Under the Table (15 page)

T
ucker, Junior, Ben, and I began our Level 2 efforts in the pastry kitchen. What could be better? With a choice of caramel custards, fruit tarts, chocolate-raspberry ganache cake, lemon tart, apple tart, a classic génoise cake with crème anglaise, or profiteroles with warm chocolate sauce, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Not only could I sample these mouthwatering desserts during their creation, I would also be able to eat any of the leftovers. Level 2 might not be so bad after all.

All Level 2 students would be making their dishes for the chefs and deans to taste and critique at the chefs' table, a long banquet-style affair set with snowy white linen, crystal, and silver, nicely tucked away in a quiet alcove of the restaurant's dining room. There they would be waited on by the members of my class as they were served a fulsome meal including appetizer, fish course, main course, salad, and dessert. In addition to the fine tableware, the table was also set with pens and pads of paper, on which the chefs recorded their impressions of each dish, complete with a letter grade. These critiques would be collected at the end of the meal and given to Chef Pierre, who would then read them aloud to the class assembled for our lecture, which at this level came not first thing in the morning, but after lunch. As part of the lecture, an example of each dish prepared by each brigade would be plated and arranged on the marble of the pastry station. After all the critiques had been read, the class was allowed to sample the example to see what, exactly, the chefs were complaining about. The only exception was the poor, overworked brigade handling the family meal, that frantic team trying to churn out lunch for the two hundred students and staff in the
school. They were exempt from the often stinging commentary the chefs slung at our best efforts.

Tucker, Ben, Junior, and I argued about what dessert we should prepare for the chefs on our first attempt at the Level 2 pastry recipes. After a brief skirmish, we decided to tackle the
choux
puffs with warm chocolate sauce. Tucker thought that making the
choux,
the little round balls of puffed dough, in a uniform manner would be beyond our piping skills, but I argued that everyone loves a good cream puff, and the warm chocolate sauce was sure to win over the chefs.

While we had learned to make the
choux
dough in Level 1, it was merely part of a larger introduction to the many different types of pastry dough and not an intensive
choux
learning experience.
Choux
dough is made with flour, butter, whole eggs, and water. Added salt makes it ideal for a savory concoction, while the addition of sugar instead makes it a perfect dessert. The butter and water are cooked gently in a small pot over low heat until the butter melts and the mixture begins to simmer. Then the flour is added all at once, in a great dusty pile. Using a wooden spoon, the mixture is then stirred, hard, to remove any lurking lumps and coerce everything together in a smooth paste. The paste is then cooked until it is dry and forms a cohesive clump. The pot is then removed from the heat and the eggs are added, one by one. There is no set number of eggs to be added—the number varies from three to as many as six, depending on how well the paste has been cooked, how humid the day is, and how big and fresh the eggs are. It is advisable to proceed slowly, cracking one egg at a time and mixing each egg very well with the wooden spoon after its addition. The dough is ready to be piped when a trench dug through the middle of the dough (good chefs use their fingers to dig the trench, the better to taste the dough as one goes along) fills in, but slowly. There's no very precise measure, but it's one of those things that once you see, you learn to recognize and repeat. This was often the case in chef school—preparing the same recipes in the
curriculum over and over and over again would teach us to recognize the proper look and feel of the food we were making, more than merely learning the recipe.

Once the dough is formed, it is transferred to a piping bag with a large tip and piped onto sheet pans covered with parchment paper. The trick to piping even circles is one of practice and mastery of a whole-body motion, a modified crouch garnished with an arm swirl and wrist flick that would take thousands of choux to master. The choux are then baked in the oven until puffed and golden brown. The water and the moisture content in the eggs turns to steam, which causes the dough to puff up, making an air pocket inside that is a perfect nest for a delicious morsel or two.

At least, this is what is supposed to happen. More than one team in Level 1 had turned out something that looked more like pancakes than golden spheres. Lack of puff can mean that the eggs were too old to work with, or that the moisture had already evaporated from the dough before it went into the oven, or that too much moisture was added with the inclusion of too many eggs and the dough was too heavy to rise. There are lots of pitfalls on the road to perfect pastry. I was confident that my team, with Tucker, who was a stickler for following direction, and Ben, who quietly and methodically produced gorgeously plated food, would be equal to the challenge.

