Evan Hanczor landed in New York with many passions but no plan.
He was a voracious reader and poet. He enjoyed academic research and was preparing to apply for a Fulbright. And he’d discovered, almost by accident, a talent for cooking.
Hanczor had decided to explore food as a career but his first New York cooking job didn’t work out. “There was little interest in where the food was coming from,” he said. “The foundation of the restaurant was not something I really connected to.”
And then good fortune hatched in the form of Egg, the “acclaimed and perpetually packed” farm-to-table breakfast spot in Brooklyn.
Hanczor applied for a job as a line cook and immediately hit it off with Egg’s founder George Weld. They shared a love for “the balance of cooking that’s so appealing,” Hanczor said. “There is the physical labor, the craft, the tactile element where you’re making something with your hands. But in addition, it’s intellectual, mental, creative, academic engagement that a lot of food industry work lacks.”
Five years later, Hanczor has found success precisely by merging his work as a chef with his interests in writing and policy. The literary-themed feasts he helmed have won accolades and next month he’ll publish his first cookbook, an ode to breakfast co-authored with Weld. He’s also involved with an array of food-focused nonprofit and activism groups, which won him an industry Rising Star award for his sustainability work.
In a Q&A with The Huffington Post, Hanczor shared details about how he works and how he learns, his intellectual influences, his morning routine, and his predictions for the next big trends in food.
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You started at Tulane University in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina. What was that like?
I arrived for my freshman year two days before Katrina hit. We evacuated immediately, went away for one semester, then returned to New Orleans in January or February. It was a crazy college experience, a crazy orientation.
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On the global level, I’ve worked with Oxfam recently on a number of campaigns. They have been leaders in an effort to get chefs more involved in food issues and to harness the expertise and marketability of chefs on food issues. They work a lot with this group called Chef Action Network, which organizes chefs around the country on issues from school food to international food aid policy to hunger to climate change. That group helped get me much more focused on advocacy and policy work.
Fir mush? Nope: spruce vinegar in the works from our (still-standing) Christmas tree. #Apartmentforaging #wastenot >A photo posted by @evanhanczor on Jan 19, 2015 at 6:01pm PST
What are some emerging food trends that those of us who aren’t professional chefs may not be aware of?
Trends are always hard to predict, and often frustrating when they arrive. One exciting thing that I’ve been hearing a lot about is an emerging awareness of the importance and diversity of grains.
The pin-up vegetable phase has come — tomatoes are deified, and pasture-raised beef and heritage pork is all around, and that’s all awesome. But I think grains are primed for the next turn in the limelight, everything from bakers, pasta makers and pizza restaurants, and fresh grains in-house.
People are being exposed to the intensity of flavor that comes from freshly milled and heirloom grains. It’s a revitalization of the way we think about breads and flour. It’s not just this stuff that sits in your cupboard for a year, and you use it every once in a while; it’s like the way coffee has changed from something you’ll buy pre-ground and use for months to now people wanting fresh beans, grinding them five minutes before they make their cup of coffee, and celebrating the variety of qualities that come out of different coffee beans and coffee-growing regions. I think the same sort of thing where we can tap in with grains.
Savory oatmeal from Egg. Photo by George Weld.
I think potatoes have also been passed over to a degree by the foodie movement. Fingerling potatoes were exciting for a little while. But again, like grains, there’s this huge diversity of potatoes, different varieties and qualities, particularly here in New York, which used to be I believe the leading potato-growing region in the country. We’ve talked with people at Cornell University’s Ag Extension Program, and up at our farm, growing different sorts of potatoes that thrive in New York soils. I think these will have more of a presence on menus and more of an appreciation from chefs, instead of something you just mash or roast or put under a piece of meat.
More generally, there’s a great book about Mark Twain and his love for food, “Twain’s Feast,” that highlights his delight with regionalized ingredients that were so prized for what they were. Someone wrote about shad; it wasn’t shad in general, it was Connecticut River shad. These days, we think of Virginia or Kentucky country hens. Wheat that’s grown in the Northwest is amazing, potatoes that are grown in New York, or peppers that are grown in New Mexico — this idea of prizing the qualities and quality of regional ingredients will come back into the mainstream a bit more.
As people better understand how food is grown, where it’s grown and the conditions of it, and how those conditions affect that final product, I think new appreciation for those regional specialties will arise. It exists to some degree now, but I think it’ll become more encompassing than just smoked salmon from the Pacific Northwest, but of things that are grown all over the place.
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