A day in the Life of a Chef - Part 6

And on it goes ....
The steamed vegetables come out of the oven and go straight into the Baine Marie in a long oven tray. The steamer trays a perforated so that water doesn't pool in the base of the tray whilst you are steaming. Now it is time to put the Carbonara pizza into the oven. The pizza goes in for 8 minutes at 200C before turning and giving it another 5 minutes. This should prevent uneven cooking and give an even browning to the cheese and crust of the pizza.

A lid on the pasta water should speed up the boiling and have us ready to cook our ravioli. I will usually start with 2 or 3 packets of the ravioli which is cooked from frozen. Simply cut a corner off the packet so that you can control your pouring and tip into the boiling salted water. After about a minute I gently stir the pasta to prevent it sticking to the base of the pot. I would then cover with the lid to bring it back to the boil. As soon as it does remove the lid wearing a heat resistant glove or a tea towel in hand and stir a second time to again prevent sticking. The pasta should now be right to boil away until cooked. If the pasta sauce had reached a good thick consistency earlier in the morning I would have turned the heat off. If this is the case I would reheat in at a gentle heat turning it back on just prior to putting the pasta on to cook. This should mean that when the pasta is ready the sauce is also hot. When the pasta is cooked (the manufacturer usually knows their product so check the packet and taste the first time you use a new brand) use a handled colander to scoop the pasta into a large bowl on the side. Add in about ten large ladles of pasta sauce, scooping deeply to get plenty of the good ingredients which are by now no doubt nestling on the base of the pot. Also I make sure I take the last few ladles from the top to get a good balance of sauce and chunky ingredients. I will also throw in a bunch of fresh parsley and a big handful of Parmesan cheese and mix with a kitchen spoon to incorporate everything thoroughly. This is then poured into an oven to tray and transferred to the Baine Marie. The other point to note is that when it comes to pasta I use more sauce than I would if I was serving immediately due to the evaporation that occurs whilst the sauce sits in the heated environment of the hot baine. This hopefully prevents it looking dry when the customers come to eat.

The Pizza should now be ready and slid onto a fresh white chopping board to cut into 8 even pieces. After cutting slide the pizza back onto the flat tray it was cooked on and into the hot baine to await service. In the case of the flat trays I always put a perforated steamer tray underneath them in the hot baine to prevent the tray from sliding into the hot water below. Better safe than sorry.

The last item to add is our chicken Vindaloo. The Brat pan is tilted enough so that the curry tips onto an angle that allows me to get a smallish bowl in to scoop the curry into an extra deep oven tray. In my early days I used to scoop the curry into a deep tray that held just over half the curry and then had to reheat the rest during service but have not decided that it is easier to put it all out the front right from the start. That bit is actually fairly obvious, but I always had concerns about the quality issues related to putting the whole curry up for the entire lunch session. I now believe that the pay off outweighs any loss of quality in relation to the food in most wet dishes.

I used to push hard to try to get myself a lunch break but these days I have decided that the time is better spent finalising my paperwork from the mornings cooking and hopefully getting my ordering list written up. What paperwork does a chef do? In the modern kitchen it is essential that we keep record of temperatures of food we cook and do some checking of goods received to make sure that they are in date, held at the correct temperature and of appropriate standards for use in our kitchen. Some of this needs to be written up to help with compliance with both the council food hygiene inspectors and the even more critical internal auditors from my own company. Everybody has a job to do in this area and it is just part of a modern workplace. Whinge about it if you want, but as is the case with many things in life it is usually easier just to get on with it.

Writing this now I feel as I do at work where getting up to this part of the day, that being the start of service, I feel like the work is done. Which I think is a little strange and partially a result of working in a non Ala-carte kitchen.

We do share the paperwork around so that everyone in the kitchen has some to do, but as you would expect most of it is left to the chef. I need to record all the goods received and a temperature of a sample of any high risk foods. I also need to record the cooling temperature of one item a day. That may be the eggs we steam for the sandwich bar or any leftover food from the hot baine that we intend to reuse, perhaps an example would be chicken leftover on roast chicken day.

I believe brings to the end of morning service  with only Lunch service and clean up to come. But that's for another time. Until then happy cooking!!!