The Psychology of Cooking, Professionally

By chefhenry » Published on July 31, 2010

 

I have often wondered what it is that drives some of us to continue on in this business year after year, decade after decade. It is easy to understand why some might entertain the thought of entering the profession, especially these days with all of the media coverage of celebrity chefs, and celebrities pretending to be chefs. It has become fashionable and glamorized to the point of excess. What is sometimes puzzling is what it is that keeps us at it. Thankfully for those of us that have been bitten by whatever bug it is that causes us to work in such an inhospitable environment with all the accompanying hardships the one good thing the Food Network and uncounted cooking shows have brought us is a little respect, something that in my opinion was at the least lacking and at most non-existent in the first decade or two of my career. While working conditions,wages, focus on safety and labor standards seem to have improved overall I would still hesitate to recommend this profession to any young persons looking for a career choice. That is not to say that there will not always be some that are drawn to the work, that have a passion for service or for cooking and they are the ones that will be carrying on the industry long after we have been put out to pasture. Perhaps it is the adrenaline rush of a crazy service running perfectly, or the accolades received from a new special being served for the first time.

As I have often mentioned in this blog, my current position and venue here have little to do with fine dining or current trends in the business but is in fact still cooking and some days I have to say that I love it, even here, (only some though), I certainly do try to keep up on the happenings around town, and around the continent and it does seem to be a great time to be a chef. The list and quality of ingredients from around the world and around the corner is growing with every season, and the strides forward that are being made in traditional and non traditional equipment and techniques is enough to keep virtually every cook on the planet happily entertained for years to come, if only they are given the opportunity to use them. Wages and salaries for the most part have certainly increased somewhat, if not by the leaps and bounds that the industry seems to want to lead you to believe, but the latest survey that I took part in shows that it is at least a good living wage in many urban centers but of course the survey covered mostly our neighbor to the south. For years it seemed that the only way to relieve the boredom of the rut of a job was to move on to the newest and biggest and best restaurant down the road to push the envelope of knowledge a bit further, with the advent of the Web and proliferation of chef blogs and websites the information available to further yourself in this industry has grown exponentially. Since this information is available to all parties interested it seems that the dining public is also much more aware of the trends occurring everywhere and a growing number of them are interested in sampling whatever it is that you wish to create.

So what is it that has kept you cooking, if you are one, and what is it about this business that has you intrigued enough to wish to do it for a living if you are not, yet?

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Chicken is a Vegetable

By chefhenry » Published on June 28, 2010

Watch your Demographics,

 

“Where I come from, Chicken is a vegetable.” Is a phrase that one of my guests here uttered to me the other night as he came back for a third slice of Prime Rib, totaling close to two pounds of meat he had ended up having for supper, nothing else, no jus, no horseradish, nothing. Tonight he was a little less focused on his protein, he had some dressing and gravy to go with his Turkey, and of course only one steak, to start. (Didn’t notice what he had for his second helping tonight, but he always comes back for at least one more helping of anything). Suffice it to say that some of these workers here come in with very healthy appetites. It certainly doesn’t hurt matters as far as they are concerned, that they don’t have to pay a dime for anything that they eat. It is very interesting to try to remember all of the guests and what their preferences are, while one may look at the plate of food presented them and say something like, “I guess that’ll do as an appetizer”, the next guest in line would not eat that much in two days.

But enough about my guests and the amount that they eat, the point of this article is not how much they eat, but what they find appealing. A couple of months ago I moved from one kitchen to another here on site, and the way they house the workers means that the demographics change even over the three kilometers separating me from the other kitchen. I have about a third of the population here as compared to the old camp and for example, when we have lamb on the menu, in any form, I go through as much here as the larger kitchen, with triple the guests. The list can obviously go on and on in this regard. So over the distance of just a couple of kilometers we can have such a disparity of popular menu choices, you can well imagine what kind of changes take place from province to province, (or state to state). When I was cooking on the West Coast I had a few dishes that I would serve in most every venue that I could and for the most part they sold quite well in all of them. As my ex and I moved to the prairies and I needed a special here and there I would, of course go to my old stand bys, tried tested and true. No such luck, while seafood on the coast in any form proves to be quite popular with the locals as well as the tourists I had no luck in selling it in the middle of the country. Orange Roughy just does not travel inland very well in my experience, battered and deep fried anything, and you may make a few sales. Likewise a lamb dish that received rave revues on the coast and actually got a mention in a national publication did not sell enough to justify ever trying again once I managed to sell off the original case of product. Now all of this is not to say that you can’t sell lamb in the prairies, or seafood anywhere but the coast(s), but in my experience, the coast has, or at least had, a much more metropolitan, or diversified, palate. As far as geography goes, west of the Great Lakes and east of the Rockies beef is King, and pork is a distant second. Of course chicken is chicken and a turkey here and there is at least acceptable but you had best have that nice large variety of beef on hand if you want them back in the doors on a regular basis. As you move into the higher end of the dining venues the tastes of the guest will become a little more adventurous, and refined, as you get into the more mainstream dining rooms and restaurants the tastes of the guest turns to the more mundane fair. Once you get to the chain restaurants, QSRs and the like, it’s no wonder that they all serve virtually the same menu, that is what the clientèle that frequent these places want.

