The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  Pardus introduced us and told him what we were talking about. I asked him if he used a blond or a brown roux for his brown sauce.

  Pardus had told him I was a writer, and he stared at me suspiciously. “I teach what I’m asked to teach,” he said.

  “Personally,” I said. This was usually the word to use when trying to draw a chef away from the party line to their own beliefs, which most were happy to offer.

  “I’m old-fashioned. That’s all I’ll say.”

  He would not admit what we all knew. He was a brown roux guy.

  A squall had struck the Culinary Institute of America. I first got wind of it from Pardus, who told me about a dinner conversation he had had with a few other chefs. The chefs eat separately from the students, typically in the first alcove of Alumni Hall. On Day Twenty-Three of Skills, as our class gnawed away at our own braised lamb shank, Chefs Pardus, Smith, and Reilly, all of them CIA graduates, all of them relatively young, and Chef Almquist, a senior chef-instructor, sat discussing brown sauce. Chefs at the Culinary Institute of America did not talk foie gras and truffles at dinner, I was happy to know; instead, they talked brown sauce, specifically, what kind of roux one used. Chef Almquist, the ranking chef at the table whose girth suggested he had known many a brown sauce in his time, said, according to Pardus, “No one has made brown sauce with brown roux since Escoffier died!” This sort of definitive comment was common at the Culinary. Passions ran high on such matters.

  Chef Reilly, twenty-eight years old and a 1988 graduate, who had been a sous chef at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow, taught his Skills students to make brown sauce with a blond roux. Reilly’s contention, according to Pardus, was that one could make an excellent, richly colored brown sauce through deep caramelization of mirepoix and tomato and by using a richly colored stock. (Reilly stopped by Pardus’s kitchen after Chef Smith and I’d asked him for his own words on the subject; he shook his head.) A brown roux is difficult to make properly, takes much more time, and more care; a brown roux can turn from nutty to bitter in an instant, and thus required patience and finesse. Why use precious time to make a brown roux and, further, risk bitterness, when you could make a perfectly good brown sauce with blond roux? So said blond roux advocates.

  This was a reasonable response. Pardus himself liked the idea and intended to taste Reilly’s brown sauce to compare. Pardus was openminded. There’s more than one way to make stock, more than one way to make brown sauce. This was what a culinary education was all about.

  Two days after the brown roux discussion at dinner, matters became serious. A computer terminal stood beside Pardus’s desk; every kitchen had one, and Pardus spent time at this terminal daily, sending his food orders to the storeroom. He also picked up E-mail and announcements here. On Day Twenty-Five of Skills Two, he found this message in his mailbox:

  Chefs,

  According to our skills guide, professional cooking knowledge and the New Pro Chef, 6th edit., a brown sauce (sc. espagnole) is NOT made with a brown roux.

  Please refrain from teaching our students THIS incorrect method.

  The message was signed “Uwe” and added that if anyone had any questions, please see him.

  Pardus got really mad. He asked me to check my Pro Chef. I had the fifth edition. Sure enough the debate was evident even here. The recipe for “Sauce Espagnole (Brown Sauce)” in my edition of the Pro Chef called for six ounces of pale roux to thicken five pints of brown stock. But step two under “Method” reads, “Add brown roux to the mirepoix and gradually incorporate the veal stock or estouffade,” a crucial and revealing error.

  When I asked Chef Hestnar about this, he more or less evaded me in his Raymond Carveresque way; I asked why they didn’t teach a brown roux for a brown sauce and he rejoined with spare oblique stories: “Escoffier predicted that eventually roux would no longer be necessary … .” When I continued to press the issue he pushed his hand through the air and said, “Oh, forget the brown roux!”

  I couldn’t help it. Something fundamental was to be found in the question of brown or blond roux, something revealing in people’s preference for one or the other, how the school reacted to it, and the chefs’ response to Hestnar’s Roux Decree.

  “You can tell me that we have to teach a blond roux instead of a brown roux,” Pardus exclaimed, “but don’t tell me it’s an incorrect method.” This really burned him up.

