This right here, is a very, very important chapter in a book otherwise devoid of advice. Advice, real and brutally honest, that a whole bunch of people sorely need and won't get anywhere else.
It's a phenomenon I've been slowly observing for three years, since the day I realized I wanted to be a cook. At first, I was only focused on myself, slowly learning how I could make this a real career. I was learning day by day that my initial expectations were being shattered at an alarming rate. But even as my preconceptions evaporated around me, I still felt compelled and driven, only further enticed by "The Life." So I kept going.
Then I began to notice those around me a bit more.
The phenomenon is growing, gaining mass, snowballing to dangerous sizes and it not only concerns me, but straight up pisses me off.
It seems like everyone and their fucking mother wants to be a chef.
Everyone I know has a friend somewhere either attending culinary school, or is working as a kitchen grunt, or has desires to be a cook, or (god forbid) watches a lot of Food Network and has been inspired. When I hear about what they're doing, I can assess immediately how serious they are in relation to me, and what kind of threat they represent.
Yes, assessing threats, assessing competition. "Hold your fire, there's no life forms on that escape pod." Well one mistake can cost you a lot apparently, as Grand Moff Tarkin learned the hard way.
Alright, to be honest, I'm not sure why it bothers me so much. It's not like the idea belongs to me. I'm not the only college grad allowed to veer off the beaten path to become a cook. And I didn't do this to be original anyway, I did this because I think it's the only way I won't end up drinking a bottle of bleach 20 years from now as I futilely pump the fumes from my 2030 hybrid through the driver's side window. Maybe it's just that, in some future retrospect, I don't want to be seen as part of a few hipster, free thinking years that saw a huge increase in culinary school enrollment. I don't wanna be seen as a reactionary statistic to the cultural impact of Food Network. I don't want to be lumped in with these tatted up, pierced up young guns who got in to cooking for the wrong reasons.
Granted, it's not that you can't be a serious cook if you happen to be an independent, "free-spirit" or whatever the fuck that means. If you "think outside the box, man" or if conforming to society is unacceptable to you (even though most of you "rebels" are directly conforming to a subculture, hence making you tiptoe a line between authenticity and hypocrisy), but you can still rock a Saturday night service like a boss, then fine. Your presence won't irritate me much. And if you're a cool person to boot, then yes we can get along.
But the problem is, there's another thin line. A thin line between just happening to be someone who is a bit quirkier than the majority of society (and consequently someone very fit for the life of a restaurant professional), and someone using this career as an outlet for their societal angst.
Here's what I expect to see.
Many years from now, some sociology major is going to write a thesis on the growing popularity of Food Network and how it has affected Millenials. They are going to find that four hours of Bobby Flay programming a day can brainwash any young boy in to thinking professional cooking is where it's at! Iron Chef and the adrenaline bomb it is, is what I gonna get to do every night!
No.
One hour of lightning fast prep, and a race to the finish to plate your hermaphroditic salmon, or whatever they like to use as main ingredients on that show, is not what professional cooking is about.
It's about slaving over a cantaloupe with a #12 melon baller, trying to extract a perfect sphere of fruit for a customer paying $25 a head in your party room.
It's about butchering forty chickens and treating every single one with respect. It's about carefully cleaning their bones, blanching them, roasting and simmering them ever so slowly for perfect stock, something ninety percent of this world couldn't identify anyway.
It's about looking at your food cost sheet and wondering if your chef of 18 years is worth the 3% increase in waste, because this recession hurts. Because things are getting tight, and though you've known him forever, he's been incapable of changing his habits.
It's about wondering where your kids are going to be safe because school is closed due to a freak tornado hitting Queens last weekend, and deciding between watching your kids and risking your job is an impossible choice to make.
It's not a pretty life. It's not over-saturated with colors, with smiling perfect mothers and witty male chefs like Food Network would have you believe. The previous generation of restaurant professionals did it mainly because they had no choice. They didn't have the education or skills to cut it in the 9-5 world.
But now that we can do this by choice, we run the risk of making a very poor one.
If you decided you wanted to do this because you love to cook at home, Warning: Professional cooking is absolutely nothing like home cooking. Be very wary. I would say you are more welcome in a restaurant kitchen if you like hauling garbage and sweeping floors (like me).
