Authors: Michael Ruhlman

The Making of a Chef (10 page)

BOOK: The Making of a Chef

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“This is an inexact science, this is where the art comes in. You've got standard ratios that work up to a point. There are always variables, as far as: Did you cook all the roux out? How high was your cooking temperature? How much evaporation did you have? How much did it reduce? You have to take all those things into account, see what your final product is, and figure out how to
fix
it. I think all of you now know how to fix it; you just have to be not so stressed out or under pressure that you can say, âI know it's not right and I need to fix it.'

“You can't
ever
send out a product if it's not right,” he continued. He was standing now. “It doesn't matter how busy you are. Your reputation is on the line every time you put a plate out. If you get into the mind-set that âI don't care what it looks like, I'm too busy, just take it out, maybe they won't know the difference,' then that's the kind of restaurant you'll work in the rest of your life. You'll never work in a really great restaurant and you'll never be a really great chef. You'll work in a mediocre restaurant and you'll be a mediocre chef. Because that's the mind-set of a mediocre chef: âI'm too
busy
to do it right; get it out of my
face
!'

“
So. Start. Good habits. Early!
Do it right. Take your time.”

He evaluated the veloutÃ©âgritty, not cooked out enough, or a little too thinâthen the chowderâsome pork cut too big, others cooked it so long it became oatmealâthen the consommÃ©, the one bright spot apparently.

“Very good consommÃ©s, by and large,” he said. “All the way down the line they came out nice and clear. Some were very pale and a little light in flavor, some were very deeply colored and flavored. The difference generally between pale and light and deep and rich was cooking time. ConsommÃ©s, small amounts like this, can stand up to about an hour and a half, an hour and forty-five minutes before the raft starts to deteriorate. I would suggest tasting it at about an hour, take a spoon, look at the clarity, look at the color, taste it, feel the body, feel the flavor in your mouth, and say, âWell, what do I have here? Could it be richer, could it be darker?'”

He stopped, looked at his legal pad, a list of notes.

“I'm not going to beat this drum too hard because we don't have a lot of time, but you guys gotta work harder on keeping those pots clean. I was not aware until Chef Zearfoss poked his head in and asked how bad it was. It was a
disaster
. You guys have to take it a lot more seriously. There were a lot of things over there that could have been cleaned by the people who put them over there, like
that
.” He snapped his fingers. “Bowls that clams have been stored in, all you have to do is dip it and wipe it, dip it and sanitize it, it's done, takes you three seconds. This is a big issue, O.K.? If you get to the point where I am humiliated by the amount of pots, I'll shut this kitchen down. I'll say, âO.K., stop, shut off everything, everybody get over here and wash pots. When all the pots are washed and put away, then we'll open the kitchen back up.' You've
still
got a six o'clock deadline. But I'm
not
going to let you work like
pigs
.

“Recyclables, you gotta watch that. You get under pressure, you're pushing hard to get your product done in time and have quality, that's admirable, but you can't throw all caution to the wind. You still have to keep the pots up, you still have to make sure the right things go in the recyclable. We're not throwing cheesecloth, we're not throwing dirty towels in there; we're not throwing in coffee filters that are soaked with clarified butter.

“Standard daily mise en place. You are responsible for this. And this is a reasonable amount of time to get it all done, and if you come up at the end of the day and say, âThis is all I got, I didn't have time to do my brunoise, I didn't have time to do my batonnet, I didn't have time to do my chopped parsley,' you're going to lose serious points, because you're only doing half the job.

“Stock teams, you've got stock to do; make that a priority, get it started, get it started fast so we don't have to be making stocks at eight-thirty at night.

“Demo team. We had a fifteen-minute lag time today. We could have started earlier, but the demos weren't set up on time. You guys pay for it. When the demo's fifteen minutes late, that means you don't start your production. Demo team, that's the only thing you should be concentrating on; set up your stations and start setting up your demo; when that's done,
then
you worry about cutting vegetables and making your mirepoix. You're not being team players; you're being
selfish
.

“I don't know if this will help. I'm not reading this laundry list of things you guys need a little work on to be a tyrant. I'm not comparing you to anybody else and I'm not telling you that you're not trying hard. I'm just trying to get you to push.

“And one more thing. This monitor cost several hundred dollars.”

