Category Archives: Overtime

Chapter 10: Week 7: Making progress

23 Monday Jun 2014

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I get the whole idea of progressions; I understand why we do them and I even think I understand how to do them. But, to start with, I find it hard to actually write one down. A progression? It’s literally how you plan to progress through the day, in 5, 10 or 15 minute increments, all written down neatly on a proper form so your chef can write on it in red exactly where you’ve gone wrong.See, standing in the restaurant kitchen at 9 am it’s easy to see what needs doing first and why – square away the meat and put the roast in, make pastry for the tart cases, finish up with veg prep and the staff meal. Unless we’re roasting chicken for the staff, in which case we need to think of doing that at 1015 so the chicken will be roasted and rested by 1130. And if we’re making puff pastry that needs to be started first to allow the rests between turns. And of course if chef wants to cook the potatoes in their skins then that needs to be organised by 10 to give them time to roast and then cool a bit before peeling them.OK, OK. So it’s not obvious, unless you’re Chef and you’ve been doing this for 18 years and you don’t need to write anything down.But I do get how to do it: you start from the end and work back, starting with what you plan to serve at midday – for example – and then work backwards towards the start of the day. Whatever takes the longest to cook, do that first. Then work through your meat, fish, veg and patisserie in an order which allows you to keep your workstation clean and free of contaminants, doing everything of one type all in one go and then moving on to the next. SimplesWe get a choice of progression sheets at school; I find them both pretty easy to use, although School Chef reckons the one-column version is easier for us beginners – not so much chance of us trying to get ourselves to do two things at once, I suppose.So, progressions done today we’re supposed to be doing ‘Cotes de Porc Charcuterie’ – pork chops with a cooking juice and stock reduction and gherkin sauce – and ‘Oeufs pochés bragance’, poached eggs sitting in half a tomato covered with a béarnaise sauce. This is French Cooking As She Was Done By Escoffier, and don’t you forget it my lads. If it was good enough in 1905, it’s good enough in 2005 now shut up and make that bizarre sauce.On my progression form this means cut up the chops from the the whole ribs into portions of 4 ribs each, Frenching the bones – cleaning off the meat residue to make them look pretty – then do the veg prep while roasting the ribs, make the béarnaise while cooking the veg and reducing the cooking jus and poach the eggs when everything else is done and keeping warm for five minutes.But the pork hasn’t arrived so we start poaching eggs, which I think will be leathery in three hours time but there you go.Then the pork does arrive, but it’s not in whole ribs – they’ve been cut up into individual chops. Whilst they were still frozen. With a band saw. So, they’re not pretty and it’s a much too easy job to cut off what remains of the mangled vertebrae for us. In theory we: Remove the vertebra; de-nerve and de-fat; aplatir (tenderise by beating, apparently not the same thing as beating recalcitrant children), manchonner (oops, School Chef forgot to order the ‘paper condoms’, as Restaurant Chef calls the little hats you stick on rib bone ends) and reserve. Then we pan fry them, put them to one side to keep warm, recover the caramelised sugars from the pans and add some instant powdered stock to make a bit of a sauce, add in the julienned gherkins, monter au beurre et voilà , main course.Poaching the eggs is easier than scrambling them as we did last week; salted water just barely simmering, drop in the eggs one at a time one after the other, remove when cooked. When are they cooked? Harold McGee has an interesting idea about how if you get the percentage of salt exactly right in the water, you drop the eggs in and they rise to the surface at the moment they’re done. I’d love to tell you what that percentage is, but Chef’s borrowed my book at the moment (Restaurant Chef, that is). He doesn’t understand most of it and reckons McGee would make another fortune if he had it translated into French.After lunch we have Droit. Every week we, the students, ask each other “Is it Droit or Hygiène this week?”, then groan at the answer, whichever it is. We hate each one more than the other. This week: Business partners! So that’s banks, other financial partners, staff, the government, suppliers and clients. Who’s the most important? Duh. There are also ‘indirect’ partners – fashions, opinion leaders (journalists! The scum!)…it sort of goes on a bit, I think.Still. Back in the kitchen we go over ‘dégraissage et deglaçage’ – defatting and deglazing, or Getting The Most Out Of Your Cooked Meat. This is something I’ve never really thought about before. It’s something I’ve always automatically done with roasted meats – make a gravy with the bits that stick to the pan – but have almost never done with pan-fried meats, apart from making a mustard sauce in the pan in which I cook chicken breasts. And even then never really thought of it as the same sort of thing (reserve the chicken, deglaze with a large serving/soup spoon of mustard of your choice per portion, add two spoons of cream when the mustard bubbles, mix, season, serve).Choux pastry this afternoon, something else I’ve already practised in the restaurant. In fact, I know it quite well because RC is keen on it, and all our stagiaires have to know the recipe by heart (and so frequently stop by my plonge to ask me to remind them what it is): half the flour to the quantity of water, half that of butter, 16-20 eggs per litre depending – add the last one or four only if needed.I show School Chef the technique Restaurant Chef learned from the Patissier at the Martinez in Cannes for drying the détrempe of flour and water – with your sauteuse on the corner of the forneau, push the paste to the side of the pan furthest from you and then chop and drag it towards you in small pieces across the bottom of the pan. This may leave a crust on the bottom of the pan, but this doesn’t matter. When you’ve dragged it all towards you, turn it over and start again. It works better than just aimlessly smashing and stirring at it, ensuring that every bit gets an even chance of being dried out.We make Profiteroles with the Choux, filling them eventually with crème patissière – unfortunately, a good 10% or so are judges ‘unfit for service’ so we have to eat them ourselves. Ahem. The sacrifices we make…After that I got the bus home (Delphine, bless her, dropped me off at school at 0745 so I didn’t have to ride my bike, I’m still not well), made some pizza dough and then went straight to sleep. I made ham and mushroom pizzas when Delphine got home, we watched an episode of The West Wing (which I like lots) and I slept a solid 9 hours, only to wake up absolutely exhausted the next morning. Luckily I can go to work and spend 15 hours washing up for a bit of a rest. Lovely. 

