The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  “The food’s no different than what we do here,” Ben went on. “The sauce, they do a Madeira sauce that’s a little different, but the food’s not any different from what we’re doing. But the presentation is incredible.” He described the tuna dish, which included pasta ingeniously raveled into a tube around a stem of rosemary that stands about a foot off the plate. “It’s about this high,” Ben said gesturing. “It’s just an awesome dish.”

  On Day Eighteen of Skills we had begun to make single completed plates that would be our dinner. “If you blow it,” Pardus had said, “you go hungry.”

  We had begun with the most common and most commonly overcooked protein item in America: the chicken breast.

  “Sauté,” Chef Pardus said to begin his lecture, “is a blast. Sauté is where the action is on Saturday night. Sauté is where you guys all want to be in about three years, right? Sauté is the next step to sous chef. Sauté is the guy who’s juggling eight or ten pans at a time, makin’ flames, makin’ things jump. Sauté is the hot seat.” He paused, his little riff at an end, and turned to the easel with his spoon. “Sauté is: a rapid, à la minute cooking technique. It has no tenderizing effect, so the product has to be tender. You cannot sauté a lamb shank. The cooking is fast. That’s why it’s so much fun. Bing bang boom, it goes out the door. In a small amount of oil. Over high heat.”

  Pardus still lectured with energy but he had begun to look a little sautéed himself. He arrived at seven A.M. and rarely left before ten P.M. for his forty-five-minute drive home. His sauté lecture concluded a day during which he had tasted thirty-six brown sauces, thirty-six spoonfuls of duchess potatoes, thirty-six mouthfuls of cauliflower polonaise, thirty-six bites each of glazed zucchini and summer squash. He had assigned a numerical grade to each of those 180 mouthfuls.

  The following day, Pardus demoed our assignment: whipped potatoes, steamed Brussels sprouts, pan-steamed carrots cut in batonnets, and chicken breast sautéed and served with a reduction of stock, wine, and fresh herbs. One portion each, plated and hot at the same time. Nothing most of us hadn’t done at home in some form at one time or another. But here it was even easier. First, the chicken arrived in a suprême cut, boneless with one wing joint attached, a particularly elegant cut. Moreover, we had all the equipment, the heat, the steel sauté pans, plenty of clarified butter, plenty of stove space, and plenty of time. No one was late and many were as much as an hour early. And yet only one person so far as I knew had presented a perfect plate.

  I had not put enough clarified butter in my pan when I went to cook my chicken, and I had not ensured that the surface of the meat was dry (Pardus didn’t believe in dusting with flour), so my chicken stuck to the pan immediately. I frantically pryed it off, but a few strands of chicken, which I had obediently started service-side down for the cleanest appearance, remained stuck to the pan. I managed to cover the error by browning the surface to a dark gold that looked excellent to me. I plated the other items as my sauce reduced; I swirled in chopped parsley, chervil, and tarragon at the last moment, then plated the chicken and brought it to Pardus.

  My Brussels sprouts were very good, he said, as were my whipped potatoes. “You like whipped potatoes, I can tell,” he said. And then he bent close to scrutinize my chicken. “It looks like you overcooked the outside just a little bit. See this stringy, caramelized—” and he picked at it with the point of his knife, wincing. I stooped for a closer look and saw the strings he was talking about. I’d never noticed that chicken meat had such defined strings; thinking back on it, then, the chicken stuck to my pan in strings. Pardus then pressed the breast to check cooking time—he wasn’t tasting chicken—as I explained what happened. “Maybe your pan wasn’t hot enough,” he said. “Just a minute or two overcooked.” He cut into it. “See that grainy appearance in the meat?”

  I was flustered and agreed. I’d thought I’d done a good job. Pardus tasted my sauce, liked it, said a few more words I didn’t hear because I was mad about the chicken. As he bent pen in hand over his grade sheets, I regained my composure and said, “Wait a minute. Look how juicy it is. How can you say it’s overcooked?”

  He looked. “That’s true, it does look juicy.” He tasted the chicken for my benefit. “It’s juicy but the texture is still a little grainy.”

