Inside the fridge of Ted Corrado, C5’s executive chef

What’s the most surprising thing in your fridge? My wife had a home birth at our house two months ago. She said to me, “It’s happening,” so we call the midwife, call the doula, and the whole thing goes down. And just as they were like “All right, see you guys later,” one of them turns back to me and says, “Oh yeah, I put the placenta in the fridge.” I’ve got a million other things on my mind. So a week later, I thought to myself, did she say something about putting the placenta in the fridge? I totally ransacked the fridge looking for this big bloody placenta. It was in the freezer.

And apparently it still is? I know what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to bury it in the spring and plant a tree. One of my pastry cooks, her water broke in the kitchen on Sunday. But her husband, who’s a chef, he plans on eating it. He’s going to cook it.

It does kind of look like a steak. Would you eat it? Can’t do it. It came out of another human. It’s the cannibalism line.

Anything else you don’t eat? I have never had Kraft Dinner in my life. Maybe one day I’ll try it. My sister works for Kraft, and I’ve never had Kraft Dinner. I was exposed to my parents’ life—immigrant Italians from the ‘50s who still make tomato sauce in the garage every Labour Day Weekend. I realized a lot later on in life—they totally exemplify slow food. They don’t buy strawberries in the winter. They grow them in the yard or they wait for them to be in season because that’s how they lived when they were in Italy. I’m hoping that I’m able to pass that on to my kids now.

If you were to do some spring fridge cleaning, what would go, other than the placenta? All the frozen crap in the freezer. It’s kind of embarrassing for a chef to have that in the fridge. But it lives here, and so do I.