!["And to accompany the [walleye] on the side, we're serving it with just gently cooked fennel with onion cream, some lilac blooms that have been preserved in Michigan apple cider vinegar, with some dill fronds and then also a few Dame's rocket blooms." Miller said.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/74e9d53/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3456x2129+0+88/resize/880x542!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F3a%2F54%2F61f48b05438dac13005a04201d11%2F2024-06-kenmiller-thedish-creditjodiwestrick-09.jpg)
Even after more than 15 years in some of the country’s finest kitchens, Ken Miller gets nervous when anyone tries his food for the first time.
“That comes with the territory of caring about what you do, though, right? Like, you want people to enjoy it, but you're also putting a little bit of yourself into every dish…” Miller said. “This is a kind of a creative version of, like, personality onto a plate as well. So it's a sense of vulnerability”
After attending culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago, and then cooking at a two Michelin-star restaurant in that city, Miller came back to Michigan, sharpening his skills as a sous chef at the Apparatus Room in Detroit, and then as executive chef at Toasted Oak in Novi.
Miller’s most recent projects have him experimenting with fermentation, preservation, and waste reduction.
“I think… for every successful dish, there's probably, you know, half a dozen failures behind it,” Miller said. “It's all about honoring the process, learning from your mistakes, learning new things. And then, a lot of times it's what not to do.”
The Dish got to know Miller through one of his latest successes: poached Lake Erie walleye with cucumber and dill, and a side of sauteed fennel with a white onion cream sauce.
A full plate of projects
These days, Miller and his wife Ashley co-own a dining consultancy called Yarrow. The couple helps clients develop and execute menu concepts and other culinary projects, plus their own pop-ups and events.
The two are preparing for a seven-week residency at Host, a restaurant in Utica, Michigan, where chef entrepreneurs are invited to showcase their culinary styles. Their menu is inspired, in part, by a Nordic Izakaya concept they featured at Frame, a pop-up space in Hazel Park.
“So we'll have things like, you know, oysters served with elderberry mignonette. We'll have things like a croute, a fish crudo served with sea buckthorn juice that is fortified with some fermented carrot and honey,” Miller said. “And then also, the dish that we're gonna be working on today. We'll be using lake trout at Host.”
The walleye dish exhibits Miller’s range and attention to detail. He cures a delicate filet with salt and vinegar, and then poaches it sous-vide. The surface is shingled with thinly-sliced cucumbers, and brushed with Ken’s special everything-bagel miso diluted with charred cucumber juice. He plates the filet in a vibrant green sauce of charred cucumber, fennel vinegar, and dill oil that's been thickened a bit of spinach puree.
“There's a little bit of discovery in this dish, especially coming from the everything bagel miso,” Miller said. “And so, trying to take the elevated, creative, aspect of food and kind of applying these, like, super local, super seasonal things, where we like to introduce people to new points of discovery, while also giving them a good balance of comfort as well.”
A commitment to preservation and no-waste
The everything-bagel miso is a mixture of Miller’s own design. Miso is typically a paste made of fermented soybeans, grains, and a type of mold called koji. Miller’s concoction, now five years old, instead uses koji and bagels.
“At Toasted Oak back 2019, in November, we were expecting a huge, huge banger of a weekend,” Miller recounted. “We accidentally ordered too many bagels, and instead of throwing away... I was like, ‘You know what? Why not? I have a couple trays of koji that I just finished up. Let's just see what happens.’”
Miller used water to break down the bagels, mixed in some koji and salt, stored the mixture in a bucket, and forgot about it as much of the industry shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“A couple months later, when we reopened, I was bringing some of my equipment back to the restaurant, and I was like, ‘Oh, I have this bucket, let's check this out.’ So I brought it in, and we opened it up, and it's a perfume of, like, sweet, fruity – the spices that are on ‘everything’ seasoning.”
According to Joseph Van Wagner, executive chef of the soon-to-open Echelon Kitchen and Bar in downtown Ann Arbor, waste management through preservation and fermentation have become a staple of Miller’s practice.
“And it's incredible what he's able to do with what most chefs are just throwing in the garbage,” Wagner said.
Miller’s been known to take protein waste, like beef and seafood waste, fermenting it with koji and other methods, and turning the result into seasonings, sauces, and garums.
“Something as seemingly useless as octopus head can be turned into a sauce that I guess we would liken a little bit to Worcestershire. He's capable of doing that, and he does that,” Wagner said. “The food implications, the flavor implications, aside from just waste management, are incredible.”
There’s also a financial incentive for leaning into more sustainable practices, Miller said. He estimates that his everything-bagel miso, for example, saved about $200 worth of bagels that might have gone in the trash.
“We get much more longevity out of [the miso], and it's a value-added product,” Miller said. “We can use it to elevate other things as well. So it's not just a cost saving thing, but you can increase the value of the dishes that you're putting out in front of guests.
A love for what’s seasonal, local, and wild
To pair with the walleye, Miller prepares a serving of lightly cooked, still-crunchy diced fennel dressed with an onion cream fortified with a bit of white wine. He speckles the dish with lilac blooms picked from his own backyard.
“And they've been soaking in apple cider vinegar made from Michigan gala apples,” Miller said. “So this is just going to be a little bit of a acidic pop to go on the accompaniment for the fish.”
Growing up in Flushing near Flint, Miller remembers nature walks with his grandfather and learning to identify edible plants. Now, he infuses that knowledge into his dishes.
Miller is uniquely “in tune,” Wagner said, with the ingredients that are native to Michigan. Some of his dishes have incorporated things like saskatoon berries and pawpaw – local fruits that don’t commonly appear on high-end dining menus.
“He is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to things, things that grow in Michigan,” Wagner said. “I mean, you can drive anywhere with [Miller] down the side of the road and he could point out like 10 or 12 things that are edible and can be used for this, and you can make a tea out of this, or a sauce out of this.”
!["The fish in and of itself, because it's basically just like very lightly cooked fish in a sauce, that [dish] is very light-bodied. And then we have this richer element that has some more texture to it to kind of like be, you know, a nice contrast," Miller said of the walleye and fennel pairing.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/45ef751/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3456x2304+0+0/resize/840x560!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa0%2F56%2Fd9e74181494c915a10e5cf9df1f0%2F2024-06-kenmiller-thedish-creditroniacabansag-1.jpg)
The richness of the fennel pairs nicely with the light-bodied fish filet.
“Rather than serving the two together on the same plate, this kind of gives you an opportunity to try them both together,” Miller said. “Or if you eat one and then get relief from another, then, you know, I think the flavors also played very well together between the two dishes.”
The successful pairing, like all of Miller’s culinary creations, is the result of a tenacity and creativity cultivated over years spent in professional kitchens.
“Just because an idea doesn't get fleshed out immediately, that doesn't mean that it's not something that can be refined and tweaked,” Miller said. “And, you know, at the end of it, what can we take away from it to make truly the essence of what the dish should be, one hundred percent?”