  His verdict stood, as I admitted to myself, it should. We were looking for perfection here, after all. This was where perfection began. My meat had cooked too long on the surface, having stuck to the pan; it had taken on more crunch and toughness to the bite than I had intended. It wasn’t perfect. It was my dinner, and with the elegant sauce, I thought it quite tasty. But not perfect. Acceptable, absolutely. Good, even. But not perfect.

  Perfection had come that day from Erica. Pardus had approached me a little after five o’clock, pulled me aside, and began to speak in quiet tones. Erica had just brought him an almost incredible plate. Sweating, terrified, and red in the face as always. Everything, he said, was perfect, perfectly and simply presented (“I don’t want you guys getting creative on me,” he would say. “I don’t want froufrou—concentrate on the food”), and perfectly cooked. “It was the kind of plate I’d expect from Greg or Adam,” he told me. “If I didn’t see her bring it up to me, if I didn’t know everyone in this class so well, I’d swear someone else did it. Blew me away. I would never have expected it.”

  Erica, who had scrambled the eggs meant for sauce hollandaise, clouded her consommé, served onion soup in a cold bowl, Erica, whose roux had caught fire, was improving.

  Each night at 6:30 most of us would eat together. I often asked people about what they were learning, how they were liking Skills. Len, my tablemate, said, “Now I know why things happen,” echoing a sentiment voiced by almost every student I encountered. Len said he could troubleshoot, think problems through. When he saw an emulsion beginning to look greasy on the surface, he said, he knew he needed to add more water and he knew why.

  Ben said he’d read about such mysterious concoctions as béchamel, had been curious about them, and was glad now to have done them himself.

  Adam likewise had never worked with the mother sauces. Now he had and he liked them. “I’d use a demi-glace,” he said, imagining a restaurant of his own. I asked him what he thought of the cauliflower polonaise. To my amazement, he liked this too. “I’d maybe change it though,” he added, “so that the cauliflower laid flat and somehow I’d make the breading stick.”

  Erica had found the polonaise pleasing as well, shyly noting, “I really like hard-boiled eggs.” Then she frowned and said, “Some people call me simpleminded.” This appeared to hurt her, this recognition, though she showed no compunction about offering it aloud as we all sat eating our trout à la meuniére with steamed new potatoes, green beans, and braised endive.

  I asked Erica what she’d learned so far in this class.

  We were all quiet as Erica mulled the question over. Then she chuckled and said, “Just about everything. I didn’t know any of this.”

  What could one say about Adam Shepard, beside whom I worked daily? I found him compelling because he seemed to be the one person who was solely interested in food. Almost everyone else said they had chosen this school mainly for the brighter financial prospects it promised. Adam never talked about money; money was simply something he would never have much of and that was fine by him. I had sat next to him in one of the front rows of the Danny Kaye Theater, where visiting chefs demoed their work for an audience and two video cameras. Chef Pardus had given us a break from class on Day Twenty-One to see Chef Michael Lomonaco, who had resuscitated a wheezy “21” Club and brought it to the forefront of New York restaurants serving American regional fare. Adam sat with his camera (he shot for the school newspaper, La Papillotte), slouched, propped on his left hand, waiting.

  I asked him what his ultimate goals were. He said, “To be the best possible chef I can be.” This was not a dumb, Miss America response; he really meant it. But I knew this already. In the best of all poss
ible worlds, I asked him, what would he be doing?

  “If I had fifteen million dollars?”

  I nodded.

  “I’d open a space that had a restaurant, a gallery, and a performance theater.”

  I stared at him and said, “You’re not a tradesman.”

  He said, “I told you I was an artist, too.”

  He had mumbled it, perhaps, but here he offered it plainly, with a self-protective shrug. Here was one student who hoped to aspire to the level of artist.

  After the lively performance by Lomonaco who, unlike many chefs, was enormously articulate and spoke well that day about the importance of regional fare and quality ingredients, I said, “Good demo.”

  “I guess,” Adam said.

  It had been better than “I guess” for me on a number of counts, not least of which was that Lomonaco had given some perspective to our daily classes. Watching him sauté whitefish—a Great Lakes fish served with morels and asparagus—was itself instructive: he first placed the filet in the pan, heard very little sizzle, and pulled it immediately. His pan wasn’t hot enough. He checked the flame, waited a moment longer, then lay the fish in the pan and a loud crackling began. This was just as Pardus had taught us.