To look at it from another perspective, that being the monetary one, the guest that is able to go out for a very nice meal (read expensive) on a regular basis is probably also the one that is willing and eager for a new and different taste sensation, the dining public that is frequenting the chains and fast food venues is more than likely the guest that is spending the same fraction of discretionary income on the meal outside of the home, but is not willing to part with that money on something unknown. That tried and true comes to bear again and those people are looking for a meal out just to not be cooking at home more often than not, as compared to the high end diner that is looking for something new, that more often than not they could not re-create at home even if they chose to.

It all boils down to knowing your guests, and where you are. There is nothing more difficult than moving to a new area and having to ascertain what the clientèle is hungry for. The three most important things in the business being location, location, and location work in more than one way.

 

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Sourcing in Canada 2.0

By chefhenry » Published on May 31, 2010

As much as I have always wanted to keep my purchases within Canada, and my wish is to pass along any information I can gather in regards to this, I just have to pass along this information even though it is to do with an American company (read duty and exchange, international purchase). For months I had been looking for a few rather difficult impossible to find ingredients here in town. It seems that unless you are in a large urban center (probably only Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto qualify) a lot of my shopping list is found online only. Even then I continued to attempt to find them within Canada on the web without success. Of course the Web is a wonderful place, and the epitome of global, but dealing with foodstuffs on an international basis is a dicey proposition at best, add shipping and exchange rates, duty and time frames into the mix it is a daunting task at best. Well, I took the plunge recently, and received my rewards at the post office, with the duty dutifully paid, I manage to finally acquire my first taste of a few rather esoteric (and consequently expensive) ingredients, esoteric for this neck of the woods anyways. For those of you out there that follow some of the more renowned chefs and restaurants, and have the urge to recreate the dishes that they have published or televised, the ingredient list can be daunting, and substitutions are not an option when attempting new flavor combinations. You just can not replace yuzu juice, for example, with another citrus when you have never tasted yuzu to begin with, and after you have tasted it, you realize that you can’t substitute anything since nothing else out there would do the dish justice. Fennel pollen is another one that had me quite intrigued, fennel, sure, anise and a couple of other flavors I could imagine, but what Fennel Pollen was really all about I had no idea, and just had to get me some. Glad I did.

So anyways, to get to the point of this post, Earthy Delights handled my relatively small purchase gladly and professionally, the order was shipped out promptly and shipping itself was not unreasonable, all things considered. Of course the one thing to keep in mine is that no matter what, you can still only order “non-perishable” items for international delivery, regardless of what company you find to deal with. In the end I would imagine the moral of this little story is, that while I would love to buy local, and of course seasonal as well, I am not going to limit myself to what I manage to find in Northern Alberta in my one week home out of every four. An adventurous palate with a global experience behind it is going to be somewhat bored with a local only ingredient list.

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Take a Moment, Relax

By chefhenry » Published on April 1, 2010
  

Fool's Sunset, April Fool's

Fool's Sunset, April Fool's

While around here I certainly can’t say to stop and smell the roses, or even suggest a couple of nice deep breaths most of the time, one can at least stop and appreciate the wonders of something as simple and regularly occurring as a sunset. Just so happened this evening that I had been busting my posterior for a few hours straight and just needed that cigarette before doing any packing up and changing to get out of the kitchen for the night. Had I done the packing up and changing first, as would be the usual, I would have missed a gorgeous sunset. Three minutes of relaxation and a colorful palette in the sky was enough to brighten the mood and reduce the stress caused by the usual onslaught of 1200 hungry workers coming through for their evening meal. For only a couple of days right about now, and then again in the autumn when the days are getting shorter will this sight greet me as I finish work. In a few days it’ll be daylight well past the time I finish for the day, and as we get closer to the solstice it will remain light annoyingly late into the night. Nice to have caught an evening without full cloud cover today.

