Reflection from Studio Kitchen: Bradlie Morgan

I wasn't sure what to expect of our lunch at Studio Kitchen. In my mind, I had pictured a small restaurant where Shola would stand by our table and cook our meals on a small cart, until I realized he didn't actually own a restaurant. Upon entering Shola’s “studio”, I was amazed at how it was set up as a regular apartment kitchen, but with shelves of spices stacked to the ceiling. I immediately sensed Chef Shola’s welcoming and vibrant personality, as I felt like I was visiting a relative for a home-cooked meal. However, my perception of him changed once he started cooking.

Now, I no longer saw him as a relative of mine, but as a true chef. His apparent knowledge and passion of cooking and the science behind it had taken over. When we discussed people’s opinions on whether or not Shola was a chef, I wasn’t exactly sure where I stood, as I hadn’t witnessed his work. I think that he is a chef now. I don’t think that a chef should be defined as a person who cooks in a restaurant. He is a chef because he is innovative, passionate, not afraid to make mistakes in his experiments, and wants to teach others about the amazing food he makes. I think that if Chef Shola had a restaurant, it would definitely make him more well known and more people would be able to experience what we had. However, I don’t think it would make him any more of a chef than he already is. His knowledge and access to innovative and high-end equipment allowed him to take his cooking ability even further.

It’s difficult to pick one piece of equipment that amazed me the most. Each piece encouraged him to experiment and use his knowledge of molecular gastronomy to make his food better or more interesting. However, I was first drawn to the vacuum chamber that he used to aerate the mousse. I don’t completely understand the science behind how it works, as I’m only familiar with the simple kitchen vacuum sealers. I know it was related to the differences in pressure from inside the bag/container to the vacuum chamber to outside the vacuum chamber. I’m really happy that he showed us an example with the watermelon and salt. One could immediately see a difference in the watermelons, as well as taste and feel a difference. The vacuum had concentrated the juice and flavor into a denser piece of watermelon, evenly distributing the salt throughout the fruit. I would have expected that he had discovered this from another chef, or maybe the instruction manual of the machine, but he listed different elaborate ways one could infuse a fruit with a different flavor with this machine. And he had discovered all of these with his own experimentation. I was shocked by his ability not only to experiment, but to grow from his unavoidable mistakes along the way. He did not let these mistakes stand in his way for long, as he would further experiment in different ways to find a recipe that worked.

Even his ability to know the exact amount of time to boil an egg to make a soft boiled egg reflected his patience and persistence. One can only imagine how long it would’ve taken to find the perfect amount of time to boil an egg. He discovered on his own that one should poke a hole in the bottom of the egg and that it didn’t matter if the egg was at room temperature or not. This experimentation is yet another example of his ability to be a chef. He spends much of his own time and effort on making his cooking both better and more efficient, and he aims to share his knowledge with others.