awesome. I love it. Yeah, mess like it.
(58:58):
It's just come back to the summer. You can see
that the shrimp are done. That's it. You know what's nice?
When you eat it? You you can you know, second
a lemon grass a little bit. I was working on
some recipes with an Indian chef, Suvir Seran, who likes
to leave inedible aromatics in his curry, like clothes and
cardamom pods, as a reminder for us to eat carefully
(59:20):
and thoughtfully. And sometimes you just want to bite into
a little flavor bomb like that. Yeah, exactly, because you
put a chili. Get a chili in there. Gorgeous. Now
we have to eat it. We gotta eat it. What
we're good? Beautiful? So wait, wait to eating is really
(59:45):
too uhcause rice lead them home. So you put some
on rice and spoon, pick up some soup. Good Thailand
as the best. Wow, it's beautiful, beautiful, thank you. When
you have a couple of spoons. All right, let's get
some spoons. That's it good when I am so, We've
(01:00:12):
seen where our water comes from, explored some of the
engineering feats that get water from the mountains of New
York to New York City, and looked at one phenomenal
use for water in the kitchen with Jean Jorge. Next
time you turn on that faucet to Philip pot, take
a few moments to consider where it came from, what
it can do, and how lucky we are to have it.
(01:00:37):
Special thanks to our guests Adam Bosh and Sarah Kelsey.
If you enjoyed hearing us chat from within the old
Crotton Aqueduct, go check out one of Sarah's tours and
go see it and enjoy it yourself. You won't regret it.
Thanks also to chef Jean Jorge vangar ritten. His brand
new memoir, which he and I co wrote, is out
now and it's called j G V A Life in
(01:01:00):
twelve Rescues. Lastly, my new book is out now too.
It's also called From Scratch, but it's all about cooking
and ten meals that can teach us all we need
to know in the kitchen. We'll have a link to
it and all the other links in the show notes
and on my site ruman dot com. From Scratch. The
(01:01:22):
podcast is produced by Jonathan Dressler. Our executive producer is
Christopher Hasiotis. Our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. All the
music on From Scratches by Ryan Scott off his album
A Freak Grows in Brooklyn. From Scratch is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my heart Radio,
(01:01:45):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Has been here, Got
a smile on Me as a man only, where my
(01:02:12):
mo evers only, sad M
I'm standing in the old Croton Aqueduct, the passageway from
which water arrived in New York City into I'm Michael Rohlman.
This is From Scratch. This episode is water. Welcome to
(00:23):
From Scratch. My name is Michael Rohman, and I've spent
the last twenty years in professional kitchens, writing about and
with the world's best chefs. From Scratches a podcast about cooking.
In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one
non chef about the same theme. The great thing about
the cooking life is that you never stop learning. In
(00:44):
this show, I want to go to the edges of
what I know and then go beyond together with you,
with all chefs, home cooks, and everyone who cares about
food and cooking. Water is perhaps the most powerful yet unwrecked,
agnized ingredient and tool in your kitchen, watered as far
more than we realize, and how it gets to our
(01:06):
tap I find a marvel. In this episode, we'll talk
with an expert who knows every detail of New York
City's water supply, from rain drop to your faucet. He'll
share the surprising details of the gigantic silent service that
is our water supply. We'll also go inside an aqueduct
(01:27):
that was built in the eighteen thirties, before most modern
construction machinery was available, to learn how the delivery of
water to New York City in eighteen forty two transformed
a featied, filthy, disease ridden city prone to devastating fires
into a safe and thriving metropolis. But first, we spoke
(01:48):
with one of the most well respected chefs in the world,
Jean George von Richton. We spoke with him about his
career and his feelings about my second favorite ingredient in
the kitchen, in water. Jo and George is like no
other chef I've worked with. He has seemingly endless energy.
His creativity is ceaseless. New ideas come flying out of
(02:11):
his brain faster than I could write them down. And
in business he's all but unmatched. J G or Joe Joe,
as he's sometimes called, has created a fleet of shining
restaurants on nearly every continent, dozens of them here in
New York City. If you're a chef who came out
of one of his kitchens, you will be perceived as
(02:31):
a badass, unless you prove otherwise. J G. Is in short,
a culinary and business dynamo and the consummate host. And
I feel really lucky to be here with it by
your history and fascinated especially by one specific part of
your history, and that's when you moved from a traditional kitchen.
(02:52):
You did a traditional apprenticeship at Aubert Delille in Alsace
with Chef Paul Helin everything and food on local food.
You don't right now tell us what that kitchen was like.
I mean the kitchen was really you know at the time,
you know, they were not chipping fish for many pestles
and Asasi's the middle of a between Germany and France.
(03:14):
And so the fish, freshwater fish, I mean the fogs,
to eel, freshwater il, trout, before the days of daily
fresh fish deliveries classic French restaurants in all sauce, relied
and freshwater fish, carpet, pike, crayfish, eel and trout. The trout, though,
had to be delivered alive and swam in a little
(03:36):
pond behind the restaurant. The dish he was responsible for
it was the famous tweet Blue, named for the vivid
color the trout becomes when dipped in vinegar. It's slimy
film coating changes color when it hits the vinegar, but
it only works if the fish have just been killed.
Describe what you had to do for trout. Took treat blue.
(03:57):
Had to run as soon as the other come in.
Had to run out, get the fish net, go into
the pound. There was a little pound just for trouts.
While trout that the fishermen were bought. Every day we
got about fifteen twenty trouts. Fish out the trout jumping
around in my net. Had to grab you with a
towel because you can use your hands. Because there's a
(04:20):
kind of a slime on a trout. We should want
you on a remote or had to take it with
a little town on with a wooden spatula behind the neck.
Don't then you have to empty it, you know the
gods and take the guilds out. Then had to run upstairs.
The say party had had a coon ready the water
(04:43):
with the mats. You know. There was carrots and onions
and charatte, garlic, some bailieves some time and I had
to touch the the trout in a vinegar, local vinegar,
you know the honey honey her vinegar. It's called mel
for tos to try and trudging them on and plunging
in there covered right away because it was still you know,
(05:06):
it depends how much I was not that he's still
moving around to move around, so the water was flashing
out so on. I was pushing so that we removed
from from the stove. So I was boiling trout in
the cover. Remove it, patch it for like twelve minutes
and it turns to color when it turns like bright blue,
like a blue like you never see anything like this,
(05:29):
you know, the vinegar on the that slime on the trout.
