Chef at Home

Archive for February, 2010

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My current endive fixation was sparked by my trip to Brussels.  Backstage at the Flemish Primitives were several flower boxes planted with endive. The endive was beautiful breaking free from the soil and the sight prompted immediate scribblings and sketches. I returned home and quickly forgot about that stream of inspirations. A trip to the store and a bounty of endive reawakened my new found interest in endives. Endives are interesting vegetables. They have several textures and possess a variety of flavors.

An issue I have had with endive is the difference between the feathery tips and the denser core of the leaves. When we were working on our fluke dish we cut the endive in a new way for us. We separated the stalk from the lighter feathery tips and created two exciting textures. What is interesting is that the core of the endive was sweet and delicate while the feathery tips contained the bitter notes commonly associated with endive. In separating the endive into textures we were able to look at the traditional spears in a new light. The center stalks take well to bolder flavors and marination while the feathery tips add light crisp bitter notes. The butchery of the endive inspired the direction of the fluke dish and the subsequent idea of endive and pear kimchi. 

In thinking about the endive flavored with kimchee we began looking at complimentary flavors. Somehow pears jumped out. We made a puree of kimchee and and used that to dress the endive stalks and pear slices. We added a splash of lemon juice a bit of salt and some minced parsley. To bring the salad together we reached for some Cabot Clothbound cheddar and the endive feathers. 

Upon reflection the salad as we prepared it could be part of a larger dish, as an accompaniment to several other small plates, an accent of sorts to support a few other ideas and directios.

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Our print gallery is now open. After several requests for print copies of our photos we’ve made the leap and created an online gallery where you can check out some of our favorite images and purchase these large prints if they inspire you. It’s been a fun project for us, choosing the prints was a lot harder than you may think. We plan to change them periodically as new and interesting photos catch our fancy. We hope you enjoy this new aspect of Ideas in Food as much as we do. There are new projects on the horizon and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Crispy rice or rice crispy in salty or spicy is a plus-plus snack that you find anywhere in chinatown. Made with jasmine rice they are very flavorful and good. After making some rice crackers, cooked rice dried on sheet then deep fried, we decide try a new way. Cook the rice, blend it to a fine consistency, color it and spray it over a silpat. It is oven dried for about 12 hours, broken into pieces and then deep fried. I like the deep red color, like sangre de toro. It is visually exciting.

 

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This dish is still a work in progress. It started with a bounty of chicken backs, which is really code for chicken tails. The backs became the base for an intense lemon chicken jus which we in turn cooked shaved endive.

To get started, we were able to remove the tails from the backs with a bit of quick scissor work. The tails were then cooked separately from the backs so that we could cook them in the intense cuisson. The cooked tails were then de-boned and wrapped into small parcels. The fish was cooked in the Cvap and then coated with sliced parsley stems dressed in olive oil. The chicken tail packets were sauteed quickly in their own fat and the feathery tips of the endive accented the fish and added a crispness to the dish. 

We came away from this first run with a number of new thoughts and are looking forward to working with them as we tweak this dish and look at other possibilities.

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in the course of a day a person hears a lot of words, thinks a lot of words, writes a lot of letters bunched up  with each other, and reads even more.

in kitchens we mince words, speak incomplete sentences, shout orders, and make clear, sharp points quickly. the concept is: listen the first time because i don't have time to repeat myself. sometimes communication is done without words, happens without opening our mouths. our hands communicate, our gestures speak volumes, our eyes admonish, our bodies teach, our body memory saves our lives, and those we work with.

patience. it's an unknown, a foreign word. a full explanation is gold, but not the traded kind, the sort found on a sunk ship, on the sea's bottom. recipes are scarce, methods are memorized, reasons are few. why is a word regarded with resentment, at best. no time for why. why is a word you have to take to the library on your day off. why is a word for those with enough money to go to culinary school. why? why takes time. minutes you don't have.  minutes you could use to go to the bathroom, breathe, take a gulp of water, pause.

sink or swim.

and we do a lot of sinking, and more treading water, hopeful. that our feet will reach sand. soon.

kitchens are about the now. about the i needs and the whens and the now, motherfuckers. maintenant. 'can i have that today, please?' kitchens are about economy. the economy of movement. the economy of words. the economy of thought, opinion and critique. choose your battles wisely, timely.

communication in staccato.

you better be good at morse, at braille, at seeing: using both eyes. hard.
you better have your blinders off.
except when you need them strapped to your head. tight.

kitchen communications are written in invisible ink, in shorthand; spoken in slang colloquial dialect vernacular jargon. kitchenspeak. kitchen-uendo.

that said, all over the world, there's only one language: kitchen.

graffitti.

if you speak it here, you speak it there. even when you're not speaking. once you learn kitchen you can never shake it. tattooed into your skin.

you smell a cook before you see her cooking. you see a cook even before you smell his sallow skin. you see scars, you hear invisible scars. you know.

look up passion. it means tortured.

