The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (26 page)

Fold your omelet in one of two ways. Carefully fold it in the pan using your spatula, and then slide the finished omelet onto the plate. Or put a serving plate on the counter and carefully tilt the omelet toward it. Once the edge of the omelet hits the plate, use the spatula to guide the other edge over in a fold.

CHAPTER 9

Not long after I moved to London in the autumn of 1999, I scanned newspaper headlines while waiting for a bus at Oxford Circus on a dreary winter's morning. TWO MORE DEATHS LINKED TO MAD COW, screamed one headline. TODDLER ORPHANED! blared another.

Like a lot of people living in the United Kingdom in the wake of the BSE epidemic, I stopped eating red meat. The problem wasn't limited to British beef,
²²
although the issue had the greatest impact in the United Kingdom. I swore off poultry and pork, too. What tripped me up were the crispy, fragrant ducks hanging in the windows of the city's small Chinatown area that I passed by on my way home from work. I tried changing my route, but the ducks, shiny as if varnished with a chestnut-colored lacquer, called to me like an artful siren luring the unsuspecting to treacherous rocks.

I relented the way I imagine alcoholics fall off the wagon. I went into Lee Ho Fook's alone late one night. I'll just get a few steamed pork dumplings, I told myself. I can stop anytime I want. Everyone knows that dumplings are a gateway food. Before I knew it, I'd inhaled half a duck. I sorted through the remnants, prying tiny bits of dark meat from the bones with the enthusiasm of someone who has just returned from a space mission and subsisted on nothing other than gel packs and Tang for months. I walked home through the busy environs of Chinatown with my head down. I swore that it would never happen again. The next night, I went back. Settled in a discreet booth and wearing dark glasses, I broke the land speed record for consuming a full order of moo shu pork. After that, the floodgates opened. I bought my first whole chicken in more than three years and I never looked back.

All this transpired not long before I started studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. I felt particularly unprepared for the routine dismemberment of lambs, ducks, chickens, and beef that was de rigueur in the course of culinary school.

Even more than chicken, beef comes with baggage. So many people buy chicken in nonoffensive white breast meat hunks that it's ubiquitous enough that the “meat thing” doesn't even factor into the discussion. It's kind of like that scene in
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
when an aunt, on hearing that the main character's fiancé is a vegetarian, cannot fathom that it's an issue. The aunt replies, stunned, “He don't eat no meat?! What do you mean, he don't eat no meat? Oh, that's okay, I make lamb.”

During the kitchen visits, many of the volunteers expressed that the meat department in their local supermarket was often a place of confusion. How to tell what cuts work for different types of cooking? “I look at packages of meat and it's just baffling,” Shannon said. “I know that a T-bone is a good steak, but I am not sure what should be roasted and what should be grilled. And what the heck is chuck?”

Cheryl shopped at a local food co-op. The labels confused her. Choice? Prime? Natural? Pasture-raised? Grass-finished? She didn't know what they meant.

They're all good questions. I didn't know the answers to many of them either, especially around meat classification. So I did some research.

Unsurprisingly, beef is big business. The United States produced nearly 27 billion pounds of it in 2008, the result of processing about 33 million head of cattle. On average, Americans consume about 54 pounds of beef per capita each year. That's nearly one Quarter Pounder from McDonald's for every man, woman, and child in the United States every day of the year.
²³
More than 40 percent of all cattle raised meet their destiny as hamburger.

I wanted to break the lessons out of the grind, so to speak, so I felt it was time for another guest teacher. I'd recently met Robin Leventhal, the former chef/owner of Crave, a minuscule wedge of a restaurant in my neighborhood that specialized in beautiful comfort food. For the past few years, Robin had been winning a battle against two forms of lymphoma, yet lost the lease on her popular restaurant after a protracted negotiation with her landlord.

“It was both devastating and liberating,” she said on reflection. “For once, I wasn't a slave to my phone twenty-four hours a day.” Released from the pressures of a restaurant, on a whim she auditioned for
Top Chef
and earned a place as a cheftestant in the sixth season of the series from a field of thousands of candidates. Over a couple of celebratory cocktails, we ended up chatting more about her background. She started life in the art world, earning a master's degree in ceramics. “I didn't want to be a starving artist,” she said. Instead, she went to work feeding people. In food, she found a creative outlet that paid the bills and that was as emotionally satisfying as art. “For me, feeding people is primal and maternal. It's arguably the most satisfying experience in the world.”

A week later, thinking about her comment, I called to ask if she would be willing to teach a class. Among the best dishes that I'd had in years were her simple braised specials at Crave. She agreed. For her class, we'd focus on cuts of meat, how to prep them and get the most from inexpensive cuts. But I hoped some of the ethos that Robin felt about cooking and her passion to nourish people would come through in the lesson as much as anything she could tell the volunteers about shoulder roasts.

When I told Lisa and Maggie that Robin was coming in to teach, they had identical reactions. “No freakin' way,” Maggie said. No cupcakes would keep her from that class. “Seriously, whenever I would go to Crave, the waiter would start to rattle off specials, and once he said ‘braised whatever,' I'd just say, ‘I'll take that.' The server would say, ‘Don't you want to know what it comes with it?' I'd say, ‘Uh-unh. Don't know, don't need to know. Just bring it.'”