I think I already made my case for food on TV, but if you decided you wanted to do this because of anything you saw on TV, Warning: Big. Fucking. Warning sign. Really stop to reevaluate where you are with your life, and make sure it's not the lack of a dog or girlfriend that's making you bored or something. As legitimate as Top Chef is, don't let the glamor fool you. They are only 18 chefs out of hundreds of thousands, and they are just as much selected for their TV faces and propensity to yell at each other, as for their culinary prowess.
If you decided you wanted to do this because Bourdain made it sound like you can do drugs, drink whenever you want, get laid, be tatted up and nonconforming to all the suit-and-tie stiffs around the world, Warning: You may just be a 17-year-old who doesn't like learning anything in high school and can't get girls. You know, something really uncommon. In the words of Ruhlman, "I can't think of a worse role model for young cooks."
If you are doing it anyway, and you are working at a restaurant like Bottega, or Jean-Georges, or you're just slaving away at two stages while getting a business degree, then mad props. I'll see you on the battlefield.
If you decided you wanted to do this for any reason other than passion, passion so strong that it doesn't bother you you're never going to be rich or have a 401k, or any reason other than the fact that nowhere else in society would have you, then maybe you're on the money. But know that it's going to be a long, merciless path to the top, and the price of failure is greater than most industries. For every chef with an eponymous cookbook at Barnes & Noble, there are ten who lost their fortunes and dreams putting everything in to one restaurant that failed. That number will only increase as the competition grows. And having closed the doors on a few restaurants in my life, I know how devastating that can be.
I speak so menacingly about being a cook, and where you draw your influences from, because I myself have a deep, dark secret. I am most likely, a Food Network baby.
Yes, I admit it. It hurts my soul to admit it, but it's true.
Months of watching Giada and her freakishly large head, and lavishly accentuated cleavage slice parsley, entranced me. Tyler Florence and his "Ultimate" renditions of dishes had me watching and recording every day. Alton Brown and his quirky food science helps me to understand how we cook more and more even now.
I no longer watch, and I don't deserve a perch above you to judge, but I do give words of caution.
So when I say I'm angry, and I deter you, I'm being honest, but only because I know how dangerous it is.
My first few weeks at Oceanique were hard. I wasn't expecting to have to communicate with my remedial Spanish, clean organic dandelion greens one by one, and vaccum pack cobia filets all day in a basement. I had this image of a smiling, fat, white chef (which Mark kind of is) standing over my shoulder and instructing me on how to properly clean a roasted beet.
Not the case. And the entirety of this blog will show you how long it's taken me to get here, and frankly, I'm still nowhere. I've learned a lot, and it's only because I grew up in restaurants that I didn't fall off the wagon. I had a childhood molded by the industry to ground me in a sense of reality when TV and celebrity threatened to pull me off course.
So I welcome the competition.
I imagine it will soon become much like any professional sport. Millions of passionate, hard-working people vying for very few spots to rise to the top. Some, of undeniable talent and genius will get there almost regardless, few as they are. And most others will have to fight, claw and work their asses off to reach the higher echelons of professional cookery. You may have to suck a few dicks and lose a few girlfriends in the process (funny how those go together), and you'll definitely need a healthy dosage of luck.
But not quite yet. I'm still suspecting many of these Food Network babies will wash out. Someone who didn't grow up knowing the sacrifice and complete fuck-job restaurants do to your personal life may not be able to handle it. The idea of 80 hour weeks, no weekends to get together with your friends to watch Eat.Pray.Love (or some bullshit like that), and living at your restaurant while the whole world ticks away without you is not appealing to most.
So for those of you thinking this is a good idea, well best of luck to you. If you find out cleaning grease traps isn't your cup of tea, then alright, see ya. We don't want you here anyway, amongst Bourdain's so called "ranks of the damned," if you're not willing to get a little dirty. And as for the rest of you, like me, who are going to doggedly pursue greatness, well... I'll need a sous chef at some point.
EP6
KIDDING! Remembering my own rules, #4: be humble, and don't be that guy.
Oh and PS - I'll take a hipster over a bro, any day.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The Chinese Kitchen
So I'm sorry I've been absent, but frankly ... I've been busy as all hell.
It feels good to be back in the kitchen though, after a long hiatus from professional cooking. It's good once again to be getting my hands dirty, hearing the familiar clang of a dishwasher slamming shut, rediscovering my lost knife callous (painfully, I might add), and thinking about restaurants, food and pleasing customers for most of my waking day. Exhausting though it is, it is a comforting reaffirmation that I have chosen the right path in life.
