gaining tempi

If you were to put your head into a professional kitchen, at kick-off, anywhere in the world, you would be struck by the speed. Everybody is moving so quickly.
In dodgy operations there can be a sort of “Carry on Cooking” chaos.
In the good there’s a blur of multitasking and precisely avoided collisions.
And it’s all at fast forward times 30.
In restaurant kitchens people move quickly because they have to. During Service, during “The Hit”, if you stop digging like crazy you get buried by the dockets coming in from the front.

It’s the same in the period leading up to Service. Chefs do what they call “mise-en-place”, get food cooked or marinated or portioned and ready for The Hit (which usually comes about an hour after you open the doors).
Chefs never have enough time. So they do what chess players do.

Good chess players will always force a win once they’ve gained a “tempo”. That is; they manipulate a time advantage over their opponent. They manage to achieve more development in the same number of moves.
In the pro kitchen your opponent is the looming presence of the customer and often, in the big brigades, your fellow chef.
The wily old kitchen hand demonstrates his superior understanding of the Space-Time Continuum by nabbing all the pots and burners while the junior is still regaling the team with too much, night-off related detail.
When I was a junior, or “Commis”, as this first link in a chef’s evolution is called, my habit was to arrive a fashionable five minutes late for work, and I’d end up taking twice as long as necessary to do said work because I’d been out-maneuvered by my less fashionable colleagues. I’d be trounced in the Opening, beaten by the equivalent of Fool’s Mate.

Not being ready in time, as a junior chef, usually results in the application of a Sous Chef’s boot. And those most unaccustomed to this boot are those with the gumption to apply a little time and motion study to the process of their craft.
In the home you too, Gentle Reader, can benefit from the results of this study as you battle, Master Chef like, to get everything ready in time for your guests without the comforting presence of John Torode and his trademark “concerned” look to camera.

There’s one basic technique.

In a nutshell; you work in parallel, not in series. You get lots of jobs going at the same time, starting with the longest, rather than cooking one thing after another. In other words if you can leave a job unattended, working in a self employed fashion (like a boiling pot) - get it going, then get a few other things on the go. The worry with this strategy, given the domestic dangers of attention seeking family members and easily available alcohol, is a catastrophic loss of timing resulting in a disaster with no survivors.

But fear not - by applying not the science of interplanetary spacecraft, rather, some of this physics of the blindingly obvious and notwithstanding the clamor from spouse, child or bottle, I guarantee shattered personal bests and plenty of pre-arrival wine time.

Let me show you what I mean. Let's cast a new Commis in the role of a chef doing his mise-en-place for a busy lunch - he'll dreamily top and tail his beans, then put on a pot of water. A little bit of blanching and refreshing later his thoughts will lightly turn to the tomato sauce, after that’s well on the go he’ll attend to the washing of the watercress, the chicken bones then go in the oven (later to reappear in a stockpot) and finally, his attention will be drawn to the urgent lack of a béarnaise sauce by the first order of the day (“No starters, 2 Steak and Chips to go!”).
His methodology has been “that’s one job finished, now what’s next?” I could tell him what’s next; the Sous Chef’s boot is what’s next.

Rewind and replace our bushy tailed but callow, young hero with a character actor more evolutionarily advanced and what follows has more of a happy ending.
This wizened old pro works on the principle of “ get everything on the go at the same time and for God’s sake don’t forget about anything”
In the opening scene there’ll be a couple of pots of water on the gas for no reason in particular, a range of heavy bottomed pots will have been stashed and he'll have diced a few shallots before the beans even think of leaving the walk-in fridge.
The chicken bones will have hit the oven, shallots will be sweating and salad leaves will be soaking before the first bean lands on the chopping board.
In this remake, the cooker is doing half the work while the chef is doing something else. The water will be boiling at the minute the beans are ready to drop, the shallots, after twenty minutes, will be soft and ready to go one way with tomato, the other with tarragon, the stockpot will be gurgling away and the waitress will be chatted-up, long before lunch.
By this simple act of rescheduling the required motions in the time available to him our hard-arsed veteran manages to avoid the unpleasant surprise of not having ready the food ordered by a customer.

So if you prefer to be changed, washed and sitting, half sozzled, on the sofa hours before your guests arrive - borrow the professional’s practice of careful planning, simultaneous scheduling of the means of
production and ambulance-cheating acts of pot juggling.
But what’s the point?

Where’s the fun in cooking if, in the comfort of your own kitchen, with the radio on, and without care, you can’t tootle along all bloody day at the pace of an injured snail?

The Gentle Art of Sauce Making

Religious scholars agree that in Heaven, the English provide the entertainment, the Germans do the work and the French get on with the cooking. If you’re unlucky enough to end up in Hell, you’ll find the English at the stoves, the Germans on stage and the French on strike.

In other words – if there’s something that is heavenly about French culture, it’s their cuisine.

