Am I a Good Cook?

You may have wondered while reading this blog,

"God, this asshole rants endlessly. Mr. Low-rent, Asian Bourdain-wannabe needs to stop using so many fucking adverbs and learn what a preposition is already. Can he even cook?"

And there it is.

Have you ever wondered, is Eric actually worth a damn in the kitchen?

Well, that's a good question, and unfortunately you have to sit through a wordy examination of it.

Firstly, what constitutes being a good cook?

Well I've gone through what it takes to work in a professional kitchen and excel many times over. But in terms of just food, and heat, and flavor, I guess it's a combination of things. Knowing people, knowing what they like to eat. Being able to hit seasonings on the money, not over or under. Being efficient, having a wide range of knowledge, knowing how to play to each ingredient's strengths or weaknesses. Just making something taste good, allowing someone to be happy, and then being able to reproduce that effect on command.

I don't really know what it means to be a "talented" cook. A talented musician is able produce a silken tone that sings to their audience's heartstrings. A talented athlete is seemingly able to adapt to any sport. Not just possessing raw physical prowess but an ability to affect the game and earn a victory for their team. But a talented cook?

I've only seen it as the "golden touch." I worked with Sergio, the long time prep cook at Va Pensiero here and there. He started working in kitchens when he was 17, and has worked every kind of restaurant and every kind of station. He often filled in to help on the line when the nights got crazy. The salads he made were somehow better than mine, even though we were using the exact same ingredients. We rolled out pasta the same amount of times, but his ravioli always ended up more delicate and thin. The grill marks on his ribeye steak were more pronounced and flavorful. So what's my conclusion? He had a golden touch. He was a talented cook, which really adds up to a collection of so many subtle effects that it is nothing less than mysterious.

So am I a talented cook? No. I'm going to have to learn things the hard way, nose to the grindstone style. You know how coaches in professional sports often weren't superstars in their youth? That's because they were the hard workers who earned some success anyway. They had to learn everything step by step, calculate every move, work their asses off and in the process learned every single thing about their sport. The superstars? The LeBron James', the Kobe Bryant's, the Derek Jeter's? I'm not saying they didn't work hard, but they just knew how to play the game naturally. It just came to them without ever having really known why. That's talent, and in terms of food, I'm not sure it works quite the same way, but regardless.. I don't got it.

Alright, next are we talking about in a professional sense or a recreational sense?

There are many great chefs who have analyzed the differences between home cooking and professional cooking, and they have expressed those differences far more eloquently than I could. But in my opinion the difference is very simple.

An amateur does something until they get it right. A professional does something until they can't get it wrong.

Whereas many home cooks go to the kitchen to relax (although I am very aware that figuring out something your kids will actually eat, while balancing the rest of your life is a nightmare in its own right ... I was an unusually picky eater for being a fat kid), or to enjoy it as a hobby, professional cooks are doggedly pursuing refinement in technique, efficiency and presentation.

Well, the good ones are...

So most importantly, we practice. Yes, we talkin' bout' practice.

Thomas Keller stresses this a lot, and it's strange how many people are surprised by this but, cooking requires practice just like anything else. Sports, music, any sort of craftsmanship, it's all about doing something until your body does it automatically. Muscle memory is a beautiful thing, and I have a lot of firsthand experience with its effects through music. Though that was when my brain was a lot more receptive to learning, and while it was relatively simple for me to learn to play the cello, earning proper knife skills has proven far more difficult.

Regardless of current cerebral prowess, I probably crammed in enough pressured professional cooking in the past one and a half years to surpass the average home cook.

But then again I almost never cook at home, as my roommates have disappointingly realized. They occasionally talk about their aspiring chef roommate, and people reflexively ask "Oh, does he cook you awesome things all the time?" and the answer is a resentful, "No."

So yeah, sorry to all my old roommates for failing to live up to expectations, but I'd like to think yes, I am more proficient than the average home cook. Not because I've stacked up a lot of theoretical knowledge, not because I've burned myself with saute pans and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with ice-cold Mexican line cooks, but because I know how to use salt better than most of you do.

Most home cooks are afraid to push it with the salt, either for health reasons, or simply out of fear of overseasoning. When I watch you cook I can sense timidness. Though under or over seasoning something in a professional kitchen are equally criminal, I agree with you that when you over-salt something, there is no going back. You get a haircut you can always cut more off, but you can't grow it back on the spot. So I get it, better to fix it later and gradually adjust. But even then I don't think you go far enough. You will learn as you experiment with your palate, and cook more, but just know that it's almost impossible to over-salt a steak, and it's very educational to constantly taste your own food as you cook it. If you make soup or sauce, take a taste every time you add a pinch of salt. You will very quickly learn the evolution of flavor, and how big a difference salt can make.

Okay, so now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's assume we're talking about me as a professional cook.

Well ... I'm not sure how much my former employers appreciated me. Chef Mark was a perpetually cheerful kind of dude, who only offered occasional instruction. And I was mostly playing as dishwasher in his kitchen anyway. And Chef Jeff? Well, he hired me full-time from a stage position, but then again he liked to reiterate how much I sucked on a daily basis. Not in a harsh way, but when I think I'm working at full speed and keeping on top of everything, he would swoop in to say "Not fast enough" or "How about you try being first in the window?"

