What I had expected on this Day Three to be a rather pedestrian lesson in onion soup, more or less still warm-up before the real stuff, became instead an experiment in and discussion of caramelization. The students would be caramelizing their brains out in a hundred different ways, but here was caramelization in a pure form, white broth flavored and brought to a deep rich amber solely with caramelized onions.
That day it began to feel like we were living inside a cooking show. The demos were just like the TV Food Network, only now you could really see things, smell them, hear them, have an actual sense of time. Here you could ask the chef questions. If you thought something was bogus—I was eagerly awaiting the demos on the béchamel and the roux-thickened brown sauce—you could say so and the chef would defend it. Pardus was a fun chef, animated and smart. When he demoed the American Bounty vegetable soup, a soup that calls for ten vegetables, all of which require different cooking times synchronized to the same end, he ladled some clarified butter into his pan and sweated some leeks, then some onions, then added the garlic, saying, “You’re cooking with your eyes, you’re cooking with your nose, you’re cooking with your ears—all your senses.” He took the pan off the flame and swept it slowly before us, our heads bobbing one by one to smell the garlic that had only just started to cook. “It smells a little raw now,” Pardus said. He cooked it more. “That’s almost there,” and he swept it again through the crowd of noses, eyes, and ears. The garlic smell had fully developed—a smell I’d inhaled a thousand times, yet I’d never stopped to scrutinize the stages of its cooking. Each stage was distinct and would alter the flavor of the final product accordingly. Pardus shook the celery and carrots, cut to a perfect small dice by Table Two, out of the white paper cup and into the pan. Corn, lima beans, turnips, and potatoes would also be used. “We’re trying to time it so that they’re all done at the same time, so that you can taste each vegetable,” he said. “That’s what makes this a great soup.” When he added the parsley at the end, he noted that he preferred flat-leaf parsley because it was spicier and not quite as assertive as curly. When I completed my vegetable soup and set it before him on the desk, he told me that it looked good, bright, not overcooked, but the flavor was a little flat. “Take a ladleful out and salt it,” he told me. “Then compare the two. It’s a big difference. It’s a good test. It keys you into the effect of salt.” Not the taste of salt—a food shouldn’t taste of salt—but rather the effect of salt.
He made Erica do the salt test as well. She would approach Pardus, her face scarlet and glistening from effort, trying to blow a stray bang that had snuck out her toque and down her forehead, a look approximating terror on her face. Her onion soup had not been hot. Her vegetable soup had been underseasoned. Her cream of broccoli would be too thick, her consommé cloudy. Each day she seemed to return from his desk, hyperventilating and apparently on the verge of tears, her whites becoming less and less so with each class.
You couldn’t not like Erica. She tried so hard to no avail, and she did so with such visible effort that one absorbed the pathos of her predicaments. She had the foulest mouth in the class, but she was also sweet-natured and endearingly ingenuous. When we got to the front of the line at K-9 for dinner and Erica was asked if she would like one of the two soups, she responded, “Split pea, please.” She turned to me, cranking her head all the way back. She said, “I. Love. Split pea soup.”
After dinner we’d return to cool the stocks, clean the enormous kettles, wash the pots, wheel three large bins of garbage—compostable garbage, recyclable garbage, and worthless trash—down a flight of stairs, through a hallway, out back doors, and down the drive to the Dumpsters. And then we would sit for lecture. On Friday night, Day Four, everyone was looking forward to the weekend.
“This is nice,” Chef Pardus said, pacing before us, spoon spinning in the air. “It’s quarter to eight. If we’re doing this in three weeks, I’ll be real impressed.” He went over Monday’s products. Roux, first of all, then the soup. “The big one on Day Five, we do consommé. Now keep in mind, six o’clock is still our deadline. All of a sudden you’ve got extra things to do. Some of you were right up against the wire today. On Monday, you have to be developing a sense of urgency. You’re going to have to be very well organized. You’re going to have to have a good equipment list. You’re going to have to have a good prep list. Walk yourself through your day. What are you going to do when you come in? Set up your station. Start your bones, whatever you’re going to do. Make sure you’re going to have enough time. Consommé’s going to take at least an hour, probably an hour and a half to cook. Might be one of the first things you want to get done as soon as the demo’s done.”