*

I'm in a kitchen right now with a lot of 'green' cooks. They need a lot of care. A lot of 'hand-holding.' Way more than I would have been able to get away with. Ever. A lot of explaining needs to happen. While we will always have to repeat ourselves, {ad infinitum, in fact– basically until a cooks gets so tired hearing us say the same thing over and over he will comply, merely out of annoyance!}, the management team (3 of us in total) find ourselves really frustrated by the simplest of basic pieces of information we barely remember learning ourselves. We're frustrated because it seems as though a lot of these cooks have been cooking for a little bit, but did not learn the universal language, kitchen, along the way.

This is not to say I don't remember learning as I was coming up: I do. More than most because I did not go to culinary school. I remember when and from whom I learned what an 'All Day' was. I was taught, the hard way, to use my towel every time I reached for a saute pan. {My partner placed a red hot cast iron plancha in the same stack as the 'cold' ones.}

But I don't remember anyone ever telling me not to call in sick. I remember a female line cook taking me aside and telling me how it was and would always be for female cooks. {"You will work twice as hard, and get 1/2 the recognition & pay."} I remember a sous chef telling me I had to choose between a lover or friends: that I would never have both and have this career.

I have seen a lot of marriages end. I have witnessed a lot of addictions flourish. I have seen a few miracles. I have tasted a lot of tears. I have talked to a lot of people from the edge of a bridge. Mine, theirs.

*

If cooking is your calling, I suggest you pick up the phone. And listen.

If no one is teaching you kitchen, allow me to school you.

~

If you're cooking in the kitchen of some famous chef's empire, but you are not learning, get the fuck out of there. You have no time to waste.

If you don't know how to properly give notice, whether as a dishwasher or a sous chef, ask someone who has been cooking longer than you. If you start burning bridges at the beginning you will have no way of getting to the next job, later. Remember: the worst reference of all is no reference. If you think you will never come across the people you are working with now, again, you are sorely mistaken. No matter how many thousands of miles you travel, I guarantee you you will work with someone who knows someone else you worked with. People talk. Reputations start getting built early.

Stick with the winners. Watch the cooks who do it better than you. Watch cooks who are more organized, work cleaner, are more efficient, have composure, can take criticism, are graceful. Watch. Hard. Study, yo. LEARN GOOD HABITS NOW. Think of it this way: it's easier to learn good habits now than get bad habits beaten out of you later.

Stop moaning, whinging, complaining, pouting. Have you ever babysat? A silent, resentful cook takes all the energy out of a room, a kitchen, team. You are no longer a child. You are not the most important person in the kitchen, even if you're the strongest. There are no cowboys in kitchens. Kitchens are teams, yo. If you're so strong, help someone who isn't. If you need so much attention that you will fuck up on purpose to get it, a good chef will weed you out and press eject. If you need help, ask for it like an adult. Passivity is annoying. Ask for what you need. Be direct. And if one cook says no one night, she might say yes the next, so keep asking. Sometimes the most noble bravery is vulnerability. 

Watch, listen, learn. TASTE. I can't stress watching enough. Memorize your station, and the station next to you. Inventory, taste EVERY PIECE OF YOUR MIS EN PLACE EVERY DAY, every night, every service. Even if you are the only one on your station. Even if you don't want to. Some ingredients/components just take a few hours to go off. If you serve bad food it's on you. Have INTEGRITY. And if you hate your job/menu/chef so much that you don't care to taste your m.e.p., leave. Please. You have no time to waste.

Read. Read the restaurant reviews in your town. Do Google searches on your place of work. Read what people are saying. Read about the cuisine you're serving. Read food magazines, cookbooks, food blogs, industry magazines. Just read. Please. Look up ingredients. Read about how ingredients are used in their native foods/cuisines/dishes/ceremonies. 

If you're allowed: eat where you work. Get perspective. Try eating something you serve, start to finish, with the utensil your front of house serve it with. If you don't want to eat the whole thing/a certain component, then it's a good bet your diners don't want to either.

