Ruhlman's Twenty (54 page)

THIS BOOK BEGAN ON A PORCH AT THE
Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, at an annual food writer’s symposium, where after a day of seminars I sat with Bill LeBlond, editorial director of food and wine for Chronicle Books, but, more important, a man who likes to cook. Sipping his mint julep, Bill lamented that he didn’t feel he was improving as a cook, that he had plateaued. I said I got that sense from a lot of people who like to cook. It’s almost inevitable if you cook only from recipes. That was the problem.

“Bill,” I said, “there are about twenty techniques that you need to know in order to cook almost anything. If you know those twenty techniques, there’s virtually nothing you can’t do.”

Bill’s face lit up. He liked that idea. I’d used the number after only a moment’s thought, but I knew it was the right order of magnitude. There weren’t just five techniques and there weren’t a hundred. There were about twenty.

“Now that’s a book,” he said, and before we headed off to dinner, he wrote down the title of this book on a piece of Greenbrier stationery, twice. He tore the paper in half, gave one piece to me, and kept one for himself.

The idea for a book on the twenty techniques took hold in my mind that May 2009, and grew over the summer, and by fall, I was ready to begin writing.

♦ ♦ ♦

I began my professional culinary career by accident, or at least not intending to pursue cooking as a profession but rather to pursue writing as a profession. But I fell into cooking by exercising the same muscles that propelled my writing—asking questions.

In my early thirties, I worked for a magazine in Cleveland, Ohio, and initiated a monthly column about cooking with chefs around the city. I’d begun to sense by then that recipes were not a beginning or a source, but the result of something else. That “something else” was what I needed to get at. And it didn’t have anything to do with recipes. Recipes were like a ghost itch on an amputated limb. The real thing was somewhere else. And chefs, I figured, knew where that somewhere else was.

A chef I wrote about at the time, Parker Bosley, was one of the more notable chefs in the city, among the first to develop relationships with farmers and to become vocal about the importance of cooking seasonally and eating food grown nearby. When you did that, the simplest dishes were exquisite. A roast chicken for example.

“How do you roast a chicken?” I asked.

“You season it and put it on a bed of mirepoix and—”

“What’s mirepoix?” I asked.

He paused to regard me, the writer, with my little notebook and pen. He paused long enough for me to get the point, before explaining that mirepoix was a mixture of onion, carrot, and celery, aromatic vegetables. His contempt for me was like heat coming off him. How can you possibly think you can write about food, he was clearly telling me with that pause, when you don’t even know the most basic things about cooking?

That moment more than any other crystallized my recognition that chefs knew things that I didn’t, things that weren’t in recipes and books. So when I at last set about to write about what chefs knew that we didn’t, I went where there were a lot of them. The Culinary Institute of America likely contained the greatest concentration of excellent chefs-per-square-foot anywhere.

I went to cooking school in order to write a book about what you need to know to become a chef. The United States had begun to appreciate
the work of chefs as never before, and I hoped to tell a story about what being a chef meant: what you had to know and who you became when you became a chef. I also was looking forward to learning about cooking itself. I’d been an eager cook since I was nine years old and had worked my way through countless recipes. I’d never seen the word
mirepoix
in any of them and yet
not
knowing this word had resulted in withering contempt from a chef I respected. What else didn’t I know? This I wanted to find out. I went to culinary school to ask
what
and
why
and
how.

And I did. I was lucky to land in an intro kitchen with a young American chef who thrived on questions. I interviewed every chef I could. I spent time in their kitchens. I cooked their food. I kept asking questions. And I focused on the things that didn’t change. Recipes changed; recipes were fashion, clothing. Some chefs’ food was the equivalent of Hermes, others of Levi’s and comfortable old T-shirts. One wasn’t better than another; each was a matter of choice and disposition. I could study fashion later. What I needed first was the stuff that was bedrock, the stuff that remained fixed and immovable in the work of cooking.

These chefs always, always returned to the same thing: fundamentals.

From my notes:

Chef Rudy Smith, Intro to Hot Foods: “Culinary fundamentals are what it’s all about. Everything else is fluff. These fundamentals will carry you through your entire culinary career. It’s the fundamentals at every level.”

Chef Uwe Hestnar, Skills Kitchens Team Leader, who before handing me a sheet of culinary ratios said, “The culinary fundamentals don’t change.”

Chef Dan Turgeon, American Bounty: “How to properly cook a green bean. That’s what they really hammer into you here. It’s really, really important. If you look at these master chefs, all they’ve really done is mastered those basic cooking techniques. They’ve mastered them. It’s what they always do, it becomes habit— every time they cook a green bean, it’s a perfectly cooked green bean.”

Escoffier himself, who created the kitchen brigade and cataloged his preparations in
The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cooking,
opens his book with the basic preparations, the fundamentals, “without which,” he wrote, “nothing of importance can be attempted.”

I loved that line. Without the culinary fundamentals, nothing,
nothing,
of importance can be attempted. Classic chef arrogance and truth.

Those notions stayed with me, and I wrote about them as they played out at this prominent cooking school, but I wondered, Were the fundamentals just a school thing? Were they simply a teaching device? Did they apply to the real world of restaurant chefs? I’d spent plenty of time in restaurant kitchens by then, and I didn’t hear people talking about the fundamentals. I saw stocks kept at raging boils and green beans cooked al dente, and no one chanted the culinary fundamentals mantra. Maybe that was just an in-an-ideal-world scenario.