I'd spotted a heavy-duty digital instant-read thermometer sitting in a puddle of ice water on the stock sink. I'd told Victor, who was cooling stock, that I didn't think it was a good idea to leave it there. I didn't move it myself. “The digital thermometer,” Pardus continued, holding it up. “Someone left it lying on the side of the sink in a puddle. All the electric circuitry in there is soaked. It's probably not going to work for a few days, if ever. I'm assuming it will dry out and be O.K., provided there wasn't too much
salt
in the water it was sitting in, and it's not going to corrode it to hell.
Guys. Come on.
This is an expensive piece of equipment. If it's your restaurant, you would be well within reason to severely reprimand or discipline or fire someone who mistreated such an expensive piece of equipment.”

Pardus stopped. He looked around. He grimaced. Then he said, “O.K.
Dad
lecture is over. Emulsified sauce lecture begins. You can read about all this stuff. It's getting late and you're going to fall asleep if I get too detailed on the chemistry of emulsions. But you can read about it and it would
behoove
you to do so.”

I was glad he didn't go into the chemistry of emulsions and very glad when he said, “O.K., see ya tomorrow.” I slunk to the parking lot. I thought about home twenty-five icy miles away and how good it would be to see my wife, who would still be up, reading the newspaper or checking E-mail. We'd tiptoe into the next room to look at our tiny daughter sleeping silently. This was what I looked forward to, but it was later than usual and I had a lot of homework to do for the next day. The emulsified-sauces paper was due. I had my prep and equipment lists to write out and more reading in McGee. Before I knew it I'd be back in uniform, unzipping my knife bag, tying the apron at my waist, and hefting a cutting board to my station.

Brown Sauce

I
know of no more infelicitous name for a standard ingredient or item than brown sauce. The French name, sauce Espagnole, sounds drab, even leaden to my ears, an attempt to cover up what is obviously sauce brown. Like the gravy you can buy in jars at Shoprite. Veal stock thickened with roux. More paste.
Old
paste. Who used it anymore? Fine reduced stocks and nothing else for meat-based sauces, that's how American chefs work today. But at the Culinary Institute of America, on Day Nine of Skill Development One, you learn to make brown sauce, the mother sauce first classified by Marie-Antoine CarÃªme in the early nineteenth century. CarÃªme's recipe calls for a Bayonne ham and partridges and about three days of cooking, but we have since reduced the simmering time and dispensed with partridges and ham.

We, of course, meaning the students, were following the textbook,
The New Professional Chef,
for our recipe: four ounces of mirepoix well caramelized, an ounce of tomato paste deeply pincÃ©d, five cups of brown stock, eight ounces of brown roux, and a sachet. We would simmer this slowly for at least an hour, skimming, skimming, skimming, and making sure to stir up the flour sticking to the bottom. We would taste it, shrugâ“Tastes like brown sauce”âand strain it into another pot or bowl. Some would strain it through cheesecloth. As far as I could see at the time, there was only one pleasurable aspect of the brown sauce: Chef Pardus had to eat eighteen spoonfuls of it each time he assigned it.

Despite the dated and pedestrian nature of the brown sauce, a few contradictions kept the sauce lively in my mind. Nobody noticed that first brown-sauce day Pardus's willful variance of the recipeâhe directed us to use a brown roux when the recipe called for a pale roux, running outside the baseline, as it were. Or was he? The recipe called for a pale roux but twice on the same page of my
Pro Chef
, the fifth of six editions, under “Method” a
brown
roux is added to the stock.

The second was that, while brown sauce was not used much anymore and was widely looked down upon as dated, it nevertheless had a legion of articulate supporters. After all, the brown sauce, refined through further cooking to a demi-glace, was the base for hundreds of small or compound classical French sauces. Espagnole was thus the cornerstone sauce when the edifice of French cuisine was built and proceeded to dominate the Western world.

Listen to Julia Child. In her classic text
The Art of Mastering French Cooking
, one of a few books that permanently altered the home cook's culinary landscape, her falsetto and invisible exclamation points intact, she writes: “Sauces are the splendor and glory of French cooking.” And yet she too seems slightly dismissive of demi-glace, making brief reference to it in her book, then writing, “But as we are concerned with less formal cooking, we shall discuss it no further.”

The poor
Pro Chef
is almost apologetic in tone about classical sauces: “Although they may not be relied upon as heavily as in years past, the grand sauces are still important in a contemporary kitchen.”
The Pro Chef
fails to say why, as if hoping people will assume it's self-evident and get to work on the old dowagers.

