[Sca-cooks] Sous Cheffery

[Philippa Alderton]

--- Kim Schab <madchefla at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Having been a good Sous Chef, the Sous Chef is the
> one
> person who SHOULD be able to tell the Chef, are you
> SURE?  You really want to do that?  That is the job
> of
> the Sous Chef, to not just help the chef, but to be
> his backup brain among other things...if they are
> good. The concept is that there is a trust and
> respect
> at that level that is different than with your other
> cooks, line cooks, etc.

OK, slow down a bit ;-)

You're coming from the POV of a professional cook, in
a professional kitchen.....

> But then again you should
> have
> been brought in at the planning phase.

This is not always possible in an SCA or other amateur
milieu.

The major difference is that frequently in our
kitchens, most of us may not have cooked together
before, and, while in a pro kitchen, you can count on
knowing the skills of various assistants, you can't
always do that in an SCA (I'm including Acre, and any
other reenactment group here- just don't want to type
it all out)situation.

Furthermore, despite multiple phone calls and emails,
some info bits can slip between the cracks.

As an example, Adamantius asked me to smoosh 40 lbs of
pears for EK 12th Night, which I did. He was planning
on a higher yield, and wound up with not as many pears
as he wanted, but he also had a few other things
relating to the feast going on in his head. If we'd
both been thinking, he'd have told me that he needed X
number of gallons of smooshed pears, and he thought
about 40 lbs would do it. My inexperience combined
with his distraction, and we didn't have as many pears
as he had wanted- this was a learning experience.

In a professional kitchen and situation, we'd most
likely have had X plus smooshed pears, because
smooshed pears would have been an ongoing supply item,
and there would have been no problem.

In a second instance, when I was dealing with the veal
calf for Yasmin, the veal stew got burned, and she
asked me, as veal person, if we had enough extra to
make another batch of stew. I asked her how many
pounds she needed, and how prepped, she told me, and I
thought a minute, and told her she'd be better off
buying some.

Now, at this point, she'd watched me work long enough
that she knew I knew what I was doing, and was willing
to trust my judgement. By the same token, I knew how
much veal we had, and how it was prepped, and the
skills available and the time we had to make the stew.

I could have cut up enough for the purpose in the
available time, but I was very busy with what I was
doing, and although we had the meat available, it was
my judgement that we didn't have the necessary skill
resources to cut it up fast enough to make up enough
for a pot of stew- it was much more sensible to saend
someone out to buy more meat.

> Personally,
> I
> do that with all of my volunteers, I don't just have
> a
> my way or the highway attitude.  I let them know
> what
> I'm doing and why I'm doing it from the beginning,
> they feel more invested in it that way.

Certainly, that is the ideal, but in this instance,
Avraham apparently knew that she was going to use
boxed gravy mix at the last minute. The time to
suggest that a Head Cook should use a different
ingredient is NOT in the final stages of feast prep,
particularly if said Head Cook is holding sharp
cuttlery ;-)

I don't know why Avraham didn't know until the last
minute- perhaps he didn't volunteer until after
everything was planned, or perhaps it was a
misunderstanding similar to the one Adamantius and I
had. But, he did the right thing by doing the best he
could with what he had.

> Yes of course you make sense...what it tells me is
> that you are a nice guy and helped keep her fat out
> of
> the fryer as it were.

Hmmmm. I always thought the idea was to keep the fat
IN the fryer ;-)

Phlip

=====
Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....

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