Knives at Dawn (37 page)

Then he rolled up the beef and bacon.

They kept going. Guest sliced carrots for the beef cheeks. Hollings-worth peeled the shrimp. Guest cut brunoise of bresaola. Hollingsworth sliced the scallops into rounds. Guest cut the pith from an orange peel, then sliced the peel into strips. In between her tasks, Guest also checked on her Silpat work, monitoring the bacon chips' progress.

By the one-hour mark (5:00 p.m.), Guest was assembling the millefeuille, but the bacon was falling apart. She informed Hollingsworth.

“Why?”

She showed him the stringy connective tissue.

“Did we not bring good stuff?” he asked.

“I thought it was,” she said. “I basically brought all The French Laundry had.”

“No more to choose from?”

“No,” she said, then added a line that verged on insubordination. “But we can talk about it later.”

Hollingsworth, understanding the stress that brought on the comment, didn't bat an eye. “Okay,” he said.

After about one and three-quarters hours, Hollingsworth put the pressure cooker in the sink, opened the valve, and let steam pour out; then he moved back to his station, bringing the celeriac and a mandoline and starting to slice the root vegetable.

“All the celery root has holes in it, get two.”

“Two, Chef!”

Between the bacon and the celery root, the team was being reminded of one of the fundamental truths of cooking: without good ingredients, you're basically screwed.

I
N THE PASSAGEWAY BY
the fireplace, Boulud had turned his attention to the judges' packets, the informational booklets that would be handed out to the jury on Wednesday. They'd been written, printed, and bound for days, lacking only the insertion of the final menu. How, he wondered aloud, would the judges have time to read so many pages in the few minutes they had to taste and evaluate each platter? It was a valid—if not obvious—concern, but nothing could be done about it now. One of the few drawbacks to being Daniel Boulud is that you can only devote so much attention to any one of the myriad projects that captures your fancy. Wait until the last minute to focus, and even with all your power and influence, it might be too late, especially with an undertaking as mammoth as the Bocuse d'Or.

Boulud reviewed the menu with Pelka and Laughlin. A French-born chef, reviewing food descriptions composed mostly by Americans was bound to lead to a few disagreements.

“The foam is not a nage,” said Boulud. He continued to scan the document. “And
millefeuille
is one word.”

“You can do it two ways,” said Pelka, who had to look up such things every day as part of her menu work at restaurant Daniel. “Traditionally, it's hyphenated. That's how we did it, right?”

“Yes,” said the chef.

Looking over the beef descriptions, Boulud wondered aloud why the team had gone with
rosette
instead of
tart
to describe the beef-truffle-celeriac pie.

“We didn't want to say
tart tart
,” said Laughlin, referring to the shrimp and avocado tart on the fish platter.

At almost the exact moment Boulud suggested
galette
as an alternative, Hollingsworth was slicing the fillet for it in the kitchen. He then began assembling the tart … er,
galette
. He drew a circle on parchment paper, using a tart mold as a guide. Then he assembled alternating punched out pieces of beef, truffle, and celeriac in a narrowing circular pattern until the circle was filled.

Boulud appeared in the kitchen, his bag over his shoulder, ready to cruise into Lyon and get checked in to the Sofitel, along the Rhône river, the ultra-luxe hotel where all of the Bocuse d'Or powers that be would be based for the week. He'd be back later that evening to taste the food.

For the next hour, the team performed almost wordlessly, executing a passage of steps that they had great comfort with: Guest checking the two potato preparations in the oven, piercing them with a paring knife to discern their level of doneness, then sealing them in plastic bags and chilling them down over ice, while dropping punched turnips and carrots in Cryovac bags, readying them for sous vide cooking.

Christian Bouvarel returned with two young cooks in tow, both wearing hooded sweat jackets. They watched the Americans cook and nodded approvingly. A moment of inadvertent comic relief was provided around 6:30 p.m., when a sleazy-looking guy with a pencil mustache walked in, camera around his neck, telling them he was there for a photo shoot. Bocuse's cooks, showing amazing solidarity with the United States team, pointed to the American flag at the back of the kitchen and told him the team was training and that it was
privée
.

