Kevin Schuder

Kevin Schuder has cooked plant based food since 2005 — in San Francisco, Chicago, and now Los Angeles.

He has led kitchens and won the Vegan Iron Chef in California before opening businesses in Chicago. It was in Chicago that he opened Fancy Plants Catering, and then Fancy Plants Cafe. Fancy Plants was the first vegan coffee shop in the Midwest, and won numerous awards. Kevin Schuder also introduced upscale vegan dining to Chicago, creating a new market years before there was Althea, Bloom, Spirit Elephant, or Planta.

Kevin has commanded the kitchen & biodynamic farm at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and was the first guest chef in its history.

His extensive knowledge of fermentation precedes the Noma influence, and he learned koji and miso production in a Japanese kitchen as early as 2012. His passion for harnessing umami in vegan cooking through fermentation is well documented, and he continues to innovate his pantry, as well as his clients’ pantries, with new inspirations.

Beyond the Cafe and Catering, Kevin has hosted over 500 unique dinner parties.

Kevin creates dining experiences that explore farm to table sensibilities, his training in Japanese cuisine, and utilize both ancient and modern techniques.

Chef Kevin draws on vast culinary experience to make experiences memorable.

Essentialist Cooking means everything is there for a reason. We celebrate Health, Happiness, and Harmony, and create food that reflects these virtues.

Food is an essential need. If we plant seeds of health, happiness, and harmony into the daily ritual of eating, we cultivate feelings of security, connection, autonomy, growth, and purpose.

Let’s be less concerned about purity or place, but set our sights on orientation and direction.

Essentialist cooking isn’t minimalism. It asks the questions:

• Is our food making us healthier?
• Is our food making us happy?
• Does the experience bring harmony to people and place?

Essentialist Cooking celebrates:

• Seasonality
• Locality
• Nurturing our health
• Connection
• Special Occasions
• Freshness: The Power of Eating Sunlight
• Aging: Ferments
• Crop Diversity: Diversity on the Plate
• Waste Reduction
• Compassionate Consumption
• Living in Harmony with Nature
• Distinction & Unique Offerings

I am a Plant-Based Chef, because it aligns my compassion, our health, and living in harmony with nature.

Sourcing locally and seasonally is delicious and fresh, is optimal for our health, connects us to our local growers and producers, makes the seasons feel like a special occasion, encourages crop diversity, and helps us to live in harmony with nature and the land.

To taste and experience the seasons is grounding. We can keep one foot on our land, to support our reaching for the stars.

Diversity on the plate can make a meal a journey. The food industry provides profit for shareholders by processing a few foods in great quantity for maximum shelf stability. Nature provides breathtaking biodiversity to support life, and humans alone consume over 1000 different vegetables, sometimes growing a hundred different cultivars for each plant, such as the tomato. Instead of depleting the soil to grow monocrops which need industrial processing to give them flavor, we can celebrate the spectrum of biodiversity, and eat with a sense of adventure, curiosity, health, and abundance. We don’t fear nature’s flavor palette.

Harnessing aging to transform surplus foods into ferments brings immense health benefits, waste reduction, and invests in our future. It’s always a special occasion to sample and prepare the miso you’ve been aging for 6 months. The transformation from surplus beans and koji to richly flavorful umami feels like alchemy, and by committing to your food future, you elevate your conscious understanding of time.

You’re giving your future self a gift, planting a seed of hope, creating a superfood, and ensuring you are going to have rich, delicious, umami rich broth to keep you healthy and happy all year. I’ve made and enjoyed hundreds of misos and umami ferments to keep healthy and well fed as a vegan in a Chicago winter.

I focus very intently on capturing the essence of sustainable, celebratory cooking that elevates our health, happiness, and harmony.

I want to deepen your appreciation of food. I want to deepen our appreciation for the rich biodiversity of our land, appreciation for each other’s contributions when we share at the dinner table, and appreciation for the cultures that have shaped our unique sense of taste.

I don’t want you to just know about food, I want you to be curious about food. I want these lessons to be understood intellectually, understood by the body through sensory experience, and I also want this knowledge to be felt.

The best chefs I worked with didn’t feel like they had it all figured out. The best chefs I worked with were forever humbled before the evolving natural world, responsive to people’s changing tastes and needs, and forever grateful to the growers and chefs who come before them.

We can bring value and gratitude to the act of eating, and make the simple sublime. Eating is an essential, utilitarian act at the base level of our hierarchy of needs. Above this base level of survival, food brings us pleasure and social connection. Most of us are lucky enough to know that food can bring a sense of love and belonging. How we procure and prepare food can be an expression of achievement and respect for others. At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, meaningful work is an expression of self actualization.

I’ve had incredible opportunities and experiences, and met so many interesting people because of my culinary profession.

I’ve cooked in the streets of Bangkok, and I got to take over the famed Esalen Institute in Big Sur for a week, with full use of their biodynamic farm.

