The Reach of a Chef (10 page)

One of his first jobs was as a breakfast cook at a Marriott in Denver. It’s pretty hard to get much lower in the cooking hierarchy, but he’d cooked
thousands
of eggs there. Theo comes right out and says, “I’m not hip enough to live in New York”—a quality I can relate to—but because of the thousands of eggs, he moved into a regular line cook’s position, thirty hours a week, at a very hip joint on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, above his station in every way.

“I worked at Café Luxembourg,” he told me, “part time, while I was a student here at the college—the administration likes to refer to the Culinary as a college these days, and I guess it makes me feel important. A friend set me up with a tryout for their brunch service. Because of my breakfast cooking experience at the Marriott, I was able to jump right on the hot line. First, the Marriott taught me how to properly cook eggs, which believe it or not, is a skill all to itself. Another good thing about being a breakfast cook was it not only taught me how to read tickets and expedite, but it also forced me to be clean and organized. Chefs hate disorganized slobs.”

If you are a cook, there is something to be learned everywhere you go, even if you are a Marriott breakfast cook.

It intrigued me, also, that this former breakfast cook was now in charge of training tomorrow’s chefs. Roe had obviously come a long way.
How did the CIA
—
the leader in American culinary education—hire chefs?
What did they believe a chef must know in order to qualify as a teacher of tomorrow’s chefs, how good did they have to be, and how did the school evaluate a prospective chef’s knowledge and skill and taste?

As it turned out, I found, they hired chefs not unlike the way a restaurateur hires a new chef for his or her establishment. Prospective chefs fly in and try out, cooking for Tim Ryan and Henry Woods, associate dean for faculty development, and up to six others, answering questions about their food to test their knowledge. If they pass, they are asked to give a lecture and demo to a class, on, say, egg cookery, or making polenta.

But just as the student body had evolved, so had the incoming chef-instructor.

“Our ideas of what it takes to be a successful chef-instructor have changed,” said Woods, the man in charge of the hiring process, a 1978 graduate of the school. “It’s a more complex world. Being a real good cook, fifteen, twenty years ago—that was OK. But it isn’t anymore.” For instance, they used to hire a pastry chef for their baking and pastry curriculum. They now have categories of chefs for this program: artisan bakers, production bakers, and pastry chefs—everywhere, the chef world was specializing. Of the three hundred or so applications Woods sees each year, the candidates most likely to be hired are those who have been referred by current chef-instructors. The least successful candidates, he said, are CIA graduates who apply on their own, thinking that the school is the same place they graduated from.

When an applicant looks good on paper—eight to ten years in the industry, good cover letter, good résumé, in midcareer growth rather than burned-out-and-looking-for-a-nine-to-five-with-weekends-and-holidaysoff job—Woods invites the chef for a tryout. The first thing a prospective instructor must do is cook a four-course meal for eight people. “The price of admission,” Woods says. “They have to demonstrate they have the fundamental skills.” If they don’t,
sayonara.

Thus, on Mondays, when the Escoffier restaurant is closed, one or two prospects will try out in that kitchen, which has a built-in, big semi-circular viewing window. The chefs have four and a half hours to prepare and present their courses: a consommé, a salad, a fish course, and a meat course.

Consommé takes some craftsmanship and knowledge. Can they make a perfectly clear beef soup—date-on-a-dime-at-the-bottom-of-a-gallon clear—one that doesn’t taste solely of the garnish they put in it but has a rich, full-bodied beef flavor? Salad: They’ve been able to go to the CIA’s formidable storeroom in order to pick ingredients that satisfy them, and the CIA staff will evaluate how complex the salad is. Did the chef simply use mesclun greens, or did he or she choose a variety of ingredients, perhaps roast some vegetables, perhaps toast or candy some nuts? How was their vinaigrette—simple or complex—and was the acidity right? The chef is presented with a fish and a meat, and must devise a dish for each on the spot. Does the chef know what the fish is, does he or she fabricate it well, serve the right portion size? And is it seasoned and cooked properly? Does the chef make a fumet from the bones or decide on an easier, nonstock-based sauce? And then the meat: a similar set of evaluations and expectations from the judges.

