The Making of a Chef (21 page)

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Authors: Michael Ruhlman

BOOK: The Making of a Chef
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Most days there was no time to spare. Lecture ended at 10:15 and you had two hours to prep before the chef began demo plates. But on Day Seven there was no lecture so we had plenty of time. And the chef looked nervous. She said, “It's an oy vey day. Too much time.” Rarely a good thing in a kitchen. The chef would spend most of the morning, she said, “putting out little fires.”
Tim, who was making the ciabatta, forgot to put the counterweight on the scale to compensate for the weight of the bowl he had the flour in and consequently the Hobart whipped up bread dough that looked like cake batter.
The chef told him to add more flour, watching as he did, till he reached the right consistency. Then she asked him why the herbs and calamata olives weren't in there. He rolled his eyes—oh, yeah. Tim dumped them in but the moisture from the olives ruined the consistency and he needed more flour.
He was headed home to Minnesota after the next block to extern at a country club and also to help open a friend's restaurant; he couldn't wait to leave, he said, and he wasn't focused.
This was what happened when you had too much time. The creamy, black pepper dressing for the niçoise kept breaking. The mayonnaise for the club, a gallon of it, was soupy. James, who had the job of deep-frying the root vegetables in the little baby fryer, found that they took so long he had to remove them before they were done in order to get them all cooked by service. Here I did something that would become instructive: I said nothing. Vats of chips waited to be deep-fried. I'd cut half of them, on the mandolin, myself. Taro root, sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots, potatoes, and beets—twenty-six pounds in all. When they were fried properly, they made a beautiful hill of red, orange, and golden brown chips. But James was loading up the tub with soggy masses of starch. I was part of the team working on that plate, but I wasn't really part of the group and didn't want to overstep my bounds.
I continued helping with the construction of the sandwiches. As service approached everyone began to work a little faster. We still had a lot of sandwiches to make. Cutting them in quarters was indeed the tricky part, as the chef had said. James had almost finished all the chips, such as they were. As service approached it grew more and more clear to me that unless somebody did something, we were going to have to put soggy, undercooked chips on the plate. At last, about five minutes before service, right after the chef and the hammer thrower tried to reemulsify the dressing for the niçoise, I asked the chef if we could serve the chips like this. She shook her head, partly to say no but partly in disbelief. She glanced at the clock.
I said, “We can refry them at service. They'll cook fast.”
“We don't have any choice,” she said.
The doors opened and the chef herself began to refry the soggy chips. Everyone else on the deli plate was occupied, two people constructing, one person on toothpicks, another cutting, and I rushing them from our station to the service counter that ran the length of the kitchen, as the volley of “Pick up one deli! Pick up a deli! Pick up a deli!” descended. A frenzy reminiscent of Chef Clark's kitchen took hold. No time. Get it out. I had
donned latex gloves to plate the chips that Chef Shepard was refrying, along with pickle and olives. The fryer, which James had cranked for mass loads, had grown too hot and the blanched chips burned before Chef Shepard could get them out. There was little the chef could do. It would take time and several batches to drop the temperature of the oil. I continued to plate the burnt chips as fast as I could and they disappeared as soon as I put it on the counter. It seemed as if everybody wanted the club today.
The phone rang and the chef was called away. I took over the fryer, just now starting to cool. Tim, whose herb-olive ciabatta had come out nicely in the end, stepped in to help me with the chips.
“
What
is
this
?” a voice across the counter asked.
It was Chef LeBlanc, formerly executive chef at the Ritz and Maxwell's Plum in New York City, now the P.M. instructor in Charcuterie. He had a round head, dark hair, dark eyes, and a mustache. He leaned on the counter to display to Tim and myself a very crisp, dark chip. “What
is
this?” he repeated.
Tim looked carefully at the chip pinched between LeBlanc's thumb and forefinger. “I believe,” Tim said, pausing, “it's a parsnip.”
“It
was
a parsnip,” LeBlanc exclaimed. “Now it's burnt!” With that, LeBlanc took his club, pickle, two olives, burnt root vegetables, and departed.
 
