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DSoon, when he talks about how important order in gastronomy is for him, Emilio Deik (58) stands up, leaves the living room and walks towards his kitchen. Enter a large, well-lit room, with a central counter, a couple of ovens and various pieces of furniture where there are pots, wooden boards, utensils, molds, gloves, knives, and sophisticated technological machines. But that’s not what he wants to show: he opens a door on the side and then his pantry appears. There everything is classified and packaged in small glass jars, with the neatness of a laboratory.
“Here are all types of salt,” he indicates on one of the shelves. And it continues: “Over here, the Thai dressings. This is dried galangal, which is a type of ginger used for Tom Yun Goong soup, exquisite. There I have a variety of seeds. Up here, Japanese ingredients and sauces. Next, the legumes. Here, Mexican ingredients. Here, variety of algae. There, the legumes, the chili peppers. Down here, shrimp paste.”
He speaks with enthusiasm, but also with knowledge. 18 years ago he created a blog that still exists, called Chef Deik, where he has uploaded some 1,400 recipes, each accompanied by the history of the dish. He has prepared them all. It receives around 100,000 visits a month there. It also has an Instagram, with the same name, which is very popular – since its creation, in 2020, it has 2,193 publications – and is followed by nearly 130,000 people. Now he has just released his own book, Chef Deik. Stories and recipesin a self-edition of 2,000 copies.
Emilio Deik, in any case, is a self-taught chef. Industrial civil engineer from UC, dedicated to technology and software development, created the company Azurian three decades ago, which today is already in five countries. He mentors entrepreneurs, is a university academic in digital transformation, is an investment fund advisor and a director in several companies, such as Scotiabank (where he is vice president). He admits that he dedicates his weekends and some weekday evenings to cooking. “It’s a very entertaining trip, I love it. Furthermore, the kitchen has a lot of engineering,” he says with conviction. It will explain why.
A chef is born
He says he comes from a family of gourmets, but not cooks. Even he himself had a late connection with what is today one of his main passions. It happened in 2006, after a trip to Mexico, where he encountered a ceviche that blew his mind. “It was with snapper and they added avocado, tomato, cucumber, cilantro, onion, lemon juice,” he explains. Back in Santiago he prepared it several times and his impressed guests always asked him for the recipe. As an easy way where they could search for it, he posted it on a blog. And he added the story of the preparation, something he has not stopped doing in all his online publications..
He started having visitors. He got excited and since he had also started cooking – as if it were an old love, of which he had no news -, he filled the Chef Deik blog with more recipes and their respective stories. “For example, I published the recipe for Caesar Salad and its history that began in Tijuana. Or the brownie, which was born by accident when someone made a mistake in the proportion of the ingredients. There are stories that come by chance, others by accident, others by migration.”
“I published the recipe for the Caesar Salad and its history that started in Tijuana. Or that of the brownie, which was born by accident when someone made a mistake in the proportion of the ingredients”
This is how the years passed, with Emilio participating in companies and directories, while Chef Deik cooked and posted his recipes on the internet. He learned to ferment foods, make charcuterie, make cheese and bake different types of bread. He visited fairs, visited coves, went to the Asian supermarkets in Patronato. During the pandemic, he took another step: he opened an Instagram account and, in keeping with the language used on that social network, he began uploading short videos, which he records while preparing his dishes, to which he then adds a voice-over. This new showcase increased his fame as a chef. “My kids’ friends meet me and say, ‘How’s Chef Deik?’ And they asked my mother: ‘Are you Chef Deik’s mother?’” she says, laughing.
He says that he uploads recipes frequently, that he is very rigorous about that. Again, the order. “I have a system. First, I have a kind of recipe incubator where I’m watching and researching. There is always a list of recipes in that incubation process. Then there are others that are in pre-production, which I already have more finished. And then I have a publishing plan,” he explains. “I tend to post Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and I post what I cook to eat at home.”
“My kids’ friends meet me and say, ‘How’s Chef Deik?’ And they asked my mother: ‘Are you Chef Deik’s mother?’” she says, laughing.