Maybe I have a thing for sunsets, or maybe it is the sight of anything beautiful that makes you stop and appreciate it, that can take your mind off of the trials and tribulations of the daily routine, that is the way to rejuvenate at the end of the day

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The Care and Feeding of a Blog

By chefhenry » Published on March 4, 2010

Over the past year (and a bit) I have often lamented my inconsistency in posting, and apologized rather too frequently for my liking due to this. Although I cannot seem to figure out how to bring regular posting into my daily routine my food-centric nature has led me to these following thoughts:

 

I read, and have read many different blogs and they can certainly be personified in these ways:

There are a few blogs out there that suffer from obesity; they suffer the North American malady of being regularly stuffed full with far too much junk (food). There are the blogs that are simply overweight, they have been fed too much and do not have a good balance in their diet. There are the trim, healthy blogs that seem to have found a good balance in their diet and are nimble, fit, and energetic, and are bound to live long, happy and prosperous lives. There are the ones that seem to be a little underweight, verging on skinny, these are the ones that seem to be well fed some of the time, but are put on a starvation diet far too often, (this is where I feel this site is currently standing).

In the same way I have a new pair of running shoes gathering dust under my bed here because I can’t seem to manage to make it into the gym to follow up on my desire to rearrange a couple of pounds on my body I can’t seem to get into the routine of sitting down and writing for a few minutes, or longer, on any kind of a regular basis. I get up and make it to work on time day in and day out but that’s where the reliability seems to end.

Just so that anyone out there actually reading is aware that I’m not intending to let my blog die of malnutrition, here’s the bone being thrown to the starving blog. Hope to be putting it on a nice healthy diet soon. Whether or not I can remains to be seen, but I really hope to. ;)

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Short Staffed???

By chefhenry » Published on February 5, 2010

One of the things that seems to be chronically a problem most everywhere I have worked is the issue of staffing. Over the years there has been only a very small number of venues that have had the stability of staff and volume to rarely experience an issue with being short staffed, or overstaffed. From an employees standpoint, no one wants to get sent home early because of lack of work, or lose a shift because of lack of business, and from an employers viewpoint, the last thing you want is to be paying for staff that are being under utilized. Labor cost being one of the few areas that can be managed on an hour by hour basis. Conversely though, no one wants to be critically short staffed either, when quality or service are compromised due to a shortage of staff, absolutely no one wins. When it happens on a regular basis and the customer is suffering in one way or another, soon staffing will be the least of ones concerns.

In this current position, staffing is a very unique problem, as are most of the ones we deal with on a day to day basis. But I am really starting to wonder how long we can go on being “short staffed” on such a long term scale, before we don’t even think of it as being short anymore? When we actually have the “correct” number of bodies around, the job suddenly becomes quite easy, relatively speaking. But this situation is such a rare occurrence in the past couple of months that we are starting to consider it a treat to not be running full tilt just to make it though the day successfully.

Every time I have taken the time to consider this situation it reminds me of the time a number of years ago when I read about our government’s effort to reduce the number of people living at, or below, the poverty level. Their solution, rather than any grand scheme to employ people, or increase the wages, or reduce the cost of living was to simply lower the dollar figure used to calculate the amount needed to live comfortably. Using this school of thought I’m sure that my employer is simply experimenting with just how “short staffed” we can be and still manage. Until of course the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back occurs, and then you can rest assured that it will be a case of the staff not working hard enough because, by the employer’s calculations, we are fully staffed.

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Winter @ Work

By chefhenry » Published on January 18, 2010

Change the fryers again?!?

Change the fryers again?!?