He paused, picked up his daily grade sheets, and flipped to today’s page.
“Today—was a good day. I think. Everybody came in on time, the kitchen was pretty clean.” He spotted some low numbers on the page and said, “A few people lost some points on sanitation. Again I want everybody to be clean, I want everybody to look clean, I want everybody taking care of their hair, O.K.? Look at yourself in the mirror before you get to class. People with long hair and people with pony tails, you need a heavy-duty hair net. People with hair that’s getting borderline, make sure that it’s under your hat, no stray edges; I don’t want to see any bangs coming down the front of your hat. Check your sideburns; they’re supposed to be half way, no farther down. Hey, I had to cut my hair and shave off my beard. If I have to give up those things, you guys gotta toe the line too. Make sure your tables are clean and neat. I don’t want to see wads of paper towels sitting on cutting boards after you’ve finished degreasing a consommé. Please. You’re going to start losing points as a group, as a table; I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, your board is messy. I’m just going to take points off of you.’ You’re working as a team on that table. You start out with ten sanitation points each day. You can go down to zero. It’s usually not that severe, unless I see somebody tasting with their fingers. Then that’s an individual case. But watch out for each other. ‘Hey, guys, our table’s messy. Let’s clean it up.’ ‘I know you’re busy, I’ll wipe down your area right now, you watch my back later.’ Work together. Pots, good job today. Prep list, equipment list, you’re getting a good idea of what I’m looking for, that’s good; it’s gonna come in handy. We’re starting to pick up a little speed here. It’s still kind of a light load. It’s gonna get a lot heavier. Talk to some of the guys in Intro now about what the load’s gonna look like by the time you’re halfway through Skills Two. They could come in here and knock this out in an hour and a half and go home, something that takes you right up to six o’clock. But that’s O.K. You’ll learn to become more organized and quicker as the weeks wear on.”
To me, this did seem like quite a lot to get done in four hours. We’d made ten gallons of white stock. We’d cut all our standard daily mise en place and turned our carrots. Then we’d done all the additional fine knife cuts on leeks, onions, celery, garlic, tied up a second sachet with butcher’s string, small-diced our turnips and potatoes, measured out our lima beans and corn, concasséd more tomato, and chiffonaded our cabbage. And then we made the soup and had everything evaluated. I wasn’t out of breath or red in the face, but it seemed to me you could only go so fast.
“Now, American veg soup. Drum roll.” He scanned the numbers. “Everyone had a good soup. Nobody had a bad soup.” He said a lot of them needed salt. He told us how to evaluate the soup, how to think about the tastes. “A little underseasoned, I said? It doesn’t taste bad. It tastes good, right? Good soup, nothing really wrong with it. You add a little more salt, it doesn’t taste salty. But it tastes a little … better. It picks up the flavor, rounds it out a little. That’s the balance you try to strike, and that’s how you start to develop a palate and be aware of those four dimensions—acid, sour, sweet, and bitter. Knowing how to play off those components and round them out is what makes a well-developed palate.”
And if we think he’s wrong, he added, “
Tell me. I want to talk to you about it. Show me. Show me that I made an error in judgment, or convince me. I’m happy to debate this. I’m not always right. Don’t be afraid to challenge me on this stuff. We can both gain something. Any questions on American Bounty soup? I liked it, I thought you guys did a really good job.
“O.K. Let’s go first to page four-fifty-four and talk about this consommé recipe, so we get it broken down for you. It’s one gallon now; we want to take it down to a quart. So we’ll use a small onion brûlé. Mirepoix—we’ll need four ounces. Ground-beef-shank—we’ll use eight ounces. Three egg whites, beaten. Four ounces tomato concassé. Now this will depend if you use fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes. It depends on the acid content of the tomatoes. This time of year, the hothouse tomatoes, they don’t have a great deal of acidity, so I like to use canned tomatoes. Summer, when they’re really fresh and ripe and they’ve got good acid, we use fresh tomatoes every time. But this time of year we’re gonna use canned tomatoes.