Did you say, oh my god, that's one out on.
That's nice in the spring and summer, but you have
to running the snow. An important step in Johan George's
evolution as a chef came when he first showed up
at the kitchen, which broke many of the rules of
the more classic traditions. Tell me about the difference between
(05:50):
Louis UT's kitchen at Louisis and I mean I was
totally differently, was like arrive where I with my dusabu,
my shen in front of the rest. On was like
ten o'clock in the morning, a dwarf all night arrive
and there was a couple of cooks opening scallops, some
people peeling vegetables, and there was nothing on the serfash
They probably closed for lunch. You know, it was like
(06:10):
ten ten thirty. So they tell me where to change.
I can come with my my knives on apparent they
give me a jacket on. When I come in the
kitchen and still still everybody's prepping. But it's still nothing
on the sofa. Now it's like eleven fifteen. I said, oh,
who asked the young coming next to me as a
scross for lunch? But a musing and sarces don't know.
We open the clock. So there we have eighty people
(06:33):
for lunch. I say, is everything on? So there was
a culture shock because I have and I you know,
we started everything. The whole store was filled in the
morning with that stock on sins worthing you know on
so there was like a anti misson plus an anti
music plus you know. Also it was all about opening
(06:55):
scallop on you know, everything was cuts on every herb,
every you can you could parsley and sation you had.
You know, even the fish was cut. You know, it
was phil but not not Poh. Chef von Richton has
been an innovator of lighter cooking for many years, as
(07:15):
far back as his days as executive chef of Lafayette
in the nineteen eighties, he noticed New Yorkers wanted less
butter and cream, and so he created a new kind
of French menu reliant on vegetable juices, vinaigrettes and brass.
And of course water, which he found at Louisis was
considerably important as it chef did not rely on veal
(07:37):
stock and demi glass, which can take days to make
and which was ubiquitous at the time and fine dining restaurants.
Why is the water important? Why not reveal stock? I mean,
you know, he didn't believe that. He didn't wanted that
sticky flavor of you know, sort of France, so you
don't need as much calorie to do squub hosts, juice,
(08:01):
pung juices instead of a stock, which we had. We
never had a piece of broad breast meat on the menu.
We had a lamb, shank, vilhank, you know, different parts
of the animal breast, you know called way open. You
want a happier food sins to your guts France, he
was all about blackness on them from Muthier j g.
(08:23):
Went to the father of modern French cuisine and perhaps
the man who turned chefs into celebrities, Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France.
Nothing yet Baucus by then had his signatures the truffle
consume and the chicken all vse chicken stuffed in a bladder.
But there he learned new skills before being lured to
(08:44):
Aubergine and the youngest three star chef ever Eckhart Witzigman
at Aubergine in Germany, where he learned a whole new
form of our minute cooking. Witzigman wouldn't post a menu
for the nights one covers until late after and then
you got a call from your old mentor Louisa. Then
I got a call from Luigia on try. He called
(09:06):
me for three months to try to convince me, at
twenty three years old, to take over the He became
consulting for the Orient hell Tell in Bangkok. The normally girl.
He was normally grilled and if you changed to normal normaldy,
it's gonna be the chef there cooking his food on
I can't never been a chef, never been a chef.
(09:28):
M want me to runiversal I can't so on an
thinking about it. Thailand exotic, I don't. I read about it,
but then never can talk to anybody. I've never heard
about anybody who went there on you know, I don't
know what you say. Yes, when one mon night I said,
(09:51):
you went, maybe went too many beer or two with
the carter after work on the next morning, I should
have if I fell over there, and what's what's come
happen to me? Right? I'll come back, right, you know,
I come back. I've been now in the kitchen for
seven years. I know a little bit of how how'd
you go along? I always gonna get a job, so
(10:12):
I don't back my three case. Let's go. After six
months of training and preparing the menu, join, George took
the first long distance flight of his life. Tell me
about your arrival in Bangkok and that because we're gonna
get yes. So I arrived in Bangkok early December nine,
when I was like, you know I landed at the time,
(10:34):
you know, it was like a flu entire airways. So
I got a little sense of you all of you know,
the hospitality that they do. Then you know, everybody's so
nice on the plane. I was like, Wow, that's a
bit different than France when a company have been on
I wouldn't flew that much, you know. That was my
probably my my third flight in my life twenty three.
(10:56):
You know, at the time, you don't you know, was
driving everywhere. So I took a flight once to London,
once uh to Spain, but I never flew that far away.
You know. The longest flide I took was probably, you know,
two and a half hours, right, So it was my
first flight. You're on the other side of the world,
twelve hours with a stop in h was a stop
in Karashi, Pakistan. So at the time they flew the
(11:20):
plane were not flying more than a ten hours, so
there was a twelve hour flight. So we stopped in
Karashi because I was what's going on? We still on
the plane. It was just a rifuel and then we're
riving bankok it. You know at the time when they
opened the door, there was no there was no tunnel.
You had to walk down the stairs. Some do open up.
(11:43):
It was like I could smile. I was like, wow,
this is different, this is like a different I don't know,
it was like a mix up. Giant lemongrass jungle, a
little pollution, a little coconuts, a little uh, a little
bit of everything, you know, so it's a blend of
all this. I was like, wow, this is a bot
(12:04):
in Paris. You know, Persian smell on an the arrival
and it's like a hole to different road mine in
the air already. So I was like, wow, that's like
an adventure. So I was ready fully, I mentioned so
when all of the of the airport and I took
a cab to go to the hotel, can only give
me the address? You know, I was you know at
(12:25):
the time, I was you know, nobody was calling for
there was nobody was calling for a car for me.
He was kind of a you know, I was jumping
a cab and it was it was so hard to me.
It was like ninety to degree and it's very hot
in Thailand, so why do we you get off that plane?
You're like, whoa, it's like a you know, a wall
of a heat. And then in a cab condition window
(12:47):
open on a it was amazing, and it was like
elephant on the road. There was like a chicken running everywhere.
There was a you know, people on horses, people on
on took two. You know, there's a three wheel. I
was like, oh my god, it's like and I was
arriving to like a palm tree. I mean it was
(13:07):
and with the heat and everything on a at the
time was a highway, was like fallen going to the city.
But it was not not much traffic. You know. When
I arrived in the banking nteen a d was maybe
three four hotels, you know. Myn hotel was the Audienceell Hotel.
