The Culinary Institute of America Videos from The Culinary Institute of America

Amanda Cohen is the James Beard-nominated chef and owner of Dirt Candy, the Michelin-starred vegetable restaurant in New York City's Lower East Side. Dirt Candy was the first vegetable-focused restaurant in New York City, and a pioneer of the plant-forward movement. Dirt Candy was also the first restaurant in the city to eliminate tipping and share profits with its employees. In this interview, Chef Amanda Cohen talks about how diner perceptions have changed, as well as the creative process in developing her whimsical vegetable dishes.
Watch the full documentary and find recipes here!

Inside the Plant-Forward Kitchen: New York is the second edition of a new educational video produced by The Culinary Institute of America—a first-of-its-kind video reference library documenting the best of plant-forward cuisine. In this documentary series, we explore the markets and restaurants of New York with the chefs who are on the leading edge of this culinary mega-trend.
We talk to Chef Amanda Cohen, a pioneer in the plant-forward movement at her restaurant Dirt Candy. We meet Chef Daniel Humm, who discusses how he transformed his world-famous restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, into a fully vegan establishment. We’ll experience the Middle Eastern creations of Shukette, traditional Iranian and Persian food at Sofreh, organic Queens diner fare at Golden Diner, and Southern Soul Food cooking at Cadence. We visit two Mexican restaurants, Cosme and Oxomoco, where the chefs combine Mexican gastronomy with locally grown New York produce. Finally, we leave New York to see how plant-forward principles can be scaled at high volume foodservice, when we head to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with Chef Alexander Ong.
Watch the full documentary and find recipes here!

A sabich is traditionally pita or laffa bread stuffed with fried eggplant, hard-boiled egg, chopped salad, amba, and tahini sauce. It’s an Iraqi Jewish street food that has become a staple of Israeli cuisine. This creative twist features watermelon salad and watermelon rind "amba." Amba is traditionally a super pungent, tangy mango sauce popular in Iraq and Israel. In this version, Chef Magnus Young, Chef de Cuisine and Culinary Manager at the Bruschetteria Food Truck for Clif Family Wines in St. Helena, CA, makes the sauce using watermelon rind in place of mango. This dish is a delicious way to use all parts of the watermelon and reduce food waste.
Get the sabich recipe here!

For a delicious dish that balances the richness of grilled lamb with the bright and fruity sweetness of watermelon molasses, try these grilled lamb chops with watermelon molasses, watermelon sofrito, and polenta. Your guests will love the combination of savory and smoky lamb with sweet and fruity watermelon glaze, spiced watermelon sofrito, and creamy polenta. Chef de Cuisine and Culinary Manager at the Bruschetteria Food Truck for Clif Family Wines in St. Helena, CA, Magnus Young shows us how to make this stunning entree.
Get the Grilled Lamb Chops recipe here!
 

This fruity, sweet, and refreshing drink inspired by the traditional michelada, uses watermelon juice in place of tomato juice. Chef Magnus Young, Chef de Cuisine and Culinary Manager at the Bruschetteria Food Truck for Clif Family Wines in St. Helena, CA, shows us how he makes this watermelon “melonchelada.”
Get the recipe for this Melonchelada Cocktail here!

Chef de Cuisine and Culinary Manager at the Bruschetteria Food Truck for Clif Family Wines in St. Helena, CA, Magnus Young shows us how to make a watermelon stack cake. This stack cake filling gets its beautiful color and sweet flavor from watermelon molasses and watermelon butter, and is inspired by a classic Appalachian dessert. Some historians believe that stack cake was a 19th century Appalachian wedding tradition, where each guest brought a single cake layer to the ceremony, which would then be assembled and spread with apple butter. This cake features sweet, jammy watermelon butter in between the layers.
Get the Watermelon Stack Cake recipe here.