“Forty ounces of white beef stock. We want to have some room for reduction and loss and you’ll understand why when we talk about the method. A standard sachet. Forget about cloves, and forget about allspice. Don’t do it. You want to try it some other place, some other time, fine. I’d rather concentrate on the flavors of the consommé rather than building a fruitcake. Kosher salt and white pepper. Careful with the pepper, taste your soup, you may not need it.
“What we’re gonna do is make what’s called a clarification. A clarification is the mixture of the ground beef, the egg whites, mirepoix, and the acid of the tomato product. You could add white wine, you could add lemon juice. You could add hydrochloric acid if you wanted, probably wouldn’t be very tasty. It needs acid in there. So we mix the beef, the egg whites, the mirepoix, and the tomato together, that’s a clarification. It’s a noun. It’s a thing. It’s different from the process of clarification. It’s gonna look like a too-wet meatloaf.” He smiled. “It looks pretty gnarly.”
Consommé was clearly going to be the most interesting thing we’d done so far. The idea of making goop that looked like a ground-beef milk shake and dumping it into perfectly good stock offered childish pleasure—like making mud pies or dropping very large melons from very high places or seeing how far apart you and a friend could play catch with a raw egg before it smashed in one of your hands. And yet, despite these crude pleasures—indeed, because of them—the end result was one of ultimate refinement.
Over the weekend I read about the method in The Pro Chef, our textbook. This had helpful illustrations of what happened to your meat milk shake when you boiled it. It coagulated into a gray, scummy mass, or raft, and floated to the top of your stock, bringing everything that made stock murky with it. The raft was like an organic water filter—and the stock simmered up over it and back down through it. Consommé was not difficult to do, apparently, but it took some care. Sometimes a consommé would get the best of you.
Earlier in the winter, after several months of consommé heaven, K-8 ran into problems. Chef Pardus, who had been teaching since July, suddenly couldn’t get a clear soup. The first time he shrugged, said this happened, and apologized to his class; no one else in the class could get a clear one either. And the definition of clear here is perfectly clear. Rule of thumb: you can read the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon.
Pardus went to the books.
Proteins, both in egg whites and in the meat, are actual things, molecules; if you took a twenty-foot metal tape measure and crinkled it up into the shape of a cantaloupe, you would have a replica of a protein. Imagine, further, that at each inch of this crinkled tape measure was a little round magnet. These magnets are sticking to all the other magnets, keeping the protein all balled up. When these bonds are broken, lose their magnetic juice, the tape measure relaxes, loosens up, spreads out. Instead of looking like a tight tape-measure cantaloupe, it looked more like a lazy tapeworm. When you’ve got millions of these things relaxing all at once in the same pot, they form a net, create the filter that, as the raft rises to the surface, lifts all the muck out of the stock, clarifying it. What breaks those bonds is acid.
When Pardus asked himself what was different between the ingredients he was using in July and the ones he was using in December, it dawned on him that the hard pale tomatoes he was using simply did not have enough acid to break the bonds and unfold the proteins into their salutary net. When he next made consommé, he used canned tomatoes, and voilà: the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon.
In addition to the consommé demo we would also be learning about roux, flour cooked in clarified butter, and slurries, pure starches such as cornstarch, arrowroot, or potato starch mixed in water to the consistency of heavy cream. Both roux and slurries took something thin as water and made it thick. Greg, doing more than his share (perhaps to keep from becoming bored), prepared the brown roux for Chef Pardus, since this took a long time to cook. Pardus could prepare the pale and blond roux during demo but he wanted the brown roux done at the same time. “Just like the TV shows,” he said.
We crowded around Table Two as Chef Pardus dumped three egg whites into a large stainless-steel bowl and took a whip to them “to denature the protein mechanically,” that is, break their bonds. “Just a little bit. We’re not making lemon meringue pie.” He dumped in the mirepoix. A half pound of ground beef shank—because the clarifying process also removes flavor, you must add more flavor. Then the tomato product: “We’re using canned, remember,” he said, “so we don’t have to worry about getting robbed of our acid in the middle of winter.” He added the stock, a nice gelatinous white beef stock. And Chef Pardus once again evaluated for quality.
