I’ve blogged about fear of cooking, about doubts in cooking, about guessing in cooking, and now inconsistency in cooking. I’m sharing all of this with you because, they all stem from the same basic root. Fears, doubts, guessing comes from a lack of knowledge about underlying cooking methods. In order to cook food like a chef, you simply need an understanding of the techniques that chefs use to cook food.
Think about watching a magician. Magic is always amazing when you watch the magician’s hands like he wants you to. However, once you’ve been shown how the trick works, you start looking for the re-direction. You now know his method, you can anticipate when he’ll repeat it and the mystery and wonder is gone.
The mysterious magic and wonder in cooking is destroyed by repetitive cooking method. These are certain basic skills that you can duplicate again and again. Just as a magician can make a playing card, coin, dollar bill, credit card, all disappear in the same slight of hand, you can cook chicken, fish, steak, vegetables, pork, in the same repetitive method and the magic will appear for you.
I promised in the last blog post that I would give you the answers to the chef test I give prospective employees.
- Anticipate when oil is about to smoke
This begins with understanding the convective process: when the liquid in the pan begins to move as it heats up, rises and cools again, you can actually see this movement in the oil. Soon thereafter, the oil will begin to smoke. Different oils have different smoke points, but now, you can anticipate by knowing the signs. You know you’ve got this skill down when someone can put 3 oils in front of you and you can tell them which has the highest smoking point. - Develop color during sauté
You have to get the sugars to carmelize at 320 degrees Fahrenheit. The trick is to get the pan hot enough to start with and you can “see this” or quantify the temperature in a pan by putting a few drops of water in the pan to tell just how hot it’s getting. - Deglaze and reduce sauté pan
This is simply knowing how to control the conductive process that we talking about in test #1. You need to add a cold liquid to drop the temperature which releases the sugars and fond from the bottom of the pan. A true test of this skill is to make a beurre blanc. This is a great test of your ability to heat butter and melt it so it doesn’t break. - Thicken a liquid to make a sauce
There are different thickening agents that can be used to make a sauce. For me, I would want my chef to be able to make a blonde, brown or brick roux and the thickening agents used for each. Flour and cornstarch are wonderful thickening agents but you need to have an understanding of how much to use and this can only happen with practice. - Softly poach an egg
This is a moist process and means that the chef would need to have an understanding of the difference between boil, simmer and poach which has to do with temperature and controlling the heat in your pan. Once you understand how to control the temperature in your pan, you will be able to poach an egg. And this is a good thing, because I like Eggs Benedict! - Roast a delicate item like fish
This is the ability to control dry convective heat. In controlling dry heat, there is a fine line between the coagulation of proteins at 165 degrees Fahrenheit (when the food would stiffen and shrink) and 212 degrees Fahrenheit when moisture starts evaporating. The key to cooking in dry heat is being able to cook in that temperature zone where the food cooks before it dries out. - Tell when a grilled steak is done
The best test that I can think of for this is to hand my chef three steaks and ask the chef to cook them to order: one rare, one medium, and one well done. So how do you do that? Use a thermometer. Cooking with a recipe and without a thermometer is like driving down the road with a map while you’re blindfolded. You’ve got all of the directions, but you’ll never know when you’ve gotten to your destination….if you can even get close!
This is what’s going on in my kitchen! But if you want to cook great food more consistently and cook like a chef in your own home, then you will want to pay attention to cooking techniques and have repeatable methods. Understanding these methods will allow you to make sense out of any recipe or to not use a recipe at all because of your increased understanding of how different cooking techniques work. You’ll be creating things the way you want them and be able to do it again and again.
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