Kitchen Confidential (7 page)

Pigs are filthy animals, say some, when explaining why they deny themselves the delights of pork. Maybe they should visit a chicken ranch. America's favorite menu item is also the most likely to make you ill. Commercially available chickens, for the most part (we're not talking about kosher and expensive free-range birds), are loaded with salmonella. Chickens are dirty. They eat their own feces, are kept packed close together like in a rush-hour subway, and when handled in a restaurant situation are most likely to infect other foods, or cross-contaminate them. And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don't know what they want to eat.

Shrimp? All right, if it looks fresh, smells fresh, and the restaurant is busy, guaranteeing turnover of product on a regular basis. But shrimp toast? I'll pass. I walk into a restaurant with a mostly empty dining room, and an unhappy-looking owner staring out the window? I'm not ordering shrimp.

This principle applies to anything on a menu actually, especially something esoteric and adventurous like, say, bouillabaisse. If a restaurant is known for steak, and doesn't seem to be doing much business, how long do you think those few orders of clams and mussels and lobster and fish have been sitting in the refrigerator, waiting for someone like you to order it? The key is rotation. If the restaurant is busy, and you see bouillabaisse flying out the kitchen doors every few minutes, then it's probably a good bet. But a big and varied menu in a slow, half-empty place? Those less popular items like broiled mackerel and calves' liver are kept festering in a dark corner of the reach-in because they look good on the menu. You might not actually want to eat them. Look at your waiter's face. He knows. It's another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh. If he likes you, maybe he'll stop you from ordering a piece of fish he knows is going to hurt you. On the other hand, maybe the chef has ordered him, under pain of death, to move that codfish before it begins to really reek. Observe the body language, and take note.

Watchwords for fine dining? Tuesday through Saturday. Busy. Turnover. Rotation. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York. The food that comes in Tuesday is fresh, the station prep is new, and the chef is well rested after a Sunday or a Monday off. It's the real start of the new week, when you've got the goodwill of the kitchen on your side. Fridays and Saturdays, the food is fresh, but it's busy, so the chef and cooks can't pay as much attention to your food as they-and you-might like. And weekend diners are universally viewed with suspicion, even contempt, by both cooks and waiters alike; they're the slackjaws, the rubes, the out-of-towners, the well-done-eating,

undertipping, bridge-and-tunnel pre-theater hordes, in to see Cats or Les Miz and never to return. Weekday diners, on the other hand, are the home team-potential regulars, whom all concerned want to make happy. Rested and ready after a day off, the chef is going to put his best foot forward on Tuesday; he's got his best-quality product coming in and he's had a day or two to think of creative things to do with it. He wants you to be happy on Tuesday night. On Saturday, he's thinking more about turning over tables and getting through the rush.

If the restaurant is clean, the cooks and waiters well groomed, the dining room busy, everyone seems to actually care about what they're doing-not just trying to pick up a few extra bucks between head-shots and auditions for Days of Our Lives-chances are you're in for a decent meal. The owner, chef and a bored-looking waiter sitting at a front table chatting about soccer scores? Plumber walking through the dining room with a toilet snake? Bad signs. Watch the trucks pull up outside the restaurant delivery entrance in the morning if you're in the neighborhood. Reputable vendors of seafood, meat and produce? Good sign. If you see sinister, unmarked step-vans, off-loading all three at once, or the big tractor trailers from one of the national outfits-you know the ones,

'Servicing Restaurants and Institutions for Fifty Years'-remember what institutions they're talking about: cafeterias, schools, prisons. Unless you like frozen, portion-controlled 'convenience food'.

Do all these horrifying assertions frighten you? Should you stop eating out?

Wipe yourself down with antiseptic towelettes every time you pass a restaurant? No way. Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Sure, it's a 'play you pay' sort of an adventure, but you knew that already, every time you ever ordered a taco or a dirty-water hot dog. If you're willing to risk some slight lower GI distress for one of those Italian sweet sausages at the street fair, or for a slice of pizza you just know has been sitting on the board for an hour or two, why not take a chance on the good stuff? All the great developments of classical cuisine, the first guys to eat sweetbreads, to try unpasteurized Stilton, to discover that snails actually taste good with enough garlic butter, these were daredevils, innovators and desperados. I don't know who figured out that if you crammed rich food into a goose long enough for its liver to balloon up to more than its normal body weight you'd get something as good as foie gras-I believe it was those kooky Romans-but I'm very grateful for their efforts. Popping raw fish into your face, especially in pre-refrigeration days, might have seemed like sheer madness to some, but it turned out to be a pretty good idea. They say that Rasputin used to eat a little arsenic with breakfast every day, building up resistance for the day that an enemy might poison him, and that sounds like good sense to me. Judging from accounts of his death, the Mad Monk wasn't fazed at all by the stuff; it took repeated beatings, a couple of bullets, and a long falloff a bridge into a frozen river to finish the job. Perhaps we, as serious diners, should emulate his example. We are, after all, citizens of the world-a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really Want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Senor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What's that feathered game bird, hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some.

