[Sca-cooks] Once again, from today's NY Times

Wed Sep 4 15:31:33 PDT 2002

For those who might be considering restaurant school, or otherwise
entering the mundane culinary world...

Adamantius
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September 4, 2002

How to Boil Four-Star Water: A Master Class
By GUY TREBAY

YOUNTVILLE, Calif., Aug. 29 ‹ The joke was going to be that in order
to get into the French Laundry I had to get a job there. And like a
lot of wisecracks, this one contained more than a kernel of truth.
Despite what one reads about the dot-com debacle, the Silicon Valley
money that helped transform this one-time mining, timber and prune
growing region into a viticultural wonderland still seems immune from
what most Americans would consider economic reality. For the moment,
at any rate, there is no apparent shortage of lotus eaters willing to
spend the $300 or so that dinner for two can easily cost at Thomas
Keller's celebrated Yountville restaurant.

"We have to say no, unfortunately, a lot of the time," a waiter
explained to a customer last week. "But we do have a waiting list,
and I encourage people to put their names down, because you never
know when something will open up."

It never does. At least, it hasn't for me in the eight summers that I
have migrated to this valley, visiting generous friends. I have tried
pulling strings to snag a French Laundry reservation, worn out the
redial button, and driven often past the restaurant's modest
fieldstone building, once a brothel, with longing in my heart. But
mostly my pals and I just grilled food at home.

Then, a friend alerted me to L'École des Chefs, a program that allows
what its originator, Annie Jacquet-Bentley, refers to as "passionate
cooks" to spend time as stagiers, or apprentices, in the kitchens of
world-class chefs like Guy Savoy, Daniel Boulud and Mr. Keller.
Founded in 1999, the program was soon folded into the upscale Relais
& Châteaux syndicate. The affiliation added scores of chefs to the
roster, so that now passionate and prosperous amateur cooks can hone
their skills with one of nearly 100 professionals in 17 countries
throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Pros do this all the time, of course. Kitchen hierarchies are
notoriously medieval in their structure. Novices serve time as
scullery serfs as they work toward the privilege of trailing a pastry
chef or a garde-manger; seasoned workers perform unpaid drudgery in
return for what amounts to a stove-side master class. Students at
what is now called L'École des Chefs Relais Gourmands bypass the
usual flying skillets and backbreaking hours slicing carrots for the
stockpot, though, and invert the occupational formula entirely by
paying for a chance to be, pardon the expression, a fly on the wall.

And they pay richly. The fee for two days in Mr. Keller's kitchen was
$1,400. This was subject to approval of my application, and exclusive
of other requirements like black chef's pants, black shoes with
nonskid soles, and a tool list that read like the armamentarium for a
battle of the Iron Chefs.

I applied. I was accepted. I drove to Yountville on a recent August
day when the temperature hovered near 100 degrees. I was handed a
French chef's coat, a French blue apron, and hugely to my surprise,
was immediately put to work.

Of the several ways to interpret this article's opening sentence, the
one that surprised me was philosophical. As a perk of my expensive
internship, I did eventually get into the French Laundry. I did
unexpectedly find myself inducted into an echelon of customers that
the restaurant's reservation book terms PX's (interior code for
V.I.P.'s). I did dine on an extraordinary improvised multicourse meal
that is Mr. Keller's customary way of rewarding favored regulars for
their patronage.

But I also got into the French Laundry in another sense altogether,
one that had to do with Mr. Keller's intensity of focus, his
relationship to the market, to techniques of cooking, serving,
sanitation, management and also, ultimately, to finesse.

What I did not do is learn very much about how to cook. The printed
schedule for my abbreviated "stage" (most interns spend five days at
the restaurant) was efficiently broken down into increments of about
an hour.

On paper, Day 1 was dedicated to visiting a local purveyor with the
chef de cuisine, Eric Ziebold; preparing pasta with a commissaire,
Donald Gonzales; and getting an introduction to sauce making and the
organization of ingredients and tools that, in classic French
cuisine, is called mise en place. On paper, Day 2 would see me
learning rudiments of pastry making with the pastry chef, Sebastien
Rouxel; doing a stint trimming meats with the butcher, Ryan Fancher;
learning fish butchery with another chef, Jonathan Benno; and
arranging canapés with Jonas Lundgren, a chef de partie.

Some of these things occurred. Some did not. The reasons were fluky
and as subject to whims of temperament as is anything that happens in
a professional kitchen. I found myself being conducted deeply into
the arcana of meat preparation by an enthusiastic Mr. Fancher. The
fish butcher, on the other hand, barely gave me the time of day.

In no particular order and to no very evident purpose, I accumulated
a hodgepodge of culinary lore. Waste nothing. Wash as you go. Trim
the sinews on steak by stroking the knife in smooth arcs. Prick the
inner membrane of a rabbit kidney with your thumbnail and it will
slip away as easily as a silk sock. Use the dull edge of a blade to
squeegee fish you plan to sauté with its flesh on and it will cook
evenly all the way through. Salt water for vegetables until it tastes
like the ocean. The secret ingredient of a restaurant kitchen is a
good supply of C-fold paper towels.

I was destined to be surprised about tools at the French Laundry,
since the technology in use there is little more complex than what
you would find in many kitchens at home. And the kitchen itself,
while white-tiled and gleaming, is a good deal smaller, at roughly
600 square feet, than the culinary luxury liners that are the norm in
certain neighborhoods of New York.