Illustrated recipes
Since 2006, Emilio Deik has been building a good library of cookbooks. And four years ago he thought, “Why not write one?” He didn’t want just one recipe book, because he says there are already many. So he decided that it would be in the same formula as his blog: each preparation with its story. But something else was missing. And what he was looking for he finally found in botany, another of his tastes.
“I have had a passion for plants, flowers, trees and the garden since I was a child, instilled by my father who was also a very fanatic.. I even thought about studying Botanical Engineering. It has been a lowest common denominator of my entire life, and it still remains,” he explains. He also liked the illustrations that accompany books on the subject. And it was right there where he found inspiration: “I wanted my book not to be with photos, but with drawings like botany texts.”
He started looking for who could do it. It was not an easy assignment. “Until a friend shared a recipe with me and it came with an illustrated red radish. ‘This is what I want!’ I thought. “I located the person who had done it, Francisca Espinoza, and I presented the idea to her.” She responded that she was a botanical illustrator, not a gastronomic one, and Deik clarified that it was exactly what she needed. That art put at the service of the ingredients of a recipe. The artist accepted, and worked on it for four years. “Only the cover took six months to paint. All the illustrations, about 150, were painted with watercolor on a special paper that I brought from London, based on animal leather fiber, because that makes the watercolor absorb perfectly without losing its shine.“, account.
– How much does it cost to make a book like this? It must be very expensive.
– Yes, it’s expensive. It bothers me to talk about money.
-But some figures…
-The printing press alone cost $30 million with VAT… But I think that, if I sell what I have in mind, I can recover what I invested. If I gave myself the pleasure of making a book like this, it is because I want to recover the money and have it sold. I have never stopped being a businessman. If the numbers work, I’m going to come out flush or with profit.
In 216 pages, the book – which will be in Contrapunto bookstores and on Chef Deik’s blog for $58,800 – contains 80 recipes. The variety of preparations is wide, eclectic: appetizers such as gravlax or baba ganoush; starters such as causa limeña or tuna tataki with black and white sesame; onion soup; meat empanadas; gnocchi; shrimp pad thai; desserts such as crepes suzette or nougats. “Generally chefs, whom I look at with great respect, tend to make semi-self-referential books,” he points out. But I had no history, no career, I’m not a chef either, in fact when I call myself that I feel like it’s a little stupid.…so this is a book where the protagonists are the ingredients, the recipes, the stories, the illustrations. In the end I am watching this in the third row.”
The chef entrepreneur’s business plan also includes publishing an edition of the book in English, because that opens up a larger market. “Sell it on Amazon, for example. We are also evaluating with an international publisher, selling them the rights so that they can do the publishing. We already have the texts translated.”
“If I gave myself the pleasure of writing a book like this, it’s because I want to recover the money and have it sold. I have never stopped being a businessman. If the numbers work, I’m going to come out flush or with a profit.”
– Does the idea of a restaurant not tempt you?
– All the people have told me why I don’t have a restaurant, but no chance. I think it is a very complicated business. Of three, two do not survive the third year. I enjoy life, I like to be quiet on the weekend. Anyone who owns a restaurant gets up at 5 in the morning to shop and goes to bed at cheese time. He is waiting to serve customers, he has a huge health risk, two roosters get sick and they sue you. No, that’s not a problem for me.
The recipe and the software
Emilio Deik maintains that the kitchen has a lot of engineering. “It has sequence, steps, processes, temperature, grams, liters, fermentation,” he points out.
“I am a software engineer. And what is software? A series of variables with a sequence of processes that are executed to achieve a result. It has parameters, calculations, numbers that are entered, sequenced, controlled, calculated and there is an output. If you make the analogy with the recipe, it is good looking. Ingredients are like variables. Processes are the functions of software and you also have a result,” he explains.
“In addition, in the software there is a user interfacea screen with beautiful colors, user friendly. Food also has something of that, because its result can be shown in various ways. The assembly of a dish is a kind of software interface.”
-And where is the emotional, sentimental space of the kitchen?