With all the other trials and tribulations involved in the day to day operation of a kitchen weather is one that we sometimes do not take into consideration. Up here it is a fairly constant factor in how things are accomplished. These photos were taken after work last night, the really ironic part is that we just had a (rare) sunny day with no snow actually falling, as you might well imagine though it was fairly windy. The grease barrel on the right was used just the day prior to these shots having been taken, and in the course of twelve hours was hidden away again nicely. If we aren’t putting up with horribly frigid conditions or a blizzard we are being dug out from the last one. At least half of the winter is spent without our cardboard compactor functioning due to hydraulics freezing up, and as the photo below shows, even the fire hydrants are not immune to the conditions Mother Nature imposes upon us. The best part of all of this is that these things end up being preferable to the spring and summer in some respects, once this snow starts melting and the ground thaws, trucks routinely become mired in knee deep mud, this problem has been alleviated somewhat over the last couple of years by better road construction but still happens on occasion. Looking forward to summer arriving is also taken with a grain of salt since once all of these inconveniences are past the hoards of mosquitoes make us pine for colder weather (which is not far in the future) again. The company operation this site has in their experience found that construction and operation is much easier in the winter than in any other season, at least the conditions are consistent and until the mercury hits forty below, much easier to deal with than what the rest of the year may bring.

 

 

After a couple of decades living on the West Coast, had you asked me ten years ago if I would willingly work, let alone live, in an environment such as this the answer would have been a resounding no, filled with as much sarcasm as I could muster at the time. With a few years behind me dealing with winter again I do find that it isn’t all that bad, and cold can be dealt with more effectively and easily than heat and humidity. Once you get used to wearing long underwear in the kitchen. ;)

Frozen pipes, extra large

Frozen pipes, extra large

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Sous Vide 3.0

By chefhenry » Published on January 14, 2010

As I sat mulling over what I had managed to accomplish culinarily over the past year, on my days off anyways, I was quite happy with the situation. While I realize that at the moment I am never satisfied with the number of new and different things I manage to create, in hindsight I somehow end up understanding that it’s enough, sort of.

With everything that I have dabbled in over the last few months I must say that sous vide cooking as the new technique I have added to my repertoire has made the largest impact on my cooking inventory.

The introduction of hydrocolloids into my pantry has certainly opened a few new avenues of texture and although there is still much to explore in that area, ( i.e.: agar clarification, calcium chloride encapsulation, etc.) the basics have been dealt with. Adding an induction burner to my kitchen, while outstanding for efficiency, control, and heat reduction, is nothing more than a new and better method of heating the bottom of your pot or pan. The dozen or so new spices and herbs and the handful of new ingredients I have managed to finally find have added new flavor and variety to my dishes but they are nothing new or notable really.

Sous Vide cooking on the other hand has given me (and anyone else employing it) an entirely new and different technique to cook with. While at it’s heart it is in fact “boil in bag” cooking, the precision temperature control makes all the difference in the world. You are never in fact bringing anything to a boil in the water bath, and the forgiveness factor in the timing of the rest of the evenings dinner is a thing of beauty. You can of course manage to under cook items easily enough but it is virtually impossible to overcook anything. I certainly am not professing to be an expert on this subject, and there are plenty of chefs out there that have been published on this subject, and years ago for that matter but to give you a rough idea of how easy it is; Those steaks that you are preparing for supper will quite happily sit there in the water bath for an extra hour or two at a perfect medium rare, while your last guests finally arrive, or while you take an extra half hour to complete the preparations of the rest of the meal, before you sear, or quickly brown your steak at the last moment before serving. All in all I have to say that the equipment required for Sous Vide cooking may be pricey, all the way up to downright expensive, but with the introduction of the Sous Vide Supreme into the marketplace recently, (no knowledge of that one), and the Sous Vide Magic (my first piece of gear), the competition is certainly heating up. While these units are relatively inexpensive they both lack the circulating function to keep the water bath at a really precise temperature. Fresh Meals Solutions is apparently introducing a new unit with some circulating capabilities but I haven’t checked that out in a bit. Now the 7306C thermal circulating unit from Polyscience is, from everything I’ve ever researched and read on the subject, the cream of the crop, but at about a thousand dollars a piece, getting fairly expensive for your average home user. The thermal circulators that I picked up on eBay fit the bill just fine for me right now and after extensive sanitizing just in case, are working beautifully. Now the only thing left to really talk about is the vacuum sealer aspect of the entire technique. I went with a Food Saver vacuum sealer to start, just so that I could get started, and I’m glad that I did. There are of course the limitations of not being able to seal liquids and very moist products, but there are a couple of ways around that. The lack of compression does limit you to sealing and cooking but you can produce excellent quality sous vide meals with it. Chamber Vacuum sealers are certainly the way to go, but at a price that makes me squirm, the cheapest I have been able to find in dozens of hours searching the Web is still around $800.00 shipped, made in China and fairly small in the chamber department makes me very hesitant. Two to five thousand seems to be the price range for a seemingly good quality unit with a fair sized chamber (the chamber depth seems to be the big problem) and that is just not in the budget quite yet. While the plastic for a chamber vacuum system is substantially cheaper than for a Food Saver type sealer, you can buy an awful lot of rolls for a couple of grand. Over all though, if you are serious about cooking, and most of all, if you are a professional cook/chef, sous vide is an outstanding addition to any kitchen. Stay tuned for further news in this department, I can’t wait for my next days off, still ten days away.