Thankfully the highs have been much more numerable than the lows. The exciting developments of a foreign kitchen and a busy, busy restaurant are giving me welcome obstacles to surmount. There are oh so many things I wish to tell you, and I can only hope my schedule and my quickly-loosening grip on the English language will allow me to relate them to you.
But let's discuss the most important thing dear to my heart already. The new kitchen.
For my loyal readers (of whom I am eternally thankful ... and yes you can point out if I used "whom" incorrectly there, because I'm quite sure that's likely) who can remember, I moved back to New York with a sense of trepidation. What would this kitchen be like? What strange things will I find, and how will they upend my expectations of a good kitchen?
Well, I was relieved to find that a Chinese kitchen is very similar to a Western kitchen. I'm not sure if that's the case in China, but here in Ah-murr-ica our kitchen feels very familiar to the old French brigade based systems I worked through in Chicago. There are subtle differences but they are more curiosities than actual exotics serving to redefine my conceptions of a kitchen. Things are just a ... bit different.
In Western kitchens, we use the traditional chef's knife. A typically 6"-8" blade, curved with the weight centered just above the hilt. It is very adept at slicing, precision cuts and damned near anything quite frankly. It relies on the presence of a solid cutting board; hard and resilient enough to allow for speed and efficiency, but soft enough so as to not dull the blade, as the primary cutting motion requires the blade to be in contact with the board at all times.
This is not the case with the Chinese cleaver. Whereas a Western chef's knife can run you hundreds of dollars for the finest high carbon steel, to ensure durability and sharpness for a lifetime, the Chinese cleaver is a rough hewn instrument, expecting replacement often at a cost of maybe $20 a knife. The best kind of cleaver is heaviest along the tang, has a slight curve to the blade, is wide and is just heavy all around. You know how Boris the Blade says a good gun feels heavy? Well a good cleaver just feels heavy, like it was cast out of recycled carburetors or something. It can be deftly used to make precision cuts and even vegetable carving, but it requires quite a bit of experience to master it. But stir-fry does not require precision cuts (the Certified Master Chef's exam even docks you points for vegetables that are cut "too precisely" in the Asian cuisine part of the test), and a skilled cook can run through prep really quickly with a cleaver. It can smash garlic cloves in to a paste, it makes a huge shovel for scooping diced onions in to a bowl, and really where it shines over a chef's knife is in butchering (as you could imagine). No more careful deboning around a chicken thigh, just slam straight through that fucker. It is a bit unnerving how high a cleaver hangs in the air, before delivering a thunderous, guillotine-esque chop. If you slip up with a chef's knife, at worst we're probably talking stitches. If you slip with a cleaver, we're probably talking "put those fingers on ice, and call 9-1-1." Even if we did listen to music in the Chinese kitchen, the tunes would be drowned out by the constant whamming of steel hitting wood.
I used to use a whip-like filet knife to break down chickens at Va P. The flexibility of the blade helped it to snake around rib cages and wishbones. A good butcher can clean almost all the meat off a carcass and leave a boneless chicken half for service. I didn't think it was possible to do that with a cleaver. We get cases upon cases of chickens at Pearl, from the waist up (I think white people don't like dark meat or something). I would actually kind of hate to see the Doomsday Machine that relieves these chickens of their lower halves. But we get the top half and butterfly off the breast meat just like anybody else. How do you do that with a thick, rectangular blade? You use the bottom corner to create the first incision, you then insert the wide blade in to the cut and bluntly.. you rip it off. The whole chicken tit.
I thought it was a rather gruesome and imprecise way to butcher a chicken, but I found it's actually quite graceful. It leaves the meat very intact and clean so as long as you have some skills. Then you separate the chicken tenderloin, and save that for certain dishes. A cleaver is the Bowser of the kitchen Mario Kart world; deadly in the hands of a skilled player (I know I use Mario Kart analogies a lot, but seriously they work for ultimate and cooking if you're a nerd like me).