Chapter 9: Week 5: Quiet for the time of year

23 Monday Jun 2014

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It’ll soon be Christmas and although the season has wound down completely and we have no more than a couple of rooms occupied in the hotel at any one time (if any at all), we’re still fairly busy in the restaurant with Christmas lunch and dinner groups. December was supposed to be quiet because the directors didn’t bother employing a sales manager this year, intending to do all the publicity themselves, something they then forgot to do leaving us with no reservations. In the end it turns out that everyone wants to celebrate Christmas in our restaurant.Last week I worked every day as normal, after a week in the UK with my lovely, indefatigable gurus Steve and Caroline (thanks!) which WAS a lot calmer than we’d expected, so we ended up eating and drinking in pubs and (French-run) restaurants instead – Pebble Beach is highly recommended, although you pay UK not French prices for French food – venison especially highly rated).Last Friday was the last Soirée Vigneron of the year, a Caviar/Foie Gras/Truffles/Lobster special for €100 a head, AVC compris (Aperitif/Vin/Café included). Chef had devised special ‘menu dégustation’ to go with each of the seven wines brought along by the various wine producers, which means seven courses, two with ‘doublures’ – under-plates. This is important to me because, with 50 covers, that gives me an extra 100 plates to wash. Thank you, Chef. Although it’s not as bad as our old Dutch Seconde de Cuisine who managed to find a way to use four (count ’em! 4!) plates for one dish during the summer. I’ve refused to tell Chef how she did it because he’ll only go and do the same.So we finished at about 1am on Saturday morning; Chef came into the Plonge and stuck his hand into the water in the dishwasher and said, “Hmm, what’s this?” Now, the machine’s been a bit dicky recently and the repairman’s been out a few times; right now it’s over-filling with water on occasion, and at this moment there was about a two centimetre overfill. I told him this, and he said, “No, I mean why have you emptied the machine and refilled it?” I hadn’t, and told him so. “Yes, but this water’s clean!” he said. That, I explained, is because I don’t put anything dirty in it. I wash everything first in the sinks, I said. “I know,” he replied, “but after all the covers we’ve done I thought it would be at least a little bit dirty”It wasn’t, but then I’m a good dishwasher (please imagine a self-effacing grin here). In the kitchen I don’t just want to do the best that I can do, I want to do the best that ANYONE can do. Which is why I wasn’t happy with the Hollandaise sauce I did for him last night.We’re currently down to two stagiaires, from the four we’ve had for the past three weeks. Only one of them, the German (natch) was any good; right now we have a chatty Portuguese grand-dad and the usual French teenager in the patisserie (although this one does show some signs of waking up now and then); the rule with stagiaires is that two do half the work of one regular cook, and four do a quarter of the work of one cook between them. So while Chef was busy showing them how to cut grapes in half to decorate the dessert plates he asked me to make a Hollandaise for the lobster he was serving last night.At cookery school we do this over a bain marie, but in the kitchen it’s direct onto the hotplate. You keep the saucepan at the right temperature as you’re whisking up the egg yolks (six, in this case, with a tablespoon and a half of water) by holding your hand on the side of the pan; if you smell burning flesh, it’s too hot. You whisk in a figure of 8 until you can clearly see the bottom of the pan, then you ladle in the clarified butter (one Pochon – a small ladleful – per yolk) slowly off the heat. Now, I started on the butter when, as at school, I could CLEARLY see the bottom of the pan as I drew the whisk across it; but Chef checked