  Pardus and Smith continued to discuss it that last night of Skills, my own brown sauce steaming on the table in a steel bowl. Pardus tried to make a case in favor of a slight amount of bitterness.

  Smith said it needn’t be bitter at all and doubted that you would ever want bitterness.

  Pardus handed Chef Smith a spoon and said, “This is Michael’s brown sauce. I think it’s pretty good.”

  Chef Smith tasted it. Chef Smith had eyes set so close together they seemed almost to touch. He squinted hard. He gave the impression of wanting either to spit or to hit me. Then he said, “Could be sweeter.”

  Chef Smith was cause for me to step back and take stock of the situation and the people I’d met here. First there had been the unusual Mr. del Grosso, a micropaleontologist who became a cook on the strength of an epiphany upon waking one morning on his living room floor. The sanitation instructor, Richard Vergili, was the sort of man who could have his students rolling on the floor with laughter during his lecture on e-coli bacteria; when I told people he did Atlantic City on the weekends, as Mr. Virgili himself had joked, they said “Really?” with admiration. The Product Identification man, Jay Stein, a former caterer, would go to the grocery store, buy seven kinds of lettuce, and rush home to lay them on the dining room table for a taste test; his teeth appeared to be ground on a slant, and I imagined this was an indication of his intensity. One of the Meat Fabrication instructors had been for years a baseball umpire in the minor leagues, had gotten his degree in English, and acted in community theaters; his name was Ligouri and he taught people to butcher meat for a living. Chef Pardus almost paled beside this hale cast.

  Shortly after Adam began Rudy Smith’s Introduction to Hot Foods, I asked him how he liked the chef.

  “The chef is great,” Adam said. “He’s a really smart chef.” Then Adam told me that Chef Smith used to live in a teepee.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  Rudy Smith, a 1986 graduate of the Culinary, was, for a time, executive chef of a restaurant called Krabloonik, in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Krabloonik was on a mountain. A single road wound up the mountain and dead-ended at the restaurant. One day Chef Smith walked uphill away from the restaurant, beyond any roads, for about thirty minutes, and pitched a teepee. He lived in this teepee for three years. Every workday he’d walk down the mountain to the top of the dead-end road and the restaurant. After work, he would fill water bottles and climb back up.

  I asked him why he quit living in a teepee.

  “Skiing,” he said. “I broke my leg in two places. My fourth time on skis.”

  A cast, of course, made it difficult to climb, especially through the snow of an Aspen winter. I asked him how it felt to return to civilization.

  He squinted at me and, without a trace of humor, said, “It was really hard to write that rent check.”

  He had lived for free on the mountain. His site was remote, and nobody bothered him. He dug a hole in the ground that, in the summer, served as a cooler. He had a battery-operated light and CD player. He joined a health club in town where he could shower. Chef Smith’s goal at the Culinary was to become a certified master chef. At the time there were forty-nine cooks in the country who had passed the grueling ten-day, 140-hour exam. Chef Smith believed this was the highest achievement in his profession. I figured someone who could live three years on a mountain in a teepee probably had the self-discipline to pass such a test.

  I wondered aloud what winters in the mountains of Colorado were like. This was ski country, snow measured not in inches but in feet. It must have been freezing, I said. Chef Smith narrowed
his eyes at me.

  “It’s important to have a really good sleeping bag,” he said.

  Part II

  The Formative Kitchens

  Introduction to Hot Foods

  “My name’s Rudy Smith, and I’ll be your chef for the next three weeks. It’ll be an interesting three weeks.”

  Day One, Smith said privately, is like running into a brick wall. By the first week he has the kitchen running smoothly; by Day Fourteen it runs itself; then the next day, boom—take two steps sideways and start again with eighteen new students.

  “Here we’re serving customers,” he said. “If we’re late, we’re penalizing them … . Speed needs to be much greater here. In the last class, you were learning skills, now you’re producing. This is a really big transition.

  “I need you guys to respond,” he said. “You need to challenge me. ‘Hey Chef, Escoffier says to do it this way, but you say to do it a different way. Why?’

