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?