A day in the life of a Chef - Part 3

As well as the regular breakfast items that are cooked each day I also do a special item. Special is in truth a little generous as a descriptive as the items are the same for their day of the week. Monday is French toast, Tuesday is a sausage roll, Wednesday is eggs Benedict, Thursday is Ham, cheese, tomato Turkish melt and Friday is Scrambled eggs. These items are cooked either alongside the other breakfast items as with the sausage rolls or after the other breakfast has been transferred to the Hot baine as is the case with the scrambled eggs.

From here I swing into lunch cookery and preparation. Breakfast cooking runs from 7 am until 10 am but in reality I only have to cook a few pans of eggs or put another half dozen hash browns into the fryer or on busier days put another tray of bacon into the oven. If I am lucky the the other staff will jump in, provided they have time and cook the eggs or hash browns. The key for me is to not pay too close attention to the way they do it and to accept that not everything will be done exactly the way you would like. 80% is good enough and all help is good help.

For this purpose I have grabbed an old menu from a random Monday and will run through how I would have cooked and prepared the food. On a Monday morning the sandwich bar requires hard boiled eggs, some will be displayed as whole peeled eggs and other mashed up from egg salad sandwiches. I am required to steam 2 trays or 60 eggs for 14 minutes in the combi oven. I do this as soon as the oven is free of breakfast foods. The other thing I am always careful to do when switching between oven cooking and steaming is allowing the oven to cool to below 80 degrees Celsius before steaming an item. This means that the steam with start almost immediately and also stop the oven baking the item that I am attempting to steam. The biggest problem items for this are when I am steaming rice up to heat for service and vegetables. The top of the rice can become crunchy if the oven is too hot and the vegetables with burn which is not what you want from your steamed veggies.

The other thing that usually occurs at this time of day is the arrival of the milk delivery. I am usually required to send our dumb waiter (goods lift) down so the driver can load the milk onto a trolley in the lift. Once done I will call the lift up and with the assistance of the manager load the milk into the coolroom. Milk deliveries come on Monday and Wednesday and on a typical Monday there are 9 crates of milk to unload.

From here I continue on with my work. The eggs are transferred to a sink in the washup room and covered with water and ice to chill them as rapidly as I can so that I can record the cooling being successfully completed within four hours. The catering assistants with peel the eggs during the morning for their use in the sandwich bar.

I then fill an oven tray with around 3 kg of rice, usually jasmine rice from Thailand. The rice is rinsed for about a minute under running water and then covered with approximately 3 litres of water. I find that the steam adds water during the cooking process so I don't add quite as much water as I would if using a rice cooker. The oven is set to steam and 20 minutes on the timer. The rice for this particular day was to accompany Chicken Vindaloo. Vindaloo is a spicy Indian curry that contains no cream or coconut cream to help balance it's natural heat. When the rice comes out of the oven it will be divided in half into a fresh tray and moved to the top shelf of the coolroom to chill. I have found the part of the coolroom where the cooling fan blows and put the foods I wish to cool on the shelf to assist in rapid cooling.

Next item on the agenda on this particular day would most likely have been to take the pizza bases out of the freezer. The pizza bases are slab sized which fit perfectly to the size of my 4 flat baine trays.
The pizza of the day is Carbonara pizza which is from a recipe that I found in my company's quarterly food magazine. It has a Parmesan cheese white sauce base and is topped with  bacon, mushrooms, shallots and Mozzarella. I would now jump into making about 2 litres of white sauce by first measuring and melting 200 grams of butter and whisking in 200 grams of plain flour and gradually whisking in the 2 litres of milk. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to thicken. After removing from heat add in the Parmesan. Spread over the 8 pizza bases which should serve 32 people.

Anyway, it's time for me to get the dinner on the table. Until next time, happy cooking!!

A day in the life of a chef - part 2

Sorry for the wait for part 2. Continuing on with breakfast preparations.

It is now approximately 6.25am. I turn on the heat under the fry-pan to a low to medium heat to preheat the pan before returning to the cool-room to get the sausages to put into the pan for cooking. I only cook between 5 and 9 sausages for the breakfast depending on the usual business of the day. The breakfast gets busier as the week goes on so I cook less earlier in the week and increase numbers as we get closer to Friday. By turning the pan on and then going to get the sausages I allow the pan to preheat a little before adding a little oil and the thin breakfast sausages. The sausages with fry in the pan for approximately 5 to 10 minutes before being added to the oven for 6 minutes to finish cooking. When removing from the oven I will test doneness by inserting a probe into the thickest part of the middle sausage. I tray the bacon. I place nine rashers on each of 3 large trays and 7 on a smaller tray as a backup. The backup tray in cling wrapped and put back into the cool-room to be used if needed. I use our older trays for this as we will not need them later in the morning and also they conduct heat better than the newer stainless steel trays. By this stage the oven is preheating nicely and I put the 3 trays into the oven to cook. In my time at my current site the grill plate has never worked and there have been occasional whispers that a replacement will be installed but this little Chef is not holding his breath. Without a grill the oven is the best way to cook the bacon in my opinion. After putting the bacon into the oven I wait for the the temperature to come back up to 190 Celsius before adjusting the timer to 15 minutes remaining.