Having sent out the last course, would-be instructors then leave the kitchen to sit before the panel—usually several are Certified Master Chefs—to be grilled about the food they’ve just cooked and served. Do they speak well about it, do they have clear explanations for how and why they handled the food as they did, why they paired this meat with that garnish? Sometimes, Woods said, the panel will like the food but sense no passion or energy from the chef, qualities a chef-instructor must have. Other times, the food will be borderline, but the chef wows them with a passion for food and cooking, or with exceptional articulation of a subject, and may be hired on the basis of this.

If they pass the chef practical, they are then invited to teach a class. If they succeed here, they will be given an offer. If they accept, they’ll be trained in teaching skills for six weeks before they begin their first Day 1, the maiden voyage in Skill Development. Which is where Theo Roe is now, a bit slow to react, a bit plodding and unsure, but not lacking confidence in his knowledge and technique, simply finding his teaching legs.

For his chef practical, Roe did a Beef Consommé Royale (“Royale” signifies a plain custard garnish, a form of egg cookery, notice; one whole egg and three yolks per cup of cream, according to Escoffier #496, chilled, then diced); a salad of organic lettuces, pickled globe beets, spiced walnuts, Chatham goat cheese, and a Dijon vinaigrette. He was given striped bass for his fish and a couple of chickens for his meat. He poached the sea bass and served it with a citrus butter and an herb salad. He broke down the chickens, roasting the bones for a natural jus; he made a forcemeat with the dark meat and piped that into slits he made in the breasts, which he partially sautéed first, to render fat out of the skin, then finished in a low oven to ensure they would cook all the way through without drying out. He served the chicken sausage–stuffed breasts with herbed spaetzle.

“My cooking tryout was intimidating,” he recalled. “But I guess they liked it.”

The chef tryouts all have an assistant for help, if they need it, to peel shallots, chop mirepoix, locate equipment, and the like. Frank Jerbi is the Escoffier kitchen Fellow—a recent graduate who assists the chef, a six-month paid position. Frank thus works for the chef tryouts. He can gauge the quality of the chef by how much the chef leans on him. The more work they ask him to do, the worse they tend to be. One chef, for instance, had to ask Frank if he thought he had enough egg whites for the consommé. “I don’t think that’s gonna do it, man,” Frank told him. The guy didn’t pass, Frank’s advice notwithstanding. Frank was Roe’s assistant and said Roe was “cool,” hardly asked for any help at all.

Pardus did his tryout at the winery kitchen of Markham Vineyards, in St. Helena, in the Napa Valley. He threw up in the parking lot beforehand, but he felt better once he got cooking. He, like Roe, did a Consommé Royale and pan-roasted chicken. He garnished his salad with roasted tomatoes and a goat cheese crouton. The most interesting part of his tryout, though, was receiving the odd small fish they gave him—smooth, shiny skin, looked like pompano only really small. He finally decided they must be pompano and was right. They were too small for eight portions, he said. The proctor agreed and got him some tiger shrimp, and he made a forcemeat with these. (Forcemeat is a display of craft the judges love to see.) Pardus seasoned his with citrus zest. He made a stock with the fish bones as a sauce base. He thought it was a good dish, tasted great. But, before the panel, when Tim Ryan asked how he dealt with the texture of the shrimp farce, Pardus immediately realized his error: He should have pushed it through a tamis, a drum sieve, so that it would be completely smooth on the palate. Thinking fast, he said he’d seasoned the shrimp with citrus zest before pureeing them and didn’t want to tamis out the flavor. Ryan surely spotted this as the BS that it was—but he probably didn’t care; what would have been important to Ryan was whether Pardus
knew
in the first place to tamis the farce for a smooth, clean texture, and he did.

I would imagine it’s a nerve-racking experience, even if you’re doing something you do all the time, like breaking down chickens and cooking fish. But cooking techniques are not what usually brought a candidate down, but rather bad decisions—thought mistakes. “You’d be stunned by how many people try something they’ve never done before,” said Woods, naming the biggest cause of failure in the tryouts.

Frank Jerbi is twenty, young for the management position he holds, the sous-chef of this restaurant kitchen. He has brown eyes and straight brown hair, and his pallid complexion shows off deep circles beneath his eyes, the mark of overtime and weekend jobs. I admired the confidence with which he both instructed students and with which he cooked. He said the chef tryout was easy—he could pass it no problem, and from a purely cooking standpoint, I didn’t doubt him. My first day in the kitchen of the Escoffier Room, the school’s oldest restaurant, one devoted to classic French cuisine, he made the consommé. “I’ve been making consommé twice a week for a year,” he said. “I love it.”