The day of the class, Lisa and I raided a local supermarket to collect twenty-two packages of beef, lamb, and pork, essentially clearing out the “manager's special” discounted area. We had ribs, round steak, tri-tips, oxtails, London broil, T-bones, beef shanks, lamb shanks, lamb steaks, pork shoulders, and something called chuck Denver steak. We dragged nearly forty pounds of meat into the teaching kitchen. To witness that much meat in one place is both impressive and disturbing. The students filed in, and as each one approached the table she stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh, wow, that's a lot of meat,” Cheryl said, summing up the group's reaction.

Robin has stores of quiet energy, yet a big personality. She's also physically impressive, a square-jawed, solid woman with dark, olive skin and black eyes. Her black short-sleeved shirt accentuated hard biceps. Whenever I saw her, I made a mental note to check out Pilates and never to cross her because, frankly, she could take my pale carcass in a fight without breaking a sweat. She stood demurely behind me as I introduced her. “In two days, she'll be on the first episode of this season's
Top Chef,
but tonight she's going to be teaching something very important—meat.”

Everyone seemed suitably impressed. She was going to be on TV! We handed out diagrams of cows and pigs with dotted lines to demarcate various cuts. Even at the paper version Trish recoiled a bit. As Robin talked, Trish pulled me aside between two towering metal racks of dried goods and tableware as everyone took turns washing their hands. “So, this is kind of awkward,” she said, literally wringing her hands, the way she had when I visited her kitchen. She cast a glance back at the dense collection of red meat on the worktable. “We don't eat much meat now, so I may not be able to stay for the full class.” Her anxiety was palpable. I assured her that I understood and told her of my fling with vegetarianism.

We started with a basic lesson on recognizing cuts. The July heat crept into the kitchen. Two minutes into the explanation, half the class started fanning themselves with the meat diagrams. Their collective eyes started to glaze over as Robin and I began to discuss chuck and sirloin. I looked at Maggie and Lisa. We all sensed we were losing the audience already. Lisa bent over abruptly.

“So, everybody, look at me, I'm a cow,” she said loudly. Possible comebacks rattled around my brain. The students exchanged glances and snickered. Lisa waved a finger good-naturedly at the group. “No wisecracks!” she warned. “Okay, see my shoulder? It gets a lot of work. Feel your shoulders and arms. There's a lot of muscle there. It's tough. This is where chuck comes from,” Lisa said. The group snapped out of its stupor. Each person started to feel her own shoulders.

Then Lisa slapped her thighs. “This is where shank and brisket come from, and you'll want to braise them the way we did with the legs and thighs in the chicken class. We'll do another one tonight.” The class kept their eyes on her, feeling their upper legs. “The meat near the ribs is tender. It isn't used as much. This is where you get your prime rib and rib-eye steaks.” She put her hands on her lower back. “Behind the ribs are the short loins and then sirloin. That's where the most expensive cuts come from. Think tenderloin, filet mignon, that kind of thing.”

As they prodded their own backs and ribs, it struck me that while effective, there was something curiously macabre about demonstrating meat cuts using the human anatomy.

Lisa took one last fling as a cow and put her hands on her buttocks. “Feel your butt. Round, right? That's where round comes from. It works a little harder than the back, so it's tougher.” Then she bolted upright. “Okay, I can't believe that I just did that,” she said, laughing. Everyone clapped, and she took an embarrassed, quick bow.

Then we quizzed them. “Where is your short loin?” The group tentatively reached to their lower backs.

“Round?” Looking at one another and stifling giggles, they grabbed their buttocks.

“Your chuck?” They pointed to their shoulders.

We then looked over the vast assortment of meat on the table. Maggie videotaped the class as Lisa, Robin, and I started to pick up various packages and explain how to prepare them. We grouped them by cuts. Robin took over. “Most people know steaks or ribs, so we're just going to focus on the lesser-known cuts. Anything that says chuck is tough, so these are great for stews, pot roast, or braising.

“The other one is round,” Robin continued. “If it says round, just think of that as a cue to marinate it before you cook it. For instance, London broil is a cut from round, and normally you marinate that and then grill it.”

Every so often, though, you may run into a cut you've never heard of. “For instance, let's discuss this Denver chuck steak,” Robin said as I picked up a vacuum-packed oblong cut of beef. It turned out to be one of the “new” cuts developed by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The good folks at the Cattlemen's Association dedicated $1.5 million and five years to finding new ways to market lesser cuts of meat. Cuts that might have normally found their way to hamburger had been salvaged as whole pieces, including the Denver, an inexpensive, well-marbled piece of chuck that could be cooked like a steak.

“This piece used to be ground into hamburger. You'd pay three or four dollars a pound or whatever for it. Now that they call it a steak, they can charge seven to twelve dollars a pound. I'm not saying that it's a bad cut of meat, it's just that meat producers are always coming up with new things, so don't get discouraged if you don't recognize it.”

Robin picked up two T-bones. “But this is a good example of why you should learn a little about meat cuts, or get to know your butcher,” she said. “This should have meat on both sides of the bone. One side is a strip steak, and the smaller part is the tenderloin. But the butcher cut off the tenderloin and left just the strip steak. The difference?” She selected another package of meat. “Here's a New York strip. It's $8.99 a pound. This T-bone is $12.99 a pound. But you didn't get half the T-bone, or the most expensive part of the steak. It's hard to know if this was a mistake or if it was on purpose. But if you bought this, you'd have been robbed.”