– Look, when you talk about assembling the plate, that’s where the art appears. The concept of ephemeral art, because you eat it and that’s it. But there is that sensory thing, of recognizing, for example, what you ate as a child and suddenly you eat it again. I had a memory of a recipe that I loved, an Arabic recipe, like little dough hats filled with meat and almonds on a yogurt broth. I ate it as a child, and later I didn’t even remember what the recipe was called. When I cooked it many years later, it was a step back. That happens a lot with recipes.
Deik says that he is one of the chefs who seeks precision. “You can find two types of cooks. There are those who like more improvised cooking, they fish for the ingredients and put together a dish. I did that sometimes, but what happened to me?… that afterwards I couldn’t reproduce what I had done, the result was never the same. And there are those of us who follow a recipe, the more precise the better. Don’t talk about cups, but about grams, cubic centimeters. And with specific ingredients. There are recipes that work with canned tomatoes and not with winter plum tomatoes, for example.”
-If you look ahead, will the chef end up imposing himself on the businessman?
– I am a businessman. I am a native of the business world. Furthermore, I am in the field of technology that is constantly changing, which is revolutionizing many things. The kitchen is like side business. So moving forward I want to have health and energy to continue doing what I like, which is being an entrepreneur. At 70, 75, 80 years old I see myself linked to business, possibly with a different logic. But not 100% dedicated to cooking, but to the same extent as I do now.
Bees in the garden
Deik goes into a corner of the garden and says: “Come closer, they’re not doing anything. “They are working.” It refers to the bees that he has in four hives installed at the entrance of his house.. “Six years ago I read an article about urban beekeeping, a movement that started in Spain and that I found super funny since it was about people who had hives in their apartments, on their terraces. I looked in Chile and met a person who did it: he had eight hives in his house. I went to see it with my wife and my children, as a family project. Then they wrinkled, but I continued. I have even given beehives to my neighbors,” he says.
He says that he has a partnership with three friends, with whom they own a centrifuge where they put the frames of the hives and extract honey. “I produce about 100 kilos of honey a year, a multifloral honey, of super good quality. “I package it and give it away.”
What specific business strategies might the chef employ to ensure the profitability of his high-end cookbook, considering its target market and distribution channels?
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Here are some open-ended questions based on the provided interview, broken down by thematic sections:
**Theme 1: The Business of the Cookbook**
* **On Investment and Profitability:** The chef mentions a significant investment in the cookbook. Do you think this high production cost is justifiable for a cookbook, even considering the luxurious aspects? What factors might determine whether or not this venture is ultimately profitable?
* **Target Market and Distribution:** The chef discusses selling the cookbook in bookstores, on his blog, and potentially through Amazon. How do you think these different distribution channels will impact his target audience and the book’s overall success?
* **Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing:** The interview mentions that the chef opted for self-publishing. What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing a high-end cookbook compared to traditional publishing routes?
**Theme 2: The Intersection of Cooking and Technology**
* **The “Software” of Cooking:** Deik compares cooking to software development. Do you find this analogy helpful or limiting? What are the strengths and weaknesses of applying a technological mindset to the culinary arts?
* **Precision in Cooking:** Deik emphasizes precision in his recipes, favoring grams and exact measurements. How important is precision in cooking, and does it limit creativity or spontaneity?
* **Technology’s Role in the Kitchen:** Looking ahead, how do you think technology will continue to influence and transform cooking and the dining experience?
**Theme 3: The Chef as a Businessperson vs. Artist**
* **Balancing Passion and Profit:** Deik describes himself as both a chef and a businessman. How can one successfully balance the demands of artistic passion with the practical considerations of running a business?
* **The Future of Deik’s Culinary Pursuits:** Given his business background and his emphasis on technology, do you think Deik’s culinary journey will focus more on entrepreneurship, food technology, or continue to be centered around traditional cooking?
**Theme 4: Bees and Sustainable Practices**
* **Urban Beekeeping:** How do you think Deik’s urban beekeeping initiative reflects a growing trend of sustainable practices and awareness of environmental issues in urban environments?
By exploring these themes and encouraging diverse perspectives on these questions, you can spark a rich and insightful discussion about the world of cooking, business, and the changing relationship between technology and artisan crafts.