By another accident of good fortune, shortly after I finished my cooking school book, I was invited to the French Laundry restaurant to work with Thomas Keller on his first cookbook. Among chefs, his reputation was peerless. He was born in California, grew up in Florida and Maryland, and had no formal training, and even the French guys were impressed with him. One told me, in a whisper, “He’s the best French chef in America.”

What I found when I arrived in Yountville, in California’s Napa Valley, was that Keller hadn’t achieved iconic status among cooks and chefs by abandoning culinary fundamentals for new and innovative techniques and dishes. Rather, he’d deepened the fundamentals and
taken them to crazy extremes. When we talked about cooking, even he talked about green beans.

“How do you cook green beans?” he asked. “You’ve got a certain amount of water, a certain amount of salt in that water, and a certain amount of green beans relative to that salt and that water. All of it is important.”

He wanted a vast kettle of water, salted like the Atlantic, at a raging boil, and so few beans that the water didn’t lose its boil when you added them. And if those green beans were fava/broad beans, he didn’t want you boiling them first, then peeling them (very easy to do). He wanted you to peel them first (a pain in the neck) and then boil them. One of his cooks spent all morning peeling raw beans. When the cook put them in heavily salted water, there were too many, and not enough water. The water stilled. Keller happened to be passing the stove and saw it. “Toss ‘em. Do it again,” he told the cook.

I do not recommend that cooks at home go to such lengths as discarding perfectly fine, if not perfect, beans. I tell the story to illustrate how one of the best and most respected chefs in the country got that way—not through innovation so much as through a deepening of the culinary fundamentals. (“How do you like your green beans cooked, Thomas?” I asked. He replied, “I like my green beans cooked through.”)

In my last book, I explored the fundamental ratios, that is, how the proportions of basic ingredients create the finished product—what proportions of egg, milk, and flour make a pancake batter rather than a crêpe batter. As I wrote there, knowing a ratio and the base techniques frees you in the kitchen. A ratio is like a key. To turn that key, you need technique. If you understand a handful of basic methods, you can climb to new plateaus.

Moreover, only by reducing cooking to its core techniques can we begin to understand the infinite nuances that contribute to making something good, and what elevates the good to the great. Cooking can be broken down into these few parts, and doing so is enormously useful no matter what level you cook at—whether you’re a beginning cook or an accomplished one.

Mise en place begins with tools.
Cooking is a craft, and having the right tools is critical. Regrettably, we’ve turned cooking tools into fetishes, and we like to fill up our kitchen drawers with gadgets and gewgaws that we use once, if ever, and then abandon. I recommend that no one buy unitaskers, those kitchen devices that serve only one function. There are exceptions, however. A coffee-maker only serves one function, but I use it every day. And I like my corn cutter, which I use only occasionally, and only for cutting corn for a specific dish. So while I have my convictions, tools are ultimately your own choice and deeply personal. I only ask you to think about them.

Here are the tools that, I believe, you must have, and other tools that are good to have if cooking is part of your routine.

Two good knives, a big one and a little one, are all you need. Brand is not important as long as the knives are good. I use Wüsthof because my cousin gave me a block of the knives for a wedding gift twenty years ago. Shun knives are popular as well. J. A. Henckels knives are good, too. I use an 8-inch/20-centimeter chef’s knife and a 3-inch/7.5-centimeter paring knife, and they are going strong all these years later. If you’re going to cook throughout your life, invest in these two good knives. Choosing quality is worth it.

A steel is worth buying and learning to use for bringing back the sharp edge on your knives. You should find a grinding service where you can get your knives sharpened once or twice a year.

A bread knife—a long blade with a serrated edge—is good to have. It is very difficult to cut bread or cake with a chef’s knife without smashing it.

For using your knives, you need a cutting board. Invest in a big, heavy one. I prefer a wood board at least 1½ inches/4 centimeters thick and 18 by 24 inches/46 by 61 centimeters. You want a board that won’t hurt your knives and that won’t slide around on your work surface. If your space is confined, choose the biggest, thickest board that will fit. I like wood for its feel and look, and highly recommend it, but polyethelene boards are fine.

Sauté pans, which have sloping sides, are what you’ll use for most of your stove-top cooking. You need a small one for sautéing a small item or a small amount, and a big one for cooking larger quantities. Invest in high quality. I recommend All-Clad stainless-steel pans and, if you can afford them, the copper-lined ones, which control the heat very well.

Other manufacturers make good pans, so buy what you like, but be sure the pans are heavy. And just as important, the pans should have metal handles so that they can be used in a hot oven.

A nonstick pan comes in handy on occasion, for eggs or fish, but it should not be your go-to pan. Any nonstick pan you choose should be high quality, or the coating will come off, causing food to stick to the surface. Treat a quality nonstick pan well, and it will last forever.

If you want other pans and can afford them, get them. I wouldn’t want to do without my cast-iron pans, for instance—all bought at the flea markets and antique stores. With minutes of work, I restored the rusted pans to their former glory. If you cook for a lot of people, multiple pans are necessary. But as a rule, all you need are two good pans, a big one and a little one.

Once again, I recommend a big one and a little one. The large pot, 6 to 8 quarts/5.7 to 7.5 liters, is for pasta and green vegetables. The smaller pan, 1 to 2 quarts/960 milliliters to 2 liters, is for sauces, soups, rice, and small amounts of pasta and grains. Strictly speaking, that’s all you need. If you do a lot of cooking or cook for more than one or two people, having multiple pans is useful.

If you make large quantities of stock, having a pot with a capacity of 16 or 20 quarts/15 or 19 liters comes in handy. It is also practical for blanching quantities of vegetables or cooking lobsters.