We recently had the opportunity to visit Four and talk with their Chef de Cuisine, Matt Rosen. Four is a restaurant located in downtown Toronto (below Far Niente at the NE corner of Bay St and Wellington St), with an unique concept of low-calorie food – all their dishes are less than 650 calories! I’ve had the chance to dine at Four, both for drinks and lunch, on a few occasions and found their food quite good, so I was definitely curious to learn the secret behind their low calorie, tasty food. Chef Rosen was nice enough to demo his recipe for Grilled Salmon with Quinoa Tabbouleh and share his nuggets of information about cooking, creating a low calorie menu, and challenges of running a kitchen with us, all while feeding us his delicious salmon and desserts! It was so much information that we decided to write about it in a separate post from our Salmon post. Read on for some highlights from our conversation.
On how to create low calorie meals that taste good
Chef Rosen: So it’s really important when we’re designing the recipes that we take a lot of things into consideration. For example, vinaigrette is always 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. Unfortunately, each tablespoon of oil has 140 calories. So if I give the full quantity of oil I would like to give in a vinaigrette, it doesn’t tend to work out as well because I don’t have room in the recipe for other things. So it’s really important that we build really intense flavours right off the start. We start off all vinaigrettes the same way. Basically what we’re going to do is use salt and sugar to break down the shallots. What that’s going to do is basically suck out some of that harshness in the shallots and allow that sweetness to come out. But what you’re also doing is building a really strong flavour base.
On the process of creating new menu items
YouCook: How do you create new menu items for Four?
Chef Rosen: I’ll download 10 of the exact same recipe, and then find the commonalities in each recipe, and from that create my own. Once that is done, once my recipe is created, I’ll email it over to our nutritionist, who will email them back to me and say, you might want to watch your sodium, you’re under the calorie count, but your sodium is really high – something along those lines. And it’s been a battle – I know when we did Winterlicious this month, I had a recipe for tofu and black bean enchilada. It came in 200 calories over because of the oil in the sauce, not what’s actually in the enchilada. So we spent an hour back and forthing with each other. Ok, let’s take 15mL of oil out of the recipe because, that’s going to drop it, you know, a ton. Take the cheese out of the inside of the enchilada, so it’s only on top. So it was back and forth, back and forth, until ok, she said, “You’re at 650 now”. Great. So, it’s a big learning experience.
On types of cuisine as inspiration for new dishes
YouCook: What types of cuisine do you use for inspiration for new dishes?
Chef Rosen: You know, whether it’s Japanese food, Indian food, Southwestern cuisine, like being from the New Mexico-Texas type of area, that sort of thing. It (has to be) really intense off the start.
YouCook: Ok, so you use food that’s really intense off the start so you don’t need to use a lot of oil. So do you find things like French food not as good for this concept, because it uses a lot of butter?
Chef Rosen: It’s not that it’s not good…I like French food. But maybe it doesn’t lend itself, in some ways, to this cuisine we do because we have to focus on being much lighter. It’s a rash generalization that all French food is 35% cream and lots of butter. But it’s not that far off in the sense that it’s easy to build a strong flavour base.
YouCook: Would you classify your cuisine as fusion?
Chef Rosen: No. I don’t like the term fusion necessarily, because I feel that if you are going to do something, you should try to do the whole dish that way. Maybe “worldly”. I think fusion is the fusing of 2 cuisines, like we’re fusing together Chinese, Japanese, and French. There have been some wacky combinations out there, so I rather think of my food as a little more “worldly”. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to study about it and learn about it, and then try to do it the way it should be done. Like marinating something in soy sauce and calling it Asian fusion. I think it’s dis-respect to the good Asian food, and it is what it is.
On making low calorie desserts
YouCook: For desserts, how do you keep the calorie count low? Is there anything you can substitute for butter/cream/sugar that tastes almost as good?
Chef Rosen: (By having a) very skilled pastry chef… She comes up with very intense desserts, but they’re all in shot glasses. So the small portion size gets it under 200 calories. However, we still use butter and cream – just less of it.
At this point, Chef Rosen offered to bring out desserts for us to try, and they were delicious! I had the Double Chocolate Cream in cute shot glass size so it satisfied my craving for a sweet, intense chocolate dessert, but small enough to only cost 194 calories! I guess I was so busy devouring desserts that I failed to notice my camera had stopped recording so I will have to write up the rest from my notes and memory.
Chef Rosen and I continued to talk about desserts and portion control. He noted that in France, they still eat lots of butter and cream, but they are not as fat as North Americans. He believes that this is due to the smaller portion size. Their food is more rich and intense, so you eat less of it. He believes in “everything in moderation”. Also he made the point that you should use natural food over manufactured food, and there is nothing wrong with using real butter. I definitely agree with that!