 
A
s this was Day Seven, the class prepped for the incoming class's Day One. It was important to prep well for the new students since they'd be walking into a new kitchen with two and a half hours to prepare lunch for two hundred fifty people. After prep the class moved next door to Burns Demo, one of the original demonstration kitchens in the building. Chef Shepard herself had sat in this kitchen-cum-lecture-hall as a student straight out of high school. The Culinary relocated from its New Haven, Connecticut, location in 1972, and when the young Katherine arrived, wire still hung from the ceilings. Her first classes were putting the kitchens together. It was a time when students would sit for six hours watching Chef Czack or Chef Weissenberg cook (both 1958 graduates still at the school). The next day students would watch another chef cook, asking questions and taking notes, but never tasting (unless it was MSG, which they were required to taste, since it was an oft-used flavor enhancer at the time). The
Culinary then was a learn-as-you-go place; you picked up knife cuts as you needed them.
Chef Shepard would be doing doubles next for the rest of the block, teaching A.M. Pantry to her current group, beginning at three-thirty, and then sticking around to teach a new group in P.M. Pantry.
Eighty percent of A.M. Pantry was egg cookery, which she loved. Adam Shepard, who was no relation and who would not enjoy Chef Shepard's A.M. Pantry, told me, “She sleeps with her omelet pans.”
Chef Shepard's goals in both classes were similar: to encourage a respect for these forms of cookery, to teach the ingredients and methods of these forms, which often differed from P.M. Cooking, and to develop in her students speed and agility required of a volume kitchen. “When you're cooking eggs that take one and a half minutes per order,” she asked, “how slow do you think you can move? How much time can you take to do that job? It should take a minute and a half to two minutes to make an omelet. Period. If you can't do it that fast, then you're not
good
enough.”
On graduation day, two of her students would be chosen to make omelets in the president's dining room for Mr. Metz and his guests, including the graduation speaker, typically a prominent figure in the food industry. “Mr. Metz is right there in front of you,” Chef Shepard told me. “Mr. Metz likes to show off his students. It's an exciting feeling to cook for, maybe, Robert Mondavi.”
Chef Shepard distributed a test (among the questions: list the components of a composed salad; list the steps for preparing and holding salad greens for service; define three types of vegetarianism). Everyone would arrive tomorrow morning at three-thirty for Breakfast Cookery. Students who lived off campus, the chef warned, should beware of drunks and deer on Route 9 as they headed into class.
 
 
I
couldn't stop thinking about LeBlanc and the burnt parsnip. I'd told the chef about what had happened when she got off the phone. She felt bad and mad and asked me if I thought we should bring him some properly cooked ones. I said yes. I put a handful in a bowl I'd lined with a paper napkin and strode into the dining room. LeBlanc was eating with Chef Reilly, his back to the dining room.
“Chef LeBlanc?” I said, holding out my offering.
He turned, looked at the chips. He managed to convey surprise, scorn, and irritation with one expression. He said “Thanks” and took the chips. I returned to the kitchen to finish service.
This small gesture made up for nothing in my mind; LeBlanc was simply receiving what he should have had in the first place. I couldn't shake the image of him pinching that burnt chip in our faces. Why the chips burned was easy. A chain of bad decisions: James's hurry to finish the chips; my decision not to say anything when I saw he was undercooking them; the chef's cooking the chips in oil she knew to be too hot; and finally my decision to lift these burnt chips in my own gloved hand and float them into the center of a plate containing four triangles of juicy club sandwich. For me, a series of bad judgments had condensed into one crisp black parsnip chip.
The fact that LeBlanc and the parsnip ran on a loop in my mind was not, I believe, the result of some inner sensitivity of my own; rather, it was in the very nature of the Culinary Institute of America and the changes it wrought in its students. Unlike many educational institutions these days, this place dealt not only in knowledge and skill but also in value judgments. It taught a system of values that was almost religious in scope and beautifully concrete, physical, immediate. And because of this, a great human dilemma bound itself up in me and that parsnip chip.
I'd served numerous people chips I knew very well were burnt, that I myself would leave on the plate had they been served to me. I
decided
to do this. Why had I given them something visibly inedible? Wasn't this a question of morality? It was wrong, I knew it, I did it
anyway
. Wasn't this the very kind of decision that defined a mediocre cook?
 