  “I must taste everything before it goes out that door,” he said. “Everything goes through me. Think of me as a funnel.

  “Today is a day of following directions. It’s not a day I want you guys making decisions. If I say I want you to have a two-ounce ladle and you have a four-ounce ladle, that won’t be acceptable.”

  He stood in front of his desk and scarcely moved from there. His clean crisp chef’s hat made him seem seven feet tall.

  “I’m not here to teach you to season your soup,” he said. “I expect you to do it. When it’s perfect, bring it to me. Green beans, when they’re cooked, bring one to me so I can taste it. If I’m talking to someone, stick it in my face. I’ll know what you’re doing. I’ll say they’re done, you’ll run back and shock ’em. I want you to do that with every batch, every day, through Day Fourteen. That’s how you learn.”

  “I thrive on the classics. I live in the present,” he told his new class on Day One. “I’m very into the idea of giving attention to food. It’s like a child. The more attention you give it, the better it will be. Smell it, touch it, listen to it. You gotta give it everything you got. If you’re uptight and nervous, your food will come out that way.”

  Ben and Adam liked Chef Smith because, in Ben’s words, “he gets excited about food.” And to everyone’s relief, he turned out not to be the exmarine that everyone expected. Travis’s fears were unfounded. Even Erica would grow to appreciate Chef Smith because she said she learned from him. The reconfigured group seemed to be a good one. Greg, Bianca, Paul, and Travis also remained, and so did Lola from Staten Island, and Travis and Lola remained as one.

  “I’ll marry ya, but I’ll never work with ya,” Travis would say.

  “Oh, Trav,” Lola would say.

  Gone, however, were Lou and Eun-Jung and Len and Stupid-Ass Dave, Susanne and the rest, to a different Intro kitchen. There were an equal number of faces (and personalities and skill levels) to get used to, but the main thing to learn now was the chef and the demands of a new kitchen, a new classroom. Each chef had his or her own personality and this dominated the kitchen and could affect your grade if you didn’t abide. Some chefs liked a heavy use of salt. Some didn’t want you using black pepper or garlic. Some wanted you to flour meats that were to be sautéed (Smith); others wanted it patted dry but no flour (Pardus). Some did not want you to make decisions; others encouraged experiment and autonomy.

  In Chef Smith’s class, prep lists were elaborate and were to display a clear sequence of movements and times. If you were on braise, your prep card had better read “2:45 Roll, tie, season, sear meat” and “3:30 Pot roast in the oven.” One might also remind oneself “3:00 Check mise en place” since the supplemental order is placed at 3:15 and if you didn’t have everything you needed at service, it was your own fault; you either had it or you didn’t—no excuses, didn’t matter why. If you were on starch, your card should include “4:50 Start pilaf.” And everyone’s card read “6:05 Service.” Sometimes prep lists would go on for several cards. These cards were not checked, but if Chef Smith saw you in the weeds, he’d ask to see your cards. He could usually point to the spot on the card, the error or omission, that put you in the weeds.

  Chef Smith also wanted a card with your station setup; if you were on sauté, he wanted you to plan before class where your veal would be, where your bain-marie insert would be, and what utensils would be in it, where every item of your mise en place would be, from salt and pepper to clarified butter to the sliced mushrooms for your sauce champignon to the rack you’d hold your veal on while you made the sauce.

  Also you were to write on three-by-five cards all the recipes you would need for the day. On Day One the soups were puree of broccoli and chicken broth. The broil station would do lamb chops (Smith wanted them Frenched to the eye), which would be served with a cabernet-rosemary butter, orzo, ratatouille, and sautéed spinach. Sauté station prepped for veal scallopini champignon served with a lemon-almond rice pilaf, green beans, and ratatouille. Everyone would be responsible for the entire menu and should be able to answer questions regarding any station. Everyone would know the method, recipe, and history of each item without referring to notes.

  The breast pocket of a student in Chef Smith’s kitchen bulged with three-by-five index cards, along with a pen and an instant-read thermometer. And on Day One, Chef Smith could spend ten minutes at the roast station explaining how to use that thermometer.

