Bad Habits

Everyone has bad habits. How much these habits affect your life is a whole 'nother matter. I've never really worked an office job so I can't say how your corporate habits will present themselves, but in a job that requires a lot of physical efficiency of motion, bad habits can kill. Even a minor inefficiency in a golf swing could have untold effects on a tournament. How else do you explain Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, veritable masters of their sport, retooling their bread & butter motions every so often? In cooking you could get by with bad habits, but you may never excel. At best you will last long enough in good restaurants to graduate to a point where you no longer need to work on the line. At worst, you could kill someone. Okay, maybe a bit melodramatic as that is quite unlikely, but you could seriously hurt someone, starting with yourself. You are most likely to hurt yourself, and if anyone has seen my forearms recently you would know that I haven't developed a heroin habit, I've just been burning and cutting myself a lot.

I think a lot of the appeal of being a professional cook is that there is a bit of danger to it, isn't there? Not only is there the adrenaline bomb of service, but there's fire and knives everywhere and at any moment you could maim something. You're just hoping it's already dead and had an organic diet of natural whole-grains. I went to a cooking exhibition by Grant Achatz and he had his assistant, then sous-chef, demonstrate how they prepare their "Sweet Potato Pie" dish. It's kind of complicated by normal food standards, but fits right in with the current molecular movement at Alinea. Imagine a cinnamon stick used as a skewer of some sorts. On the skewer are three cubed components. A cube of creamed sweet potato, a cube of brown sugar candy, and a cube of gelatinized bourbon whiskey. These 3 cubes are bunched together and battered in tempura. Now the only way to fry it is for a cook to hold the cinnamon stick between his fingers and dip the business end in to hot oil. And since the cooks at Alinea will often need to make several of these at once, the most seasoned fry guys will hold up to 7 or 8 Sweet Potato Pie skewers between their fingers just inches above a pot of hot-hot oil. The finished product is served in the unique "spider" service ware that Chef Achatz developed (imagine a many-pronged antenna with the prongs all reaching towards the sky), and the cinnamon stick is lit on fire, so when the dish is brought to your table your nose is enticed by a hint of smoldering cinnamon.

Needless to say the oil sputters and pops and burns are commonplace. Chef Achatz went on to say, "Yeah ... all cooks like to think they are street warriors. We usually put the rookies through the Sweet Potato fry test to test their mettle."

Anyway the point of this tangential anecdote was to illustrate that yes; cooks do like to think of themselves as something of badasses. You move fast, your profession moves fast, there is the possibility of danger at every turn. In a kitchen, bad habits can seriously hinder you when you are trying to prep as quick as possible. I am not without my own fair share of bad habits, and though I try to fix them, they remain difficult problems to solve.

I have issues with finding things. I don't know if it's because I'm blind or I give up easily on searches, but whenever I need to look for some ingredient and it's not exactly where it should be, I either take a long time or I come back with news that I couldn't find it. At that point one of the cooks will immediately storm back to the cooler or the dry goods area, immediately find what I was looking for, grunt and make me carry it back. This grunt is usually followed with the question, "Necesitas lentes? ... Pinchi Eric" (You need glasses? ... fuckin' Eric). To be fair, they've been working there for years, many of them for a decade plus. They know where to look for things that have been misplaced slightly. But still, I'm kind of Magoo-esque with my inability to find anything. I don't know why this is the case, perhaps it's a lack of persistence. But I get the feeling this might be what I am remembered for by the Mexican cooks. They always talk shit about the last sous-chef, also Eric, who used to leave his stirring spoons everywhere. Or this other gringo named Dave who they always used to call a bitch for being a hapless suburbanite from Des Plaines, IL. I hope I won't become "Asian Eric Who Couldn't Find Shit." I'm hoping more for "Asian Eric Who Made Good Family Meals."