But in general, I think he liked me. He liked the Asian jokes I made at my race's expense and, being a cheap bastard, liked that he was getting an enthusiastic, English-speaking line cook at $9 an hour. The one time he gave performance reviews he sat me down and said "You underseason the tagliatelle. Stop that." (Funny, right? After I spent a whole paragraph telling you how I use salt well) And that was it.

I got better evaluations from Chuy. Ever the big brother figure, when Sergio or Jeff would yell at me to hurry the fuck up he would quietly help me plate and say, "You're doing very well, Eric, don't worry I help you with the scallops." I don't know if he was being nice, or if he was being honest, but it made being in the weeds less painful. Especially when Chef Jeff turned me in to a chef-de-tournant, and had me filling in on every station throughout the week. As Va P started to struggle with business, it would often just be me and Chuy in the kitchen, working all four stations with a dishwasher, the other cooks getting cut and sent home early. It was just busy enough to be crazy for two people, and proved to be a bizarre line cook experience. Cooks usually just focus on one station, one kind of cooking technique, but during these times I was doing everything. One minute you're roasting a whole sea bass, the next you're torching a creme brulee, and then back to check on your raviolis boiling away in the drink after you make that endive salad.

But let's put aside other people's evaluations, and consider my own.

Critical self-analysis and evaluation were skills I learned at Juilliard. That hyper-competitive environment forces one to constantly be humbled and learn from each humbling experience. Every time you become very proud of yourself, some eleven-year old Korean robot gets accepted and starts showing you how to really play your instrument. The practice rooms on the fourth floor had curtains to isolate your sound from one another, but I like to think they were just thin enough for you to hear your neighbor, so as to foster a cutthroat, hateful environment where classical musicians fight over scraps in a highly cultured, but ruthless dog-eat-dog world.

There was nothing worse than being singled out by a conductor during rehearsal to play your part in front of 70 of your classmates, be publicly excoriated and expelled from the room. Though your classmates' eyes seemed to plead sympathy, inside I think there was a feeling of sadistic pleasure in your humiliation.

I might be a little scarred.

So, all those past nightmares aside, I've learned how to analyze myself pretty closely. Not just to avoid embarrassment, but also because I've been roughed up to be competitive.

I think I'm ... decent. I'm good farm system material. Put me in the minor leagues for a year, let me work hard and one day I think I can be your starter. I don't think I'm exceptionally gifted, whatever being a talented cook means, but I have enthusiasm, no lingering lower body injuries and a decent noggin that is resistant to substance abuse. What I lack in experience, I make up for in determination, and what I lack in practical skill, I somewhat compensate for with theoretical knowledge.

I was never blessed with a lot of natural athleticism. I learned how to be an effective ultimate player through technique, field awareness and game intelligence. I think that is much the same for cooking. I don't know if I can just visualize and create an eyes-roll-back-into-head, orgasm-inducing dish on the spot, but I can realize how you did it and execute accordingly.

I may not be able to saute six orders of skate wing, baste with butter, blanch haricot verts and emulsify a beurre rouge at the same time, perfectly and on cue during a Saturday night crush. But I can tell you exactly how a saute pan affects fish, why basting is important, why wet heat is very beneficial to certain vegetables like green beans, and why the more RPMs you put in to whisking the better your emulsification turns out.

I may not be able to beautifully cut up a case of chickens, debone and butterfly them in under a half hour. But I can tell you why white meat is white, why dark meat is dark, and why they react differently to heat. And I definitely respect a well butchered chicken, and the whole process of presentation. Frenching a wing in to a supreme may be a pain in the ass, but it makes a difference to your customer.

I may not be able to plan my mise en place well enough so I have time to strain a light chicken stock ten times before service, but I can tell you why straining through a cheesecoth-lined chinois is crucial, and why perfect stock makes perfect sauce.

I may not be able to tell you how I plan on respectfully and tactfully blending various food cultures together, to represent my own personal style, but I can assure you I will try my damnedest to figure it out over the next decade. I may be way behind, there may be kids younger than me working in three Michelin star kitchens, so what I may "lack" in youth I will have to make up for with maturity (HAHA) and determination.

My goal is to first be a great cook, then a great chef, and then a great restaurateur. What makes a great cook is relatively simple. An ability to reproduce dishes consistently, quickly and in dogmatic dedication to the chef. What makes a great chef could fill endless blog posts. An ability to command and lead people to carry out your vision is probably the most significant distinction. And what makes a great restaurateur, well that still remains mysterious. There is no one way to do it, there are many paths to success, and there is an expansive skill set one must master. But being able to read people, the current restaurant climate, and express oneself in an attractive manner through food are among them.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. In the words of Bourdain, "There's a gulf the size of an ocean between adequate and finesse." Though I've worked in some decent restaurants, pressed my ability to learn, I haven't even gotten a canoe out to traverse that gulf. Maybe by the end of this year, we'll make it a speedboat. Maybe by the end of culinary school it'll be a cruiser. Let's just hope it never becomes a Titanic. Though I have faith that the chefs I work under will make sure to keep my ego in check. If not, I'll always have horrifying memories of Juilliard to remind me that there's no such thing as being the best.

EP6