one ladleful of butter in and said the yolks weren’t foamed enough. Still, we checked to see if it would glaze by putting a spoonful onto a torpille (a torpedo-shaped metal serving plate) under the salamander, and it came out fine. So, OK, continue with the butter but next time foam those yolks more. And in the end it was a good Hollandaise, the junior French stagiaire told me so (jealously, I have to add, he hasn’t been let anywhere near the stoves in the two weeks he’s been here to do anything other than burn milk).Because Chef is the only proper cook left in the kitchen (we have no Seconde and the Chef de Partie des Entrées left three weeks ago) I’ve been getting to do more and more of the advanced prep and even some of the cooking, which is fine by me; beats washing up anyway, although I do still have to do that at the end of it all.For the soirée Vigneron I got to prep the lobster and the foie gras, and de-bone the filets mignons of venison that were served as the main course and de-skin the two joints of poitrine, pork belly, that we used to lard the filets – something I’ve actually already done at school – it’s not too difficult if you remember (a) to keep the skin pulled tight and (b) not to cut yourself.I enjoy all that sort of stuff a lot, enough to make me think that I’d enjoy working garde-manger in a large brigade; but then I do a bit of patisserie and enjoy that a lot, too. And then I also get to work the hot side and enjoy that as well. After a year and a half in professional kitchens I’ve gained a lot of experience in a variety of bits of the job and don’t know if I want to specialise or not.I’m thinking of doing a second year at school, assuming I get my Diplôme this summer. They offer a CAP in Patisserie or Traiteur-ship, and the idea of both interests me. For one crazy moment I thought of doing both at the same time, since they’re taught on different days, but I’ve come to realise just how much more tired I’ve been since September than I was even during the height of the summer. The problem is that, with two days off a week, I’ve been spending one of those days working in a kitchen again, effectively giving me just one day off per week. And since September the restaurant has been closing mostly only for half-days at a time, so often I’ve been going in to work on Monday evenings after school, giving me 17 or 18 hours out of the house at one go, and then only two half days during the rest of the week to recuperate. Which really isn’t enough, and now I’m just completely knackered. Yesterday the restaurant was closed for the midday service and I’d intended to spend the day working on the repainting of our new front room. But after I’d gone out for bread and eaten some breakfast I found I was literally incapable of doing anything else at all other than lying in bed and, at most, reading a little. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak, unfortunately.The restaurant officially closes from December 23 until February 14, and doesn’t re-open fully until March. Even then I don’t know what I’m going to be doing; I certainly don’t want to do another full season as plongeur, but would love to go on working with Chef because he’s been so good to me. I’ve learned lots and lots and he’s a great teacher, but (a) I don’t know (and nor does he) if he’ll have a budget for a Commis Chef and (b) in any case I’m not experienced enough to do that job in that restaurant, in my opinion; I’m certainly not experienced enough to do, for example, the entrées, where he will almost certainly have a budget to hire someone.And, while he’d probably love me to come back to the plonge I, as I say, don’t want to do that; I may come back a bit at the start of the season if I haven’t found anything else, but I don’t want it to become a regular gig. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed doing it for the past year, but there’s other aspects of the job I enjoy much, much more and, frankly, a year washing up is enough. 