Except for an ice cream maker the size of a Chevy transmission and an
electric fish poacher resembling a Lilliputian sitz bath, there were
few fancy gadgets. The one that seemed to excite Mr. Keller most was
a Raytek MiniTemp ‹ a gizmo that digitally reads surface temperature
and that resembles a toy gun.

"Isn't that great?" he asked on Tuesday, as he zapped the contents of
a refrigerator drawer. "When the food inspectors come in and start
saying, `It's too cold, it's too hot,' you can just show them this."
He grinned.

Hanging above the threshold to Mr. Keller's kitchen is an enamel sign
with a dictionary definition of a favored word. "Finesse," it reads.
"Refinement and delicacy of performance, execution or artisanship."
It is no secret that Mr. Keller was not always renowned for his
finesse, and that his highly pitched scale of standards was often
expressed with performances not notable for their delicacy. "I don't
explode anymore," he once told a reporter. "I let it out in different
ways."

That was in 1996, two years after Mr. Keller first assembled nearly
50 limited partners and the $1.2 million it took to purchase the
original French Laundry from its longtime owners, Don and Sally
Schmidt. Mr. Keller's French Laundry was the culmination of a journey
that began at the Palm Beach Yacht Club in the South Florida
restaurants where his mother was a dining room manager, and where ‹
according to a well-burnished legend ‹ he stepped in to replace a
chef who quit without notice, and learned to broil a lobster tail by
consulting with his older brother, Joseph, who was already a cook, on
the phone.

Since that time the trajectory of this chef with no formal training
has carried him to New York, where he worked at the Polo restaurant
under Patrice Boely, to stages at Michelin-starred restaurants in
France, to a stellar but doomed stint as the chef at Rakel in
Manhattan, and to his 1997 award from the James Beard Foundation as
the Outstanding American Chef.

Nowadays, the French Laundry is a global destination, a conglomerate
that extends to an award-winning cookbook now in its 13th printing
and to Bouchon, Mr. Keller's bistro-style restaurant down the road.
And it will soon include a boulangerie, an inn and spa in Yountville
designed by the architect Antoine Predock, and an as-yet unnamed
restaurant set to have its debut at the AOL Time Warner building when
it opens in New York.

French Laundry, the diffusing empire, seemed pretty remote on the
days I spent there, when Mr. Keller's focus was like a tightly
focused arc of white light. The atmosphere of near silence in the
French Laundry kitchen has often been noted. Yet that hardly conveys
a level of concentration that probably wouldn't feel out of place at
Livermore lab. From the vantage of the small garden, where diners can
peer through the kitchen windows, everything seems evenly paced and
mellow. Why would it not? There are, after all, just 62 seats and
rarely more than 90 people being fed on a busy night.

Yet distributed among those people, on a variety of tasting, à la
carte and improvised menus, are as many as 900 separate dishes,
composed of ingredients from 300 purveyors, and rendered over a day
whose two culinary shifts end at 2 a.m. and begin again at 5:30 a.m.

There are 102 styles of plates at the French Laundry. There are 83
people on staff. There are preparations that, while theoretically
familiar to anyone with a smattering of training in classic French
cuisine, have been tweaked and pushed well beyond the limits of rote.

The pepper confetti, for instance, that Mr. Keller uses as a garnish
‹ sparingly enough to save it from seeming like an anachronism left
over from the first wave of California cuisine ‹ is created by first
flaying red, green and yellow bell peppers, and then slicing their
lobes to the thinness of onion skin. The slices are then julienned
and laid on trays to dry slowly on shelves suspended above the
800-degree stovetops. The resulting flakes are not much larger than
grains of the fleur de sel that Mr. Keller favors; so delicate, in
fact, that they make actual paper confetti seem crude.

It is in a weirdly accreted blur of details like this that I passed
my two days in the French Laundry kitchen, being handed along from
one worker to the next, from cold room to front room, from stations
where a pastry chef merrily blasted crème brûlées with a propane
torch to the cold-room shelf where a butcher shouldered aside boxes
of calfs' feet to make room for a tub of some marmoreal reduction
made from the head of a pig.

At a certain point, I, too, began to feel like a reduction. It
happened while the canapé chef was attempting to explain a
contraption used to snap the dome off an egg.

The egg would eventually be emptied of its contents, sterilized and
then refilled with a white truffle custard. The custard would be
thinly glazed with another truffle sauce. The egg would be set in a
cup and ornamented with a papery oblong potato chip. The chip, in
turn, would have a single strand of chive embedded at its translucent
center; how, I never learned.

That almost everything in Mr. Keller's kitchen was similarly
considered, recast and rendered as an essence of itself, made a
certain kind of sense, given an anonymous quotation that he keeps on
the clipboard hanging above his desk. "If we did all of the things we
are capable of doing," it reads, "we would literally astound
ourselves."

As I observed Mr. Keller ranging around his kitchen, trimming the
bright flesh of a red snapper, tweaking spears of baby leeks on a
plate of salad until the arrangement pleased his eye, the lesson of
his process began to come clear. Like all good lessons, it seemed
both too simple and, ultimately, profound enough to justify the price
of admission. It was this: Think about the food.

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And the following in a little side panel:
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What You'll Need

The French Laundry asks interns from L'École des Chefs to bring the following.
2 pairs black chef pants
1 pair black shoes, with nonskid soles
1 French knife
1 paring knife
1 slicer
1 serrated knife
1 palette knife
1 peeler
1 timer
2 pairs of scissors (heavy duty and all purpose)
1 pair of fish tweezers
Assorted saucing spoons 