So that was a rather long treatise on knives. But the subtle differences are what I notice and appreciate. The wok system is beautifully efficient. Instead of using multiple pans and having to clean them after every dish like you would on a 6-burner range, you use one cast-iron wok set over a jet burner (a hole the size of a basketball hoop that burps fire at ludicrous temperatures, the only way to stop the flames from searing your face is by plugging the hole with the wok... or turning it off, but that's for pussies). You let the wok go supernova and then you immediately douse it with a handy water faucet that hangs over the range. The intense heat and the sudden introduction of water, and a little elbow grease from a steel wool pad, cleans the wok faster and better than any dishwasher I've seen. How cast-iron can go through thousands of degrees of temperature change, hundreds of times a night, and still retain it's non-stick qualities without degrading is nothing short of a miracle. Get yourselves cast-iron skillets.
And there's a whole 'nother thing. The speed. Most Western kitchens use the "order-fire" system, especially fine dining restaurants that serve complex dishes. When something is "ordered" the cooks start cooking the time-intensive parts of the dish, like a thick steak, a braise, a duck breast, etc. And then when it's "fired," meaning the diner is ready for their entree, we finish it by cooking it to temperature, heating up sauces, garnishes, sides, plating, etc. The pace is a bit more complex, it feels slower and requires strategic planning, and often finds a cook deep in pots and pans, sorting out orders for different timings. In a Chinese kitchen, it's balls to the wall, full-tilt boogie-woogie as soon as service begins, and you finish dishes one at a time at light speed. Every cook gets two woks, one for keeping frying oil at a stable temperature, one for everything else, so you have no choice but to do one thing at a time as fast as humanly possible.
I wondered how we did it. A very busy weekend at Va P saw us doing at most 400-500 covers, and that taxed the kitchen to the limit. A very busy weekend at Pearl has us doing 800-1000 covers. Granted, the complexity of prep is far less and we also serve lunch at Pearl, but I realized it is the brilliant efficiency of stir-fry and the Chinese wok that allows us to crank out so many meals at an average time of one hour per table. Oh and by the way that 800-1000 number doesn't include the 100-150 takeouts and deliveries we do, which feed anywhere from 200-400 people. I realized after all this rudimentary math that my mother has fed well over a million people in her career.
And there are all sorts of other strange little differences. Ways to say that Westerners and Chinese people both recognize the path to ultimate efficiency in cooking, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. (Is that the saying? I'm pretty sure I effed that one up...)
Both kitchens use mise-en-place, much to my relief. There simply isn't a better way to cook professionally. But whereas Westerners put ingredients in restaurant-grade plastic boxes of varying sizes, well organized in a big walk-in refrigerator, Chinese people use good ole' clear plastic bags. There are merits to both. An expensive but efficient plastic box can be stacked, you can put hot liquid in it, it can be labeled, and it can't be punctured. But it has to be cleaned and takes up a lot of space. A plastic bag serves most of these purposes, and they use less space and can be simply thrown out. Instead of rows of boxes, you can load up fat bags of diced onions and cram them in to a cardboard box, and label that instead. Much like general Chinese strategy towards everything, we focus on a just acceptable but cheaper means of doing things.
In Western kitchens you often use big rectangular cutting boards made of hardwood or some kind of weird wood-plastic hybrid that I've never been able to identify. In Chinese kitchens we use circular bamboo cutting boards. Again, they are cheaper.
In Western kitchens you use grills and convection ovens, in Chinese kitchens we use dual-purpose smoker/rotisserie ovens.
In Western kitchens you use butter and flour to make a roux for thickening, in Chinese kitchens we use cornstarch (for damn near everything, I might add).
In Western kitchens you use lids, in Chinese kitchens ... I don't think we've used a lid for anything yet, except the lids on our industrial size rice cookers.
In Western kitchens you have a plethora of stock-based sauces, made often and scrupulously maintained. In Chinese kitchens, you make a redonculous amount of sauce every few weeks and keep it in old soy-sauce buckets in the fridge. Chinese sauces are damn near timeless as they often rely on fermentation to achieve that exotic flavor.
In Western kitchens, you often have a kitchen towel in one hand and either tongs or a spoon in the other. In Chinese kitchens, you have a thick linen towel to grasp the edges of rocket-hot woks, and a long, bowl-shaped spoon in the other which is far more necessary than your hand. If you were a pirate cook who lost his right hand, you may not be able to work in a Western kitchen, but if you put a big Chinese cooking spoon on your nub you'd be just fine with us.
