by Kristina Kuhaupt, Customer Experience Manager
I have had the pleasure of seeing Mike Tomaloff’s passion for recipe development, honoring of ingredients, and joy of teaching for a little more than a year now in his role as a part-time Co-op class instructor. Mike’s full-time gig while he was teaching classes here and there throughout the month was working at our Production Kitchen. Over the last eight years he has been a Production Cook, making many of the items you see in our stores (and maybe have eaten yourself), including thousands of pounds of soups, salads, and hot bar dishes. He’s also developed many of the Co-op’s recipes including our corn fritters, green chili black beans, and mac and cheese. If you have taken some of Mike’s classes already, you will be pleased to know that you will be seeing many more class offerings now that Mike is our full-time class instructor, teaching classes for both adults and children alike. We are very excited to have him in this new role! So that you can get to know Mike better, enjoy some reading below.
Classes are a fun way to learn more cooking tips, tricks, and skills you may want to hone, and they are a great way to plan a good night out with friends, co-workers, and family. Additionally, if you are looking for a private class for any reason, check out www.willystreet.coop/private-classes. We’ve conducted classes for anniversaries, bridal showers, department team-building events, and birthday parties of all ages.
And now, five questions with Mike Tomaloff:
What has inspired, or continues to inspire, you to be in a culinary career?
When I was younger, my interest in the culinary arts focused on fine dining and the “restaurant scene.” These days I am far more interested in the universality and accessibility of food and cooking rather than making those things exclusive or elite. One of the things that has inspired me in cooking for the Co-op is that the Co-op is for everyone. I want my classes to be for everyone, too, whether they’re experienced home cooks or brand new to cooking.
What are you most excited about in your new role?
Demystifying the craft of cooking, highlighting the beauty in simplicity, and demonstrating techniques and methods that, I hope, will encourage folks to try something new, and to think outside the recipe. When you start experimenting with flavors and techniques you learn more than you ever would strictly following recipes.
What is one of your favorite classes to teach, and why?
I am looking forward to teaching “Rustic Noodles and Dumplings” again. That class is a great example of some of my favorite themes: universality, simplicity, and method over recipe. Every food culture in the world has some version of noodles or dumplings, virtually all borne out of similar circumstances and made with inexpensive ingredients. The simplest of ingredients, eggs, flour, water, and salt, coming together to make dozens of variations. When you learn the basic methods and techniques of the recipes in this class, the possibilities are endless: gnocchi, pelmeni, pierogi, soup dumplings, rolled noodles, spaetzle, klösse, knödel, and I could go on!
Do you have a favorite chef you most look up to?
There are many famous chefs that I admire, whether for their cuisine or their approach to it: Pepin, Bourdain, Keller, Beard, and, of course, the queen herself, Julia Child. However, it was my great aunt Harriet Rosinski, and her niece, my mother, Kathy Novak, who first inspired and taught me. Both accomplished home cooks, one a homemaker and matriarch, the other a working mother. Something was always cooking at Hattie’s house, and there are dishes of hers that I love to prepare, the smells filling my home and transporting me back thirty, forty years in time. My mother did a lot of adventurous cooking before I came along and continued to cook for our family even when she was busy with work. Several of her staples are in my regular rotation to this day. Fortunately, both of these women shared what they knew with me and inspired me to go on and learn more.
What is your favorite cooking tool and technique that you feel would more positively benefit most folks in the kitchen to have a better experience when trying to prepare a meal for the day?
When it comes to tools, I know it’s been said before but there really is no substitute for a good, sharp knife. Gimmicks, gadgets, single-purpose kitchen toys? Save your money and get a decent knife, and keep it sharp. As for technique, my advice is to get a notebook or something for planning your culinary exploits and recording the results. The more you plan, getting your mise en place in order, the less effort you will expend on the actual execution. Keeping a record of your successes, and particularly the not-so-successes, will help you to improve and learn as you go. It will also make a good heirloom for the future cooks in your kitchen!