I’ve cooked for chefs and writers I admire, for musicians and artists, for a shaman from Altai, for Zen monks in Buddhist monasteries, for spiritual and political leaders, for numerous fundraisers and charities, and for thousands of people living on the streets in San Francisco.

I am grateful to be able to express love for friends and family through cooking.

Being from a village in Door County, Wisconsin, cooking has brought me adventure I may not have found otherwise, and shaped who I am. Being a chef has served as a vehicle for becoming the person I want to be.

We can best serve our role when we are humbled in our profession, but being a chef can also be important, noble work, and held in high esteem.

Whether someone is an exalted executive chef, a dedicated short order cook, a farmer or grower, a diligent porter, an attentive food runner, or a dependable prep cook; there is an understanding that we were all contributing to the production of a good meal. The work can be physical, and the work can also represent our highest values.

I want to share my passion for culinary education with you, and help you understand how this work is connected to the greater world.

People want to feel at home with other people, as food connects us. People want to feel at home with history, and food often tells of traditions and stories. People want to feel at home with nature, where food is a connection to the land. Even in this modern age, it’s impossible to eat without involving nature, people, and history.

I have given my working life to cooking, to business ownership and management, to building teams, and to marketing and business development.

I especially enjoy the challenge of making the evolution of ‘plant-based’ cooking sensible, accessible, and exceptional. It is becoming common knowledge that we need to consume less animal products if we are to thrive as a species that can live in harmony with our environment. I trained in classical kitchens that worked with animal products, so this is a choice rather than a limit. I have also worked with fine Californian wineries, tasted new heirloom chili and tomato varietals in the fields at Eatwell Farm, grown koji and produced miso and shoyu alongside an esteemed Japanese chef, and cooked with some of the best produce on earth.

I feel like the lexicon of ‘plant based’ food isn’t a new culinary creation, but is as deep and wide, and flavorful as anything I’ve ever had the pleasure of preparing and sampling, in the best restaurants in California.

With education, people will learn to say ‘yes’ to this culinary enlightenment, and ask for seconds. It is not deprivation when every single culture in the world has a varied repertoire of cooking beautiful, delicious food without animals, and I believe the best chefs in the world know how.

‘Plant-based cooking’ is really just like any other style of skilled cooking, but omitting animal products. It seems simple and sensible to me, but I have also been doing it since 2005.

I focus on developing deep layers of umami, creating structure and focus in my dishes, and achieving familiar textures to that of many traditional meat and dairy dishes. Much of this is achieved through fermentation, whether I’m creating it, or simply buying a fermented product.

Teaching is the part I find most satisfying. What took me years to learn, I can often pass on in a deep, memorable and lasting way, in a fraction of the time.

As an educator, I like to engage curiosity, instill a sense of purpose, and stress the importance of their primary experience. Taste is subjective, and the best education is tasting and trusting, valuing the feedback of others, and learning from those who have a deep connection to the work.

Everyone has built up potential, and cultivating it is truly exciting to me.

When I moved to San Francisco to pursue being a vegan chef, it didn’t take long to learn that umami was the secret to getting people not to miss animal protein. At first I was working on intuition — stirring a little miso or a dash of soy sauce into dishes that never asked for it, but wanted the depth.

I was fascinated by Japanese cuisine, and in 2012 I started working for Chef Takashi Saito, who taught me to grow koji and how to use it. The kitchen at Bar Tartine showed me new possibilities with lacto-fermentation, brines, fermented pepper pastes, a wall of dehydrators, and so much sauerkraut. Thanks to The Noma Guide to Fermentation, I now keep urns full of yeast garum for building beefy flavors — and the best caramelized onion soup you’ve ever had.

Eater wrote about my work growing my own “meat”, inoculating a substrate of rice and beans with tempeh and koji spores — essentially growing my own superfood veggie burgers. I love growing different kinds of burgers and tempeh.

At any time my cellar might hold a six-month aged mushroom tamari, or miso pastes made from barley, masa, smoked peppers, lentils or sunchokes. I have even made a popcorn miso. I make a “chicken soup” miso from chickpeas and overnight-dried onion, carrot and celery with bay leaves, and it tastes like instant chicken soup.

Having these flavor builders on hand makes cooking very easy. Balancing the freshness of raw or lightly cooked food, its integrity preserved, against the depth and soul of rich umami feels like letting nature do the work for me. Sometimes I don’t even feel like I’m cooking. I’m just harnessing nature. Anyone who has been to one of my dinner parties or restaurants, or had me as a private chef, has eaten my subliminal cooking.

The pursuit of deeper flavor led me to see and appreciate nature’s transformations. Nothing ever dies, and if you are cognizant of transformation you can harness its power. Fermentation breaks food down so your body can absorb more of it, including breaking proteins into the amino acids that read as umami — the flavor your body is telling you is delicious because you need it.

All of this is good for your body. Food is medicine.