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

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    OK, these guys were union, right? The Potato Cutters union wasn't going
to interfere with the Mushroom Cleaners unions who wasn't going to cross the
line of the Sauciers union who would never step on the toes of the Meat
Cutters union who wouldn't even THINK of annoying the Glaciers union who has
a close working relationship with the Sauteir's union, and are all looked
down upon by the Line Cooks union, all of who aspire to eventual membership
in to Pompous Pretentious Pampered Media Chef's union . . . Jayzus Keerist,
no WONDER it costs so damn much to get a decent meal dining out! Division of
labor, my ass! So, how much did these pups get paid for their half-hours
work each, I have to wonder.
    Lord, how on earth did those poor, deprived french peasants ever dragoon
the labor required to prepare simple country dishes, anyway?!?!

    Sieggy, laughing his butt off . . .

-----Original Message-----

>
>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 ;-)]]