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