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9 Cardinal Rules For Someone Learning To Cook

9 Cardinal Rules For Someone Learning To Cook

By Judy Hevrdejs, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

No one is really “born” a cook or a baker or a candymaker. Not even the world’s culinary stars.

The road to becoming comfortable in the kitchen, a cook will tell you, is rarely straight or smooth. It is riddled with scorched pans, oversalted soups, scars, underseasoned stews, burns and flops.

Trust me. I have scars and scorched pans to prove it.

Along the way, though, family, friends and colleagues have shared kitchen wisdom with me. So have many chefs, cookbook authors, farmers and home cooks. Some of that wisdom I’ve passed on to readers in thousands of stories I’ve written for this newspaper. It’s made me a better cook and baker.

So promise yourself, perhaps as a New Year’s resolution, to get into the kitchen and cook or bake or make candy or pickles or … you get the idea. Maybe it will be a solo creative pursuit, and the steady chop of a knife against a cutting board will become a focused meditation. Or maybe it will be a weekend shared-cooking feast with friends. Or a family affair with children helping prepare a meal.

No matter what, let the power of cooking work its magic. Flops and all.

And when flops happen, quote Ray Bradbury: “Life is trying things to see if they work.” With a little help from some friends, of course:

Fix the flops: “Anyone who does a lot of cooking has flops, and each one teaches you something. … If you’ve had a great flop, take a ‘what-the-hell’ attitude, and pull the dish through with flair,” the late Julia Child told us 30-plus years ago. Recalling a deflated chocolate souffle she decorated with whipped cream, dubbed “chocolate torte” and served to guests, she added, “Keep in mind that your audience doesn’t know what you’re aiming for, so don’t let on.”

Know where you went wrong: Chef Jacquy Pfeiffer, co-founder of the French Pastry School in Chicago, tells students, “It’s very possible that a recipe will not work out right away. Sometimes very simple things, like you don’t let your ingredients come to room temperature, might make the recipe fail. … It’s more important to know how a screwed-up recipe looks, and it’s even more crucial to know how to fix it, than to make the perfect pastry.”

Don’t overdepend on gadgets: “My favorite kitchen tool is my hands,” said Connecticut cookbook author Pam Anderson. “When you go in the kitchen, wash your hands and touch, smell, taste, look — freely. … There’s nothing like pulling pizza dough or bread dough out of the food processor, pouring it onto the countertop and giving it that final 30 seconds to a minute kneading to pull it into that baby’s-butt smooth texture.”

Learn how foods feel: “You can’t just follow a recipe and have it turn out,” said Paula Haney of Hoosier Mama Pie Co. in Chicago. “The recipe for a pie crust is going to be variable depending on the weather and humidity, so you kind of have to have a feel for it. … You only have flour, butter and cold water. So I think it takes on this sort of magical thing.”

Plan but be flexible: When chef Stephanie Izard (Girl & the Goat, Little Goat) plans a multicourse meal, “You want to have a little acidity; you want a little sweetness, a little spice or a little salty,” she told us. “With each dish, I’m always trying to make the whole mouth happy.” How do you start? “Pick the proteins first, (then) be flexible because you definitely want to base it on what’s looking good at the market.”

Don’t overdo it: “People try to do too much,” said legendary chef and cookbook author Jacques Pepin. “They take a cooking class, learn seven desserts and try to do all of them. It’s better to do one well.”

Simplify: “Almost everybody who is cooking dinner on a weeknight is doing a (‘Top Chef’) Quickfire Challenge,” said chef and cookbook author Rick Bayless (Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, Xoco, etc. “You don’t have very much time. You just have to get dinner on the table, but you want it to be delicious.” Understand how a recipe works, then “go into the kitchen and make something that’s just exactly right for you.” Improvise, he said, balancing flavors and textures.

Memorize these secret ingredients: Lauren Braun Costello, in Notes on Cooking: A Short Guide to an Essential Craft, explained that sweetness (a touch of sugar, agave syrup or balsamic vinegar) can boost a dull tomato sauce. Vinegars and lemon can “add brightness” to nearly everything. And a pinch of salt? “It makes everything brighter and stronger, (but) that doesn’t mean that things should taste salty,” she said. Foods such as Parmesan, capers and anchovies can add saltiness to dishes.