Oh yeah, and in Western kitchens you have handles. I don't know what Chinese people have against handles, but they are few and far between.
So it's little things. Some changes are whimsical, others take a bit adjusting to. I guess our cultures just view things differently. We see gunpowder, we say "Hey! Fireworks!" White people see gunpowder, they say "Hey! An incredibly efficient means to murder and dominate the known world!"
Kidding. Sort of. Don't think I forgot about the Opium Wars. I was an East Asian History major. No big deal. I know some shit ... kind of.
Ah, there's so much to tell. I'm learning so much that my brain, riddled with holes from alcohol abuse, feels like it's leaking. Front and back of the house. Stir-fry, Chinese prep, and DIM SUM. Jesus Christ, I spend most of my waking hours making dim sum rather than actually cooking, and by gorsh there is a lot to be said about my struggles with the delicacy required of dim sum. But that's for another time.
I'll end my little post with an anecdote. We do whole Maine lobsters at Pearl. We do 'em live and we do 'em right. To be honest it's my favorite lobster that I've ever had. Chopped up, lightly floured, fried and quickly wok'ed (it's a verb) in different styles; Szechuan, Hunan, Cantonese, etc. I've been thinking a lot about sustainability, organic vs. non-organic, the merits of slow food and family farms vs. industrial farm factories, about PETA and their whole whack-job operation. And obviously the disposal of lobsters is an important nugget of discussion to the animal lovers. Do they feel pain? What is the most humane way to kill a lobster?
I've killed my share of lobsters. Not a lot over an extended career of cooking, but I did murder like 150 of those sons of bitches in one sitting for New Year's at Va P. And I popped my lobster slaying cherry at Oceanique when I coyly threw one in to the court bouillion steam pot. I don't love it, I do agree that it's rather unpleasant, but it's not the war crime PETA makes it out to be. No one's going to be fucking talking about it at a Geneva Convention or anything. Anyhow, these exact thoughts were running through my head as our executive chef, Ah Gau pulled out a big 3-pound lobster to be cooked to order.
I'm thinking, oh he'll probably parboil the guy and then take the flesh out for frying; quick and clean. Or he might do it the most "humane" way and put a knife through it's brain, ending the crustacean and any "consciousness" it might possess in one fell swoop. So he puts it on the stainless steel prep table and grabs it by the back of the head, where the head shell meets the thorax I guess (I'm not a lobster anatomy expert, okay? What's important to cooks is claw, tail, knuckle meat, roe and et cetera meat). He then RIPS the head off.
Yes, caps is completely necessary there. What I'm talking about is ripping the shell off and leaving the organs underneath intact, and jiggling with life. That's like ripping the top of someone's skull and their face off in one vicious movement, and watching their brains pulsate. I was shocked and awed.
And then he takes a cleaver, one that I was using not five minutes before to cut scallions and having a hard time of it because it's so old, chipped and blunt, and he dispatches and cuts up this lobster in less than ten cuts in less than fifteen seconds. Perfectly, cleanly, no bits of errant shell flying anywhere.
He cuts the lobster in half at the "waist," where the tail meets the body. Cuts off all the legs in two quick hacks, then quarters the body in two chops. Scrapes off the guts and brains in to the garbage. Then he flips the cleaver, uses the blunt side to hammer off the claws and rip them off, then hammer the claws in to smaller, manageable pieces. Then he takes the tail, sets it on the cutting board and watches it for a second as it writhes and curls and jumps. Yes, the lobster is done but it's nervous system is still kicking (it's closely related to cockroaches actually, the primitive nervous system can stay rather lively for a long while after execution). The tail kind of inches and worms around the cutting board, and Ah Gau lifts the cleaver as high as his head and brings it down in a final, and absolute blow that cleaves the tail perfectly in half. The aim, the skill, nothing short of remarkable.
He scoops the good bits in to a bowl, sprinkles a little flour/corn starch/salt over them as he tosses the pieces, and then fashions the ornamental parts of the lobster (the fan of the tail, and the head) so that they'll sit prettily on a plate.
Suck that PETA. I couldn't do anything short of smile. It was a very succinct reminder of how much there is to learn, and how much of it can't be from books, or blogs, or eating at fancy restaurants.
It's from being back in the grind.