  “It’s only as accurate as you are,” he would say, then ask if the thermometer were calibrated; you should calibrate your thermometer regularly. He explained what part of the metal bar read the temperature. When the roast station was ready to check the strip loin, he said, “You try to get to the coolest part of the meat there is. That will be the center of the thickest part of the roast.” He eased the thermometer into the meat. “How do you know you’ve got the center?” He waited, then said, “If you push it farther in, the temperature should rise.”

  Chef Smith generally would float through the kitchen, demonstrating how he wanted the broccoli florettes (wedged apart for a natural break rather than cut and small enough to fit on a spoon), tasting the vinaigrettes, tasting sauces, checking doneness, calling out, “It’s four-twenty. Are my potatoes on the stove?”

  “Yes, Chef!”

  “Is my roast in the oven?”

  “Yes, Chef!”

  The meals on Day One were clear and not altogether complicated. Everyone was usually frightened into overpreparing. Chef Smith would walk the hot line and explain to each student how to set that station. He was a stickler for perfect setup. “I’m a true minimalist,” he said. He wanted nothing extraneous, not even an errant grain of kosher salt.

  “Sauté, let’s talk about station setup,” Chef Smith said. “I want you to have a full hotel pan with ice, I want a half sheet pan here; I want your flour here, salt and pepper, spoons.” He turned to the range and, pointing, said, “Bain-marie here, clarified butter here, sauce here, white wine, stock, all of them with two-ounce ladles.” The veal would be pounded and rolled in three-piece portions. Why? “Because in service you don’t even have to look,” he said. “You’re doing two hundred fifty covers a night, the orders are coming, you just grab ’em, boom boom boom, they’re in!”

  In a restaurant situation, that is. Here, eighteen people would be preparing about eighty plates. The sauté station would do sixteen of them. Many people deride the kitchen experience at the Culinary as not being like a real restaurant. True, a third of the people would be needed were this an actual restaurant kitchen; on the other hand, a restaurant doesn’t change every item on its menu daily, start with nothing daily, not even cracked pepper. In Chef Smith’s class, you cracked your own pepper, minced it with your chef’s knife to the consistency you desired. You did everything the long way here.

  Chef Smith would cruise the long bank of ranges, beginning with broil and ending at roast, which had the use of a convection oven with glass doors. Learning how to set a station was a primary objective of this class. Chef Smith also wanted s
tudents to understand the types of meat on the menu and how they were cooked; they must be able to identify their total mise en place, have their mental mise en place in order, and be able to do all this in any kitchen in which they might find themselves. The transition from cooking one plate of food to sixteen plates required a shift of gears and deeper focus on execution. If they didn’t learn all these basics here, Smith said, they would not be able to focus on the new tasks coming their way in future kitchens.

  By five-thirty all were ready for Chef Smith to demo plates, and again he’d walk the line, preparing one plate at each station. He would begin at broil and demonstrate the quadrants of the grill for perfect cross-hatching during service. He explained that one should check doneness by touch, then by cutting into the meat to check your touch judgment. “This is the one kitchen where you can actually cut into each one to check doneness,” he said. “Take advantage of that.” To make sure no one misunderstood him, he reiterated that this would not be considered an acceptable way of determining doneness in a restaurant kitchen. He would then demo how he wanted the item plated and move on to the next station as service approached.

  During our Skills Two a change in service had occurred. Instead of receiving meal tickets and waiting in line outside K-9 for dinner, Skills One and other classes would be seated in Alumni Hall and waiters would take their orders. This meant that instead of having “customers” passing through your open kitchen, Intro students cooked with the doors closed and filled a hot box that would be wheeled to the dining room. While this made for a more orderly and refined dining experience, Chef Smith didn’t like it for his kitchen; it took the urgency away. You didn’t see the faces of people you served. He tried nevertheless to keep everyone working at production speed, telling the sous chef when to fire what orders, and the sous chef, standing between the hot box and the steam table that had been set up to hold the veg and starch, would shout, “Fire two sautés! Fire two roasts. Fire two broils!” or “Pick up two veg entrées! Pick up two braise!”