Chef Eric & Laura Lee/ Santa Rosa, CA

Salad Season  

Chef Laura Lee’s best advice for budding culinary professionals is: Taste everything. “The thing that I would emphasize for any student is to continue tasting,” she says. “Taste everything all the time. It’s the only way to keep yourself excited and to really gain the knowledge you need. Eat out as much as you can, travel as much as you can.”

Laura and her husband, Eric Lee, own Chef L Custom Culinary Experience, creating one-of-a-kind private dinners with expert food and wine pairings in the San Francisco Bay Area and California wine country. Laura and Eric travel for inspiration as much as possible, but being a chef is time-consuming, so they look for fresh ideas close to home, too. “Head into unknown grocery stores,” Laura says. “Taste in Asian markets, taste in Filipino markets.”

Another place they find global flavor is The Perfect Purée. One of Chef L’s first courses on its summer menu, Gulf Prawn Escabeche, Avocado, Grapefruit, El Corazon Mojo de Ajo Shaved Radish & Baby Spinach Salad, was inspired by The Perfect Purée Red Jalapeño. Escabeche (fish marinated in an acidic sauce with herbs and spices) is popular in Latin American, Spanish, and Filipino cuisines. Used for marinating and pickling, it’s endlessly adaptable. “After tasting [Red Jalapeño], this was the first use that came to mind,” Laura says. “The acidity with complex fruit flavors made me think of a mojo de ajo dressing I was making with grapefruit. In development, I decided to prepare the shrimp in an escabeche instead of grilling to infuse even more of the fruit flavors.”

Laura finishes the salad with mojo de ajo, a Mexican garlic and olive oil infusion. Along with this potent, versatile ‘garlic gravy,’ the dressing’s bold flavor comes from white miso paste, mint, basil, Red Jalapeño, and El Corazon, an original bar chef-inspired blend of passion fruit, blood orange, and pomegranate. “We’re obsessed with [El] Corazon in this garlicky dressing. It just brings out the bright flavors,” Laura says.

Wine Country Wisdom

Eric graduated from the Culinary Institute of America with the singular goal of creating food memories all over the world. He’s been a caterer on photo shoots, a culinary instructor, and a chef at Apple. He was also a contestant on Season 8 of “The Next Food Network Star.”

Chef L began after Laura and Eric met at Simi Winery, where they both worked as chefs. More than food, Chef L forges emotional connections and creates lasting memories. Experiences include a five-course wine dinner, a cooking class with a multi-course dinner, and a nine-course chef’s tasting menu. Seasonal, farm-fresh menus are customized for every individual in the group.

The Lees’ WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) Level 2 training and collective experience working at wineries gives them extensive knowledge of food and wine pairings. “Steak and fish are the basis of our dinner offerings, then we allow clients to customize with seasonal suggestions changing every two months or so,” Laura says.

The Perfect Purée stars in decadent fruit caramels. “Seasonally, we rotate which fruit flavor we’re using to do a caramel with one or more desserts,” Laura says. She’s been using the products for 30 years, from climbing the ladder at large-scale restaurants to working as an instructor at the Napa Valley Cooking School and CIA Napa. “I became familiar with [The Perfect Purée] through the pastry department, then as a chef, you go to the bar after work, so I saw it in lots of cocktails,” she says.

Hot Tamales

Laura and Eric partnered with The Perfect Purée for the 2024 Worlds of Flavor Conference at the CIA at Copia in Napa. The theme, “Borders, Migration, and the Evolution of Culinary Tradition,” asked chefs from every corner of the globe to reflect on how ingredients migrate with people from one continent to another. The Lees turned to three cross-cultural flavors, Coconut, Tamarind, and Red Jalapeño for their Madras Lamb Curry Coconut Tamale.

“My favorite thing to do is recipe tasting and development, and I couldn’t get past this connection of a South Indian curry, which utilizes tamarind, chili, and coconut, and a Latin American dish that utilizes the same ingredients in very different ways. That’s sort of how I got stuck with using an Indian curry and putting it in a tamale,” Laura says, laughing. “It seemed like a great way to bridge the two [cuisines] and keep the authenticity. Curry utilizes mostly dry-roasted chili, but there’s a condiment-like chili paste in Indian curry.”

Tamales gave the couple a chance to play with fire for a change. “Our passion is travel and learning from chefs around the world, and we’ve spent a reasonable amount of time in Mexico, but we don’t really have a lot of opportunity to create big, bold flavors in our day-to-day work,” Laura explains. “We do infuse flavors from around the world in our cuisine, but we have to avoid things like chilis because they don’t work with red wine that has tannins, and all red wine has tannins.”