Chapter 8, Week 4: Puffing and panting

23 Monday Jun 2014

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Once again Chef (restaurant – as opposed to Chef (Ecole)) came up trumps by getting me to make a few kilos of puff pastry in advance of this week’s school session. Normally in the restaurant we use bought-in sheets of frozen puff pastry, one of the very (very very) few ready-made things we use, for several reasons: It’s good quality; it’s not expensive; and we don’t have a chef-patissier. Chef spent three months at the start of the year looking for a decent patissier, and even thought he’d got a good one signed up until, at the last moment he instead accepted a full-time contract in a restaurant on the Cote d’Azur in one of the Palace Hotels down around Nice. There is a HUGE lack of cooks in the entire French catering industry – not just in restaurants. Overall the country is about 70,000 cooks short, and good patissiers are worth their weight in truffles, the real ones not chocolate ones. We were offering a large salary and good benefits but someone even richer offered him more – so, if you fancy working in France, bone up on your pastry skills – there’s work waiting for you.The only caution I’d offer is that its virtually essential to speak French at least a bit, simply for your own comfort. We’ve had stagiaires who didn’t speak French and, luckily for them, my Chef is easy-going and prepared to work his schoolboy English, but they’re not all like that. There are, unfortunately, chefs too stupid to realise that in a market where there’s a lack of talent you have to treat the talent you can find nicely – which is how come I was able to have a blazing row and quit my last job with a chef traiteur in front of a shop full of customers (“Je m’en fous de ce putain de merde de travail! Je démission!”) and walk into a good job the next day.So, a couple of kilos of puff pastry last week gave me a head-start on doing it at school this week and, again, an interesting insight into different techniques of doing things; at the restaurant I mixed the détrempe, the flour and water mixture, in a big bowl; at school it’s direct on the worksurface, which made more mess for no apparent gain. We also used margarine at school instead of the ‘beurre fin’ (butter with less than 16% water content) at the restaurant. The margarine was easier to work but gave a much poorer quality taste at the end. But it is cheaper.We used the puff pastry to make some sardine tarts, so we also got to practise our fish gutting skills again; a Chef I know in England has told me about his old Portuguese kitchen porter who could disembowel and de-bone a sardine just by running his thumb up along through its guts and then ‘sort of twisting it’, but I can’t work out how to do that so have to stick with the knife technique I do know. A quick ‘tomate fondue’ (sweated shallots, concassé of tomatoes and a touch of garlic all stewed together) makes a base and finishes off a simple tart.We start the afternoon with another ‘droit’ class, business administration; this is the most boring thing we do – the teacher, who normally teaches recalcitrant 16-year-olds, thinks that the best way to teach us anything is to read stuff from the text book at dictation speed so we can copy it down into our own exercise books; I’ve short-circuited this process by simply buying the text book for myself and I read along with her. As our final exam will be based exclusively on exercises drawn from this book, most of us have started using this class as a time to tidy up and correct our recipe books. Or for having a nap.More interestingly we do a mayonnaise this afternoon, our first ‘sauce émulsionnée. I’ve made it a fair few times in my life before but today it just does NOT want to work. No obvious reason why, it just won’t take and stays runny. My cooking partner wants to throw it away, but I show him how to take another egg yolk and use the runny rubbish as if it were oil, and this time it works fine. Chef was impressed I knew how to do that, too.The rest of the afternoon we spend making a ‘tarte fine aux pommes’, a posh apple tart with the other half of the puff pastry we made this morning. A ‘tarte fine’ has crème patissière on the pastry base and then poshly-sliced apple on top. Again, it’s all about knife skills, cutting up apples into thin slices rather than giant chunks, which is much harder than non-cooks think. But my workstation partner, who never, ever cooks apart from in our lessons, has a hard time doing this sort of stuff because he simply never handles a knife anywhere else. He’s only doing the course because it gives him a wage increase at work (he works in a hospital canteen ‘conditioning’ the food prepared elsewhere, i.e. freezing/defrosting/reheating it for patients and never gets to cook – nor does he want to. Eating at his home is done via a microwave, takeaways or in a restaurant) and while I get on great with him and like him dearly, it’s maddening to be always next to someone for whom food is just fuel and cookery simply a way to get a pay rise rather than make something others want to eat.We put our tarts in the cold room to chill while we clean up and then chef gives us our marks afterwards. I only get 7 out of 20 which is very disappointing, until I realise that someone has swapped dishes with me to get my 15. Hmm. Something like this happened the other week when I got marked down on some vegetables we’d turned, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.Still.Then this evening they have a big group in the restaurant and Chef has asked me to come in to work, so I cycle up there from school. It turns out to be a bit more difficult than I thought it would be to do this, since one part of the route is along a dual carriageway flyover with no pavement, so I get badly shaken about by passing lorries. In the end, I get there just in time for the staff meal – roast chicken and ‘pommes de terre coin du rue’ (potatoes cut in quarters lengthways then into a large dice, sautéed very quickly with some chopped garlic and parsley and bunged into the oven for 20 minutes – the name means ‘street corner potatoes’), one of my favourites and Chef’s, too. He suffered during the summer when our (Dutch) Seconde de Cuisine (or Sous-Chef) always cooked potatoes and roast chicken on his days off so he never got to eat them. Now every time we have potatoes everyone makes a point of moaning about how they can’t face any more because we ate so many over the summer; it never fails to get him going in a good-humoured sort of way, so it’s worth the effort.The 47 covers don’t finish eating their puddings until gone midnight and I have to wait for their dessert plates but can leave the waiters to put their coffee cups and saucer into the soaking bowl to finish overnight and get home just before 1 am. I left home at 0715 this morning, so it’s been a long day. Delphine, my girlfriend (she’s a florist in Orange about 20 minutes up the road) is already fast asleep, and I manage to get into bed without fully waking her. Luckily for me she’s very understanding about this sort of thing and works public holidays and weekends herself, so restaurant hours don’t bother her at all.I’m a lucky chap.