Food and Wine Classic Reporters’ Notebooks: Day 3

Aw nuts: The cookie that changed a superstar chef’s life

Lauded chef Nancy Silverton returned to the FOOD & WINE Classic in Aspen this year with a jar of cheap peanut butter.

Her Saturday afternoon seminar, “The Cookie that Changed My Life,” featured three recipes including a chocolate salami (which is much less weird than it sounds, a cylinder of chocolate stuffed with nuts, made to look like a cured meat), biscotti morbidi (a round cousin of the cup of coffee’s best bud), and the star of the show, a simple peanut butter cookie. At least it looks simple when a 2014 James Beard Outstanding Chef Award recipient is making it, even if she didn’t understand how to use the Wi-Fi feature on the incredibly fancy Monogram stand mixer on stage.

“What I like is food that tastes good, that’s made properly,” Silverton told the crowd. A few essential steps? Leave the skin on the highest-quality Spanish peanuts you can find. Use more vanilla extract than you think you might need — vanilla paste is even better — use “golden butter,” which is mellower than the brown stuff but still adds a needed nuttiness, and, most importantly, the cheap stuff in the nut butter aisle. “Croissants and laminated doughs are not something that people want to make at home,” so with the launch of her 11th cookbook, the F&W Best New Chef of 1990 wanted to give people simple and classic. “Something that’s going to save time or be a great tip.”

Adding to the seminar, the toasted peanuts were so aromatic, the first-row guests could smell them. Silverton also gave other tidbits specific to Aspen, she mentioned she loves the “little cookies” at the year-old Aspen location of Italian food purveyor Sant Ambroeus. No samples were had, but as Day Two of the Classic wound down, this impressive culinary powerhouse showed why she’s as ubiquitous as her La Brea Bakery, which you’ve likely bought in the bread section of City Market.

— Katherine Roberts