The Cooking Clock
Brayden Duggan pours pasta sauce into a pan while his brother, Connor, stirs and dad, Brian, assists. The family is making gnocchi for dinner
Brian Duggan shares his approach to making a great meal
Brian Duggan loves the French concept of mise en place, as it applies to preparing every ingredient and carefully planning a meal in the kitchen, but also at work. In both cases, he’s always looking to the future. He calls it a “preparation mindset.”
“Cooking, for me, is about timing,” Duggan says. “Maybe that’s because I’m in journalism and broadcasting.”
Duggan is the general manager of KUNR Public Radio, a National Public Radio member station at the University of Nevada, Reno. The station is a part of the Reynolds School of Journalism.
“My role is to fundraise for KUNR and ensure local journalism and nonprofit public radio continue to thrive in this beautiful Northern Nevada community,” he says.
In the KUNR office, an All Things Considered poster sits on an easel in a meeting room. The poster depicts a circle divided into 60 increments, with chunks of time labeled in different colors:
- Two minutes and 59 seconds for “Newscast 1”
- One minute and 39 seconds for “Newscast 2”
- 11 minutes and 29 seconds for local “Segment A”
And so on, around the hour. Duggan explains that every hour of the broadcast day breaks into these segments that allow local journalists to insert Reno-Tahoe news into national shows or to fill their hourlong slots with carefully timed audio clips that play around music, sponsor messages, and news from other member stations.
Like the All Things Considered wheel of time, Duggan plans his meals around family time. On the weekdays, he likes to make dishes that let him spend an hour with his young boys and wife, Megan, director of advancement for the Community Health Alliance in Reno.
Welcome to the Cooking Hour
“When we get home, Megan will make sure our eldest is getting his homework going, or she’s cuddling on the couch with the youngest, who doesn’t have homework,” he says.
An easy weekday meal might be spaghetti or baked chicken thighs, for example.
“I try to do a protein, carb, and vegetable combo,” he says.
Those meals give Duggan time with the family while the water boils, the sauce simmers, or the chicken thighs bake. But on the weekends, he sometimes likes to get into a deep, multihour adventure.
“If I’m doing a big Sunday dinner, I want to take on a two- to three-hour project because it’s fun, so I’ll make something French,” he says.
While cooking, Duggan enters a deep meditative state of focus, watching the food, picking out the perfect seasoning, and tasting along the way.
“I don’t use recipes often unless I’m cooking something for the first time,” he says. “But most recipes are just patterns. There’s not a lot of variation between recipes. They all use the same base level of techniques.”
Duggan speaks as if recognizing this pattern is second nature, but he has built this skill over years of experience watching Gordon Ramsay sear a steak “hundreds of times” and cooking his way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Duggan walks through a recipe asking rhetorical questions: Is your heat source ready to go? Did you set it up at the right time? Are the ingredients ready? Is something on the stovetop or in the rice cooker? Will it be completed at the same time?
“There’s a rhythm to it,” he says. “I guess I find joy in that, and it’s fun to have everything finished at the same exact time.”
What are three things in your fridge right now?
- Berries and cut fruits for days, because kids
- Leftover homemade chile verde from Sunday’s soup/stew day
- Open containers of stock, vinegars, herbs, miso, plus leftovers from our local pho joint
Ingredients
- 1 package shelf-stable potato gnocchi
- 1, 28- ounce bottle tomato passata fine tomato purée
- 1, 8- ounce ball fresh mozzarella
- 2 cloves garlic minced
- 1 handful of whole fresh basil leaves
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425 degrees F and boil large pot of water.
- While waiting for water to boil and oven to come to temperature, add olive oil to large, ovenproof skillet and cook over medium heat; add garlic and cook for about a minute or until it’s fragrant.
- Add passata to the skillet with a healthy pinch of salt; bring to simmer and lower heat. Take half of the mozzarella ball and roughly chop. Add to sauce with fresh basil leaves and simmer for about 10 minutes.
- While sauce is simmering, add a large pinch of salt and gnocchi to boiling water and cook until floating (about 2 minutes).
- Remove basil leaves from sauce, then use slotted spoon to remove gnocchi from water. Add gnocchi to sauce in skillet and toss. Take remaining mozzarella, roughly tear, and evenly place across top of sauce and gnocchi mixture.
- Place skillet in oven for 20 minutes until cheese is bubbling and caramelized on top. If you don’t have an ovenproof skillet, instead, transfer ingredients to a 2-quart glass baking dish for cooking in the oven.
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