Another bad habit I have is actually the lack of practicing a certain good habit. Whenever you walk behind someone in a kitchen you have to say "Behind you" or in Spanish, "Atras." This is to notify someone you are right behind them so that they don't turn around with that giant pot of hot stock, or don't turn around with that case of potatoes, or they don't turn around with that knife facing out. The Mexican cooks have all been conditioned to say this literally every time they pass behind someone. Usually it's unnecessary but it's a good habit for them to practice. They tell me sometimes when they go out and while they are sidling through the masses to get to the bar they are constantly telling strangers, "Atras, guey!" I just don't think it's necessary most of the time and I don't like to bark it out like they do every time. I'm generally very quiet in the kitchen so I guess that silence remains in most situations. In American kitchens they seem to have even more verbal signals to alert everyone, like "Coming down the line!" to tell the cooks you are coming through with something, or "Reaching!" to tell them you are stretching out behind someone, or the ubiquitous "Hot!" to tell someone ... something is ... you know, hot. I try to say it more but I forget or say it too quietly most of the time, so when a cook bumps in to me they get kind of annoyed. This has kind of lead to an unfortunate nickname. Chuy was once walking behind me and he let "Behind you, Pikachu!" slip for some reason. I then decided it'd be a good idea to tell them that I was kind of obsessed with Pokemon as a child. Pikachu is starting to stick. FML.

Because professional cooking requires so much efficiency of your usage of time, standing around doing nothing is a no-no. Even in the extremely unlikely situation that there is literally nothing for you to do, don't look like that's the case. So that means no sitting, no leaning. Ever. No exceptions. Leaning makes you look lazy and ranks high on most chef's shitlist of pet peeves. Sitting would be even worse as I've heard being caught sitting gets you a nasty nickname or a hard time for the rest of your duration at that job. So I tend to lean sometimes. I don't do it out of laziness, it's just I don't like standing so much (does that make sense?). I mean I started playing cello because it required sitting, whereas violin would have required standing occasionally. The choice was obvious. But I actually am quite a busy body in the kitchen. Because of my borderline OCD-nervosa I am constantly wiping down my station, my burners, sweeping off crumbs, sweeping the floors, wiping containers. Because I am one of the few native English speakers I often label all the sauces and stocks in the walk-in. I hate, hate, hate messy kitchens and unlabeled stocks. But of course it's human nature that your constant good habits go unnoticed, but one instance of an infraction will brand you forever. I hate people.

But those are pretty obvious habits, right? I'm sure Lebron, Kobe, Peyton Manning, Tiger Woods, have spent hours upon hours of watching tape to figure out the small inefficiencies in their respective playing motions. To fix them probably took even more hard work and study. Unfortunately I don't have hours of tape available to me. I have about one hour of footage that doesn't even capture my stove. Unfortunately I don't have a dedicated trainer studying my every move. I have a few cooks and one chef who occasionally give me pointers. But it is said the best cooks are ones that are composed and make the fewest, smoothest motions. Though it looks like the busy, perpetually moving, twitchy guy on the line may be a faster cook, they are often messier, less efficient and in the long run, slower (not to mention they disrupt the line with their helter-skelter playing style). Good cooks don't move fast, they move smoothly and intelligently.

So with that as my guideline, the best I can do is watch myself. Just scratched your hair or touched your face? Immediately wash your hands. My hands are becoming raw and chapped from washing so much (given my itchy nature, you can imagine how much of a problem this is becoming). My chef constantly tells me not to wipe plates if I make them messy. Let the runner do it, your dirty side towel will just grease up the plate. I do it anyway though because of that OCD-nervosa I was talking about. I am trying to break that habit and I'm trying to just put out cleaner plates. Less spins of the tongs to make a perfect pasta mountain, less flips of the pan to saute mushrooms, no more spilling mushrooms out the sides. Cutting vegetables faster, cleaner. Making less trips to the walk-in cooler or the bakery. All these little time saving elements that are a product of a constantly efficient mindset will save you hours over a week, and years over a lifetime. You will do everything stronger, better, faster, and any kitchen would love to have you because you are so clean, so quick, so goddamned efficient.

I learned this lesson especially with learning how to ladle a sauce. You'd think that ladling a liquid on to a plate required a little practice, not anything too complicated. I was schooled pretty hard in sauce ladling by my chef.

You hold a ladle like you hold a pencil at about 2/3 up from the bowl. When you collect sauce you don't scoop sideways, digging at the liquid. You dip the ladle in vertically, you don't fill it completely and you let the bottom 1/3 rest in the liquid for half a second. For some reason I could probably divine after thinking about it for a minute, the liquid then does not drip from the ladle as you are trying to sauce a plate.

As simple a motion as ladling a sauce could be refined to perfect efficiency so long as you took the time to think about it and execute it as a habit.

Shit. Lot to learn.

EP6