There was Dozy Tanny, a local hotel, and then I
was a Continental. There was no it was the only
(13:27):
the Ontel was the only hotel on a river on
you know. I saw all the market, merchants, markets, I mean,
the life is in the street, you know. And so
from the airport to the hotel it was probably an
hour drive. I stopped three times. I just stopped talking
about the first time the first driver. I need to
see the two cities as so I work around. You know,
(13:47):
I was gonna you know before, you know, on no
cell phone, so there's no picture, there's none, you know,
just memory, I said. I did to stop. So I
was hungry. So I got to Mango. When I got
to this woman who did put soup together, tell me
about the soup. Let's go. Nobody speak English. So the
driver the taxes are just Speakinglish. I say, what is this?
(14:08):
I said, Tom, I'm all right. So she puts her
pots a couple of caps of water, and the water
was not clear that he wasn't but I wasn't truck
about that. But then she put a tash shell in there.
She put her lemongrass, lime leave. But did you didn't
(14:29):
know what these things? I have no idea. I smelled
everything and have no idea. And it was one, trust me,
it was. It was a limited sanitation. But I wouldn't
get a prop, wouldn't get an a, but even an
air for fever on. So she put all that together
on and see married for like eight ten minutes, just water, lime,
(14:50):
but the freaking coming out of that lime leaven, lemoras on.
Then she was a mushroom in there. Then she she
put a shrimping now on field on, not even nothing,
just shrimping there. And then she squeezes in some nime.
You know. I like the way they cut the limes.
You know, they don't catch in half like a lemon,
(15:11):
because you don't get the much shoes that corner the
three you get the three and three. That's where you yeah,
that woman on Fish shows, she had no idea what
he was. You know, at saw his source months in
a us to you know, I saw in about in
a package in the supermarket, but I never had the
Asian food in my life. On when she finished with
(15:35):
the Fish Shows and she was testing it on, I
got a ball, but I bought the ball for the
you know, it was popularly like fifty cents for shrimp,
beautiful brol She gave you a little ball of rice
on the side. It was the best arriving paddads. It
was like, wow, another water stock, but with flavor fragrance
(15:55):
I never had before. H So it was a whole.
It was a culture shock. Was like my god phone
from the dirty water. She made something amazing, amazing you
know on and got stuck in my head forever, and
I could I could we do the movie step by
step the way she she did everything, and it was awesome.
When it was so hot, it was like sweating on
(16:16):
my eyes, you know. The cab driver, I was like
getting it like it's a you know, whatever it is,
you know, like something like porridge. I was drinking like
a every spoon was like so hot and so but
you could meet on somehow, you know. Then I went
back to the continuing my journey on stop a couple
more times for fruits, for other things. Right on, you
(16:39):
would basically take that that that that powerful arrival in Bangkok,
and it would transform you as a chef and your
career in New York City absolutely help guide you. They
put me to a different direction of my life. You know,
that's one of the I think one of the twelve
steps absolutely changed my life. So I think you really,
(17:01):
you know, it was really not to say, my god,
this is like I'm gonna learn so much in this country,
and you know, I'm gonna show them what I know
and I'm gonna learn absorb whatebout Thailand. That's who do
you give me? And people are gonna have to read
how you did that In your new memoir j g
V absolutely recipe life in twelve recipes, yes, and it's
(17:21):
a book. Later on, Jean George will cook us Tom
Young Kung and demonstrate the power of water and cooking
all a minute. But before that, we're going to find
out precisely how is Jean George, his fellow chefs and
everyone in New York City gets their water. Adam Bosch
(17:59):
is the director of Public Affairs for New York City's
Department of Environmental Protection, And if that sounds like a
made up job title, it might be because Adam created
it himself. But this wasn't to pull one over on
the Department of Environmental Protection. They're actually lucky to have
someone as passionate and articulate as Adam is in this role.
(18:20):
He's taken it upon himself to become the leading expert
for all things New York City water, from the historical
dilemmas to the problems of the future, from the folklore
to the scientific to his own chicken soup. But as
a curious home cook, I had to first know where
exactly does the water from my tap come from. The
(18:41):
water that comes to your apartment in Manhattan will have
started as a rain drop or a snowflake, uh coming
out of the sky, landing somewhere in the Catskills, and
when it makes its way down a hill or melts,
it will go into one of the streams, rivers, and
creeks that needs are reservoirs. If you were to look
(19:02):
at the farthest drop of water away in the farthest
reservoir away, it could take as much as two years
to get to the city. Okay has to get all
the way across the reservoir. It eventually gets into a
a tunnel or an aqueduct that feeds what we like
to call one of our terminal reservoirs. Our terminal reservoirs
are reservoirs that, under certain operational configurations of the system,
(19:24):
can send water directly into the city. Okay um from
the cat Skills. It's going to go through one of
one of two aqueducts. It's either going to go through
the Catskill Aqueduct, which is a ninety two mile aqueduct,
The original aqueduct that was built in the Catskills delivers
water from a Choking reservoir all the way to the
hill View Reservoir, which is in Yonker's right on the
(19:45):
northern border of the Bronx. Or it's going to go
through the Delaware Aqueduct, which is an eighty five mile
long tunnel. It is the longest tunnel in the world
delivers water from Rondout Reservoir to Hillview Reservoir, which is
the start of New York City's just Atribution system where
there will go into one of three large tunnels that
deliver water into the city, up into what we call
(20:08):
trunk mains, which are the larger mains, into mains in
the street. They're about seven thousand miles of water mains
under the streets of New York City, and then eventually
into your home where you'll be able to use it
for all the things you use water for, whether that's flushing, washing,
making coffee, or even cooking. One reason that Bosch may
be able to quote so many details is that he
(20:30):
worked as a reporter and taught journalism for ten years
before his current role working for New York City. In fact,
it was while reporting on a lethally boring city government
meeting that he accidentally discovered the critical nature of water
for growing communities. And early on in my journalism career,
this was hammered home to me. I covered some very
(20:51):
small communities in the Hudson Valley and there was one
community that was very popular and projects wanted to come there.
And I remember sitting at a planning board, which is
sort of like, you know, the dull drums of covering
local government, but you have to do it. And I
remember there was this great company that wanted to bring
a hundred jobs to the small community in Orange County,
(21:11):
and the project was turned down. And the project was
turned down because that community happened to sit over top
of a very small aquifer, an underground pocket of water
that was essentially tapped out, and they didn't have any
more water left to support growth of that community. And
it was just an early reminder, at least in my career,
that you can survive or thrive without a source of water.