H
OLLINGSWORTH ASSEMBLED THE COMPONENTS
of the deconstructed beef stew: pinning punched out black truffle and carrots together, and cutting the cheeks into cubes.

Hollingsworth called out the time. “Three-fifteen. What's left?”

Guest: “The yuzu and the melbas.”

“You going to make it?”

“I'll push hard, Chef. I think I'll make it.”

“Call it out.”

“Little job coming up right now is yuzu. Big job is pommes Maxim and melbas and breading dauphinouse.”

Hollingsworth was in his element now, helping a young cook with his ability to see the big picture: “You have Gavin the whole time. You can use him the whole time. Have him set up the mise en place for the dauphi-noise.”

“Yes, Chef.”

Hollingsworth wiped down the silver border of his oven with steel wool, then with a towel. The action was a touchstone for him; for a moment, he was back at The French Laundry again. It felt good.

Guest sliced and stacked melbas and diced little croutons to be sautéed and added to the bottom of the smoke glasses. At her instruction, Kaysen set up the breading mise en place for Guest: all-purpose flour in one bowl, whipped eggs in another, panko (Japanese breadcrumbs) in a third. When cut, the rectangles of dauphinoise would be dipped in these ingredients, in that order, after which they would be prepared for frying. (Additionally, they would be flashed in a hot oven just before serving to reheat them.)

Hollingsworth layered avocado shingles and shrimp halves together, the topping for the tart. He was still trying to set Guest at ease. “Three-thirty, Aaaaadiiiinnaa,” he said, drawing out her name, almost in the style of a stereotypical surfer dude.

“Three-thirty, Chef.”

“How we looking?”

“Okay, Chef,” she said unconvincingly.

Henin brought over a parchment-lined sheet tray with twelve Tupper-ware containers on it; these would stand in for the considerably more elegant smoke glasses that were being kept safe and sound in their boxes.

Guest moved on to making the melbas. She set the punched brioche slices between Silpats, set bricks on them, and went up on her toes, putting
all her weight on them. Then she put them in the oven. She was doing well technically, but falling behind her timeline, so Hollingsworth took some jobs off her hands, sautéing the croutons in clarified butter, then turning them out onto a towel-lined tray to drain, and then it was right to the shrimp tart, which he brushed with fennel compote and set aside, and then sautéing rectangles of mille-feuille.

As they rounded the corner into the home stretch, the pace picked up, and communication became more essential:

“I'm going on steam, Chef,” she told him, letting him know that she was changing the mode of the combi oven.

Hollingsworth called back, “Steam,” as he added the brunoised ingredients to the Tupperware containers. He realized something was missing.

“Shit,” he said, then to Guest: “Pickled pearl onions?”

She brought them over on a tray lined with parchment.

“Did you blanch this onion?”

“I did not, Chef.”

“You run out of hot water?”

“No.”

“Taste it.”

She did.

“Taste the heat?”

“That's how we've been doing it.”

Somehow a major detail had slipped through the cracks in all their practices because there were two things wrong with the onions: they weren't blanched ahead of time, and the solution wasn't what Hollingsworth called “ripping hot.” As a result they were not pickled. They were marinated, or macerated. But there was nothing to be done for the practice, so Hollings-worth added the onion to the cups, then piped in horseradish cream, but ran out before filling each bowl.

“Two pastry bags of horseradish cream,” he said to Laughlin, who logged it in her notes as Kaysen handed him the leftover cream in a plastic container and he finished filling the remaining cups with a spoon.

Next up for the smoke bowls was adding the bresaola. Hollingsworth found it hard to separate the refrigerated slices, so he performed a veteran move, nonchalantly sliding the cured meat briefly onto the flattop to warm and loosen it, then he and Kaysen separated it into slices, arranging little tornadoes of bresaola atop the horseradish cream.

Guest readied the custards for the oven, setting the martini glasses in a bain-marie, then covering it in plastic for the steam oven. Meanwhile, Hollingsworth arranged alternating shingles of shrimp and avocado over the fennel compote on the shrimp tart's puff pastry, lifting them with an offset spatula and sliding them onto the pastry sections.

Guest yanked a bag of turnips from boiling water, while Hollings-worth brushed the shrimp tart with yuzu gelée.