I appreciate the craft of the consommé, so I asked him to describe the finer points of making it.

He shook his head and said, “It’s the ratio, man.”

Now I really liked the guy—ratios are truly what cooking’s all about. It’s not about the ingredients; it’s about the proportions of those ingredients: 2 eggs per cup of liquid make a custard; 0.3 ounce of salt seasons a pound of ground meat; 3 parts fat, 2 parts flour, 1 part water make a pie dough; and 100 percent flour, 60 percent water, 3 percent fresh yeast, 2 percent salt equals bread. This is where cooking begins. Are the ratios variable? Sure—I like less egg in a custard, and maybe another cook wants less salt in ground meat—but the point is, you have your own convictions, which are matters of preference, and preference is relative to standard ratios. Only once these are committed to your soul can you truly begin to cook.

I asked Frank what the ratio was for his consommé, a stock made clear with egg whites, its flavor fortified with meat and aromatic vegetables. He rattled his off: 5 quarts stock, 3 pounds meat, 1 pound mirepoix, 10 tomatoes. “Plus whatever scraps from garnish I have” (the soup is garnished, in part, with leek, carrot, and celery julienne, the cutting of which yields a good amount of flavorful trim). This was straight out of
The New Professional Chef,
one of the school’s texts. He salted to the chef’s taste—Chef Le Roux, from Brittany—the chef liked things really salty, he said.

Frank, too, appreciates the finer points of consommé. He said he cut the mirepoix—2 parts onion, 1 part each of celery and carrot—in a julienne, rather than in a rough cut. When you mix egg whites, vegetables, and ground meat into stock, then bring it to a simmer, the egg whites coagulate around the meat and vegetables and rise to the top of the pot in the shape of a thick disk, called a raft or a clarification. The way it clarifies a stock is that the proteins of the egg white form a mesh, and as it rises, it collects all the particles that make the stock cloudy. Frank said he cut the mirepoix in thin sticks because he felt as they overlapped within the raft, forming their own mesh, they made the raft sturdier. I liked the notion that the vegetables, whose purpose is to add flavor, mirrored the network of proteins. I don’t know if it really mattered, but it was an elegant idea and worth the extra effort to someone who liked to cook.

Also, he has a special tool for his consommé, a four-foot length of plastic tubing. By the time the raft has formed, the stock is mainly clear, and you can see this as it bubbles over and through the raft. You must keep cooking it so that the vegetables and meat give up their flavor to the liquid (the egg white also traps flavor molecules and gelatin). But you should cook it only so long, because eventually the vegetables will break down, and their particles might recloud the stock. Once the consommé has cooked for the appropriate time, it is then strained through a coffee filter to remove all the solids. Typically, one pressed a ladle through the raft to get the stock out. You had to be careful, because you inevitably break up the raft when you do this and threaten the clear stock. When Frank’s consommé was done, he set it on the counter above a five-quart container and a strainer lined with a coffee filter. He stuck the plastic tubing down into the consommé and siphoned it out. This method disturbed the raft as little as possible and saved quite a bit of time as well, the elegant fluid issuing from the tube as if from a spigot.

In the Escoffier Room, this consommé was not simply served as is or even with ordinary garnish. The restaurant has added the name Bocuse to it, and the signature
B
above the ranges, in honor of the Great One (this class, in fact, currently had a Troisgros offspring working sauté; the restaurant preparing Italian food currently had a young Vongerichten in its ranks; and, as long as we’re dropping names, the school made no secret of the fact that Bocuse sent his own son here). Thus, the consommé Chef Le Roux served was the one Paul Bocuse made famous at his Lyonnais restaurant—Consommé Elysee, formally, but Le Roux called it by the name of its creator. The broth is garnished with black truffle, foie gras, julienned meat (beef or chicken, depending on the broth), julienned vegetables, then sealed with puff pastry and baked at service till the dough rises into a golden brown dome. The diner breaks into the flaky crust to release the heady aroma of truffles in the piping hot broth. Damn good dish.