(21:35):
Let's go back to the early days of New York City.
Described a situation where were people getting into water? What
was it like, what were the problems? Sure, so, the
earliest days of New York City, if you go back
to the seventeen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds, New
York City was really just Manhattan Island below fourteenth Street,
and there were about, up until the early eighteen hundreds,
about two hundred to three hundred thousand people living there
(21:57):
at the peak, and they were getting their water from
what we would cannsidered to be very primitive means. So
we're talking about things like ponds and open pits and
shallow primitive wells, and that worked okay, for a period
of time until the early eighteen hundreds when those sources
became contaminated, and they were contaminated not only by human waste,
but you gotta remember there were also a lot of
(22:17):
animals on Manhattan Island this time, there were a lot
of barn yards and things like that, and uh, that
small water supply that those small sources of water um
led to three big problems. One problem was disease, so
that contaminated water was leading to outbreaks of things like
cholera and yellow fever, and that was killing hundreds or
thousands of people a year. The second big problem was fire,
(22:41):
so they didn't have pressurized firefighting the way we think
of it today. All they had were bucket brigades, where
if there was a fire, and there were many of them,
some guy would run to the local contaminated pond, scoop
up some water in a bucket, pass it on down
the line until the next guy was staring at a
fire that was gobbling up mull sutiple city blocks and
(23:01):
just sort of go we and toss the bucket of
water onto the fire. And as you can imagine, that
was not very effective. And the ineffectiveness of that method
was highlighted during something called the Great Fire of eighteen
thirty five, which gobbled up something like thirty entire city
blocks in one fire. Um. The last problem was just
general filth. There are some really great newspaper editorials from
(23:24):
back in that time that described New York City as
having filth that was ankled deep in the consistency of
bean soup, and one of my favorites said that if
you wanted to cross Broadway, you had to have the
bravery of a desperado because the filth was just so
gross a deep um. So it was really with that
in mind, disease, fire and filth, that the leaders of
(23:45):
New York City said, if we're going to be able
to once again survive and thrive, we really have to
go somewhere and look for a source of fresh water
that can be tapped and brought into the city to
sustain this popular not only the population they had, but
the population they hope to have as the city grew.
And it was during that time that they looked just
north of the city here to where we're sitting now
(24:07):
in Westchester County, and they decided to develop what's known
now as the Croton System. The very first parts of
the Croton system. So in the eighteen thirties they set
out on an ambitious plan to build a single reservoir,
Croton Reservoir and a single brick line tunnel that would
deliver water from the Croton River into Manhattan. But that
(24:30):
original system had a brick lined aqueduct that changed in
elevation thirteen and a half inches per mile. So you
think about that, that's very precise construction, right to maintain
the flow of water by gravity alone to the city,
and gravity alone, we had to see this. We'll hear
(24:50):
more from Adam and a bit, but first we wanted
to head to the source and go inside the old
Crowton Aqueduct. And Sarah Kelsey was a perfect person to
show us. I'm Sarah Kelsey. I am cohed of walks
and tours for the friends of the Old Croatan Aqueduct.
The sound here, yeah, isn't it grain yea almost makes
(25:14):
you want to sing. You should use if you have
any voice at all, you should sing a little something.
Someday when I'm off, when the world is cold, I
will feel a glow just thinking of you and the
(25:34):
way you look TONIGHTE what's your fascination with the aquaduct. Well,
for me, it's a combination of things. That's one thing
that's great about the aqueduct is their whole range of
interests that can be satisfied. So for me, I love history.
(25:59):
I love the history of New York City, especially in
the Hudson River Valley. H But in addition to that,
I love engineering. I love to know how things work,
and it's really interesting to find out how this was built,
how it works, and realized that the entire very large
(26:19):
water system that New York City has now is built
on exactly the same principles. An engineer named David Douglas
was the first man on the job the contours of
the land and how it should go. He came up
with it should be gravity fed. So that was the
first guy, David Douglas. He was the one who said,
(26:40):
David Douglas said we're gonna let gravity do the work
and pull this water down. And then and then they
fired him because he was a slow because they thought
he was moving too slow while he was doing all
of this, and it involved a lot of surveying, and
of course nobody gave him enough staff. It's always the way,
right but there was a major epidemic, and then in
(27:06):
eight five there was a major fire that you know,
eliminate a large proportion of New York City. And so
they said that's it. Times we need water, we need
pressurized water. Yeah. So so then they hired John Jervis.
John Jarvis succeeded in setting up the Crotton Aqueduct system
that began the succession of clean water that hasn't stopped
(27:29):
flowing into New York City since it was turned on
in eighteen forty two. And along the way on his
original aqueduct there were structures called weirs, and that's what
Sarah took us inside of. It's a big brick, square
structure with a door that opens to the top of
a staircase. And the purpose of the weir is basically
(27:51):
two damn up the old Crotain aquity duct tunnel so
that they could stop the water from going in south
of here and do repairs if they needed to do repairs. Also,
at the top of that staircase is a giant black
piece of iron. It's probably more than ten feet tall
and eight ft wide. What does this to remind you of?
(28:13):
It's like a gear team. Yeah, and they lowered it
by pollice. It was all done by hand, no machines involved.
They lowered it down until it covered the face of
the tunnel. Then the water was diverted across here through here.
(28:33):
And you can you can still, you can still use
this gear. It's and it's still work a blow. So
I say to people, children and people with an inner
child can now work the gear. And everybody rushes to
work the gear. That wheel would divert incoming water to
the nearby Hudson River when they needed to make repairs
(28:54):
inside the tunnel, and the men making those emergency repairs
they were called the keepers. There were six keepers who
lived in houses along the aqueduct, always ready to repair
any leaks as they occurred. The friends of the old
Crotton Aqueduct have recently refurbished a keeper's house which now
serves as a permanent exhibit for the history of the
(29:17):
Crotton water system. They had about six keepers houses along
the trail and they were the people that maintained and
kept in working order the aqueduct tunnel. So if there
was a leak, that guy had to figure out how
to fix it um and they had all sorts of
ways to fix that they had. They had entry ways
(29:39):
in those conical um structures that are called ventilators. They
had iron plates and brick openings along the way that
nobody noticed in as they walking down the trail. They
had a number of different strategies to get in as
close as they couldn't and they had um weirds like
this along the way so they can isolate the part
(30:01):
they needed to work in and get it dry fast.
