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Curtis Duffy took off on a 1,200-mile motorcycle ride, and was surprised to find himself thinking about cattails.

Danny Salgado talked pickling with his girlfriend's 93-year-old grandmother in Iowa.

And Phillip Foss discovered the most ethereal doughnuts - in Ohio. And then he got fired.

Chef vacations are an oxymoron. They're a busman's holiday, really. Chefs eat, cook and occasionally work for free in other people's kitchens while away.

Still, this is the stuff on which memories are made - and creativity is nurtured. Chefs say a break from their own kitchens inspires them, and often, they bring their experience right back to their restaurants.

Duffy, whose delicate cuisine at Avenues in the Peninsula Chicago has quietly established him as a force in the high-stakes realm of modern fine dining, set out in July on a brief but intense motorcycle trek up through Michigan and Wisconsin with three other guys.

"My food is very much organic," says Duffy. "I'm able to get a lot of cool stuff foraging. In those wild plants, I get wild flavors. They're much more intense. So even though I just wanted to clear my mind, when we'd stop, I'd catch myself looking at the water and notice the cattails and think I could use the shoots in the spring and do other stuff when they open up.

"I didn't want to think about all that stuff I could do but I just couldn't help it."

In August, Eddie Lakin of Edzo's Burger Shop in Evanston, took his wife and two kids up to the Wilderness Waterpark Resort in the Wisconsin Dells. On the way there and back, he also did burger research, stopping at a few well-known eateries, including the 84-year-old Kewpee in Racine, Wis.

"I chatted with the guy running the grill and asked about their beef. He told me they grind their beef with organ meats - hearts, lungs, you name it. It makes sense - that's what they used to do - and you get a good strong beef flavor," Lakin says. "They're not doing it in an edgy, culinary-minded kind of way. It's something I never would have thought about."

Though Lakin is just coming up on his first year in business with Edzo's, he's no rookie, having cooked in fine-dining restaurants around Chicago and Europe and then worked as a consultant before being laid off in 2008 (the impetus to opening his own place.)

Still, there's tremendous value in comparing notes with the grill guy, he says.

"One of the reasons I wanted to visit Kewpee was to affirm that I'm living up to this tradition, that I'm doing OK," Lakin says. "I want to do it like how these guys have been doing it for like the last 90 years."

Salgado, too, was swayed by tradition this summer. The heavily tattooed, Culinary Institute of America-trained chef at Luxbar, 18 E. Bellevue, spent a four-day weekend with his girlfriend and her family on their turkey farm in Iowa. He cooked for her extended family and bonded with her grandmother, who is known for her pickles.

"I pickle everything at work myself, too," Salgado says. "What we do is not really different. Right now, I'm doing about 50 pounds of end-of-the-season kumquats with lavender and vanilla to go with tuna tartare. . . . Now I really want to get into farming on my roof."

Dana Cree, the former pastry chef at the Seattle restaurant Poppy, had what many in the business might consider the sweetest of summer breaks: four weeks as a stagiaire, or unpaid apprentice, at Noma in Copenhagen, named the best restaurant in the world by the UK's Restaurant Magazine.

"I was originally just going on an extended vacation to visit my sister who just had a baby in Germany," says Cree, who also will stage at Alinea in Lincoln Park in October. "My first day I showed up and started following a line of cooks going in a certain direction. Someone said, ‘Here's your coat, here's your apron, and there's the pastry kitchen.' I was nervous as hell."

During her 16-hour days at Noma, Cree filled butter dishes and foraged for capers and leaves. She and other apprentices brainstormed ideas in twice-daily meetings; when they came up short, they'd go out in the fields to let nature be their guide.

Now back in the States and living on the road, Cree says she isn't looking for a job as a chef right now.

"I was looking for an experience that would strip me back down to where I started," Cree says. "I wanted to go somewhere where I was just a cook. It was really humbling and I was really questioning myself as a pastry cook. I found a lot of new limits in myself."

And then there's Foss, the former chef at Lockwood in the Palmer House Hilton, who can best be described as a chef-at-large (he uses the term in his e-mail signature.)

In July, Foss road-tripped to the Chef's Garden, a specialty produce farm in Ohio, with his friend and Chicago tea purveyor Rodrick Markus of the Rare Tea Cellar.

They went to participate in Veggie U, the annual food and wine benefit at the farm. Afterward, they figured they should do a little sightseeing - Thomas Edison's house was nearby. And that's when they found the doughnuts.

"It was a place in Sandusky called Jolly Donut," Foss says. "Every doughnut was exquisite. I think I plowed through more than Rod did, and I don't have much of an appetite in the morning or even much of a sweet tooth."

In August, the hotel fired Foss for undisclosed reasons. It happened on a Friday.

That following Sunday, Foss and his wife, Kenni Foss, who was born and raised in Israel, opened a one-day-only pop-up restaurant to test food truck concepts they've been developing. In the morning, they sold doughnuts inspired in part by that little Sandusky shop. The jelly- and cream-filled pastries were pure Midwest meets Middle East.

"We're thinking outside of the box," Foss says of his business plans. "A food truck, catering, possibly a kiosk thing, and more pop-ups are definitely under consideration."

Future vacations are on the "back burner," says Foss. But his most recent one is still on his mind.

"I'm thinking I should call the doughnut woman up so maybe she could consult on something here. I mean, yeah, I'm a chef but she's been doing this all her life."

Louisa Chu is a chef and free-lance writer based in Chicago.