Junior, the fourth member of our little crew, was certainly proficient enough in the sauté and vegetable-cutting departments, but too often I noticed that his mind would wander, and he would lose focus, right in the middle of preparing a recipe. At the age of eighteen, Junior was fresh out of high school, and his youth was evident in everything he did. But he was so good-natured about everything, always grinning even when he set his pan on fire, we couldn't be angry with him even if he was constantly a half step behind the rest of us. The nickname of Junior, itself an allusion to his age and his innocence, stuck to him like glue. Junior would need a bit of supervision to keep him on course, but on the whole, I really felt like we
were the A-Team and could handle whatever criticism the chefs felt like dishing out. Okay, maybe I secretly saw myself as Mr. T, the ass-kicking, take-no-prisoners leader of our crew. A mohawked angry black dude I am not, but I pitied the fool who underestimated my team's abilities.

With no morning lecture to start our day now, we simply began cooking when everyone had assembled. Chef Pierre didn't even call roll, just stalked among the bent heads of the brigades, mentally tal-lying up those present. We had memorized the ingredients and the procedure for our chosen recipe, but each of us had copied down the important bits on an index card that we kept tucked into our jacket pocket for quick reference. These index cards were required in class for all the levels, part of our daily homework assignments. By the end of Level 1, though, few people in class bothered with the cards, as Chef Jean had long ago stopped checking up on us. But Tucker had insisted we come to our first class well prepared for anything Chef Pierre might ask, and so we were ready. Good thing we were, too. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Chef Pierre was looming in the pastry kitchen, arms folded over his belly as they had been after he had delivered his first lecture to us, tall chef 's hat already slightly askew from his morning's exertions—no doubt of yelling at the other teams in the main kitchen.

I whispered quickly to my teammates: “Eyes down! Watch what you're doing!” We all immediately tried to look even busier than we already were, weighing out butter, measuring flour, organizing pots, pans, and bowls, and generally getting in each other's way.

I tried not to make eye contact with Chef, but I could feel his stare boring into each of us in turn—it felt like my back was on fire, and I kept messing up the scale, my shaking hands unable to set the weights to zero before adding the flour. Finally, I looked up to meet his eyes, blurry behind the incredibly thick glasses he wore—forget Coke bottles, these were more like the reinforced glass on the bottom of champagne bottles.

“Oh, hi,” Chef said, super casual. It was obviously a trap. We didn't fall for it.

“Good morning, Chef!” the four of us chorused in perfect unison, as if we'd spent hours practicing.

“Oh, such obedience. Not at all what I'd heard about you four from Assistant Chef Cyndee.”

Somehow this didn't surprise me. To everyone's chagrin, Cyndee had been promoted from a Level 1 assistant to a Level 2 assistant, and had moved with us to the kitchens downstairs, just when we thought we had escaped the sneers, snide comments, and that horrible, ringing guffaw. It really wasn't fair that she had told Chef Pierre we were less than stellar, but nothing about Cyndee was fair. I made a mental note to clean up Junior a little bit and feed him to the voracious Cyndee like a hunk of man meat. Nothing made Cyndee happier than having a guy flirt with her, and even though she was distinctly less than gorgeous, with her flaccid lips, protuberant eyes, and mud-colored irises, to say nothing of the truly enormous contours of her lower half—her ass was a cautionary tale of what could happen to someone who spent all their time in the kitchen—I thought I could convince Junior to take one for the team. Despite his endless braggadocio about his stud-muffin status back in his rural Maine high school, we all knew that poor Junior was still a virgin. He was pathetically eager to dissuade everyone on this point, and would do anything (or anyone) to prove his prowess to us.

However, there was a more pressing situation to deal with, and I was forced to shelve my plans to pimp out my teammate for the moment. Chef Pierre was still looming uncomfortably large in the pastry kitchen. Now we would have to try especially hard to convince him that whatever he had heard from Assistant Chef Cyndee, it wasn't true. In fact, I was determined to prove that we were the very best brigade ever to storm the Level 2 kitchens. But it was going to be uphill work, and it looked like we were already losing ground.

