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Think Like a Chef: Methods

Methods: This is a living list of crucial cooking standards that every cook should know. This can be updated or changed but a basic set most kitchens should use. Some chefs may differ on these and others need to use these methods. You only know as much as the people you work with.  Know enough to know we learn everyday.  Best practice is to ask the chef, never assume you know the right method.

Taste is Everything, Quality is a fact.

Always taste everything, everything gets seasoned. Everything must be able to stand on its own. Always use a spoon, no fingers. Always taste throughout service and correct if necessary. Soups, broths, liquids can become salty or broken if not attended too.  Pursue the moment of excellence.

Garnish Garnish Garnish

Roasted Peppers

Place peppers over open flame and char on all sides.  A Mapp gas torch burns at an extreme high temperature and is perfect for scorching but not cooking the pepper.   Place in bowl and cover with plastic wrap until skin has softened to peel, use bowl of warm water to peel and rinse, do not use running water in the sink, clean out the drain when finished.

Blanching

Use the largest pot for blanching in very salty boiling water, do not blanch anything in bundles, example asparagus.  Do not walk away from the pot while cooking.  Keep the water deep, boiling and moving to accurately blanch the vegetables evenly.  Remove vegetables and immediately immerse in 50/50 water and ice bath until completely chilled.  Remove and allow to drain.

Sear or Grill Proteins

Season with salt and pepper or dry spice rub immediately before placing on heat. Ensure heat source is hot, with or with out oil, grapeseed oil preferred. All meats seared in a pan, comal or flat top need whole thyme and rosemary sprigs in the pan. If grilling, determine diamonds with 60 degree turns for grill marks. When searing fish, allow for a solid brown caramel on meat before turning over. Poele with butter, shallots, herbs, lemon, white wine/vermouth. Remove and rest. Once it is placed in the oven, you can start to lose control of the temperature.

Tomato Concasse

Blanch in boiling water with scored base and cored, shock in cold water and peel, seed and dice.  A quick hint is to use the coffee machine hot water tap to quickly blanch a small amount of tomates.

Omelettes

Ingredients should be heated and held separately and then folded into cooked omelette. There should never be any brown color to the exterior of the omelette and ingredients will be inside. It is not proper to cook the omelette ‘frittata’ style unless you are making a frittata. Garnish garnish garnish.  P.S.  a ‘southern’ style omelette is a lazy mans omelette.

Crab Cakes

Seared in sauté pan, blue steel or carbon steel preferred, with clarified butter. This helps with a ‘crust’ on the outside, allowing for two distinct textures of the crab cake, a hot crispy exterior and a hot smooth interior. The flat top is not the correct method. Again, monte with with butter and fresh lemon before service.

Heating Sauces and Soups

Bring to a bare simmer, skim and pass through chinois. Every time a sauce is transferred from one pot to another, pass through a chinois, taste, adjust with stock. Fortify veal based sauces with a roasted veal bone, lamb bone/lamb stock, ect

Roasting eggplant

When cut, salt and let rest 20 minutes to purge the water, pat dry and grill, roast, or caramelize in a pan. No color = no flavor

Veal Stock

Rinse bones with cold water, drain. Cover bones with cold water, bring to simmer to purge bones, drain, rinse and cover again with cold water and bring to slow simmer with following veg. For 40# bones, 1 200 pan full of chopped onions and 1 400 pan split half with celery and carrot. Use these vegetables for the stock. Add peppercorns, bay leaves, herb sprigs. Add 12 gallons of water.  Do not bring to boil but keep on low, let cook 16 hours, skimming constantly with ladle. Remove bones for remoulage. Drain stock and prepare the pincage. Yield will be approximately 10 gallons of veal stock.  Sweat vegetables in braiser or large sauté pans. Caramelized 1 200 pan of fresh tomato. Deglaze and reduce 8 btls of red wine to half. Add veal stock to this and prepare for the demi glace.

Veal Demi Glace

Reduce veal stock slowly, use remoulage from previous batch if available, skim constantly. Pass through chinois into another pot when reduced by a quarter and again when stock has been reduce to half of its original quantity.

Chicken Stock

Purge 40# bones to start, cover with cold water and bring to simmer, skim foam and drain bones and water. Add veg, 4 gallons of mirepoix with fresh herb sprigs, parsley, peppercorns and bay leaves, cover with water and cook low, barely a simmer, 6 hours, skim constantly. Strain, chill.

Mashed Potatoes

Keep gold potatoes in cold water, boil until fork tender in seasoned water. Drain, dry on sheet tray or in stock pot to allow steam to escape. Hot whole milk, not boiled and cold butter diced chunks to be folded in after ricing potatoes. Whisk quickly and violently to emulsify butter. Do not melt the butter with the milk. This separates and does not emulsify with the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper, pinch of nutmeg. Potatoes should be loose and form a meniscus on the plate when plated.

Pasta

Cook al dente in salted water, cool on sheet tray, do not rinse with water, oil and season with salt and pepper.

Soup

Season mirepoix every step of production, do not wait until the end. Chill soups overnight before serving. Vita prep all smooth soups before service. Check seasoning.

Mushrooms

Clean, pick stems, cut if necessary. In hot pan with olive oil blend or clarified butter add mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper, allow to brown on one side but do not stir or pack pan that the mushrooms will steam. Shake pan when one side is caramelized, remove from heat and allow to rest. Retain cooling juices or liquid for later use. May also deglaze with previous batch of mushroom ‘liquor’ or with wine, ect.

Clarified Butter

Butter blocks in bain marie in hot water bath. Melt completely until solids settle, skim top, transfer to quart containers.

Banquets

All food and preparations shall be the same as for restaurants. Quality and ingredients are the same.

