Grilling

I apologize for the lack of posts. March was a crazy month. But the good news is I have so many near-complete posts that I can pretty much Scatter Shot all of them to you in the next few weeks like in Contra (oh boy I just lost most of you). I'm going to blame my lack of writing mainly on my mini vacation, which involved going to Alabama to see Ms. Ali Frederick and Mr. Robert McMenamin get married. Congratulations guys! Love you and the great city of Birmingham.

So I took a brief hiatus from cooking. Being a cellist growing up there was a famous saying by Gregor Piatigorsky that went something like, "If I don't practice for a day, I notice. If I don't practice for 3 days, my wife notices. If I don't practice for a week, my audience notices." I'm not sure if that was actually Piatigorsky (who was a cellist), or if that was a stock phrase all the professors at Juilliard used to force upon us, but the point remains. If I don't cook for a week, what happens exactly? Since I'm not close to mastering anything and my actions depend on focused daily repetition, am I going to go back and suck ass?

Well good thing they let me warm up by putting me on my most familiar station.

Oh wait, they decided to try me out on grill on a Friday. Great.

I've watched grill and felt its presence since day one. It is fucking hot. It is uncomfortable to put your hand a foot away from the flame, it is downright painful to put it within 6 inches. Just being around the grill requires you to hydrate continuously. A piece of meat will get dark, black grill marks in under 15 seconds on our grill. On my first day ever they had me roast red peppers on the thing. I used the extra long tongs because it hurt to reach towards the back of the grill. Now I am a bit more comfortable with the heat, which gives me hope that I'm building a tolerance and the cooks will no longer call me "Manos de Puto" or "Bitch Hands," but the grill remains daunting. I know how all the dishes work, I've worked the station on a slow night, but the chef decided to keep a skeleton crew for Friday and see how it went.

First, a preface .. grilling is sweet. It has long had associations with manliness, facial hair and killing animals. It is essentially the first cooking technique mastered by humans. All you needed was a spear, an open fire, a woman to drag in to your cave for post-gluttony cuddling and you were a happy Cro-Magnon fool. Unfortunately, backyard barbecues are now most common in the suburban homes of the neutered, modern male, but grilling remains a way to reconnect with a man's forgotten primal nature (more adjectives please). Since it is said that 1/12 people on the Asian continent are descended from Genghis Khan, I'm going to pretend and picture myself riding a horse (which would be awesome), chasing ruminants on the steppes (which would be awesome), and raining down hot fire/arrows in the hunt (which would be awesome), and grilling them for a post-pillage feast (which would be awesome ... minus the wake of destruction I leave in peasantry lives).

So you would think I would start growing facial hair almost immediately by working the grill on a fairly busy night, understaffed and unpracticed, right? Unfortunately what little facial hair I do have was singed off as I stepped up to the plate. When I reach in to turn meats and veg I have to squint to ease the heat from searing my eyeballs (on second thought, this may be the evolutionary advantage of tiny, Asian eyes... I've always wondered...). And it isn't long before I'm juggling a ton of dishes and there are things being grilled everywhere. Because the grill is so hot, an expensive piece of meat will become toast if you neglect it. A pasta sauce you can fix at almost any stage of the game if you mess it up. A venison loin that goes beyond medium cannot be salvaged. It is garbage, to be given to a dishwasher to be eaten or thrown out (game like venison are still wild animals and have not been bred to have fatty, marbled meat, so overcooking is even more unforgivable when working with game). So precision is extremely important. There is an understood degree of waste for training a cook, but I wanted to prove that I could combine all that theoretical knowledge I've gathered from reading about food with the limited technical proficiency I have.

I want to mention two dishes in particular that gave me a hard time.

Whole Mediterranean Sea Bass Baked with Salt Crust, Filleted Tableside and served with Grilled Vegetables, and Salsa Verde

Balsamic Marinated Ribeye for Two, Sliced Tableside and served with Confit Shallots and Root Vegetable-Fontina Timbale

These are our two big dishes that are brought out on carts to the table, and served by the chef or a waiter captain. They are really quite tasty and eye catching, as I've heard the aroma and sight of these dishes coming out of the kitchen turns a lot of heads in the dining room. Unfortunately, they are absolute bastards to prepare.

Butchering a small fish like a sea bass isn't difficult, unless you have little to no practice with it. Oh right, that's me. I had to break down 7 whole fish on top of all the other shit I had to do that day and I knew it was going to take a long time. I'm sure I will talk about this at length some time in the future, but know that it is a pain in the ass if you are bad at it. Fish are slippery bastards and require a knife sharpened to mythic ninja sharpness to filet properly. Just keep that in mind the next time you buy or catch a whole fish. Frankly it may just be easier to use your axe to chop the head off, batter and fry the whole bitch. (How's that for culinary integrity!)

The salt crust is a simple thing. It's just egg whites whipped in a stand mixer until they become a meringue essentially. But replace all the sugar with salt. The lecithin and albumen proteins in the egg white form networks around air is it is whipped and gets an almost cloud like texture. Unfortunately it's very easy to mistake for meringue or whipped cream and trying to taste a salt crust is well ... a really unfortunate experience.

Anyway, the process for baking a whole fish goes something like this.