EP6
It feels good to be back in the kitchen though, after a long hiatus from professional cooking. It's good once again to be getting my hands dirty, hearing the familiar clang of a dishwasher slamming shut, rediscovering my lost knife callous (painfully, I might add), and thinking about restaurants, food and pleasing customers for most of my waking day. Exhausting though it is, it is a comforting reaffirmation that I have chosen the right path in life.
Thankfully the highs have been much more numerable than the lows. The exciting developments of a foreign kitchen and a busy, busy restaurant are giving me welcome obstacles to surmount. There are oh so many things I wish to tell you, and I can only hope my schedule and my quickly-loosening grip on the English language will allow me to relate them to you.
But let's discuss the most important thing dear to my heart already. The new kitchen.
For my loyal readers (of whom I am eternally thankful ... and yes you can point out if I used "whom" incorrectly there, because I'm quite sure that's likely) who can remember, I moved back to New York with a sense of trepidation. What would this kitchen be like? What strange things will I find, and how will they upend my expectations of a good kitchen?
Well, I was relieved to find that a Chinese kitchen is very similar to a Western kitchen. I'm not sure if that's the case in China, but here in Ah-murr-ica our kitchen feels very familiar to the old French brigade based systems I worked through in Chicago. There are subtle differences but they are more curiosities than actual exotics serving to redefine my conceptions of a kitchen. Things are just a ... bit different.
In Western kitchens, we use the traditional chef's knife. A typically 6"-8" blade, curved with the weight centered just above the hilt. It is very adept at slicing, precision cuts and damned near anything quite frankly. It relies on the presence of a solid cutting board; hard and resilient enough to allow for speed and efficiency, but soft enough so as to not dull the blade, as the primary cutting motion requires the blade to be in contact with the board at all times.
This is not the case with the Chinese cleaver. Whereas a Western chef's knife can run you hundreds of dollars for the finest high carbon steel, to ensure durability and sharpness for a lifetime, the Chinese cleaver is a rough hewn instrument, expecting replacement often at a cost of maybe $20 a knife. The best kind of cleaver is heaviest along the tang, has a slight curve to the blade, is wide and is just heavy all around. You know how Boris the Blade says a good gun feels heavy? Well a good cleaver just feels heavy, like it was cast out of recycled carburetors or something. It can be deftly used to make precision cuts and even vegetable carving, but it requires quite a bit of experience to master it. But stir-fry does not require precision cuts (the Certified Master Chef's exam even docks you points for vegetables that are cut "too precisely" in the Asian cuisine part of the test), and a skilled cook can run through prep really quickly with a cleaver. It can smash garlic cloves in to a paste, it makes a huge shovel for scooping diced onions in to a bowl, and really where it shines over a chef's knife is in butchering (as you could imagine). No more careful deboning around a chicken thigh, just slam straight through that fucker. It is a bit unnerving how high a cleaver hangs in the air, before delivering a thunderous, guillotine-esque chop. If you slip up with a chef's knife, at worst we're probably talking stitches. If you slip with a cleaver, we're probably talking "put those fingers on ice, and call 9-1-1." Even if we did listen to music in the Chinese kitchen, the tunes would be drowned out by the constant whamming of steel hitting wood.
I used to use a whip-like filet knife to break down chickens at Va P. The flexibility of the blade helped it to snake around rib cages and wishbones. A good butcher can clean almost all the meat off a carcass and leave a boneless chicken half for service. I didn't think it was possible to do that with a cleaver. We get cases upon cases of chickens at Pearl, from the waist up (I think white people don't like dark meat or something). I would actually kind of hate to see the Doomsday Machine that relieves these chickens of their lower halves. But we get the top half and butterfly off the breast meat just like anybody else. How do you do that with a thick, rectangular blade? You use the bottom corner to create the first incision, you then insert the wide blade in to the cut and bluntly.. you rip it off. The whole chicken tit.
I thought it was a rather gruesome and imprecise way to butcher a chicken, but I found it's actually quite graceful. It leaves the meat very intact and clean so as long as you have some skills. Then you separate the chicken tenderloin, and save that for certain dishes. A cleaver is the Bowser of the kitchen Mario Kart world; deadly in the hands of a skilled player (I know I use Mario Kart analogies a lot, but seriously they work for ultimate and cooking if you're a nerd like me).