The great British food writer, Elizabeth David, discoursing more than thirty years ago, sounds almost nouvelle nineties: “The result of all this sauce mystique, evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when conditions were so utterly different from our own, is that today, sauces have become horribly debased.” She even derides the concept of grand sauces and their derivatives: “The inevitable result is that every dish has the same basic flavor, and because the sauces are stale, not a very good one.”

But the redoubtable McGee is almost wily in his discussion of sauces. He calls the process “quirky,” “forbidding,” “fickle,” owing much of the success or failure, he says, “to the particular action of a cook's arm.” Sauces, he concludes, “are by nature very tricky physical and chemical systems.” This, clearly, is respect based on facts.

One of the best books I've read on classical sauces is
The Saucier's Apprentice
, by the journalist and food writer Raymond Sokolov. In reminding the reader of Brillat-Savarin's oft-quoted aphorism about a great meal without a sauce being like a beautiful woman without clothes, Sokolov explains the truth of this statement, that such a woman or meal lacks “the coating of civilization that would arouse our fullest interest.” You know immediately that Mr. Sokolov reveres, with almost chivalric protectiveness, the brown sauce. “French sauces,” he writes, “are the height of culinary technique,” noting further that demi-glace, a reduction of brown sauce and brown stock, is “the highest refinement of brown sauce.”

The man credited with propelling sauce out of the Middle Ages (a time marked by heavily spiced sauces, often thickened with bread, that overpowered food) was FranÃ§ois Pierre de La Varenne. He used a “flour liaison,” now known as a roux; his “fragrant sauce” for asparagus suggests, in its resemblance to hollandaise, that he may have been the inventor of the egg-based emulsified sauce; and one of his creations, “sauce Robert,” is alive and well today, as would soon become obvious. Over the next hundred years, many of the classic French sauces were invented and named (bÃ©chamel, for example, and its derivatives soubise and Mornay). The cooks who did the inventing rarely got credit; their employers took the credit as the various sauces became associated with particular noblemen's tables. It was not, for instance, the writer and statesman Chateaubriand, but rather his cook, Montmireil, who created the famous sauce.

In the new library at the Culinaryâa fireplace glows and sputters on the cold bright afternoons of Februaryâa Tiffany-style glass panel above a trophy case quotes Fannie Farmer: “Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.”

This seems to have been borne out after the French Revolution and the ensuing Reign of Terror, which scared all the remaining noblemenâmany noblemen had already lost their headsâout of the country. This resulted in many unemployed cooks. It seems more than coincidence, then, that the first restaurateur hung his shingle in Paris at this time (a movement apparently begun by a Monsieur Boulanger, who in 1765 advertised sheep's feet in white sauce). A public restaurant, now here was an idea. What else might an unemployed cook do, given that consulting had yet to come into its own? With the blossoming of the restaurant scene came a new interest in food costâcooks no longer had enormous sums of money to spend on foodâand efficiency. Then as now, the more people you fed, the more money you stood to make.

During this time, a vain and strident cook, who was a mere five years old when the Revolution began, became the first renowned chef of France. Sokolov says Marie-Antoine CarÃªme is “the towering figure of the entire history of the
grande cuisine
of France.” It was CarÃªme who, according to Sokolov, “articulated for the first time the concept of mother sauces” and was the man who chose roux as a universal thickener. The man went on at length to demolish verbally anyone who turned their nose up at roux. “They,” CarÃªme wrote (“they” being roux denigrators), “do not know that our roux, prepared according to the principles enunciated above, have a nutty taste that is pleasing to the palate â¦ .” A roux thickens a sauce, he argued, and then is separated from it. For one hundred years, chefs followed CarÃªme and roux became the universal thickener in the West.

By articulating the concept of mother sauce, by classifying numerous small sauces according to one of four mother sauces, CarÃªme created a “scheme” that fit the new post-Revolution needs: big vats of the mother sauce could be made economically and stored and the small sauces could be conveniently prepared
Ã la minute
moments after the diner placed an order. McGee and Sokolov are both excellent on this sauce business, as McGee recognizes by quoting Sokolov, who called this new idea of a base sauce “convenience food at the highest level.” One might even go so far as to suggest that haute cuisine was in fact history's first fast food.