Because New York City was so dependent on this water
that if there was a little leak and they had
to close it down to repair the leak, the water
was being so consumed so rapidly in New York City
that the reservoirs would be going down, down, down while
(30:24):
they're busily trying to repair at the leak. Then they
repaired the league be able to start the water again
and then raise up those reservoirs in New York City.
So it's very dramatic. You could actually see the water
disappearing while they were doing repairs. Yeah, in the reservoirs
in New York City. Yeah. Yeah. What happened originally is
(30:48):
when they first built this old Croton aqueduct, they thought
it would be enough water for New York City for
a hundred years, but no way because New York City
completely changed all of its habits. Yeah, because it was
an interaction. You can see still in the tunnel the
(31:10):
water line for how high the water got, which was
way higher than it was built for. UM. The way
around tunnel like this worse. It's sort of a horseshoe shape,
and the part that's perpendicular to the ground that's very strong.
Once you get into arch, it's a lot weaker. You
(31:33):
can see that it started getting into the arch. So
the original builder engineer of this was jumping up and
down saying, this wasn't built for this man water. You
have to build more aqueduct. So they did well. The
crowding system was deemed insufficient after only twenty years. The
(31:54):
current day system that provides water to millions uses the
same principles of the old Crotton aqueduct. It was an
engineering feat unlike anything that had ever been accomplished in America,
and um there were a lot of engineers who turned
it down. They didn't think it could work, and in fact,
the first damn they tried to build failed. UM. So
(32:15):
it wasn't without hardship, but ultimately they build something that
is widely recognized as a marvel of modern engineering, and
so is the system we have now as they expanded.
Sort of the concepts that led to it being labeled
a marvel of modern engineering extend throughout the modern day
system as it grows and grows. Okay, so you've got
(32:38):
a great system that just works. But what do those
responsible for the water supply due to keep busy? Well, first,
changing valves. We're at a point now where almost every
single part of the water supply is at a hundred
years old or more than a hundred years old. So
we're in a cycle now where we're doing a lot
of very large projects just to give everything some some
(33:01):
some TLC, some rehabilitation. So over the next you know,
twenty thirty fifty years. You know, New Yorkers won't see
a difference, but just know that we up here are
doing a lot of very big projects to make sure
that the dam's aqueducts, all the infrastructure exactly is in
a state of good repair. And that includes things that
(33:21):
seem kind of mundane, like if a valve has been
in the same place for a hundred years, it might
not turn the same way I did back in n
you know, so we got to go in and swap
these valves out. But each of these valves is like
as big as a school bus. You know, they're huge. So, uh,
they're really big, complex projects. And what happens to New
York City water in the treatment stage? Sure, so New
(33:45):
York City's drinking water is by and large treated by
just two things. Um one is chlorine and one is
ultraviolet light. Just a quick note here. Chlorine is one
of those special chemicals that's either helpful or poisonous depending
on These cooks know this to be true. For bleach,
they measure a bleach and water solution with precise ratios,
(34:06):
which serves as a sanitary solution for cleaning cutting boards
and other equipment. I mean, the chlorination of of drinking
water is considered one of the great advances in protecting
public health and the history of mankind. Once again, the
idea is being able to knock out, uh and disinfect
the water for those little micro organisms that can cause
(34:27):
your stomach illness. So we're talking about things like garda
and cryptospridium and these little tiny micro organisms that are
just naturally occurring in water. And you have to make
sure that they're they're knocked out. One of the great
technological advancements is the use of ultra violet light. Yeah,
ultra violet light is really effective at disinfecting water for
(34:47):
these little micro organisms. And I'll explain sort of what
it does. Um ultra violet light in a very specific
wavelength can actually genetically neuter these little micro are chanisms
so that they cannot reproduce. And the way it works
is this cells can only replicate when the double helix
and the d NA splits binds with new bases and proteins,
(35:10):
and that's how cells replicate. Well, what UV light does
in this very narrow wavelength is it takes two of
those bases in the genetic code of these micro organisms
and it glues them together. It is essentially like genetic
super clue. And if those two bases are stuck together,
the double helix can't split, and if the double helix
(35:31):
can't split, the cells can't replicate. And if the cells
can't replicate, they can't get you sick. So this was
discovered in the ninety nineties in scientifically, but it has
probably been at work in water supplies going back to
the great Ancient civilizations because their aqueducts. When you go
back to uh great civilizations in the Middle East or
(35:54):
even in Rome, their aqueducts were open to the sunlight
and they were open air aquity. It's not underground aqueducts.
And when the sun shines on water, it produces many
spectrums of light, but it does produce this narrow spectrum
of UV light that is effective at disinfecting the water. Okay,
so we are taking that process and essentially we've put
(36:17):
it in a gigantic canisters with very very bright light
bulbs and computer systems and workers that can monitor to
make sure it's in that very specific wavelength. We think
of it as a treatment dose, but it's really a
wavelength to knock these micro organisms out. And the great
news is because we have UV light, we're now able
(36:37):
to use less chlorine. So we're adding less chemical treatment
to the water and doing it with ultraviolet light instead
and it's equally effective. Let's start happening. Uh So, the
UV plant that treats New York cities drinking water was
turned on in In fact, it was turned on about
a month or a month and a half before Hurricane
Sandy hit hit New York UM and it is the
(37:00):
largest ultra violet facility in the world, and it is
larger than all the other ultra violet facilities in America combined.
It is a massive facility. Um. There are more than
eleven thousand, seven hundred light bulbs in it. Each light
bulb is as long as you and I are tall,
so they are very very large, very bright. And they
do a great job at disinfecting New York City's water
(37:22):
so that we know we're delivering water that is safe
and wholesome to our consumers. That's amazing. Yeah, I didn't
know about that. It has been written about, yeah a
little bit. Yeah, another surprising program that helps with water quality,
farming consultation and improvements. The first thing is our partners
from this nonprofit which is run by farmers, and we
(37:44):
should mention all of this is voluntary. Uh. We'll go
to the local farm and they will sit down with
the farmer and understand fully how that farmer operates his
or her farm. Where do you spread manure or fertilizer
in which field? In what season? You know? Where do
your where do your livestock graze? Right? Um, where how
do you manage manure? Right, where do you milk all
(38:06):
that sort of stuff, and they will sit down. They
will put together with that farmer what's called a whole
farm plan, which is a way to change their operations
in a way that's protective quality of water quality. That
could be something simple like, hey, you know, instead of
spreading manure in the spring on the field that's near
that creek, spread it on the one up the hill. Okay,
(38:28):
They're gonna go in those farm fields and test those
fields for nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, which will tell
the farmer what's sort of crop yield they're gonna get,
and if it's higher than it needs to be, then
they won't be allowed to spread in those fields. Uh.