Toasted Bread for Bruscetta

Season sheet tray with olive oil or clarified butter. Season with salt and pepper. Lay bread on tray, rotate gently and turn over. Toast lightly but not too hard until else it will chip a tooth. Avoid drizzling with oil.

Burgers

Fresh ground beef needs to be worked gently until almost sticky. This helps the myocin form with the myoglobins. Too much work and the burger is a meatloaf that will break when eating. Too little and the flavor is not great but it crumbles on the bun like picadillo. Gentle pressure and a thumbprint in the middle will help with the shape on the skillet. Avoid the grill unless using a comal on the grill, cast iron or flat top preferred.  Consider the condiments and how the burger is eaten.  I prefer the lettuce (chiffonade) and tomato, pickle, ect under the hot meat as it is a chaser, a cool intermezzo to the hot fatty and maybe cheesy burger.  Critical thinking on a burger.  Also works well if you have several on the the board, best to arrange them by temp and not assemble on the station, it only cools the burger before it gets to the guest.

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A Letter to Read Before A Chef’s Job Interview

Dear Applicant:

Thank you for your interest in working with me and with the kitchen team as well as this company.  Before we get to the particulars and meet at my restaurant for a cup of coffee,  please do yourself a favor and look up the place you are applying to before you accept the interview.  Look up the chef, the menu, the reviews on social media all before you even send the application.  Lets make certain this is the place you want to look at and be a part of.  Know full well that if you live in a 20 mile radius I have given you a weeks advance opportunity to visit the property, eat in the restaurants for any meal before we meet.   Walk through the halls of the building, walk through the restaurant, sit at the bar, perhaps engage with the front of house team.  This interaction can tell you the passion or lack of in the kitchen and the food.  Decide if you believe you can ‘fit the wheel’ of this kitchen before you waste my time.  Decide if these are people you want to be around and represent your efforts in the kitchen.  Would you feel proud having this person serve your food?  Would you spend your money on this food?  Because people do this every day, spend their hard earned money and it provides for many of us a job.  Ask them questions about the menu.  It is a sneak attack on an possible employer.  Be certain I will ask you what you saw and what you can see to change if you work here.  I want to know what your vision is, what purpose do you bring if I were to hire you.  I am dumbfounded at the lack of initiative of prospective culinarians, with the ease of the internet we make life changing decisions but ever so lightly we cannot even start to research a prospective employer.

I want to talk to you about food and kitchens and flavors, I want your feedback on the current menu and what interests you to eat.  One of the highest honors we have is to cook for another chef and if you have any validity, you would appreciate the simple and sublime items on the menu.  I want to know what is on your bucket list of restaurants in any of five global cities.  I want to know where you ate at last, where your favorite restaurant in town is, what chef or restaurant you admire in the world and what cookbook you last purchased.  Most important, I want to know what you cooked on your last day off and why, who was it with?  This exchange, to hear you talk,  this voice pattern of your tastes and passion for cooking for others extends into my kitchen.  You have to like what you do to work here, cooking is natural, like breathing, something we do with other people who like to do it as well and maybe better.  I will probably ask you for menus of your past and current jobs, just to see where you are at and what flavors you drift towards.  A menu also tells me alot about technique in the kitchen and balancing productivity with volume.  I will ask you what you want to learn and what you are able to teach well.  With an ounce of humility, be able to talk about an area in which you are not proficient; ‘know what you don’t know’.

If you live in town, when we meet, I will ask you about your last experience here.  If you have lived in town for anything more than a month and are not familiar with the restaurant, please do not apply.  If you consistently use bases or soup or stock or prefab items on your menus and in your recipes, please do not apply.  If you don’t know how to access social media and traveler reviews, Zagat, ect or any other resource regarding guest experiences, please do not apply.  Hopefully you have left most of your previous employers on a good terms, it is amazing how small the world is and how connected we are as hospitality professionals.  You are only as good as your last service, you are only as good as your last day.

I hope this helps with your career path.

 

Regards,

John

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A Few Notes on Salmon…

Salmon

I recently saw a menu that stated wild atlantic salmon and realized that the restaurant was embarrassing all other chefs.  Atlantic salmon is a species and a completely farmed product, the largest of the aquaculture industry and grown all over the world.  Pacific salmon includes five species with the majority of them wild caught and frozen at sea.   The industry of farmed pacific salmon is growing, most recently the King or Chinook is farmed with the best product coming out of New Zealand.  Atlantic salmon is the easiest and most affordable seafood to buy very similar to the chicken industry; it is speed grown for better yield.  In fact, the poultry industry sells its feathers, carcasses and waste to be made into salmon feed known as ‘feather meal’.  The other source of food for salmon is ‘fish meal’ which comes from the results of supertrawlers and fisherman exclusively catching seafood to support the farmed salmon industry.  Even salmon farms use lights to trick the salmon into seasons and control their eating habits just like a chicken farm.  Look at any industrial chicken farm and the windows are sealed for no natural light, the temperature controlled with the ease of an iphone app.  Generally, salmon require a 4:1 ratio of four pounds of fish meal to produce a pound of salmon.  In some cases the feed is a 3:1 ration of food to flesh.  Progressive aquaculture farms have reduced this to a 1:1 ratio.   One notably has developed a special yeast significant just for their salmon.  Peru, is a large exporter of fish meal, the ground product of their fisherman who export 38% of this to Europe.  The northern Europe countries of Scotland, Norway and Sweden have all been farming salmon, albeit highly industrial countries with heavily polluted waters that feed farmed salmon with fish meal from Peru.  There is a product from Canada that touts its carbon footprint and will not fly any of their fish, it is only accessible to places that deliver by truck yet their fish meal and fish oil do come from South America.   I would like to think that the salmon we buy comes from deep, dark waters, far away from pollution and contaminants yet provides a living to a community that has a long heritage of fisherman.