  Adam, however, remained unimpressed with Lomonaco. Adam’s standard was never less than perfection. And they remained so in class, I found, when he and I teamed up for the roasted chicken with pan gravy—one chicken for every two people. When Pardus called us over for the second part of the demo, I pulled our chicken out of the oven. It was nearly done and I didn’t want to overcook it. Adam was furious when he found the chicken. He thought I’d thrown everything off. He’d had everything under control. And he pretty much remained furious all the way up until he made the pan gravy—there was no discussion who would make it—though it wound up with little black specks in it. I told him to settle down, the six-o’clock deadline was not in effect today because of the Lomonaco demo. “Yeah?” he said.

  Adam was a loner, didn’t depend on anyone, and didn’t want anyone depending on him. He used his own equipment, never borrowed. When Eun-Jung grabbed his tongs from their customary spot on the handle of the oven, and he needed them, he would say, “Eun-Jung, I thought you had your own tongs.” Eun-Jung would look at the tongs in her hand and look back at the tongs on her cutting board, and say, “I am sorry, Adam.” Later, Adam had set his braised lamb shank on the flattop to keep it hot as he strained and degreased his sauce. When he turned around again, the pot his shank was in had begun to smoke. Quickly, he reached for his tongs to get his pot off the heat. His tongs were not there. Eun-Jung was at the stove an arm’s length away holding her own lamb shank in the air with his tongs, casually watching sauce drip off of it into her pot.

  “Eun-Jung!” Adam cried, gritting his teeth. Eun-Jung glanced at Adam.

  Adam looked for anything to pull his smoking marmite off the heat, found a fork to drag it to a cool spot. The shank was stuck to the bottom. While he tried to pry it loose, cursing, the sauce he had so carefully strained and degreased boiled to almost nothing. He had just enough to reconstitute it with water. Finally, in the mad rush to get his plate to Pardus on time—at last sprinkling his gremolata just so over the plated shank and rushing it to the desk where Bianca’s food was presently under scrutiny—only then did I tell him that he must sign his name. And wait. “Aw, man,” he said. I took some pleasure in this. My shank was, according to Pardus, “very good”; then, the complex flavors continuing to open on his palate, he changed his verdict: “Excellent.” Adam’s, by the time he presented, was less so, but Pardus took the waiting time into account.

  It had been a tricky day. Chef Pardus continued to stress the building of flavors; teaching palate was one of his chief aims as a Skills instructor; what good were skills if you couldn’t taste for proper seasoning, proper balance. Shank day, we worked on sweet-sour-salty combinations with glazed beets and braised cabbage with Granny Smith apples, seasoned with vinegar, juniper berries, clove, bay leaf, and cinnamon. I had been looking forward to the juniper berries because I’d never used them before and they smelled wonderfully like gin. But did I taste the cabbage to try to distinguish the effects of the juniper berries? No time. No time to even think about sweet-sour-salty. The demo hadn’t ended till quarter to four. The shanks, once you seared them, would take an hour and a half to cook to fork-tender, then you’d have to put the sauce together and the rest of the plate. We were serving the shank with turned steamed artichoke hearts and buttered fettuccine; this took planning because the pasta dough had to rest at various stages. A few people wrote their name down at six o’clock even though they weren’t finished. Ben finished before six but didn’t write his name down in time and was therefore late and he was furious.

  Back at the table, after deadline had come and gone and the kitchen calmed, Adam said, “I’m sorry, Eun-Jung.”

  Eun-Jung said, “Yes, yes,” not looking at him.

  “I’m sorry I got so mad at you.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Adam looked at me with frustration and said, “She doesn’t even understand what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, “I am sorry, Adam.”

  Every now and then, despite my own underlying competitiveness with Adam, we would share a moment of sympathy. Fennel big as cabbage had arrived from the storeroom (we would eventually braise it), and its size got us talking about vegetable gardens. I said to Adam, as I could not say to Erica or Len or Eun-Jung, “Cooking food you have grown is an almost unequaled pleasure.”