Laughlin came in to report on a call she'd made to California. “You can have whatever you want from California. He's leaving Monday morning.” This was a reference to Gregory Castells, an old friend of Hollingsworth's and former chef-sommelier at The French Laundry.

“
Anything
?” he said, then the surfer within made a joke: “How about some waves?”

He kept pushing, assembling the shrimp tart on the parchment and trimming one imperfect edge, then asking Laughlin to note that he wanted a Silpat for it in competition because it was a struggle to transfer it from the parchment to the serving tray. He moved on, seasoning the beef cheek cubes, then setting one piece atop each turnip platform.

“How did the cheeks hold up?” asked Kaysen.

“They're soft,” said Hollingsworth as Guest assembled the scallop carpaccios.

“Ten minutes, Adina,” said Hollingsworth. “You're good, right?”

“Yes, as soon as the custards come out, I'll flash the mille-feuille.”

She peeked into the oven, checking on the custards.

“How are they looking?” he asked.

“They're not set yet.”

“Turn the oven up.”

“Yes, Chef.”

Hollingsworth could sense panic in Guest's voice, a frustration and concern that the custards weren't finished. Hollingsworth, the far more experienced cook, knew that this was perfectly normal. Even at The French Laundry, where precision is a religion, custards sometimes took thirty minutes, sometimes they took an hour and a half. There were more factors than usual that affected the timing: How hot was the water when it was added? How many times was the oven door opened to check the custards, allowing heat to escape? And so on.

“You have eight minutes,” he said calmly. “You're good.”

Paul Bocuse arrived in his whites, Jérôme at his side, and began snapping pictures with a digital camera.

Hollingsworth painted the cod with pistachio cream, then rolled it in the pulverized pistachio, agitating the tray ever so slightly to cause the cylinder to roll without touching it with his fingers, which might mar it. Then he transferred the cod to two small trays and popped them in the oven to warm them through.

Hollingsworth put the scallop-carpaccio melbas atop the consommétopped agrumato custard. The melbas see-sawed in the glass.

“Melbas need to be one size larger, Adina,” he said.

The team had changed course and decided not to create mock-ups of the platters that day, instead using silver trays available at L'Abbaye. Only problem was that the one they were using was much smaller than their competition platter, so they had to cram the components into its confines: the “martini glasses” in an L formation around one corner, the mille-feuille in the opposite corner, and the shrimp and avocado tart between them. Guest pulled the cod cylinders from the oven, and lowered them into the center of the platter. Hollingsworth rested bacon chips against the leek quenelle on top of each mille-feuille. And, at eight minutes past nine o'clock, nearly twelve hours after they'd arrived at L'Abbaye, the fish platter was complete.

The team went right into beef mode, as Hollingsworth inverted
the rosette onto the puff pastry, and set the tart on a plate. Heating two stainless-steel pans, he seared the bacon-wrapped beef, turning it as it browned.

Kaysen readied the smokers, putting a pinch of applewood smoke in the carburetor of each smoking gun.

The dauphinoise browned, Hollingsworth piped a dab of chestnut puree on one end, then fixed a chestnut to them. The deconstructed beef stew stacks were assembled.

As he added the celery salad to the dauphinoise, he noticed an imperfection, and called out, “Celery leaves need to be the same size.”

Hollingsworth had issues with the beef cheeks, but chalked this up to the fact that, because they hadn't had enough stock to practice with, they had used water. On Wednesday, at the Bocuse d'Or, they'd be using real stock.

Henin grimaced. “They were so beautiful last time. So glossy and shiny.”

Guest lifted the plastic lids on the understudy smoke glasses, while Hollingsworth fired the smoke into them …

… and at nine twenty-eight in the evening, five hours and twenty-nine minutes into their last practice, Team USA was finished, right on time.

W
HEN
B
OULUD RETURNED A
few minutes later, everybody tasted. There was no shortage of opinions in the room. Most agreed that the contents of the smoke glass were too salty, which would be remedied by increasing the amount of Granny Smith apple. Everybody also felt that the shrimp tart was missing something; Hollingsworth pointed out that there would be red jalapeño scattered over it on Monday, but that none had been available today.