And maybe they can sell some of those nutrients or
not have to buy fertilizer, sell some of the manure
off the farm, things like that. Um. The idea there
(38:50):
is that an excessive nutrients in the field, right, phosphorus,
nitrogen then get washed off the fields and into the streams,
creeks and rivers, and that is the fuel that al
gen needs to grow. It's the fuel that causes taste
and odor problems in water. Right. And New York City
has a great reason to clean up water at the
sourus rather than towards the end of the supply chain.
(39:11):
Cost to build a filtration plan for New York City's
water supply would be the largest public works project in
the history of New York City. You're talking about a
facility that will cost about twelve billion dollars that's billion
with a B to build, and will cost about two
fifty million dollars a year in electricity and chemicals to operate.
You know, we don't want to have to do that.
(39:32):
We want to protect the water where it is and
deliver it to you free of contaminants, clean, pristine, wholesome,
and safe the way it's been since we built the
system to start with. Do you guys worry about terrorism. Absolutely.
One of the interesting things about security, or perhaps one
of the frustrating things about security, is part of the
way we keep you secure is by not telling you
how we do it, because because you don't want to
(39:54):
give people a playbook. But I'll give you one example.
A representative sample of New York City's water supply is
run through a very large fish tank that is filled
with minnows uh twenty four hours a day every day
of the year, and we have a system that monitors
the respiration rate of those fish and how often they burp,
(40:19):
and that system allows us to see if those fish
are in distress, and if those fish begin to show
signs of distress, it could be the very first signs
of some sort of contamination we would want to know about,
and then we begin to investigate. It is that it
is the canary in the coal mine water supply edition. Um.
But but that is just one example, and there are
(40:42):
many many other examples throughout the entire water supply and
throughout the city where we either have biological monitoring, technological monitoring,
or humans monitoring the water supply in a lot of
different ways in a lot of different places to protect it.
Let's talk about the qualities of water from New York.
You know, there's all kinds of myths about bagels are
better in New York because of the water, pizza crust
(41:04):
that are well. That tell us about the chemical composition
of of our water. So it is a little bit
of a history lesson. So when they build that croton
system and turn on, of course it takes care of
the problems of filth and fire and disease but one
of the problems that did create is the water from
here in the Hudson Valley is what we would call
moderately hard, and that means that that that the water
has some calcium and magnesium in it, and that's naturally
(41:28):
occurring from the underlying geology of this valley. There's limestone
in this valley, and so as the water goes through
the ground, it interacts with that geology and it it
puts calcium into the water. The problem with calcium in
the city was that it was causing a build up
of scale on pipes, but especially on industrial equipment and
on steamships. And this scale was very labor intensive and
(41:51):
costly to get off these machines so they would work properly.
So as New York City looked to expand its water
supply in the early nineteen hundreds, it had a lot
of criteria was looking for right want of water that
was clear, cool, didn't have microorganisms in it, wasn't liable
to corrode pipes. But perhaps the most important feature they
were looking for was water that was not too hard,
(42:13):
water that didn't have a lot of calcium and magnesium
in it. So when they go to the cat Skills.
They find some of the softest water in the world
because the underlying geology and the cat Skills is essentially
void of limestone. Um, it's shale, it's shifts, it's bed rock.
The mountains are are are pretty hard landscape features, and
they decided to build a water supply there and then
(42:34):
they bring this incredibly soft water into the city. And
it is that quality of the water, uh, that softness uh,
that many say is responsible for the great dope products
that you get in New York City, as you mentioned,
pizza across bagels, things like that. Now, I have seen
that debated over the years, but but you know, by
(42:55):
and large that's uh, that's my understanding of the role
that the saw this, but also perhaps the alkalinity plays
in creating those dope products. It's worth mentioning the very
scientifically articulate food writer Kenji Lopez Ald has done a
small scale study on this phenomenon. I won't spoil it here,
(43:15):
but will link to his blind pizza taste tests in
our show notes. And even if we can't be sure
that stable foods like pizza and bagels are objectively better
because of the exact chemical makeup of the water. There
are several solid facts to be glad about. For starters,
the water supply generates two and a half times as
much power as it uses. One of the great unknowns
(43:38):
about New York City's water supply we talked about how
it's all fed by gravity, is we have four hydroelectric
generating facilities on our water supply. New York City's water
supply generates almost two and a half times the amount
of electricity that it uses, So we're we are sort
of like, uh, the original green infrastructure, if you want
(43:59):
to think of it that way. What do you like
about water best? And what do I like about water? Well,
we talked about that idea that you know, people can't
survive or thrive without it. But I think one of
the things that I find most interesting about New York
City's water supply is it's sort of the silent service, right,
so you wake up in the morning, you turn the
faucet on, and you really never question whether it's going
(44:20):
to be there or not. UM. I talked about this
from time to time. We turned on the water supply
in eighteen forty two. Uh, there's not been a day
since then that New York City has gone without water
through the biggest storms in its history, blackouts, terrorist attacks.
I mean, you name a natural or man made disaster,
and there has not been a single day during those
(44:41):
that the city has gone without water. That's in part
because of the genius design of the system, but it's
also because there are a lot of people who are
working literally twenty four hours a day to make sure
that we maintain that perfect batting average, right, And there
are more than a thou and employees who are New
York City employees that work north of the city doing
(45:04):
that work. And you know, we're only here for a
short period of time compared to the lifespan of the system.
We're only here for twenty to forty years, you know,
depending on how long someone's career is um But during
that time, when we are the steward of this water supply,
it is on us to maintain that perfect batting average
twenty four hours a day, every single day for our
(45:24):
entire career. And we take that really, really seriously. And
that's just to say an awful lot of work goes
into getting that water to New York City, whether it's
monitoring the reservoirs to understand where the best water is
if we see overnight that the best water is no
longer at the top of the reservoir, but it's at
(45:45):
the bottom. There are people who get up at two
thirty in the morning and go operate cranes to move,
you know, massive iron gates that are twice as big
as you are tall and weigh a heck of a
lot more to change the elevation of that draw from
the reservo are to make sure it's sent to the city.