Suddenly Chef barked “CARDS!” For a moment, I just stood
there, puzzled, and then I remembered the index cards we had written the recipe on. We all yanked our cards out and held them out for Chef 's inspection.

“Good, good,” he said, not even bothering to scrutinize them. “Now, get going! What are you standing around here for? Go. Go, GO!”

With that bellow ringing in our ears, we galvanized for action. In record time we were fully prepared for our recipe, the ingredients marshaled together in orderly rows like soldiers, while we stood at attention at the stove. Tucker prepared the sheet trays, Ben was in position to cook the
choux
paste, Junior ran the dirty dishes to the dishwashers, and I manned the piping bag, ready to lock and load. We were wheels up, and Operation Cream Puff was a definite go.

Ben was the man in charge of the recipe. We had decided to take turns bossing one another around so that we wouldn't fall victim to the infighting and backbiting that often destroyed the unity of other teams. It is true: too many cooks
do
spoil the soup! Only by working together, as one unit, could we hope to make it through the difficulties of this new level. It was also true that a good team needed a strong leader to call the shots and make difficult decisions in tough situations—a scenario that came up more often than not in the battlefield of the kitchen.

Each of us—Ben, Tucker, Junior, and I—had our strengths and weaknesses. Junior had great knife skills, Tucker was great at “the big picture”—getting us from the recipe on the page to the food on the plate—and Ben was excellent with the small details, making him a natural in the pastry department. Unlike other stations, where cooking is an inexact science full of pinches of this and dashes of that, pastry is the realm of precise measurements. I wasn't really sure what I brought to the team—sure, my knife skills were pretty good, and I was a stickler for the little details, but other than a flair for seasoning and a really competitive drive to get things done, and get them done well, I wasn't sure what I was bringing to the table.

But the fast pace of our new level didn't leave me any time to brood about things. We needed to start the recipe, pronto. Ben added the water and butter to his pan and brought it to a boil. Junior stood by, handing each ingredient to Ben as it was needed. When Ben barked out, “Wooden spoon, pronto!” like a surgeon requesting a surgical implement, it was slapped into his hand with all the swiftness and panache of an ER nurse with twenty years on the job. But when Ben requested, “Flour, sifted, NOW,” his hand outstretched, his attention still on the stove, things came to a screeching halt. We hadn't sifted the flour, because none of us had a sifter. The large drum sifters were locked away in the Level 3 and 4 pastry kitchen next door, and would have been too unwieldy for use anyway. What we needed was a small, round-bottomed sieve that could easily fit in our toolboxes. Unfortunately, we didn't have one. We stood, looking at each other for a moment as the butter and water bubbled over on the stove.

“Shit.” Once again we had spoken simultaneously, in this way, if in no other, a well-oiled machine. We got out a fresh pan, and fresh ingredients, and started over again, this time with Tucker manning the stove. Butter, water, salt, sugar came to a swift boil, and this time, without a word, Tucker tipped the contents of the measuring cup full of unsifted flour into the pan, and continued to cook furiously. The paste thickened and began to clump together. Tucker whisked it off the flame and began breaking eggs into the dough, stirring with all his might, muscles cording and standing out on his forearms and a fine mist of sweat breaking out on his brow. Four eggs in, the dough had begun to take on a glossy look and was slower to incorporate the eggs—we were almost there. After the fifth egg, we took turns drawing our fingers through the dough to see if it was the right texture and taste.

I have never been a big fan of raw dough, refusing to even nibble the sugar-coated scraps left over from an apple pie, but in my determination to broaden my palate, I took a big swoop through the
warm dough with my freshly washed finger, and gingerly crammed it in my mouth. It was good, really good, more like a hot cereal than chilly pastry dough. It had none of that raw mealiness of uncooked flour, only smooth, slightly sweet, buttery paste, made subtly richer with all those bright orange egg yolks. So far, so tasty.