And there’s a crucial characteristic of French cooking that makes it not necessarily better than Italian, Indian, Chinese, or most others, but different. And that’s making sauce.
Other cuisines end up with liquors and juices and gravies - usually it’s what’s left in the pot - but the French set about making an accompanying sauce that often never meets the main ingredient until they share a plate, just because it’s worth the effort.

Once you've been promoted to a “Saucier” in a professional kitchen, you can take a little pride – you’ve proved yourself capable of making the most elegant item in your job description, under extreme pressure, which item your customers value at a level known as “good money”. You cannot really learn the art of sauce making without doing it a lot, which is what chefs do, so why not get saucing whenever you feel the urge.

For example – if you bake a fat piece of white fish, make a beurre blanc and flavor with a little dill. If you roast a duck, rustle-up a sour cream, brandy and green peppercorn number. If you’re roasting a rib of beef, knock-up a béarnaise sauce as well as the gravy. If you’re grilling some lamb chops, put on the table a jug of wild garlic, white wine and rosemary (pardon my French) jus.

You’ll quickly start getting them just right, just the right consistency, the right balance of acid, the right amount of alcohol, seasoning and so on. There’s some rules, you can add a little technique and you need to take care of the important bits but frankly – it’s easy to master a few killer sauces.

There’s only about three different types of sauce anyway, and at the top of this short list, ordered by the ratio of tastiness to difficulty is the range of sauces made by reduction.

Like the body in Blowup, there would always be an object essential to the plot, lurking in the background, were you to take a photograph in any decent working kitchen. This object is the stockpot, and without one or two of these bubbling away on the back of the range these kitchens wouldn’t be able to produce anything worthwhile in the “Sauces made by Reduction” category.

To me at home, it used to seem quite a hassle having to put on stocks, get together the right bits and bobs to share the pot, but if you take a sensibly careless approach it really is worth the very little bother.

So what to do.

Any meat bones, resulting from pre-cooking butchery, or any remnants of the cooked joint or carcass, should be thrown in a pot rather than the bin. Then fill it up with water and simmer away for a few hours. You’ve only got to avoid two mistakes and you’ve got a decent stock and only one measly pot for the designated dishwasher (or Kitchen Porter, as I like to say chez moi) to deal with.
Quite often the chicken or duck carcass will have a few vegetables and herbs stuffed in its cavity but if not and you’ve got an onion, carrot, some leeks or celery knocking around and you can be bothered you can throw them in as well. Likewise some fresh thyme or bay.

Mistake number one is being too vigorous in the boiling. If it’s churning around too much the fat in the pot will be emulsified with the liquor and you’re up that famous creek. If you avoid mistake one you’ll probably avoid mistake two, which is reducing the contents of the pot to a cinder.

Barring these forseen circumstances you can leave the pot on for a couple of hours, strain and then reduce as much as you like to end up with a concentrated, gelatinous pool of meaty flavor. Put it in the fridge. When it’s cold you can take off the fat which will appear on the top, then freeze or keep airtight in the fridge for five days or so.
These meat stocks usually end up mixing with alcohol, are reduced further, get joined by various aromatics and finished off with knobs of butter or cream or egg yolks or whatever.

For fish stocks, as for girls, it’s different.
If you’re poaching the fish you end up with a liquor anyway, and it’s usually tuned into a sauce on the spot. If you’re making a bespoke stock, there’s one mistake in the choosing of the bones and another in the boiling.

So, first – not any old bones will do. Use only uber-fresh, non-oily, white fish bones like cod, plaice, monkfish, haddock etc. Even Mediterranean, slightly oily types like seabass seem, to me, too strong, though there’s no harm in these characters appearing in stews.
The idea is the same; wash the bones, top with water, throw in any or none of the following aromatics – onion, carrot, leek, celery, fennel, mushrooms, peppercorns, thyme, bay, parsley.

Then there’s the boiling mistake – don’t leave it on the stove for longer than half an hour. That’s it.
Bring it to the boil, scoop off any white scum that forms, turn down the heat and simmer for around twenty to thirty minutes. Let it cool then strain. You mustn’t over boil and reduce (so what water you put on top of the bones is the volume of stock which results). If you leave it on too long the bones will impart a rather “waiting-for-the-bus-outside-the-fishmonger-at-5-O’Clock” flavour to the liquor. If you avoid the error, it’s a bit more “opening-the-window-of-your-room-to-the-sea-air-on-a-sunny-English-morning”.

A good fish stock will end up in a fish soup or stew, in a Champagne and cream sauce or in a mushroom veloute for a sole Bonne Femme.

Get these stocks down pat, turn them into beautiful sauces, and you’re really cooking.

seafood gratin

In the highly unlikely event of anyone reading this, let alone expecting any useful cooking advice, here’s a gold plated, crowd pleasing, 5 starred, Lifetime Achievement award winning, blithering idiot-proof, gin addle-proof idea for a starter. I guarantee it’ll go with a swing on one proviso – you don’t make any mistakes.