So that was a rather long treatise on knives. But the subtle differences are what I notice and appreciate. The wok system is beautifully efficient. Instead of using multiple pans and having to clean them after every dish like you would on a 6-burner range, you use one cast-iron wok set over a jet burner (a hole the size of a basketball hoop that burps fire at ludicrous temperatures, the only way to stop the flames from searing your face is by plugging the hole with the wok... or turning it off, but that's for pussies). You let the wok go supernova and then you immediately douse it with a handy water faucet that hangs over the range. The intense heat and the sudden introduction of water, and a little elbow grease from a steel wool pad, cleans the wok faster and better than any dishwasher I've seen. How cast-iron can go through thousands of degrees of temperature change, hundreds of times a night, and still retain it's non-stick qualities without degrading is nothing short of a miracle. Get yourselves cast-iron skillets.
And there's a whole 'nother thing. The speed. Most Western kitchens use the "order-fire" system, especially fine dining restaurants that serve complex dishes. When something is "ordered" the cooks start cooking the time-intensive parts of the dish, like a thick steak, a braise, a duck breast, etc. And then when it's "fired," meaning the diner is ready for their entree, we finish it by cooking it to temperature, heating up sauces, garnishes, sides, plating, etc. The pace is a bit more complex, it feels slower and requires strategic planning, and often finds a cook deep in pots and pans, sorting out orders for different timings. In a Chinese kitchen, it's balls to the wall, full-tilt boogie-woogie as soon as service begins, and you finish dishes one at a time at light speed. Every cook gets two woks, one for keeping frying oil at a stable temperature, one for everything else, so you have no choice but to do one thing at a time as fast as humanly possible.
I wondered how we did it. A very busy weekend at Va P saw us doing at most 400-500 covers, and that taxed the kitchen to the limit. A very busy weekend at Pearl has us doing 800-1000 covers. Granted, the complexity of prep is far less and we also serve lunch at Pearl, but I realized it is the brilliant efficiency of stir-fry and the Chinese wok that allows us to crank out so many meals at an average time of one hour per table. Oh and by the way that 800-1000 number doesn't include the 100-150 takeouts and deliveries we do, which feed anywhere from 200-400 people. I realized after all this rudimentary math that my mother has fed well over a million people in her career.
And there are all sorts of other strange little differences. Ways to say that Westerners and Chinese people both recognize the path to ultimate efficiency in cooking, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. (Is that the saying? I'm pretty sure I effed that one up...)
Both kitchens use mise-en-place, much to my relief. There simply isn't a better way to cook professionally. But whereas Westerners put ingredients in restaurant-grade plastic boxes of varying sizes, well organized in a big walk-in refrigerator, Chinese people use good ole' clear plastic bags. There are merits to both. An expensive but efficient plastic box can be stacked, you can put hot liquid in it, it can be labeled, and it can't be punctured. But it has to be cleaned and takes up a lot of space. A plastic bag serves most of these purposes, and they use less space and can be simply thrown out. Instead of rows of boxes, you can load up fat bags of diced onions and cram them in to a cardboard box, and label that instead. Much like general Chinese strategy towards everything, we focus on a just acceptable but cheaper means of doing things.
In Western kitchens you often use big rectangular cutting boards made of hardwood or some kind of weird wood-plastic hybrid that I've never been able to identify. In Chinese kitchens we use circular bamboo cutting boards. Again, they are cheaper.
In Western kitchens you use grills and convection ovens, in Chinese kitchens we use dual-purpose smoker/rotisserie ovens.
In Western kitchens you use butter and flour to make a roux for thickening, in Chinese kitchens we use cornstarch (for damn near everything, I might add).
In Western kitchens you use lids, in Chinese kitchens ... I don't think we've used a lid for anything yet, except the lids on our industrial size rice cookers.
In Western kitchens you have a plethora of stock-based sauces, made often and scrupulously maintained. In Chinese kitchens, you make a redonculous amount of sauce every few weeks and keep it in old soy-sauce buckets in the fridge. Chinese sauces are damn near timeless as they often rely on fermentation to achieve that exotic flavor.
In Western kitchens, you often have a kitchen towel in one hand and either tongs or a spoon in the other. In Chinese kitchens, you have a thick linen towel to grasp the edges of rocket-hot woks, and a long, bowl-shaped spoon in the other which is far more necessary than your hand. If you were a pirate cook who lost his right hand, you may not be able to work in a Western kitchen, but if you put a big Chinese cooking spoon on your nub you'd be just fine with us.