Stage. If you have a day off, go to another kitchen. Go to another kitchen to watch, to look, to see something else, to hear something else, to smell something else. Use your days off well. The first day is for laundry & sleeping, but if you have another: study. Even if you don't have money to eat out, look at other menus. Surf the web and look at restaurant websites. I'm not the only chef blogging… Read, look, comment, ask questions. 

Shut up. Shut up and listen. "Yes Chef," or "Oui Chef" should be your only response to critique. You have another opinion? Save it for the bar after work. Save it for someone who cares.

Someone I worked with recently thanked me for my patience, my teaching, my explaining. She said she had none of these attributes. She told me how she 'teaches' in her kitchens.

"I say, 'This is unacceptable. This is how you do it. Any questions?'"

Remember that your response to critique/instruction informs your chef about how to talk to you the next time. If you don't respond to thoughtful instruction, but you change after being screamed at, you will surely be screamed at from then on out. If you're in a kitchen where the chef only screams and you can't learn in that environment, find another kitchen. But I warn you: this industry isn't nice and patient. If that's all you can handle, there will be a lot of kitchens you'll never be able to work in. Learn from.

Clean clean clean and then clean some more. You can never be too clean, too organized, too efficient. Learn how to use 2 side towels. Yes, I said two. Not twenty. Try keeping your whites white. Whether butchering or making chocolates. It comes back to integrity. It comes back to sticking with the winners. You want to be fast? Be good first. Work clean, work efficiently, move with purpose, with grace. Look up the word INTENTIONAL if you don't know what it means. If you don't know how to practice it. Speed will come. I promise you. But if you're moving really fast, and you're a fucking mess, then you're not doing a very good job. You're no one I want to promote. You're no one I look up to. You're no one to judge.

Pay attention. Look beyond yourself, your station, your job. Attempt to see yourself as part of the whole. I know it's hard. It's impossible when you're first starting out.

Be ACCOUNTABLE. Learn the word accountability. Take responsibility for your actions, your inactions, your lies, your mistakes, your commis' mistakes, your cooks' mistakes, your achievements, your fears, your strengths, your weaknesses. You didn't order enough? Say sorry but do more than sorry. You think only about yourself? Open your eyes and pay attention to/support the cooks you work with/for/next to. Your station is never set up? You can't figure out how to keep it clean or leave it clean for the next cook? Stay late. be receptive to learning.

Ask questions. Ask how to be better. Ask questions silently. Go to work every day with a question and get it answered at the end of every shift, even if you can not utter it aloud.

Be better today than you were yesterday.
Every day.

Become versatile. Think you're great on saute? Grill? Come in on  your day off and work in pastry. learn your voids. Fill your gaps. Dive into what you're afraid of. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE MOST SKILLED PEOPLE IN YOUR KITCHEN. Volunteer to butcher. Apprentice the gnocchi making sous chef. CHALLENGE YOURSELF.

~

In the kitchen where I work now the chef is bringing in whole animals. You know what the crime is? NOT A SINGLE COOK HAS ASKED TO LEARN TO BREAK THESE ANIMALS DOWN. What the fuck are they waiting for? A formal invitation? Come on now. Are you serious? I can count on one hand the kitchens I've worked in that have brought in whole animals.

What else?
What 'schooling' have you received?
What am I forgetting?
What did you learn that has stayed with you through the days, the hours, the years, the grueling jobs, the awful kitchens, the shoe-maker chefs?
What do you teach your cooks?
What do you pass on?
What do you wish you never learned?
What's indispensable?

*

I'll leave you with these words, which I recently submitted & collected from my friends & colleagues on Facebook ~

Urgency,
Communication, Responsibility, Finesse, Listening, Accountability,
Organization, Humility, Mindful, Efficient, Receptive, Critical,
Questioning, Curiosity, Taste, Common Sense, Empathy, Resourcefulness, Creativity, Consistency, Fearlessness, Self-Critical, Levity, Focus, Grounded, Preparedness {aka Mental mis-en-place}, Humor, Taste Memory…

*

If you're in the wrong kitchen, I urge you to leave. If you're not learning, I urge you to find a kitchen, a city, a cuisine you can learn in/from. If you can't afford culinary school, don't go. You have a myriad of options.

I can't possibly be the only chef passionate about teaching, about apprenticing, about sharing.

I can't possibly be the only chef who believes these words with all her might.

Remember, know this:

we can only keep what we have, by giving it away.