1) You get yourself a "tony" pan, which in our kitchen is a thick, cast-iron, rectangular pan about 10x15, and hose it down in non-stick spray (I have no idea why my chef calls it a tony pan)

2) You put your fish down, you season each filet lightly, you make sure the thyme and lemon it's stuffed with isn't poking out so it burns, but is protected in the fish's cavity and allowed to perfume the whole thing

3) You put the fish in the pan and smear on the salt crust, the goal is that the salt crust protects the flesh of fish (which is delicate and prone to overcooking), and shouldn't transmit an overly salty taste to the fish

4) You throw it in the hot-hot convection oven (runs at about 475 during service) and set the timer to 15 minutes

5) When it's done you take it out (duh) and pour a little water in to the smoking hot pan, this helps the fish separate from the pan so it's like a quick deglaze except we aren't building sauce

Then it's ready to go. That sounds really easy, right? Pretty much a "set it and forget it" kind of deal, right? Well a few things complicates the process.

1) A lot of times the stupid waiters will "order-fire" a whole fish, which means the diners aren't having appetizers and the first thing they will be eating is a whole fish. Get that fucker in the oven and out in to the dining room ASAP. Well despite the stupid waiters telling the stupid customers that it takes a long time, they bitch and complain anyway about how long it takes. Our oven is running pretty much at max temp, there's nothing we can do to make it go faster except maybe increase the atmospheric pressure of the kitchen, so shut the fuck up.

2) Oven real estate is valuable. It's a big fucking oven but the whole kitchen uses it. And almost everything from the grill goes in there at some point. So when you are juggling 3 beef tenderloin entrees, a venison, 2 whole fish, a ribeye, and the pantry is working the apple tarts and the budinos, and the saute is working a few Amish chickens ... things get crowded and everyone is opening the door at a different time and changing the temperature and cooking time. It's hard to hit a perfect medium rare when the door gets opened every minute and there are desserts and proteins stealing heat from your steak. So when a fish should ideally cook in 15 minutes, sometimes it can vary, and it only takes a minute or so to make the difference between perfect, flaky fish and translucent, jello-like fish.

3) Oh and finding space and time in the oven for all your dishes is difficult, but timing all those dishes themselves is also a pain in the ass. The oven has one timer built in and the grill cook keeps one electronic timer near his station. Two timers for having up to 6 dishes working at once is kind of an issue, especially with such heat sensitive foods. Assuming no one messes with your timer for their dishes you'll have 2 reliable clocks and then you'll just have to rely on your internal clock from there. Have I forgotten about some things before? Maybe. But some cuts have better margins for error than others. Just remember to rest your meat for god's sake.

Anyway, the ribeye has similar problems. It takes a long ass time to cook (12-15 minutes depending on temperature) and it needs to rest a lot longer. The timbale that comes with it is also kind of a hassle because it is prepared in a disposable tin ramekin that causes a lot of sticking. Before heating it you have to cut it out, hose it with non-spray stick and hit it with a few pats of butter to make it luscious. Surgically removing a baked food item from its casing and then sending it back in the oven during the crush of service = annoying. Stabbing yourself through a tin cup = extremely possible. Being a big, clumsy Asian with man paws = ...not my fault, I swear...

So accounting for all of that, how did I do? My sous chef, Chuy, had to jump in and help me a little bit because I sold ALL of the whole fish. That is extremely unusual because it's pretty expensive and to sell 7 in one night is rare. Then we realized it was Good Friday and a lot of people weren't eating meat. FML. My hands were a little raw from basking in so much heat, I know some things weren't perfect. I turned out a grilled calamari dish that wasn't perfect, I know it in my heart but unfortunately didn't have time to fix it. Some of the pumpkin polenta may not have been in the perfect ratio of cheese/butter and polenta but ... generally I got not complaints. Chuy likes to make fun of me for being slow and clumsy a lot of the time but at the end of the day he knows I care and he encourages me a lot. He tells me I did very well for my first time. I didn't get any complaints, and only the first fish was slightly undercooked, I had to put it under the broiler for a second. As I was diving in and out of coolers and manning the grill my chef would periodically ask me,

"How do you learn to swim, Eric?"
"Throw me in the deep end, sir!"

And that was that. I'm guessing I'm either lucky or I have a preternatural sense for what medium rare is.

I'm being kind of a girlface and complaining a lot, but actually it was a really fun experience. I think a lot of the appeal of cooking is sometimes getting in the shit and fighting your way out. It requires a level of concentration and efficient movement that can be really exhilarating (if you're into that sort of thing). Time flies, there's heat and pans everywhere, it's fun as shit. And I like learning and practicing this kind of stuff. Curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn are important attributes for a good cook. You are always exploring your boundaries and thinking about how to do something better. Now I know many of you guys scoffed at that saying, "Eric/Panda ... in to learning? Are you kidding me?!" But just because I felt honing my Halo skillz was more important than Introduction to Modern Cosmology doesn't mean I don't like learning. I just like learning about certain things.

And anyway, me and Wilson are the #2 doubles Halo team at Northwestern and I know the escape velocity of earth is 11 km/sec, and the nearest galaxy is Alpha Centauri at 4.37 light years. So I win.

Hah! Taste it.

Except I just admitted that me and Wilson are the #2 doubles Halo team at Northwestern in a public forum.

Damn... I lose.

Back to the routine!

EP6