Oh yeah, and in Western kitchens you have handles. I don't know what Chinese people have against handles, but they are few and far between.
So it's little things. Some changes are whimsical, others take a bit adjusting to. I guess our cultures just view things differently. We see gunpowder, we say "Hey! Fireworks!" White people see gunpowder, they say "Hey! An incredibly efficient means to murder and dominate the known world!"
Kidding. Sort of. Don't think I forgot about the Opium Wars. I was an East Asian History major. No big deal. I know some shit ... kind of.
Ah, there's so much to tell. I'm learning so much that my brain, riddled with holes from alcohol abuse, feels like it's leaking. Front and back of the house. Stir-fry, Chinese prep, and DIM SUM. Jesus Christ, I spend most of my waking hours making dim sum rather than actually cooking, and by gorsh there is a lot to be said about my struggles with the delicacy required of dim sum. But that's for another time.
I'll end my little post with an anecdote. We do whole Maine lobsters at Pearl. We do 'em live and we do 'em right. To be honest it's my favorite lobster that I've ever had. Chopped up, lightly floured, fried and quickly wok'ed (it's a verb) in different styles; Szechuan, Hunan, Cantonese, etc. I've been thinking a lot about sustainability, organic vs. non-organic, the merits of slow food and family farms vs. industrial farm factories, about PETA and their whole whack-job operation. And obviously the disposal of lobsters is an important nugget of discussion to the animal lovers. Do they feel pain? What is the most humane way to kill a lobster?
I've killed my share of lobsters. Not a lot over an extended career of cooking, but I did murder like 150 of those sons of bitches in one sitting for New Year's at Va P. And I popped my lobster slaying cherry at Oceanique when I coyly threw one in to the court bouillion steam pot. I don't love it, I do agree that it's rather unpleasant, but it's not the war crime PETA makes it out to be. No one's going to be fucking talking about it at a Geneva Convention or anything. Anyhow, these exact thoughts were running through my head as our executive chef, Ah Gau pulled out a big 3-pound lobster to be cooked to order.
I'm thinking, oh he'll probably parboil the guy and then take the flesh out for frying; quick and clean. Or he might do it the most "humane" way and put a knife through it's brain, ending the crustacean and any "consciousness" it might possess in one fell swoop. So he puts it on the stainless steel prep table and grabs it by the back of the head, where the head shell meets the thorax I guess (I'm not a lobster anatomy expert, okay? What's important to cooks is claw, tail, knuckle meat, roe and et cetera meat). He then RIPS the head off.
Yes, caps is completely necessary there. What I'm talking about is ripping the shell off and leaving the organs underneath intact, and jiggling with life. That's like ripping the top of someone's skull and their face off in one vicious movement, and watching their brains pulsate. I was shocked and awed.
And then he takes a cleaver, one that I was using not five minutes before to cut scallions and having a hard time of it because it's so old, chipped and blunt, and he dispatches and cuts up this lobster in less than ten cuts in less than fifteen seconds. Perfectly, cleanly, no bits of errant shell flying anywhere.
He cuts the lobster in half at the "waist," where the tail meets the body. Cuts off all the legs in two quick hacks, then quarters the body in two chops. Scrapes off the guts and brains in to the garbage. Then he flips the cleaver, uses the blunt side to hammer off the claws and rip them off, then hammer the claws in to smaller, manageable pieces. Then he takes the tail, sets it on the cutting board and watches it for a second as it writhes and curls and jumps. Yes, the lobster is done but it's nervous system is still kicking (it's closely related to cockroaches actually, the primitive nervous system can stay rather lively for a long while after execution). The tail kind of inches and worms around the cutting board, and Ah Gau lifts the cleaver as high as his head and brings it down in a final, and absolute blow that cleaves the tail perfectly in half. The aim, the skill, nothing short of remarkable.
He scoops the good bits in to a bowl, sprinkles a little flour/corn starch/salt over them as he tosses the pieces, and then fashions the ornamental parts of the lobster (the fan of the tail, and the head) so that they'll sit prettily on a plate.
Suck that PETA. I couldn't do anything short of smile. It was a very succinct reminder of how much there is to learn, and how much of it can't be from books, or blogs, or eating at fancy restaurants.
It's from being back in the grind.
EP6
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