There are people who are sitting in front of computer
screens and monitoring thousand, thousands and thousands and thousands of
(46:08):
alarms that could go off for different things around the
water supply, to make sure that we're watching the valve
chambers and the dams and the aqueducts and all the
things that actually make it work, the mechanical portions of
the water supply. There are people who are working in
the treatment facilities making sure that the UV doses proper
and the chlorineum doses proper. So all of the stuff
(46:31):
happens um twenty four hours a day, but nobody knows
about it because it's the great silent service that has
always been there and knock on wood always will be
there so that New York City can survive and thrive. UM.
Last area of questions that I have for um, do
you cook? Do you like to cook? I love to cook?
UM tell me do you have a greater appreciation for
(46:54):
water than your average cook? Or how do you What
do you think about water in the kitchen? Do you
think about it at all? I think about it from
time to time? You know? I? Well, you tell me
is what are more important for cooking or for baking?
Water is universally important, period, But I think that cooking it,
I mean, there are other there are other liquid supplies. Uh.
(47:15):
For baking, you can use the milk, you could use beer, um,
whereas you can't make a stock really with milk, you know.
And what I love about water is that. Um, here's
what I love about water. Uh. It's a flavor extractor.
It pulls flavor out of bones. It it dissolves UH
(47:35):
collagen into gladin the cartilage, and UH pulls connective tissue
apart to give us body. Um. Uh it's a natural thermometer.
It won't go above two hundred twelve, so you're always
cooking things below browning temperatures in water. UH and it's
a it's a heat extractor as well. You stop food
from cooking if you put it in cold water. It's
(47:55):
just powerful, dense uh element. So that's what I love
about what are so many different facets of its usefulness.
You've jogged my memory because this is the time of
year when I'll start to think about water and cooking
more than perhaps other times a year. Because one of
the things that I like to do is we get
deeper into the falling into the winter, is cook something
(48:16):
that we can have for multiple days. So yes, absolutely,
that's very important people to realize that it is. And
so and so it tends to be the things you
cook in a big vat of water that are most
important for that. And our favorite at home is is
homemade chicken soup and getting uh you know, we're lucky
to live amidst a lot of local farms and we
can get very good whole chickens and put it in water,
(48:41):
cook it with parsnips and carrots and celery and all
the other things you want to have in a in
a in a good stock. And the thing I always
think about with the water is not only obviously making
sure it's there, but it's always making sure I have
enough of it, so you don't you don't want to
boil off so much that then man, I didn't make
as much as I wanted to. Know, I only have
three days worth instead of five days worth, and that's
(49:03):
a real pain in the rear end. So you know,
we're getting into the season where I think I cook
more with water during this time of year than I
would do this summer. Interesting to the spring. Interesting Why
didn't I tell this water expert that when you cook
too much water out of your stock, just add what
you cooked out of it water. When we come back,
(49:26):
Jean Jorge wants to cook his Tom Young Kung soup
main ingredient New York City water straight from the tap. Okay,
(49:54):
so we were in the Gangs kitchen is one of
the most beautiful kitchens in New York City. Um, and
therefore the world. We have before us a little um,
a pan of shrimp cilantro, two tight chilies, some beautifully
cut limes, a variety of mushrooms, and we have fish
sauce and lime leaves. So that's that's actually the lemony.
The fish choice is all really all seasoning. Uh huh.
(50:16):
This is the salt. This is the salness. The salt
is fish sauce. Acid is a lime aarra. Mats are
the lemon grass, lemon grass, lemon grass, let me wrap.
It's just said, it's so fragrance, so lemon me so fresh.
You've got to realize that Joan Guorge comes alive when
he's cooking. He cracked the lemon grass in half and
(50:37):
holds it to his nose, closes his eyes inhales, and
when he opens his eyes they are twinkling. As he
puts the lemon grass to your nose. It makes them
so happy. So okay, we've got a picture of water
going into a gorgeous um SACI a copper saucy. A
(50:57):
good About what two cups are treat caps at three cups,
it's about a cup. They're gonna have some lime leaving
there right away, right away. This is the infusion. So
about four or five linleaves go in there, the double
sided limeleaves. You're throwing all of them in there. You know,
in time when you use the soup, they leave everything
(51:19):
in there. They leave the line. Maybe we cannot we
can actually can you cannot eat it? The lemon glass
is very hard but you have to pick up on
it as a way they do the soup on the stew.
They only leave in the lemonglass. They leave everything in
the hole and it's for you to pick it out,
you know, all right, So you're gonna smash that. So
this I gonna cut them in a have you seen pieces?
(51:45):
What's important is to uh, I take the back of
my knife. He goes right in. He's cut a long
lemon grass stock in the four inch pieces, and it's
whacking them along in the length with the act of
his knife to help them release their flavor into the
water in the same way that he crushes with his
(52:06):
fingers the lime leaves. You gonna cover it up, so
he goes a little faster. Okay, you've got it on
a graduated flat tap, so it gets very hot towards
the center there. That's right. Don't we gonna let this
boil on refuse probably for six million minutes the meantime,
I'm gonna so mush home up to be clean. Cutting pieces.
You can almost do this while the bottle. You know,
(52:27):
you can always you could prep this. You can sell
the water your while your water is wiling. It's that fast,
I mean you can't do this ahead of time and
then just push your string. But you mushroom last minute season,
last minute, so can you You could pull that, You
could infuse it for a ten minutes, pulled off the heat,
and then when you're ready to go, just bring it
back up the heat. The chili is just gonna keep
it together up. But I gotta cut it. So he
(52:47):
releases a favor. Uh huh am I leaving the sheety
as well. And now, okay, so stem on Withdrew, Yeah,
level level, you don't slice, you don't slice him. No,
I didn't want to get home just to infuse, okay.
And then Solantro. Silantro is another one. Now, Silantra is interesting.