You can call this little number a Seafood Gratin.
As the name implies - you’ll need some gratin dishes – little, shallow (about 1 cm deep) side dishes, one per person.

Off we go.
Get in some good fresh seafood – I recommend some white fish (cod, sole, monkfish, whatever), some shrimps or prawns and something else if you like (scallops, lobster, mussels)
A little goes a long way so for 6 people about 400g cooked weight should be plenty (but use your eye)
Then I allow a guest appearance of something like button mushrooms, leeks or baby artichokes.
Everything should be cooked, and if you’re in doubt, undercook it because it’s going in the oven later anyway.
Poach the white fish briefly.
Get a little water boiling, about 500ml, chuck in something flavour-enhancing if you’ve got it - thyme, bay, onion, celery, peppercorns, blah, blah.
Put some chunks of the fish in the pot for a minute or two till they’re opaque - keep the liquor, you’re going to use it for a sauce- then break the fish into teaspoon size pieces, taking off bone and skin.
Similarly, and in the same liquor poach the shrimps or prawns, if not already cooked, and any other shellfish. All shells should be taken off, big pieces chopped into bite sizes.

Any surprise guests (mushrooms, artichokes etc) should be cooked and bite sized.

From the poaching you should be left with a pretty decent fish stock. Add to it some of the white wine that, if not open, in a glass and immediately adjacent to your place of work, will undoubtedly be in the fridge. Make the ratio about 1 wine to 3 stock. Reduce to about half the original volume then add about the same amount again of regular double cream. You’re making a classic white wine, fish, cream sauce.
Reduce, sort of carefully, until it’s quite thick but not gloopy- think Farrow and Ball.
Season it with salt and pepper – for God’s sake season it with pepper AND SALT. You can abstain or go low with salt, you’ll live very long but by Christ you’ll be miserable and so will be everyone you cook for.
Add a little lemon juice. Strain it. Fiddle with it as you like.

Now distribute the seafood and any other bits and bobs among the dishes, pour over each some sauce. Don’t cover, but nearly. Sprinkle over some fresh white breadcrumbs you’ve just knocked up in the food processor, then some nice grated gruyere or parmesan, and pop under a grill or in a medium hot oven for about 7 minutes or until they’re all bubbling and golden.
You’ll need some great, crusty bread for mopping up duties.
And a killer white wine.

Is that all there is to it? I hear you ask. Is it that simple being a culinary genius?
Yes it is.
At least it is if you avoid the temptation to throw in the Utter Idiot’s favourite ingredient, best showcased in his signature dish of "Right Pig’s Ear".
Which ingredient is - witless negligence.

In other words don’t make silly mistakes.
And the most obvious mistake is buying lousy seafood. So just get the freshest, sweetest smelling you can.
If you cannot buy something super fresh, cook something else.
After that it’s plain sailing. It’s hard to overcook the fish unless you sneek in an episode of East Enders while it’s in the pot. You can get the sauce a bit wrong. Don’t reduce it too much – it should have a little room to reduce further in the oven. You can fail to reduce the sauce enough.
And in the home straight you can leave it in the oven too long (see Eastenders, above). Blackened breadcrumbs and cloying, split cream are best saved for other dishes (see Pig’s Ear, above).

Take care then take the acclaim.

The Egg Interview

So

If the secret of good cooking is the avoidance of strewing errors, there’s a question going begging here which is this – what, actually, is good food? Is good food a universal absolute or is it relative to your frame of reference?
The answer is - It’s absolute (more or less).
If you give good food to a roomful of people of different ages and from different backgrounds they’ll (more or less) agree it’s good. With a few exceptions – if one person finds something tasty, balanced, satisfying, everyone will.
Generations of families, in each culture and community around the world (if we leave aside the Blumenthals) have worked out what goes together in a tasty manner, given the animals and plants naturally available to them. So all you’ve got to do, to end up with said tasty food, is find a good cook.
Many people over the years have failed to ask me “how do you tell if someone is a good cook before you employ them?” and the answer would have been, of course, “given the immutable rule of cooking, practically anyone can be turned into a good cook, but in order to tell if someone has a real talent you use the technique famously adopted by the brothers Roux - The Egg Interview”.
In this technique the interviewee is dispatched to the kitchen with the instruction – go cook me something with an egg in it. (I like to add the flourish “surprise me”)
This is an immensely satisfying procedure for the interviewer and, often, a rather surprising one for the putative Ramsay. The rationale, of course, is that if someone can cook a humble omelette or cares to boil perfectly an egg, then they’ll probably be crazy in their attention when cooking something more complicated. It shows, also, that they “get” food, that it is the simplest things that matter.
You can see that with Ji Sung Park, Manchester United’s terrier – like left winger. I’ve never actually seen him knock up an Ouef en Cocotte, but you can tell by the way he concentrates on the simple yet essential attributes of diligent positional play and ferocious running that it would be pretty tasty.