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Further Adventures in Sous Vide

By chefhenry » Published on January 3, 2010

Vintage EquipmentWith some time off over the Holidays I finally managed to clean up and sterilize my newest toys, I’ve gotta say, eBay comes through quite well, once in a while. The new pieces pictured are both from the auction site and I consider myself lucky that no one else was interested and I picked them up for quite the bargain. Now those of you familiar with the thermal circulator conundrum are going to say that I’m taking chances purchasing a used circulator but I just couldn’t pass up the deal, in fact it was so good I ended up purchasing two of them right off the bat. Still thinking about grabbing a couple more as soon as the dust of the Holidays settles. If they don’t run forever I won’t mind too much, I can buy 20 of them at these prices before I would approach the price of the 7306C new, and I have never seen one of them for sale used anywhere. As far as running for a while, I don’t think that’ll be much of a problem, while researching the company and the model I figured out that these were of some vintage that I didn’t really want to think about, and as I was cleaning them I noticed, written on one of them, “Thermostat replaced, 4/15/79. Now I have no idea how long these units where lying around idle, or if they were idle at all, but a unit that has been around for over thirty years and is still running (accurately) has gotta have some life left in it.

The thermometer pictured is quite another story, while it is now functional, it’s not exactly running the way I had imagined. I had a heck of a time getting it running and any time I tried to turn it on, or off for that matter I ended up having to take the back off to get at the battery and disconnect and reconnect and try again. That ended up having to happen far too often to make it something I wanted to use with any regularity. Coupled with a battery life of less than 48 hours with constant use I realized that something had to be done. Hence, as you can see in the photo, I managed to rig up the unit to run on a 9V adapter, or an external battery. It’s not exactly a hand held unit in this configuration but at least I can now monitor the entire cooking time of a dish, and reassure myself as to the long term accuracy of the circulator.

The dish cooking in the pic is my first try at a true short rib, albeit sliced a little thin for my liking, amazing how difficult it was to find it in the grocery stores, the more you look around the more you come to realize that cuts of meat that have a bone still attached is becoming a thing of the past in mainstream groceries. I have yet to find a butcher within a reasonable distance of my home to give my business to.

To sum it all up, for the prices I paid I now have a Sous Vide setup that, while not state of the art, or even attractive, rivals anything that you could purchase at any price. All of it came to about an eighty percent savings, just needed some patience and a bit of luck and time on the Web. Now to just save up the pennies (lots and lots of pennies) to invest in the Chamber Vacuum sealer.

If you have been reading here for any length of time you will know that I started the Sous Vide experiments with the Sous Vide Magic from Fresh Meals Solutions. Now, while that unit is also quite good, and great to start with, I quickly realized that the circulating issue was going to be one that I had to deal with one way or the other. The circulator I now have makes the issue moot to a certain extent but I still really like the SVM, having the water circulate is definitely something that has to be addressed for real temperature stability. Having seen some people use aquarium air pumps makes me lean towards them, although my first thought was to use an immersible water pump, also from the fish tank world, just wondering about temperature on those, even tropical fish don’t swim around in poaching water.

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If you can’t stand the heat???

By chefhenry » Published on December 15, 2009
I'll take my chances with a fire inside

I'll take my chances with a fire inside

Any one in “the business” for a while has heard the term “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen”.  Well, try this view on for size, these days we are all hoping for a bit more heat in the kitchen, and a bit less cold outside. 
Saturday saw us with wind chill factors bringing the temperature down to minus 53 Celsius.  
Fresh air is not an option

Fresh air is not an option

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