The Culinary Tales Week 38: Gone Star-Crazy

October 27, 2014

Much of successful cooking relies on the prep, the mise en place. When all of your ingredients are chopped, portioned, and readied as needed, the actual cooking process goes smoothly (one hopes.) In a professional kitchen, timing is of utmost importance, more so than taste in some cases, and proper mise en place is key to getting your dishes out as fast as the customers want them.

 

On Mondays, we generally prepped all our ingredients for the coming week, many of which were fine to hold for a few days, chilled, in steel containers we called “hotel pans.” They were packed up and stored in the school’s enormous walk-in fridge (or freezer) overnight, then taken out every day and laid out over ice in our cramped stations for that night’s service.

 

Any element of a dish that can be made ahead of time was chopped, cooked or prepared in the appropriate manner and then set aside until an order called for it. What little time we had before the restaurant opened or the rare few minutes of down time in-between tickets during service was spent replenishing diminishing supplies.

 

As promised, my station kept me frantically busy from the time I stepped foot in the kitchen through closing.

 

A breakdown of the work that went into the hot app dishes:

 

1. Tomato Consommé, served with a tomato gelee: This was a two-day process that imitated stock-making and the consommé method. If you’ll recall from my early posts, I struggled with getting consommé down and once I mastered the method, it was a breeze. That is not to say that all of the prep work that went into it was any easier. The soup still needed to be clear, which is a world of difference from making any ordinary tomato soup which is applicably chunky. The gelee was a garnish of tomato jelly (measuring 1/8”), sliced with a turtle-shaped cutter for a whimsical touch.

 

 

2. Cream of Parsnip with Celery Shallot Confit: A labor-intensive job that required pureeing ten pounds of parsnip and three pounds of celeriac, the bulk of work appropriated to chopping up the pieces to throw in the juicer. The confit called for merely gathering the ingredients and cooking at very low temp until exceedingly tender. The garnish was a celery crisp which required boiling celery seed, water, salt and isomalt (a sugar substitute the does not crystalize as quickly as regular sugar) to a tacky texture and spread on a silpat to bake. It had to caramelize enough to be crisp but not burned, and broken up into pieces at service. My “lovely” station partner See You Next Tuesday made three attempts before giving up and handing over to me, which I successfully accomplished on the first try. (Suck it, b*tch.)

 

(Midwest Girl switched over to front-of-the-house duties after the first couple of days, leaving me to deal with SYNT and the high-stress situation that came with working the station.)

 

But the best thing about the soups was that they were made ahead of time, and all we had to do at service was to heat them up, finish with cream, and serve with garnish.

 

3. Salt Cod Fritters with Meyer Lemon Sauce, Garlic Aioli and Microgreen Salad: Common Spanish tapas made of bacalao fish mixed with potatoes to form a mushy meatball which we formed in the shape of quenelles (like elongated footballs). On a good day, they were beautiful; on a bad one, they looked like turds. It took at least two days to make because the fish had to be rehydrated first, then soaked overnight in milk. At service, they were dredged in flour and deep fried in olive oil.

 

 

The Meyer lemon sauce called for grinding saffron with a mortar and pestle, which took a while. The rest of the ingredients were then boiled and treated with an immersion blender before re-heating. There was agar agar in the mix and we had to be careful not to overcook and be sure to cool down to specific temperatures to keep the sauce from breaking or over-thickening.

 

The garlic aioli also required aggressive mortar and pestle muscle, during which I grew at least 11 grey hairs to perform. After that came the hard part: mixing the paste with egg yolks and oil in the robocoup, which took another lifetime.

 

Now, the aioli had a second purpose, which was the base for the pepper aioli sauce we served with the next dish:

 

4. Tortilla Espagnola: An egg frittata comprised of beans (which had to be soaked overnight), confit potatoes (which took forever to tenderize), piquillo peppers, and a shitload of eggs. It was relatively easy to make, because once you hurdle past prep, all that was needed to do was layer the elements in a hotel pan and baked.

 

 

5. Twice-Marinated Quail: Perhaps the sexiest of the dishes we made because it required gadgets, ingredients and methods that were unused and untaught in previous classes. First, we marinated the quail in a mixture of beer and an assortment of Spanish ingredients. Then the quail was cryovacked (sealed in airtight plastic containers with the extant air sucked out of the bag using a special cryovac machine) and refrigerated overnight. Then it was cooked sous-vide, a method in which a food item encased in sealed plastic is placed in controlled low-temp water for a long time, usually with the use of a highly expensive toy called a thermal circulator which I would very much love my for my next birthday.

 

 

The idea behind low-temp cooking is to cook the meat with losing its integrity, because that is what happens when you apply heat to meat: it “denatures” as the protein cooks.

 

6. Frisee Salad with Poached Egg – Easily the simplest of our dishes to make. Except when you have to cook more than one. Poaching ONE egg to perfection is a breeze. Poaching more than one at a time, making sure each piece of cooked perfectly and kept warm: downright nightmare.

 

The clean-up process was made slightly more complicated because of the many containers holding our myriad of ingredients. Putting everything away at night was its own production. Each pan had to be individually wrapped in plastic; partly out of my anal-retentiveness, but also partly to avoid accidental spillage or mixing. Considering how much work went into the components, it would be an unnecessary nightmare to have to re-do the sauces should an unsalvageable spill occur.

 

See You Next Tuesday, eager to rush home, preferred to slap everything together on a tray and haphazardly cover up with one piece of plastic, counters and stoves hastily wiped down rather than scrubbed, tool kit and purse packed with one foot out the door ready to make a quick exit after chef’s inspection, while other stations were just getting started with their cleaning rituals.

 

As she told it, even in the hallowed kitchens of LA’s Michelin-starred restaurants (back when Michelin reviewed LA restaurants), the clean-up isn’t that detailed.

 

“I’ve worked at Melisse, that’s not how we do it at Melisse,” she had said in a haughty, holier-than-thou tone. “Melisse is a three-star.”

 

In fact, she would name-drop her experience at Melisse as if she had been working there for years when, in fact, she had only staged there a few times.

 

“Staging” (pronounced the French way, stahj-ing) is euphemism for free labor; anyone can walk into a restaurant and offer to stage for experience. Many restaurants, short on cash and ethics (and I’m not saying the aforementioned restaurant is included in this group; I wouldn’t know, I never worked there), are only too happy to allow culinary students to contribute much-needed help for literally NO pay, and students should feel blessed to be given the chance to work for free. But it sounds fantastically glamorous because it sounds so official, so French!

 

It’s modern slave labor is what it is.

 

Some of the largest catering services in town employ culinary students and pay a decent rate ($10-$11/hr.) No, they don’t have the fancy Michelin star of approval but it’s experience just the same.

 

“At Melisse, this is how it’s done.” See You went on and on, clearly expecting us to be impressed. If you missed it, no worries, there were other opportunities to be hit over the head with it. “Oh, you should do it this way, that’s how Melisse does it. Melisse has three stars.”

 

One day, I looked away from my cleaning duties long enough to look her in the eye and say “Two-star.”

“What?”

“Melisse is a two-star. Not three.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right. Two-star.”

 

She dropped the class a couple of days later. Rumor had it she was taking a leave of absence, but when I ran into her later, she said she switched to Cafe because she found Bistro boring.

 

Cue the eye roll.

 

For the record, Michelin released its first Los Angeles ratings guide in 2008 with only two restaurants receiving two-star reviews. In 2009, its last LA edition (suspended because, reportedly, Los Angeles was not a worthy, foodie-enough city), four restaurants made the cut at the two-star level.

 

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