I have no wish to die, nor do I have some unhealthy fondness for dysentery. If I know you're storing your squid at room temperature next to a cat box, I'll get my squid down the street, thank you very much. I will continue to do my seafood eating on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, because I know better, because I can wait. But if I have one chance at a full-blown dinner of blowfish gizzard-even if I have not been properly introduced to the chef-and I'm in a strange, Far Eastern city and my plane leaves tomorrow? I'm going for it. You only go around once.

UNLESS YOU'RE ONE OF us already, you'll probably never cook like a professional. And that's okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food unless I'm looking for new ideas or recipes to steal. What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody's-anybody's-mother's or grandmother's food. A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown-together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I've been neck-deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home. My mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, 'This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef. 'She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed potatoes were-being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or truffle oil.

But you don't want to know this. What you'd like to know is how to make your next dinner party look as though you've got the Troisgros family chained to the stove in your home kitchen. Maybe you're curious about the tricks, the techniques, the few simple tools that can make your plates look as if they've been prepared, assembled and garnished by cold-blooded professionals. Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items-herb oils, crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, pureed starches and veggies-are often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a 25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So, what do you absolutely need?

You need, for God's sake, a decent chef's knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers-all those medium-size 'utility' knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers-not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won't)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I'd forgo the Germans.

Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has-in addition to its many other fine qualities-the added attraction of looking really cool. Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef's knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip. Like a pro, you should use the tip of the knife for the small stuff, and the area nearer the heel for the larger. This isn't difficult; buy a few rutabagas or onions-they're cheap-and practice on them. Nothing will set you apart from the herd quicker than the ability to handle a chef's knife properly. If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.

Okay, there are a couple of other knives you might find useful. I carry a flexible boning knife, also made by the fine folks at Global, because I fillet the occasional fish, and because with the same knife I can butcher whole tenderloins, bone out legs of lamb, French-cut racks of veal and trim meat. If your butcher is doing all the work for you you can probably live without one. A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tourneeing vegetables, fluting mushrooms and doing the kind of microsurgery that myoId pal Dimitri used to excel at. But how often do you do that?

A genuinely useful blade, however, and one that is increasingly popular with my cronies in the field, is what's called an offset serrated knife. It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a 'z' that's been pulled out and elongated. This is a truly cool item which, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs-like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on-but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks. It's stainless steel, but since it's serrated it doesn't really matter; after a couple of years of use, if the teeth start to wear down, you just buy yourself another one.

Knives are obvious. What other toys are in the professionals' bag of tricks? Numero uno-the indispensable object in most chefs' shtick-is the simple plastic squeeze bottle. May be you've seen Bobby Flay on TV artfully drizzling sauce around a plate with one of these-the man's been making Mexican food look like haute cuisine for years with these things. Sure, it's just ancho pepper mayonnaise he's squirting allover that fish, but it looks like. . well. abstract, man!!! No big deal acquiring these things, they're essentially the same objects you see at roadside hot-dog stands, loaded with mustard and ketchup. Mask a bottom of a plate with, say, an emulsified butter sauce, then run a couple of concentric rings of darker sauce-like demi-glace, or roast pepper puree-around the plate, and pay attention here, folks, now drag a toothpick through the rings or lines, and you'll see that all the fuss is about nothing. It should take you about half an hour of dicking around with a couple of squeeze bottles and your toothpick to grab the concept fully. This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do.

But. . but Chef, you say. . how do they make the food so tall? How can I make my breast of chicken and mashed potatoes tower like a fully engorged priapus over my awed and cowering guests? The answer is yet another low-tech item: the metal ring. A thin metal ring, or cut-down section of PVC pipe, about an inch and a half to two inches tall and varying inches across, is the backbone of pretentious food presentation. Just spoon your mashed potatoes in here-or better, pipe the spuds in with a pastry bag-and you are in business. Just pile it high, slip off the collar, stack your vegetable, deposit your chicken on top of that, and you're halfway to making that fuzzy little Emeril your bitch. Jam a gaufrette potato into the mashed, maybe a sprig of fresh herb, or a nice pile of ultra-thin julienne of fried leeks that you've cut with your new Global, and you're talking tall.