Rethink recipes: When chef Art Smith had to lose weight for health reasons, he worked on his favorite recipes. “Roasting is probably the healthiest way to cook,” he said. “I don’t think anything blanched or boiled has any flavor. Roasting intensifies the color and the flavor of food.”

This is Judy Hevrdejs’ final story as a Tribune reporter.

©2015 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: The best advice when learning how to cook? Practice. (Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune/TNS)

 

Chefs Reveal Their Secrets

Chefs Reveal Their Secrets

By Daniel Neman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

More than half of all chefs say they have found customers making out — at least making out, if you catch my drift — in their restaurant restrooms.

This fact, which fascinates me far more than it really should, comes to us courtesy of the Food Network magazine. In a 2009 story that has recently resurfaced again on the Internet, the magazine surveyed about 100 chefs across the country and came up with a list of 25 things chefs never tell you.

For one, chefs can be picky eaters. Only 15 percent of the ones surveyed say they will eat absolutely anything. The foods they said most frequently that they will not eat are liver, sea urchin, and — this is a surprise, probably because I like them both — eggplant and oysters.

On the other hand, the chefs don’t like it when their customers are picky. You know how some people claim to be allergic to items when they aren’t really allergic to them? Chefs hate that (though it is unexplained how they can distinguish fake allergies from real ones).

And they like their customers to follow their own rules. If you’re a vegetarian, don’t tell them “a little chicken stock is OK.”

One trend made unappetizingly clear from the survey is that restaurant kitchens are less sanitary than we, the dining public, may like to think.

Although 85 percent of the chefs rated their kitchens as very clean (at least an 8 on a scale from 1 to 10), it should come as no particular surprise that 75 percent of them also reported having seen roaches. Roaches go where there is food and water. Restaurants have food and water and kitchen doors that are open much of the time. Restaurants are going to get roaches; the trick lies in getting rid of them as quickly as possible.

Of more concern is the revelation that 25 percent of the chefs say they’ve served food that they had dropped on the floor, and three of them say they have taken uneaten bread out of one bread basket and sent it out to other customers in another bread basket. Health inspectors tend to look at both of these practices with understandable consternation.

Also alarming, at least for vegetarians, is that a minority of the chefs admitted to using meat products in the dishes they claim are vegetarian. About 15 percent of those surveyed said they do that.

Worst of all are the 13 percent of chefs surveyed who said they have seen cooks do terrible things to customers’ food. After one customer sent his steak back twice, a chef reported that “someone” (ahem) ran it through the dishwasher and then sent it back out to him.

Fifteen years ago, chef-turned-writer-turned-celebrity Anthony Bourdain revealed that he never orders fish on a Monday because it is usually several days old. “Several” of the chefs — there is no telling how many that is — agreed, saying they do not get fresh deliveries on Sundays.

Some of the 25 things chefs don’t tell you they don’t have to tell you because you have probably figured them out for yourself.

More than 75 percent, for instance, say they get ideas from other restaurant menus (as the publication puts it, “there’s a reason so many restaurants serve molten chocolate cake”).

You have also probably realized that waiters are told to try to sell you on certain dishes (95 percent of the chefs say they tell the wait staff to do that), and it certainly cannot be a surprise that restaurants typically charge 2 1/2 times what a bottle of wine would cost at a retail store.

Nearly 60 percent of the responding chefs say they would like to have their own cooking show — a bigger surprise is that more than 40 percent claim they don’t — and they hate working on New Year’s Eve more than any other holiday. Valentine’s Day is a close second, though 54 percent acknowledged they like it when couples get engaged in their restaurant.

Half of the chefs say they come into work when they’re sick — remember, they’re preparing food, or are at least around food when it is prepared — and many stay through their inevitable injuries. Nearly every surveyed chef said he has been injured in some way, with several missing fingers or parts of fingers.

For this dangerous and hard work — most of them work 60 to 80 hours a week, including holidays — 65 percent of them reported making less than $75,000 a year. When they go out to dinner, they typically leave about a 20 percent tip, unless they feel the service has been inadequate.

But what about when they go to a restaurant that has no tipping? What about fast food? Where do the chefs go most often when they want something fast and bad for them?

Survey says: Wendy’s.

©2015 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Choo Yut Shing via Flickr