 
I
returned to Pantry kitchen the next day. Chef Shepard was in her first day of doubles, had been in the kitchen since three A.M., and was finishing up her P.M. class.
“I can't stop thinking about those chips,” I told her.
She nodded immediately and said she was still mad at herself for that. “If this had been a real restaurant,” she said, “those chips wouldn't have gone out.”
“Why did you send them out then?” I asked.
I wanted to know for myself. I could follow my own moves through service. It was always the same: the day started out slow, and the pace picked up, and then suddenly you're in the weeds without knowing how you got
there and all you can think about is get the plates out, get 'em out. You don't have
time
to think—if you stop to think, you're buried, so you simply
act
. You give people burnt food.
I continued to press Chef Shepard. “Why did you send out burnt chips?”
Finally, clearly troubled, she said, “I didn't want to
lose
.”
I
had been at the Culinary for three months and had yet to meet the man who ran the place, Ferdinand Metz. At first this seemed odd. I was a writer who was being given fairly broad access to a large institution with an operating budget of $65 million, an institution that influenced the enormous food service industry, an institution that he cared a lot about. He had chosen not to meet me. And I had chosen not to meet him, at first because my questions would be fruitless before I knew the school, but also because I felt I was getting to know him better by not meeting him.
Details, anecdotes, what people said about the man, how people reacted when they passed him in the hall, how people reacted to the mention of his name, my own glimpses of him—these small bursts of information, as they accrued, began to form a silhouette of the president of the Culinary Institute of America.
That he was thoroughly corporate, for example, solidified in my mind from the beginning. When I first met with Senior Vice President Tim Ryan my first day at the Culinary, Mr. Metz called from, I believe, the West Coast. Leaving to take the call, Ryan guessed aloud and with a friendly chuckle that Metz was calling from his StairMaster.
Metz, always perfectly and beautifully dressed in stylish but not corporate attire, was tall, trim, athletic. His fine gold hair never seemed to move it was so well coiffed. He wore a tidy mustache. His eyes were slivers, his cheekbones angular and high above concave cheeks. His was a presence
that never failed to arrest me, fix me, as though he were a celebrity, or maybe dangerous. Though one caught glimpses of the corporeal Metz maybe half a dozen times a year, one couldn't get away from the idea of Metz if one tried. His spirit was omnipresent.
If his name came up in conversation with a chef-instructor, I always probed for thoughts on the man. One of the instructors said simply that Mr. Metz was walking perfection and there was nothing more to say on the matter.
Among the spare details I knew of his history were the facts that he had spent his first twenty years in Munich, Germany, and that he retained a distinct German accent. I knew that he had worked at Manhattan's famed Le Pavillon shortly after he arrived in the United States in 1962, that he was subsequently banquet chef at the Plaza Hotel, and that he had left his job as senior manager of new product development at Heinz U.S.A. in 1980 to become president of the Culinary.
 
 
O
nce a month, on the Thursday before graduation, the school put on what was called the Grand Buffet in the dining chapel, a formal buffet dinner featuring competition-style platters of galantines, pâté en croutes, roulades, terrines, and cured salmons from the Garde Manger classes, and vast perfect mirrored trays of cakes, tortes, candies, and petit fours by Patisserie classes. Intro, Fish, and Oriental also served food at this buffet. The chapel would remain empty until Mr. Metz arrived with the graduation speaker and guests to tour the food. Mr. Metz often stopped to ask questions of the students about the food they'd prepared.
On Day Twelve of Intro, after dinner, Rudy Smith said to the broil station, which was preparing salmon for the Grand Buffet, “I'll bet you Mr. Metz will ask you how he can tell whether it was salted before it was cooked.” The salt, Chef Smith explained, drew concentrations of protein to the surface of the meat; protein is what caramelizes; if the salmon had a good deep caramelization on the grill marks without being overcooked, it had been salted before cooking. “Mr. Metz wants you to impress him,” Chef Smith said. “He wants you to impress his guests.”
Mr. Metz loved blanquette de veau, Chef Smith continued, directing his words to Lola, who would be making it. He always had some. The blanquette was similar to the fricassee, which Ben had done the day before, but there were distinctions. The blanquette was a highly refined white stew:
chunks of veal were blanched to remove impurities; the sauce was strained; it was a bright, elegant dish. Small attention to details would make a huge difference in the outcome. When Mr. Metz ate stew, it was this highly refined version. “It's real important for you to understand the difference, where they came from,” he said to Lola.
This was the group's first Grand Buffet and Chef Smith ran down general rules. “Nobody eats before Mr. Metz. Make sure you know the whole menu. Be proud of what you know; share it with him. One thing you should not do is try to bullshit the man. If you even
think
about it he'll know.
“The man plays to win,” Chef Smith concluded. “He cooks that way. He's a damn good cook.”
Lola, clearly anxious, asked, “What should we
call
him.”
“Mr. Metz,” Smith answered, unsmiling. “He's a
man
. He's a damn good cook, but he started out just like you.”
 
