How This Brooklyn Chef (Sort of) Embraces Technology — Just Don’t Ask About Blue Apron
Chef Evan Hanczor of Egg in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Photograph: Conor Hagen)
Evan Hanczor isn’t the first chef to spring to mind in a discussion of food and technology. Egg, the Brooklyn restaurant where he’s the chef, is known for its hearty embrace of local ingredients and traditional methods. But Hanczor doesn’t consider himself “anti-tech” at all and he recently participated in the sixth annual James Beard Foundation Food Conference, which this year focused on the future of food. Leading up to the conference, we spoke to Hanczor about the intersection of food and technology, both at home and in restaurants. He shared his hopes and concerns surrounding culinary innovation, as well as why he thinks tradition and technology can and should co-exist in the kitchen.
Yahoo Food: Looking at the food and technology landscape right now, what inspires you the most?
Evan Hanczor: The explosion of small entrepreneurial companies that have some sort of tech element — whether it be cooperatives or food hubs that are based online — or use technology efficiently to get fresh produce from a local farm to a restaurant, in a much more efficient way, is pretty exciting to a chef because it frees up a lot of time. If I need to go to the market to access a certain farm, which I really enjoy doing, it does require a certain amount of time, both on my end and the farmer’s end. If there is someone who can streamline that and there isn’t a loss of quality or transparency [and you] can maintain the relationship element of that transaction — that makes it easier for people who might not necessarily be so committed to sourcing in a responsible way because it just seems like too much work.
What worries you about food technology?
Anything that leads in the direction of mindlessness in cooking worries me. [It’s] something about the Blue Apron home delivery stuff, where these ingredients are all packed into very idiot-proof packaging. It seems like one of the aims of those programs is to bring people back into a relationship with cooking, but if you’re not required to put a lot of thought into what you’re doing and aren’t really learning techniques or ideas you can apply to other ingredients, [and you are] just combining things and heating them up, I think that can create an unhealthy relationship with cooking, which a lot of people have now. Maybe it’s a little more involved than putting a frozen pizza in the oven or ordering food, but this has some sort of illusion of being — or at least the marketing does — that this is cooking and you’re doing something that’s somehow better for you.
Credit: Gillian van Niekerk/Stocksy
I don’t think technology is either inherently bad or good in someone’s relationship to food. It’s about the way it’s used. If you use technology in a way that allows you to free yourself from a physical office and be home to plan or orchestrate a meal … and then go back to whatever you’re working on, that’s a great way that technology can free you up. But if you spend your time flipping through Reddit or something, instead of making food for yourself or your family, that’s a place where it really obstructs.
Technology that’s not related to food is part of the issue. We say we don’t have time to cook — that idea has been around for a while. People spend too much time watching TV and now people spend too much time on YouTube or Instagram or Twitter.
What are some of the ways you use technology in the kitchen at Egg?
On the equipment side of things, we’re not heavy-tech. We cook in a lot of very traditional ways. But I think there’s new technology and there are traditional methods, and some combination of those things tends to produce the most interesting and most sustainable result.
For me, the kind of technology that finds its way into my job is usually a little bit separated from the food. It’s things like using an online scheduling platform or ordering so that I can take that time and put it toward cooking and educating in the kitchen. I think it has a lot of potential to help people be a little more mindful in the work they do if they don’t have to spend that time doing something more mundane.
At Egg there’s not a lot of new technology. We’re more interested in exploring older methods, like fermentation, curing, baking, things that are hands on, things that are tactile and familiar. Those are the methods that we tend to use, not for a lack of being aware of it, just for the fact that it’s not really part of what we do.
I think one of the big arguments in favor of technology is that it’s a time saver, that it makes things easier. That can be applied in the cooking process or you can save time in a million other things that are required in running any business, and, in particular, a restaurant.
Credit: Studio Firma/Stocksy
Egg is known for fairly traditional dishes. How do you balance tradition and innovation in the kitchen?
Everyone wants to innovate and innovation is great, but some of the best innovation is somehow informed by tradition. If you’re eating something that’s totally new, that can be exciting and very cool. But if you can create a dish that feels new, but taps into nostalgia, memory, or a traditional idea about food or flavor and refreshes those emotions in an interesting way, that can be even more powerful. And I think that’s kind of a similar approach to applying innovation on a larger scale — doing it in such a way that it refreshes older things, but doesn’t completely depart from them.
So, tradition and technology can work together in the kitchen?
I think that’s kind of essential. There’s a reason things have been done a certain way for a long time. Sometimes they’re bad reasons, sometimes they’re good reasons, but there are definitely positives to a lot of traditional approaches and tons of upside to taking those traditional ideas or approaches and pairing them with the exciting elements of technology to create an even better hybrid version. It’s kind of like plant breeding in a way. You pair two plants with particular qualities and characteristics, and breed a new offspring that’s even better. It’s not entirely new, because you want the knowledge and tradition and the weight of history that comes with them, but it improves upon that, and that’s how you get the best-quality ingredients. I think that’s how you can get the best approach to food moving forward.
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