“I’ve asked Victor to write this down,” the chef said. Victor Cardamone, from Table Three, stood by the white sheet of paper taped to the reach-in, marker in hand. “Clarity,” Pardus said. “It’s perfectly clear. You can read the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon.” Vic noted this on the large piece of paper. “Flaaavor,” Pardus continued. “A nice rich flaaavor, the flavor of the main ingredient. What else?”
Greg said, “Full body?”
Pardus concurred: “Full body, nice mouth feel, a rich, full body. Overall appearance?”
Ben said, “Not greasy?”
“Not greasy. Clean. Another?”
“Temperature?”
“Temperature,” Pardus said. “Hot. This is not a jellied consommé.” Pardus paused for a moment to look around. And here was what made Pardus a good teacher in my mind. He showed you the classic method, told you why, but then would let some of his own biases show through, broaden the subject to include his own personality. He’d get a little sparkle in his eye and his lips would start their unusual convolutions for popping emphasis. “Though you could make a jellied consommé,” he said. “It’s classical. You see how gelatinous this stock is? We made this clear and poured it into bowls, floated some garnish in it, and chilled it? It gels up. That’s very classic, very European summer appetizer—chilled jellied consommé. You don’t see it much in this country because people think it’s like eating meat-flavored Jell-O. But if it’s done right, it’s very delicate. You wouldn’t want a spoon to stand up in it. You couldn’t do Jell-O shots with it. Delicate. It’s very cool, very refreshing in the summertime. Jellied quail consommé? Little bits of truffle and foie gras set into the gelatin. Nice. Rich, refreshing.”
He stirred the consommé with a wooden spoon, released from his reverie. He had put it on a low flame and warned everyone about scorching and the need to stir frequently. “Don’t throw your pot away until after I’ve looked at your consommé.” The danger, of course, is that the egg whites will fall to the bottom before they coagulate, then stick there and burn. This gives the consommé a beautiful, deep amber color, but it doesn’t do much for the flavor. Pardus knows the color so well, he can take one look at someone’s soup and say, “Lemme see your pot.” And sure enough there will be burnt egg white on the bottom.
Adam, who typicall
y hovered at the back of the crowd and was tall enough to do so, asked, “I was wondering, does the clarification take out the gelatin?” Adam was always asking questions like that.
“No,” Pardus said.
“So is consommé a base for, like, aspic?”
“Yes.”
“It is?”
“M-hm,” Pardus said. “As a matter of fact, a lot of the Garde Manger classes will be coming up here, asking us to save our consommé so they can make their aspic for the Grand Buffet.”
There was quite a bit of standing around at this point, since we were all staring at the pot as Pardus stirred, waiting for it to come up to heat and form this so-called raft.
“So why is consommé important to know how to do?” I asked.
“Why is a consommé important to know how to do?” he repeated. He continued to stir with his wooden spoon, thoughtfully, pushing it into the edges of the marmite, making sure he didn’t feel any sticking egg white. “It’s a technique that requires some finesse,” he began. “It’s a soup that is popular, that is used quite frequently in good restaurants. And it’s something that takes some patience and training to know how to do. You can’t just tell somebody to go make a consommé, this is how you do it. It takes some practice.”
He stopped stirring, abandoning, for the moment, the party line for his personal thoughts as a cook who had moved through the ranks of several high-end French restaurants. “I would think that it brings together all the aspects of making a good stock and bringing that to the ultimate state of perfection. It’s a perfect stock.” That p in perfect really popped. “It teaches you to focus, teaches you to pay attention, to take care of ingredients. There’s some chemistry involved and coagulation; there are so many things going on in making it that the beginning cook is made aware of, instead of just making a bowl of soup.” He raised his eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, one of my friends had trouble with her consommé in this morning’s chef’s practical—and consequently probably won’t be teaching here.”
The Making of a Chef Page 6