 
C
hef Shepard remembered the day Mr. Metz, on one of his periodic tours through the school, stopped by her kitchen. She was then teaching introduction to Hot Foods. “We had made quiche,” Shepard recalled, “and Mr. Metz was talking to my students about the menu and he wanted to know how we made the quiche.” They told him the chef had instructed them to sprinkle cheese into the quiche shell. Mr. Metz said, “Did she? Why did she do that?” The students were unable to answer. “We hadn't had the lecture, so they didn't know why,” Shepard said. “And he told them, ‘That's how you produce a quiche with a crisp crust on the bottom. By putting the cheese on the bottom, the egg batter doesn't penetrate so quickly.'”
She remembers with equal clarity an “unpleasant” call from the president, “something I did not want to hear.”
As a pantry chef, she was in charge of the student, the specials tournant, who prepared a morning snack for the president. “He likes things very plain,” Shepard said, “very simple. Carrots, turnips, rutabaga, and celery sticks, that's it.” An easy assignment—revealing, even, in its spartan crispness. On one occasion, though, her kitchen was under a heavy production load and had only ten students. The specials tournant was to prepare Mr. Metz's crudité. The vegetables were a couple days old and the chef asked the tournant how they looked. The tournant said O.K., then prepped and plated them, and covered them with plastic wrap. Shepard checked them but not carefully. They looked fine beneath the wrap but were in fact somewhat
dry and limp. Crudité would not seem to be the pressing issue in Pantry with only ten students. The crudité then sat for several hours at room temperature before Mr. Metz got to them.
Shortly thereafter, the pantry telephone rang. It was Mr. Metz. He asked Chef Shepard what she had sent. She apologized, made excuses, knowing no excuse was adequate. The crudité were bad and she had sent them to President Metz. Those were the only facts that mattered. He said, she recalled, “If you didn't have time, you should have said so. We could have made other arrangements.”
She knew this was true. But it was also true that you did not say no to Mr. Metz. That, too, was losing.
 
 
I
quickly became fascinated with this man—who loved blanquette de veau for its rich refinement and ate raw turnips for breakfast—because of his effect on people. One almost never saw him, except at graduation time, less so now than ever given the two campuses on separate coasts. But everyone wanted to please him, and everyone wanted to impress him. I was once walking with a young, tough, cocky student. We passed Mr. Metz in the hall; the student's eyes enlarged and he turned to me, did not speak, but mouthed the words
That was President Metz
.
Mr. Metz set the standard. That standard was perfection. Pantry had access to fresh turnip, rutabaga, carrot, celery; there was no reason not to serve them. There was something both gentle and ferocious in his tone and it remained in Chef Shepard's mind. “If you didn't have time, we could have made other arrangements.”
Do you understand what I am saying? If you can't do it perfectly, we will find someone who can.
Nothing short of perfection was acceptable. Would you serve President Metz burned root vegetables? Never. Therefore, you should never serve to
anyone
burned root vegetables. Here was the morality of cooking and service, and at the CIA, it rose to an almost religious dimension. Eventually, I grew to understand that the source of this perfection, this wanting to do it right, the anger at not living up to the task, the deep gratification when you did well—whether in Pardus's Skills kitchen or Shepard's Pantry—was Ferdinand Metz.

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