The Making of a Chef (9 page)

Read The Making of a Chef Online

Authors: Michael Ruhlman

BOOK: The Making of a Chef
7.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
I
should have known that Day Eight would be different from all the others preceding it by looking at my own prep list and comparing it to Day Three's:
DAY 8
Consommé
SMEP
Velouté
Béchamel
Clam Chowder
Clarify 5# butter
White Beef Stock
The card hints that I suspected timing would be a factor since I had built into my game plan the order in which I would present the items to the chef—consommé first, béchamel last, and only when that was done would I finish my knife cuts. I'd show him the knife cuts after the six o'clock deadline, which was all right so long as you had them done by six; between five-thirty and six-fifteen a line formed to present pots and bowls to the chef, and he would set out a sheet of legal paper on which to sign our names so we wouldn't waste time standing in line, staring at our reflection in bowls of
consommé growing cooler by the instant. At six o'clock, he would draw a line under the last name and anyone below that lost points on their food.
The pace had picked up abruptly the day before. On Day Six we were still at the mise-en-place-and-one-soup level. Day Seven became standard daily mise en place (plus julienne and brunoise carrots, and tourner four pieces of potato), consommé, split pea soup, and béchamel. Béchamel, a mixture of flour and milk, is a mother sauce for many other sauces such as Mornay (béchamel with cheese), Nantua (with crayfish), and soubise (with onion), and it can even be used in various cream soups to good effect, but here for some reason people typically linked it to building material. On the first day, Chef Pardus had told us that he could “build a house” with all the béchamel we'd be making. When I asked Lou what he had done at IBM, he told me he used to ship huge circuit boards that were made by pouring a thick white compound that would harden into a sheet—before it hardened, Lou said, this white compound was just like the béchamel sauce we'd been making. Other mother sauces, though, the velouté (chicken or fish stock thickened with roux) and the brown sauce, were held in somewhat higher regard. The much-maligned béchamel—perhaps soon to be sold at hardware stores—once played a bigger role at the Culinary than it does today.
So Day Seven, rushed and filled with fretting that your béchamel would scorch at any instant, was nevertheless lighthearted busyness. Indeed, the busyness was part of the fun.
I halted once in my endeavors: Erica made her way down the central aisle, passed behind me, her tongue apparently pinned to the left side of her upper lip, so deep in concentration was she, carefully transporting her completed bowl of split pea soup to the chef's desk. She was, as usual, the color crimson, perspiring, and mortified when she approached the stone-faced Pardus, who had very little hope for Erica. She had a sixty-five, barely passing, at the midway point of Skills One. Her soups were mediocre, cold, and cloudy. She was a mess and had lost many points simply by forgetting to put on her hair net.
Pardus sat low in the chair at the desk, typically slouched since he was either scrutinizing food or marking the grade sheets. He glanced up. He didn't actually sigh, but there was a sigh in his expression. He lifted a spoon from the container to his right and said, “O.K., Erica, let's taste your soup.” Erica shifted from one foot to another as if she couldn't wait to flee. Pardus felt the bowl to make sure it was hot, said nothing. He dragged the spoon through it, nodded. “Consistency's good, color's good,” he said. He
lifted a spoonful, blew on it, tasted, and nodded. “Taste is good. This is a good soup, Erica. This is a
very
good soup.” Erica returned to her station, bowl in hand, by appearances no less mortified than when she'd left. I went to her and asked her how she did.
She nodded seriously and said, “The chef liked my soup. He said it was very good.”
I said, “That's great, Erica,” and asked to taste it. Erica's split pea soup was indeed very good soup.
When Vic Cardamone brought his consommé to the chef, Pardus said, “Nice color. Very nice color. I'm not even going to taste it. I can tell by looking at it. It's
scorched
.”
“I scorched it,” Vic confessed. Vic, mid-twenties, a former marine from Philly, he would tell you, loved to smoke and drink, liked a loud foul-mouthed chef, and liked to be loud himself in the kitchen; his own baritone carried easily through the noisy kitchen.
“Let me see your pot,” Pardus said.
Vic returned with the pot and sure enough, the bottom was coated with scorched egg white. Pardus told Vic to leave his scorched pot and scorched consommé up there and announced to the entire class that anyone interested in knowing what a scorched consommé looked like and tasted like, there was an example on his desk. Vic returned to his station at Table Three shaking his head, evidently not happy to be the model of failure.
Midway through class I saw Susanne sitting down beside the chef's table with her hand in the air, clutching a wad of bloody paper towel. The chef had been right about keeping your thumb tucked when you were chopping.
As we waited in line outside K-9, our plastic trays in hand, people asked Erica if she did O.K. today and she nodded and smiled and said, “I did good, yeah.
Finally.
”
Things had been busy and Adam was grumbling. Maybe he didn't do well on his soup or maybe he was just always mad, I didn't know. He did have that very long narrow face, thin sharp nose, and short spiky black hair; perhaps all those edges and points came from being mad all the time.
Arriving on the tail of one of his comments, I asked, “Isn't that
anything
like a restaurant situation?”
“Not at all, man,” he said. “In a real restaurant, you say, ‘Get me a pot,' and the dishwasher gets you a pot,
fast,
because if he doesn't, he knows you'll fire him. You don't wash your own pots, you don't do the stupid mise en place every day, and even if you did you'd come in earlier.” He continued
to grumble as the line began to move and we all chose between broil, sauté, grill, braise, roast, or veg plate.