Gaufrette wha'? That's French for waffle-cut, and what we're talking about here is a potato chip. You can do that. All you need is what's called a mandolin, a vertically held slicer with various blade settings. They make some very cheap, very effective ones in Japan these days, so it's not a major investment. One of these bad boys can help you make those slick-looking, perfectly uniform julienned and batonnet-cut veggies you thought they cut by hand last time you ate out-and it cranks out lovely waffle cuts with a twist of the wrist. Dauphinois potatoes cut to identical thickness? No sweat. You didn't think they actually cut those with a knife, did you?

All right, the mandolin won't cut meat, and it certainly won't make paper-thin slices of prosciutto. You need a professional rotary cold-cut slicer for that, like they have at the deli. The home versions suck. But I highly recommend, if presenting sausage or meat on a buffet, that you slip the neighborhood deli guy a few bucks to slice what you need before you arrange it on platters. It makes all the difference in the world. Or if you have a few extra bucks, read the back of the paper for notices of restaurant auctions. As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well. You can buy all sorts of professional quality stuff. I'd recommend pots and pans as a premium consideration if scavenging this way. Most of the ones sold for home use are dangerously flimsy, and the heavyweight equipment sold for serious home cooks is almost always overpriced. Stockpots, saucepans, thick-bottomed saute pans are nice things, even necessary things to have, and there's no reason to buy new and no reason to pay a lot-just wait for that new tapas place on the corner to go out of business, then make your move.

Let me stress that again: heavyweight. A thin-bottomed saucepan is useless for anything. I don't care if it's bonded with copper, hand-rubbed by virgins, or fashioned from the same material they built the stealth bomber out of. If you like scorched sauces, carbonized chicken, pasta that sticks to the bottom of the pot, burnt breadcrumbs, then be my guest. A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull.

If you have any doubts about which will dent-the victim's head or your pan-then throw that pan right in the trash.

A non-stick saute pan is a thing of beauty. Crepes, omelettes, a delicately browned fillet of fish or tender skate wing? You need a nice thick non-stick pan, and not one with a thin veneer of material that peels off after a few weeks. And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don't use metal in it, use a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss whatever you're cooking in it. You don't want to scratch the surface.

I don't want to oversimplify here. Obviously, if you have no sense of taste or texture, and no eye for color or presentation-hell, if you can't cook at all-then all the equipment in the world ain't gonna help you. But if you can throw together a decent meal, can read a cookbook, well then, you can do a lot better if you spend some time playing with the toys I've mentioned.

There are also some ingredients that separate food at home from food in a restaurant-stuff that we in a professional kitchen have on hand that you probably don't-and I'll tell you now which of these make all the difference in the world.

Shallots. You almost never see this item in a home kitchen, but out in the world they're an essential ingredient. Shallots are one of the things-a basic prep item in every mise-en-place-which make restaurant food taste different from your food. In my kitchen we use nearly 20 pounds a day. You should always have some around for sauces, dressings and saute items.

Butter. I don't care what they tell you they're putting or not putting in your food at your favorite restaurant, chances are, you're eating a ton of butter. In a professional kitchen, it's almost always the first and last thing in the pan.

We saute in a mixture of butter and oil for that nice brown, caramelized color, and we finish nearly every sauce with it (we call this monter au beurre); that's why my sauce tastes richer and creamier and mellower than yours, why it's got that nice, thick, opaque consistency. Believe me, there's a big crock of softened butter on almost every cook's station, and it's getting a heavy workout. Margarine? That's not food. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can. If you're planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won't be able to help you. Even the Italians-you know, those crafty Tuscans-spout off about getting away from butter, and extol the glories of olive oil (and it is glorious), but pay a surprise visit to the kitchen of that three-star Northern Italian, and what's that they're sneaking into the pasta? And the risotto? The veal chop? Could it be? Is it. . why, I can't believe it IS butter! !

Roasted garlic. Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago, garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please, treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas, don't burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellow and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown. Try a Caesar dressing, for instance, with a mix of fresh, raw garlic for bite, and roasted for background, and you'll see what I mean. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

Chiffonaded parsley. Big deal, right? Restaurants garnish their food. Why shouldn't you? And parsley tastes good, too. Just don't chop it in a machine, please. Dip the picked sprigs in cold water, shake off excess, allow to dry for a few minutes, and slice the stuff, as thinly as you can, with that sexy new chef's knife I inspired you to buy. I promise you, sprinkled over or around your plate it'll give your chow that striking professional touch it's been missing.