You told me you're one of those people who tasted
(53:08):
soap when you the first time you're annoying only pastle
a rosemary time on a basil. I living Talian. For
some attested the clant It was like, oh my god,
this like soap base hope you know, so at this
we're gonna chop it, but really not fine, not fine,
you're leaving the stems in there. And yeah, well I
(53:30):
was just qu that's gonna go the last minute in
in a last. So it's just gonna Wilson Mountain. You
have a line of a fishers and I love how
you cut the line, so there's no none of that
core in there, so you get all the juice from
the lime. Absolutely, so it's fairly it's almost ready. You
(53:53):
start to wait for the infusion and everything goes in there. Yeah,
one in the seasoning. Now you're very big in the city.
I gotta see detailing my palette from my mom all
our salads. You know, we were always we agree, you know,
not too much lemon because we don't just doesn't growing
as us. But more vinegar, mostly vinegar. You knows good
(54:17):
on you boys are just removed a couple that the
reviews this is all kind of cooking two seconds. So
how do you how do you how do you teach
someone How would you teach someone at home to use acidity?
How how far should they take? How do you know?
Because they can't be here with you saying you can
say this is now it's on the money or Morris.
(54:40):
I think cooking is personal. So some people are good
more I citytail than others. But I know I'm looking
at it. Sometimes people put a lemon on the side
of a dish, start eating it on the squeeze at
the most piece. All the more your pilot gets. You know,
after a couple of bytes you get to you want more,
You want more, you want more than heat. You want
(55:00):
more of that. You know, fragrance flavor if if after
two bites boring, put on images. So what's the order
going to be. We've now got a pan of water
swimmering with lime leaves, chili peppers, and lemon grass. Then
the order is gonna be. You're always gonna be much
(55:22):
home which you're gonna release her own flavor. One flavor,
so that's gonnafuse another again, another dimension to the soup
that prettys Google mommy flavors to it. That's right. Then
I'm gonna season it nanea lime juice last minute the
stream because they're gonna push very quickly. When I know
the point done too easy to Yeah, I know it's
(55:45):
we need good water on New York as the finest water.
Yeah we're talking about that. Yeah, I mean I learned
that he can the New York water can it says
the best in the country. But because he comes from
a hundred seventy five lakes, upset New York, so natural,
so you know, handmade my maid on and he goes
via dukes all the way to the city and and
(56:06):
of course he's treated. But it's it's all from lex
so it's you know, it's pretty amazing. Some other areas,
you know, they have to use take the salt to
take seawater, take the salt water. Some other areas they
have couldn't collect from rains. I mean there's a lot
of rain water too, but from les so here we
are am I name my mushrooms. It's about a minutes
on infusion when you can see the water tunes a
(56:29):
little greenish. Yeah, this is cooling, and the lads returning
a little brown nash lun juss fishers. I'm'm gonna put
it all because I want to test it to make sure,
right than sure it's good on. The most important is
(56:50):
not to to reduce this. Why why is that you
know he gets very salty with it's but it's very
up with lime. Yeah. Yeah, and you added the rest
of the you held back on the fifth sauce and
then put the rest in there. Now the shrimp's going in. Yeah,
that's what I'm thinking. To a nice, nice, nice bro, Now,
(57:13):
why don't you want it on the center of that
waut the first time there was a vein and the
van the shell head on everything, so which be nice too,
but to the more work, Well, super am I eating
my stream? You're the fault. So I noticed that you
(57:34):
it's it really has not reached a hard will just
just summer sun up. I mean when you went infusing,
you have you left to bring it to a boy
like a tea on and you remove it similar little bit.
I know I'm a stream to be cook, but not
to you know on and beautiful slaunch talk that's gonna
(57:55):
bring that green glasses launch and slam. Was all going
into the pot. Ye can see the shrimp almost done,
almost cooked. So you want that cilantro to infuse a
little too, You don't use it as a garnish. At
the end, after we wait it in there, I'll show
you the way I had it in the street the
(58:16):
first time. You see the color has changed. You see
what the has changed with water soup, it's refreshing and
so so yeah, some jasmine rice, which is pite an investment, beau.
(58:36):
So they often eat eat rice with soup. They'll take
a bite of soup and then a bite of rice.
It's usually the you put the rice in a in
a ball on a new When you eat it, you
cover on the fragments of the rice. Is really jasmine
is really awesome. I love it. Yeah, mess like it.
(58:58):
It's just come back to the summer. You can see
that the shrimp are done. That's it. You know what's nice?
When you eat it? You you can you know, second
a lemon grass a little bit. I was working on
some recipes with an Indian chef, Suvir Seran, who likes
to leave inedible aromatics in his curry, like clothes and
cardamom pods, as a reminder for us to eat carefully
(59:20):
and thoughtfully. And sometimes you just want to bite into
a little flavor bomb like that. Yeah, exactly, because you
put a chili. Get a chili in there. Gorgeous. Now
we have to eat it. We gotta eat it. What
we're good? Beautiful? So wait, wait to eating is really
(59:45):
too uhcause rice lead them home. So you put some
on rice and spoon, pick up some soup. Good Thailand
as the best. Wow, it's beautiful, beautiful, thank you. When
you have a couple of spoons. All right, let's get
some spoons. That's it good when I am so, We've
(01:00:12):
seen where our water comes from, explored some of the
engineering feats that get water from the mountains of New
York to New York City, and looked at one phenomenal
use for water in the kitchen with Jean Jorge. Next
time you turn on that faucet to Philip pot, take
a few moments to consider where it came from, what
it can do, and how lucky we are to have it.
(01:00:37):
Special thanks to our guests Adam Bosh and Sarah Kelsey.
If you enjoyed hearing us chat from within the old
Crotton Aqueduct, go check out one of Sarah's tours and
go see it and enjoy it yourself. You won't regret it.
Thanks also to chef Jean Jorge vangar ritten. His brand
new memoir, which he and I co wrote, is out
now and it's called j G V A Life in
(01:01:00):
twelve Rescues. Lastly, my new book is out now too.
It's also called From Scratch, but it's all about cooking
and ten meals that can teach us all we need
to know in the kitchen. We'll have a link to
it and all the other links in the show notes
and on my site ruman dot com. From Scratch. The
(01:01:22):
podcast is produced by Jonathan Dressler. Our executive producer is
Christopher Hasiotis. Our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. All the
music on From Scratches by Ryan Scott off his album
A Freak Grows in Brooklyn. From Scratch is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my heart Radio,
(01:01:45):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Has been here, Got
a smile on Me as a man only, where my
(01:02:12):
mo evers only, sad M
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