Day Eight, like Day Seven, quickly became a swirl of activity. Time became impossible to gauge. Forty-five minutes seemed like fifteen minutes sometimes and like forty-five minutes at other times, but you could never be sure which. This was important when you were making consommé. If you didn't note when you got it simmering, you might cook it too long, and the raft would disintegrate; if you didn't cook it enough, it wouldn't have good flavor. This was why you never wanted to rely too much on a clock, but instead on sight, smell, and taste. Clocks were not much good except for saying it was exactly six o'clock and you hadn't turned your potatoes yet. While you stood like a statue in a twister of clanking pots and onion skins, staring at the horizon with glazed eyes trying to remember what time you got your consommé simmering, your béchamel, as if begrudging your lack of attention, began to scorch and you'd have to run and get another pot and dump what was still good into that, hoping you still had enough flour left to thicken it. We were also making chicken velouté for the first time, which is almost the same as béchamel only you use chicken stock instead of milk. This can scorch, too. You wanted to be skimming these things all the time, thus paying attention to them at all times, so there was no excuse for scorching. And if by now you hadn't gotten your chowder going, you were in trouble—because of time and because there weren't any pots left. And if you found a pot—more likely you'd have to clean one yourself—you'd be lucky for a burner or a few inches of flattop to put it on.
At one point early in the day, Chef Pardus said, “I'd like you all to know that you are now using every pot in this kitchen.” It was easy to hear him because there seemed to be not a single other voice in the kitchen; everyone was too busy to talk. Chef Pardus added, “That's not good or bad.”
I was glad to hear this because the information clarified things for me at the time and I was glad that I hadn't suddenly gone insane or lost my senses. Everyone
was
really busy. Everyone needed three pots each on the stove at the same time—that would be fifty-four pots. Each pot required an array of other pots and pans and bowls. The consommé, for example, required a coffee filter, a chinois, and a pot into which to strain the consommé and, of course, a soup bowl that had better be hot but not too hot. If you left your bowl in a 500-degree oven for a half hour, and poured your consommé into it, your consommé would be glace in about five seconds. The béchamel likewise would need to be strained into another pot. And just
about everyone scorched their béchamel so that the sink was stacked high with pots crusted with burnt milk and flour—who had time to clean them?
At one point, a high-ranking chef named Zearfoss—I'd heard him referred to as Captain Sanitation—stuck his head in the door and made a crack to Pardus about all the pots piling up on the floor. Chef Pardus was busy “power tasting,” as he called it, and hadn't noticed. “Somebody better get on those pots now!” he shouted when Zearfoss was gone. I pretended not to hear. Someone did get on those pots, probably Greg, since he was always ahead of the game.
At about five-thirty, all was chaos, our table was a disaster with onion peels and paper towels all over the place, steel bowls crammed in between cutting boards and hotel pans and chinois. Compostable scraps, which would be tossed into a huge blue trash can, spilled over onto the table. The whole kitchen was stormy with food scraps and burning sauces, tomato trim slippery on the floor, Pardus's used tasting spoons clinking into a silver bowl at an even four-four beat in the background, and someone yelling “Behind!” or “Hot!” or “Who's got a chinois?!”
Through this chaos emerged something like a mirage or vision: Three students appeared, perfectly clean, uniforms gleaming; each carried two plates. Pardus told the students to set them where they could find space. He asked Travis and me to clear off a spot on our table and, completely uncomprehending and befuddled, but like an obedient soldier, I did. There, beside my cutting board, was set an immaculate white plate with a perfect circle of quail roulade floating atop a delicate mustard sauce. Beside the roulade was a stuffed quail leg, and beside this was a golden brown potato basket, acting as a nest for two tiny, pickled quail eggs. It truly felt like a hallucination. I had no idea why this had happened and at the time I didn't really care. As we chopped and minced and strained and plated on a table that was no longer visible beneath the garbage, the beautiful quail appetizer plate remained on this table beside my cutting board, accusatory, humiliating, but also like a beacon, hope. One day there would be more to life than scorched béchamel and standard daily mise en place.
I barely got my product done by six, and I was too tired to talk to anyone at dinner. Everyone else seemed to be just as tired and discouraged as I was. Susanne asked our entire table—we all sat together, the wounded, sharing bandages—how we were compared to other groups. No one knew, of course, but everyone realized, and seemed to share, her underlying fear: we were no good. We had tried our best and we were no good.
I wondered this myself. All this anxiety and discord because of two soups and two base sauces. People were pretty quiet at dinner, and most returned to the kitchen fairly quickly because it was still the disaster that we'd left it. Twenty gallons of stock needed to be strained. Someone would have to shovel all the bones and vegetables and fat out of each one and dump it in the blue compost bin, which would then have to be rolled down the hall, carried down a flight of stairs, and rolled a quarter mile or so to the compost Dumpster along with recyclables and worthless trash. We also kept a fat bucket; all the fat skimmed from stock went into yet another giant receptacle outside, eventually to wind up as soap. Meanwhile someone else would have to cool all this stock in giant ice baths. Travis was the first man on the pots crusty with burnt milk and flour. He was an awesome pot man, probably from spending so much time in the army. We didn't begin lecture till after nine o'clock. Chef Pardus, who had been staying late working on vegetarian recipes for an unrelated project, was tired himself and not chipper.
 