  Adam nodded immediately. Then he said, “Lettuce. Everyone knows what a good fresh tomato tastes like. Whether you grew it yourself or got it from a market. The freshness holds. But lettuce pulled straight out of the garden—there’s nothing like it. It is so tasty if you can pull it out of the ground and have it on the table in ten minutes.”

  Pardus had picked up on Adam’s sensibilities as well. When he lectured on potatoes, the various starch-to-water ratios of baking, chef’s and new potatoes, new potatoes having high water content resulting in their creaminess, he noted that new potatoes just dug from the ground and cooked right away were a genuine treat. “Has anyone—I bet you have, Adam—has anyone eaten freshly dug new potatoes?” he asked. “Just steamed and with a little butter. It’s a really wonderful thing.” I looked back at Adam, who nodded Sure have.

  And it was Adam who explained to the class during Chef Pardus’s lecture on deep frying that you could run a diesel engine on a mixture of equal parts kerosene and Fry-Max, the deep-frying oil used at the school.

  Adam was a cook, I began to think, in the very best and most unusual ways. It wasn’t a matter of desire alone, or ability, I began to realize, but rather something in one’s chemical makeup and psychological wiring that made this so. In my notebooks I wrote down something Adam said that revealed an elemental part of himself. He said, “I can be having a bad day, a really lousy day. But as soon as I get into this kitchen I get a boost; it all changes.”

  There had been in our group a young guy named Matt from a small coal town in the middle of Pennsylvania. He was the one who had told Pardus on the first day of Skills that he didn’t know why he was here. Matt, a friendly, wiry fellow, was always the last to finish. When he broke his consommé raft, he wouldn’t do it just once. It would take him forever, it seemed, to emulsify his mayonnaise, even though he whipped it like a madman. Midway through Skills Two, Matt didn’t show up for class and the rumor spread that he was moving to Hawaii. The next day I called his room. There was loud music in the background. Yes, he said, it was true.

  Matt was simply uncomfortable in a kitchen. The physics didn’t come naturally to him.

  Adam, on the other hand was apparently more at home in a kitchen than anywhere else. I grew to suspect that some people, maybe most people, who became good professional cooks didn’t choose to be that way. They were simply fulfilling something that was in their nature to begin with.

  The night of the
lamb shanks ended a long week. Adam headed off to Vassar down the road to hear a band called Morphine. Ben and others were off to drink anywhere but Gaffney’s, the local CIA watering hole. I headed up icy Route 9 toward Tivoli, wondering about my own chemistry, my own choices.

  A System of Values

  Culinary Skill Development Two rarely veered from the basics. Vegetables, Chef Pardus instructed us, once an afterthought, now contributed nutritional balance to a plate, added flavor, provided color and textural contrasts. “Sort of like a sauce, huh,” he said. “It’s part of the whole picture now. It’s not just a garnish, it’s part of the meal.”

  We had braised shank to learn the technique of braising, and we had roasted chicken to learn the technique of roasting.

  “What is the difference between baking and roasting?” Pardus asked. “Today, roasting is done in an oven. So is baking. What’s the difference?” Various answers were shouted out simultaneously.

  Adam said, “Essentially, they’re the same except they’re different products.”

  “Essentially the same, just different products?” Pardus said and stopped to consider this. The class nodded, thinking Adam had got it right. “Nope,” Pardus said. “There is no difference. It’s a semantic difference.”

  Adam, peeved, said, “I thought you were talking about bread and meat.”

  “There’s no difference,” Pardus continued. “We bake bread. We roast meat. Right?” Pause. “What do you do to a ham? You bake a ham. So it doesn’t always follow.”

  And when we learned to braise and sauté, one question seemed to occur to all.

  “Now what about searage?” Pardus asked, his back to the range as we circled around him.

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” Adam said.

  Ben said, “To give it color and flavor.”

  “You sear meat,” Pardus said, “to give it color and flavor and aroma. All of those things come from caramelization. It does not seal in juices. There are people who teach in this school who will tell you that it does. I thought that for a long time. I’m sure most of you thought that for a long time. Sounds good, sure. Seizes up the outside, makes a crust, must seal in the juices. It doesn’t happen that way. If you don’t believe me, read McGee.”