Whilst waiting I get 4 tomatoes from the cool-room, selecting the best available, usually that means the biggest and reddest. I remove the core with an upturned paring knife and halve the tomatoes horizontally. They are put into a half size baking tray and put into the oven for 8 minutes. I then get the hash browns from the smaller freezer and put 6 of them into a fryer basket ready to drop into the fryer when the hash browns have 3 minutes remaining on their cooking time. When the tomatoes are cooked I will add the hash browns to the same half tray and take them to the baine marie. By this time the manager will be in and will have filled the baine marie with hot water and turned it on to maximum heat so that it is ready to keep the breakfast food at the correct temperature. That usually for us is above around 70 degrees. The browned and finished in the oven sausages should be ready around this time also and their half tray is placed in the same slot as the tomato tray in the hot baine. I will also start to pan fry eggs at this time. I again preheat the pan on low for about a minute, add a little canola oil and then the six eggs to the pan. I will do 12 eggs to start us off. Six will be sunny side up and six flipped and cooked to a firm consistency. The eggs are transferred to a long oven tray and put into the first place in the hot baine. They are covered with a plastic lid to reduce drying out.

Around this time the oven will be buzzing to let me know that the bacon is ready. I will get the bacon from the oven using either heat resistant gloves or tea towels to prevent burning my hands and move the bacon into another long tray to be placed in the hot baine alongside the eggs. The oven trays are covered with greaseproof paper to made clean up easier and initially the trays are put into the wash up room with the paper still on as they a now covered in hot fat from the cooked bacon. When the trays cool enough to solidify the fat it and the paper will be put into the garbage. To do so when still hot would result in a garbage bag full of holes.

Until next time happy cooking and eating!!!

32 Yolks by Eric Ripert

I recently completed reading this fantastic book by French born and trained chef Eric Ripert. Eric is the chef and co-owner at the famous New York restaurant Le Bernardin and initially came to my attention as the very good friend of the late great Anthony Bourdain. Eric if I remember rightly is the person who found Tony's body on that fateful day in France that shook the foodie world or at least the English speaking parts of it.

 This great book is one for the true believers. An amazing incite into the childhood, at times distressing and early cooking career on Eric. How much do I tell without ruining the reading? Hopefully, if you're lucky, just the right amount.

 The book starts out telling of Eric's childhood and his parents' marriage breakdown. He talks about eating in high quality restaurants with his mother and about appreciating good food early in life. He talks about staying with grandparents who gave him different views of great cooking and eating. He then tells of the difficulties of growing up after his mother starts living with a good for nothing guy who treats Eric abusively before having him shipped off to boarding school. Eric, his mother and good for nothing move to Andorra and it is here that Eric comes across a Chef who allows him access to his kitchen and food and gives the inspiration to become a chef.

 He loses his father to an untimely death and suffers though and survives more difficulties at school. All the while his extremely hard working mother continues to put food on the table through her clothing stores. From there his life heads as we should expect to culinary school where despite a table waiting disaster young Eric makes his way through and into the only three star Michelin restaurant to respond to his 18 sent resumes.

 La Tour d'Argent is where he meets Maurice a chef who shows him by methods that could be kindly described as tough learning. This is early 1980's or late 1970's Paris after all, would we expect any less. Whilst the early parts of the book told a nice story it is from this point on that had me not wanting to put the book down. The incites into life in fine dining restaurants in arguably the greatest culinary city of them all is as close as we can get without having lived it. The restaurant is so old that it was mentioned in the Marcel Proust classic Remembrance of things past which was published between 1913 and 1927. Eric spends a year and a half at La TourTour d'Argent and learns to become a chef. The chefs there teach him and although their methods are not for the weak they do give him the foundations that he can build on in his career. The head chef Bouchet sends him off to work at the most cutting edge restaurant in Paris at the time to work with one of if not the finest chef in the world Joel Robuchon.

 In this part of the book I want to read more and more but I also want to slow down because I don't want it to end. The dramas of his life to this point are nothing compared to working for an amazing genius. The Chef he started with at La Tour d'Argent is already there waiting for him and greets Eric with a "are you following me Ripert?" on seeing him arrive for work at Jamin. Jamin was only open Monday to Friday, but young Eric worked from between 6 or 7 in the morning until after midnight and slept the first day of the weekend to recover. The other day, Sunday was spent practising. This is where his greatness is born. Robuchon has a vision and passion that only a genius can. I loved the fly on the wall stuff here.Not sure where you grab a copy buy definitely get your hands on one.

 From Jamin, Eric does a year of Military Service and then amazingly returns to Robuchon for another stint in hell. He meets a girl and whilst on Military service and enjoys learning about food from her I think uncle in rural France. At the end of his time a Jamin he ends the book but heading off to the USA and life begins again. I think there is another book for him to write.

 All in all a wonderful book of only 247 pages. Loved it to bits. Want to find out what 32 yolks refers to? Read the book. There is so much more inside this wonderful excursion into early 80's Parisian kitchen life, A must read.