[Sca-cooks] Cooking Like a 3-Star Chef in Your Own Home (Almost) - OOP, Not e ntirely OT

[Marilyn Traber]

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Found this on NY Times online [at
http://nytimes.com/2002/05/15/dining/15NONO.html?pagewanted=1 . It is free
to sign up for and they typically have decent news articles, you might have
to sign up to get access.]

Upshot of the article [Fair use quoting here:
IT looks pretty straightforward, and for Harold Moore, the 29-year-old chef
at Montrachet in TriBeCa, it is. Take a dry-aged sirloin and sauté it. Serve
the meat on a bed of shallots in a red wine reduction sauce, with sautéed
chanterelle mushrooms, a few haricots verts and some carrots.
Finally, sprinkle some tiny flowers on top of the meat, accompany it with a
round of potato gratin and send the resulting plate out to the customer (or,
for that matter, a photographer). There it is: honest, relatively simple
restaurant cooking. A perfect French dish. The sort it would be lovely to
make at home.
But without a lot of help, you can't. It is, in fact, virtually impossible
for any home cook to cook like a chef. In order to make his dry-aged sirloin
with potato gratin, Mr. Moore employed nine people over two days. For the
final preparation, he used 10 pans and a stove area about the size of an
average Manhattan kitchen.
Not even a chef can cook like a chef outside his restaurant, no matter how
accomplished a slicer and dicer or how visionary an artist. "I just smoke up
the house, and it annoys my wife," Mr. Moore said. Still, with some planning
and a few simple techniques borrowed from the professionals, the home cook
can approach the grace of Mr. Moore's $28 creation, without smoking up the
house. It won't be exactly the same, but it will be close.
The great advantage that chefs have is a labor force. There were, for
example, the two men who arrived at Montrachet in the morning to peel the
Yukon Gold potatoes used in the gratin and to slice them to Mr. Moore's
specifications. They left the results soaking in cream in the restaurant's
walk-in cooler for another prep cook, who assembled the gratin, cooked it in
a convection oven, covered it with parchment paper and returned it to the
walk-in to cool. Then there was the butcher who accepted delivery of the
sirloin ($120 a side, aged three months) and who cut it into steaks for the
evening service, trimming fat and sinew. There was the unpaid chef's
apprentice who cleaned the mushrooms, and a line cook, Ryan Stewart, who
turned and glazed the carrots and trimmed and blanched the haricots verts
and who, at the end, sprinkled the flowering micro beet sprouts over the
meat.
There was another line cook, Pedro Espinal, who sautéed the steak and warmed
the shallot sauce. There was Kevin Lasko, who cut the potatoes out of the
gratin pan with an aluminum die, and gave the round to Mr. Espinal, who
warmed it in the oven and browned it in the salamander, a kind of
superbroiler used in professional kitchens that sits above his stove.
{break for nonsense paragraph]

And you, cooking at home? Before you finish peeling an onion, a chef is
sautéeing it. While you are mincing an herb to get the teaspoon needed in a
recipe, a chef is grabbing a pinch out of a little tray.
When, before tackling a new recipe, you wonder whether you should make a
batch of stock, which itself might require a trip to the market, in order to
reduce it so you can produce a few tablespoons of demi-glace, the chef is
spooning that thick, delicious, sauce-enhancing substance out of his
seemingly endless supply, produced earlier by a prep cook who arrived at 7
a.m.
A well-stocked restaurant has common herbs like parsley, dill, thyme and
basil on hand every day of the year; it may also stock chervil, shiso,
marjoram, lovage, baby arugula, basil sprouts or, as at Montrachet, micro
beet sprouts. Veal chops are ordered cut to specifications; beef cuts are
consistent and dry-aged; fresh pasta might be made on premises or delivered.
And so on. Will your local fish supplier or supermarket have halibut
tomorrow? The chef has someone call Maine to make sure it is delivered first
thing in the morning.
>>>>>>>>

Feh. I guess this guy doesn't seem to realize that there are a metric
butt-ton of home cooks who happen to be able to cook like this, and actually
do wierd things like make and freeze stocks, keep little pots of fresh herbs
on teh windowsill and can actually make something like this particular meal
in the required amount of time. Even to prepping the potatoes and soaking
them in cream before going to work so they can make the dish when they
actualyl get home.

Feh again. I guess that everybody in america microwaves tv dinners every
night.

margali the thoroughly disgusted

[Even if all I had was access to a good cookbook, I could probably muddle
through the menu - hell, I made 'pintade au riz sauvage' using IIRC Joy of
Cooking when I was 12 [ok, so I used cornish game hens so crucify me ;-)]]
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