 
“B
rown sauce, sauce Espagnol,” Chef Pardus began, going over tomorrow's recipes from the
Pro Chef
. “Do one quarter of this recipe. Hot oil as needed. Tomato paste, one ounce. Brown veal stock, forty ounces. It says pale roux here—we're gonna use
brown roux
. It says twelve ounces per gallon—we're gonna use thirty-
two
ounces for a gallon, or eight ounces for a quart.”
Pardus was subdued. He sat on the desk instead of pacing and spinning the wooden spoon in the air. He lacked the typical mischievous glimmer. When the recipes were done, he moved into his evaluation of today. I believe I sensed, and participated in, a sort of cumulative class slouch.
“Um, today,” Chef Pardus said, taking a breath. “The béchamel.
Problems
with that sauce. Several people burnt the bottom of their pan and consequently lost a lot of their thickening power because their roux stuck to the bottom of their pot; so you were ending up with thin béchamel and/or the béchamel tasted scorched. All of this is a matter of paying attention and being careful. I
know
you were all rushing today, I
know
you had a lot to do. This was an overwhelming day for most of you.” He paused, momentarily sympathetic. Then: “
It doesn't matter.
You still have to pay attention to your
products
. Serving them in cool bowls or pots is unacceptable. You all
know
that.
Don't … do
it. It's too thick? You've made this once before—if it's too
thick you know how to fix it.
Do
it! A couple of people are still not cooking it out long enough, it's a little gritty on the mouth. Tastes thick; rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth. If it doesn't taste
per
fectly
smooth
, if it tastes a little bit gritty …
cook it a little while longer
! You think it's too thick already, and it'll get way too thick if you cook it more, heat up a little milk and add more milk into it,
then
cook it a little longer. You gotta cook that starch out so that it's not gritty; it's gotta be a perfectly smooth sauce.

Other books

Would-Be Witch by Kimberly Frost
Master Mage by D.W. Jackson
Moonlight by Jewel, Carolyn
The Reckoning by Jane Casey
Moonlight and Ashes by Sophie Masson
Aftermath by Sandy Goldsworthy
Of Starlight by Dan Rix
Hot Secret by Woods, Sherryl