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We know that in order to cook beans we must hydrate them first to cook them well. We know that we must do this even when we plan to use a pressure cooker. We have cooked many nuts, seeds and spices in the pressure cooker to achieve wonderfully tender and tasty results. Until today we had yet to hydrate these ingredients prior to cooking them.

Our lives have now changed. The simple principle of hydrating the ingredients before cooking them has shaved three quarters of the time off of cooking. It also allows us to impart a flavor into the ingredients: for instance pine nuts in rosemary tea and almonds in smoked water.

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Our baker Noe made a tray of his own recipe for potato bread. We bake whole garlic and potato on a bed sea salt until they are soft and fully cooked. Then incorporate pulp of both the garlic and potato into the dough. Made into small elegant rolls the rustic ingredients turn into a sophisticated product.

 

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Some of you want to know where I'm working now. Now that I'm back in NYC. Seemingly, for good.

The restaurant has a lot of names. None of them names, per se. The address is the name. The name is the address. The address is not one you'd know, unless you knew the West Village really well.

10 Downing Street. No, not the famous UK address. {But ironic, dontcha think?}
10 Downing Street, on the West side of the street, just a blink South of where Bleeker criss-crosses 6th avenue, aka Avenue of the Americas.
Downing Street intercepts Bedford street, the two being tinier than the next.

We have a nice view of the Empire State Building, are a corner space with sidewalk to ceiling windows and boast an intriguing art collection…

 

But better than the view or the space or even the marble bar with the handsome, witty bartenders, is the chef, Jonnatan Leiva, and sous chef, Matthew Wilbur, in the kitchen. And our amazing team. We don't have a single 'extra' person. Everyone counts, works hard, and is growing leaps & bounds before our very eyes. I sound like a proud parent, I know. It's how I feel.

I'm proud to say I work with and amongst them. 

The jury is out on whether Jonnatan's clean, beautiful, vegetable forward, seasonal, soulful, whole animal, vegetable stock based food is what New York City wants, but we'll keep on until they catch up.

 

 

Jonnatan arrived at 10 Downing at the end of October, Matthew followed soon after in early December, and I was hired right before Christmas. All of us spent a great deal of time working in & living in California, but I never met either of them until I arrived.

I've been having a lot of fun with my menu, as you've seen. {*Lemon, *Gingerbread, *Chocolate,  *Butterscotch.} And as winter slips slowly, sleepily into Spring, our menus change and grow out of the outfits they get tired of wearing. 

 

Gingerbread, gone, Hazelnut, brown butter & pears in. Rethinking chocolate. Slipped in a lebne cheesecake with kumquat marmalade, then it exited stage left. Am playing with an apple chausson with rosemary caramel cream & a weird and wonderful pickled apple & pomegranate salad. And for those of you looking for something slightly less obvious ~ supple chocolate & pistachio cream, rose petal sugar, sour cherry sauce, toasted kataifi & cool rose-mastic cloud…

I'm also having a good time with our Saturday & Sunday brunch menu. I've revamped the granola by buying local honey, omitting nuts, replacing regular yogurt with lebne & making it with as "unsweet" as possible by using maple syrup & honey instead of brown sugar.

I've been bold & nudged in my favourite breakfast item: EGG BABIES! Aka Dutch Pancakes.

And I never thought I would do it, but I have overcome my fear of making marmalade & right this minute you could be served one or all of the following with your French Toast, Dutch Pancake 'Souffle,' and/or'Pastry Basket': kumquat, lemon, blood orange, Meyer lemon, or Mineola Tangelo!! We just yesterday finished a grapefruit-fennel marmalade that was one my first attempts.

Although brunch service happens only 2 days a week I've gone all out for the pastry basket. Every week I challenge myself with a new yeasted something. This past weekend I was utterly ecstatic to find Deb's Monkey Bread recipe in time for Friday testing.

If you came in this past weekend, your pastry basket had toasted flour & almond Polverone, ANZAC, cornbread, buckwheat-banana-walnut-coffee-candied ginger muffin, Monkey Bread & a cheesy-pear biscuit.

A lot of you have come in, introduced yourself and allowed me to meet you in person. What a joy this has been! Thank you thank you for supporting the restaurants where I work. It means so much, especially these days.

For any of you who want to see more behind the scenes photos of 10 Downing St. Restaurant kitchen & cooks, I've put up three sets on Flickr. One, Two & Three. Yes, I will continue to bring my camera in & document menu changes & cooks cooking.

And if you live anywhere near or in NYC, I hope to meet & feed you soon…

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