CarÃªme was fairly proud of himself, claimed his books carried an “indelible mark.” But he was also generous and humble: You too could cook like CarÃªme, he suggested, if you followed his mother sauce scheme, used your common sense, and occupied yourself “without relaxation.”

Escoffier would further refine and advance the work of the man who is really the first celebrity chef. Escoffier himself believed in the value of a good sauce. He put nearly two hundred of them in his first bookânot including dessert sauces. “It is they,” he wrote of the French sauces, “that have created and maintained to this day the universal preponderance of French cuisine.”

Escoffier believedânay, predicted and hopedâthat roux would be replaced by pure starches such as arrowroot and cornstarch. Roux took too long and didn't add anything, he believed; once pure starches became economically feasible, they would become de rigueur.

He was wrong. In February 1996, Chef Pardus's Skills class, and the seven other Skills classes, would be making bucketfuls of roux into which they would dump their fine stocks.

A
dam Shepard stood out from the very first day because of his questions. During a lecture on hollandaise, Chef Pardus criticized many people for serving it cold. “You cannot serve a cold hollandaise sauce. Learn how to serve it warm.” The problem was, of course, that if it were too warm the egg would coagulate, and people would rather have a cool sauce than a broken one.

Adam raised his hand and asked, “Since acid raises the temperature of coagulation for proteins, couldn't you add the lemon juice first, and then you could add butter that was maybe a hundred and fifty degrees?”

I remember being sort of mystified by this, mainly by the fact that Adam even knew what 150 degrees felt like and what butter that hot might do to some frothy egg yolks.

“That's an excellent point,” Pardus said. “Did everybody understand Adam's question?” Responding to the blank faces, he reconstructed Adam's question, concluding, “You could make your hollandaise
hotter
by adding the lemon juice first. You want to try that, you have my blessing. That's a great idea. I'm surprised I didn't think of that.” Pardus smiled as if to say, That's right, you heard me. “That's the way I try to approach a problem. That's excellent thinking, Adam.” Pardus believed that good cooking was simply a series of problems solved.

Getting to know Adam wasn't easy, nor was squeezing out a clear or complete answer. This was the general rule at the Culinary; it was not a verbal place. But there was something more to it with AdamâI couldn't even get a clear answer on how old he was. His questions, on the other hand, were complex and articulate, suggesting he'd spent plenty of time reading and thinking; moreover, he never seemed to want to conceal anything. He just always looked angry; he glared at you. And at certain angles, you would notice that one of his eyes drifted a little higher than the other. The force of his gaze, I think, and also his speed and skill in the kitchen, were likely why two weeks passed before I realized that Adam's right hand, his knife hand, was maimed.

This was not something one brought up out of the blue, but when Adam mentioned it I asked. It was after class on a Friday night; we'd made our first brown sauce and hollandaise sauce, and two white
Ã la minute
sauces, supreme and cream (the former, based on a chicken veloutÃ© and flavored with mushroom, was a dead ringer for Campbell's cream of mushroom soup,
but the latter, bÃ©chamel-based, was, to my great surprise, beautifully delicate and light). Adam had a dorm room, but he was headed home to Brooklyn to be with Jessica, his wife of two-and-a-half years. We were walking down the dimmed and mainly deserted hallway, past the dining hall, and I asked him why he was here, why cooking.

“An accident made the choice for me,” he said, lifting his right hand. Index finger and thumb appeared to be fine, but the middle finger was gone and the last two fingers were pinched together and cemented at a permanent right angle to his palm.

Adam, who said he was from all over New England, had worked in Maine fish houses. He enrolled at Marlboro College in Vermont but dropped out after one year, got a job in the kitchen there, and for three years audited classes in photography, woodworking, philosophy, art history, religion, and linguistics. But book work, in the end, didn't appeal to him. “I'm a trade-school guy,” he said.

I told him the strength of his questions in class seemed to suggest otherwise.

“Trade school, not by necessity, but by, byâI don't know â¦ ,” he mumbled.

“By disposition.”

“Yeah, by disposition.”

He left school without a degree with two career options: kitchens or wood shops. He chose wood shops, building commercial furniture and cabinets. At night, he would craft instruments. Adam's friend played music at his and Jessica's wedding on a guitar that Adam himself had made. Adam also made the wedding cakes himselfâthirteen of them, the centerpiece for each table.

I asked him how the accident happened.

“I don't know, man,” he said.

BOOK: The Making of a Chef

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