DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

[This is part II of a 3-part series. Read part I, intro to chefdom, or part II, soup from concentrate]

One of the most interesting food-service tricks we’ve learned is something I’d first realized when reading Kitchen Confidential — that most restaurant food is prepared in advance. In our case we served a six-course meal, and the only item that was actually cooked to order was what the chefs called the “veg,” the token plain vegetable served on the side of the fancy vegan entree. Everything else was either kept warm after having been cooked earlier in the day, or reheated out of the cooler.

It’s a good lesson for entertaining at home. For small groups, it wouldn’t matter so much, but even then, this approach makes way too much sense.

This afternoon, my task was to make one of the two entrees, jambalaya. This particular dish appealed to me because it was cooked in the oven with minimal fuss. I combined all the ingredients (including uncooked rice) in big “hotel pans,” and then stuck ‘em in the oven. It couldn’t get much easier than that.

The prep took time, though. The “Cajun spice blend” called for in the jambalaya recipe put me back at the spice rack with my calculator and pad, measuring micrograms of cayenne and fennel and file. We were doing 5x the written jambalaya recipe, so I made 5x the spice blend. Toward the end of the process I realized that I’d just combined about $80 worth of dried spices, enough to feed Cajun food to 100 people every day for the rest of the month. Turns out the spice-blend recipe was already multiplied out, and I’d just made 5x more than we needed. I had a big salad bowl of spices and a sheepish grin on my face. The chefs didn’t mind, though; they make batches of this stuff periodically anyway. (Maybe not again this year, though.)

My soup changed dramatically overnight. It was hugely better; the flavors had combined and balanced. As we were getting ready to serve it, I panicked, realizing that the head chef, out front acting as hostess, hadn’t tasted the soup to adjust seasonings. Back in the kitchen, I asked the sous-chef to do so, and she said, “I can’t taste anything; I have a cold. It’s on you!” So I had final say on the seasonings, and we were just about to serve the soup to 30 people.

I’ve never trusted my palette. Great chefs become great because they constantly taste and adjust. Identifying what’s lacking, or what’s overpowering, is a big part of the skill of a talented chef, and that’s the one skill I’ve never developed, or even attempted. I regularly serve food that I have not tasted at all, whether I’ve followed a recipe or not, because the few times I have tasted something I’ve never known what to add.

So, under this enormous (but largely imagined) pressure, I dunked a spoon and slurped some soup. It was fantastic. It needed nothing, and for once I knew it. There was no question in my mind. So we served the soup as-is, and it went on to get raves from everyone — I heard people talking about it in the restaurant. That was pretty cool.

I put in a 2-hour shift in the kitchen, plating all six courses. It was fun for that amount of time, knowing that things would never get too crazy. Afterwards I got to sit in the dining room and eat while other students took over plating. This was a nice end to the process, to return to the front room and act like a customer again, to have shaken every hand that had touched the food, to know the stories and the faces and the personalities and the near-accidents, and to have the recipe book open as I ate dinner.

The best part, though, is that someone else did the dishes.