I asked him why he hired externs (he himself had no formal culinary education). He said they were a good deal. Cheap labor, available when you want them, they show up, they can fill in anywhere, and they speak English. (Externs typically earn seven dollars an hour or so, but can earn as much as twelve or as little as nothing.)
When I asked Vinnie how Adam was doing, he reiterated Schenk’s concerns, then grew protective of Adam and told me how wonderful he was.
John Schenk was a hands-on executive chef and this impressed Adam. “He’s there all the fuckin’ time,” Adam told me. “He comes in at twelve o’clock, gets behind the line at twelve-thirty, does lunch. At two-thirty, three o’clock, he splits for maybe an hour; then he comes back and does all the inventory and puts together the order sheet and he gets behind the line at five-thirty, cooks dinner, and after dinner he does the prep sheets for the next day and goes home.”
And so it was today. Adam began the soup sets at twelve-twenty-five, placing diced potato, asparagus tips, and leeks into bowls ready for the asparagus soup, and soon Schenk, moving onto the line between Vinnie and Adam, started calling out orders and cooking. Lunch is fast, “a free fall,” as Schenk put it. By twelve-forty, orders were coming out as fast as ticker tape, and in an instant Schenk had two long white rows of tickets dangling from the service shelves above his station.
“Ordering two monk,” Schenk called, turning back and forth to the oven behind him, cooking as he expedited. “Ordering a soup, fire crab, pick up the tuna. Cook cook cook. Ordering chicken. Fire ravioli, fire two paillards medium, firing a monk, fire squid.” And the runners circled down into the kitchen and back up the stairs with giant trays above their shoulders.
At one point, mid-service, a tad weeded and trying to keep straight in his head what he’d ordered and what he’d fired, he looked up from a sea of tickets with a breezy smile and said, “Why don’t we just fire every fucking table, solve all our problems.” Then he cooked some more, Adam beside him a blur of motion.
“Ordering a double,” Schenk said. “Pop three chickens.” Adam had them ready above the oven on sizzle platters and spun to put them in the oven. “Let’s pick up a chicken, four bass, and a tuna,” Schenk said.
When it was over, Adam seemed disappointed. “By the time you get in the groove, it’s over.” Adam hadn’t gotten out of there until six-thirty, the night before, prepping P.M.’s new menu—chopping and searing oyster, cremini, chanterelle, morel, and shiitake mushrooms, and chorizo—nearly eleven hours after he’d arrived. He would be here late again this night, searing more mushrooms. He liked the hours, the hot-and-heavy service, but he was looking forward to returning to the Culinary the following January. There was still a lot to learn.
Meanwhile Travis worked the P.M. line at the Duck Club in Kansas City, where he’d cooked for, among others, Marcus Allen and Steve Bono of the Kansas City Chiefs. Lola had gotten a job at the Rainbow Room and the job would pass in a blink. When they returned five months later it would seem as if they’d never left. School went on. Every three weeks, seventy-two students would graduate and seventy-two students would begin Introduction to Gastronomy, as the same number left for and returned from externship. Erica would be back from her externship at the Trellis, older and more skilled; by the time she was back in a hot kitchen she was not only a competent student, she was a desirable partner to have because of her speed and proficiency.
And her old friend Dave had one of the most interesting externs of all—a job at Michel Richard’s Citronelle in Georgetown, working under head chef Larbi Darouche, who had worked under Jean-Louis Palladin at Jean-Louis at the Watergate Hotel. This was the big time. Dave was doing prep work his first day when Darouche asked him if he wanted to help out with a banquet for eighty people. Dave would never dream of saying no, of course, though it would take him out of the kitchen. As it turned out, Dave found himself at a swank Washington club. Larbi’s buddy, Jean-Louis Palladin, stopped by to help out. As did Richard. So, on his first day of externship, David Scott, veteran of Michael Pardus’s Skills class, worked a banquet with Michel Richard on his right and Jean-Louis Palladin on his left. He spilled mashed potatoes on Richard’s shoe.
Part IV
Second Year
Thermal Death Point
I arrived shortly before six A.M. on Day One and hung back in the hallway outside Bakeshop Two as sleepy students materialized in the hall, their first day back from externship. A couple were lively enough to offer happy exclamations upon being reunited with friends, but the hall was mainly quiet. Chef Richard Coppedge strode into his bakeshop and locked the door behind him. A few people muttered questions about which chef that was and which class they were in—we were evenly divided among pastry and bread—and at six on the nose, Chef Coppedge’s head emerged from the doorway and he said, “O.K.”
Chef Coppedge, a bone-thin giant black man, baked bread. According to Chef Shepard, he had galvanized the entire bread-baking program, which had apparently been stuck for years in hard-roll hell. I often used Chef Pardus as a sounding board before I moved into a new kitchen. “I happen to like him,” Pardus said when I asked about Coppedge. “Some people don’t like him. Everyone respects the hell out of him.” Pardus concluded simply: “He’s the bread guru.” And Marcus Färbinger, former pastry chef of Le Cirque and now a team leader for curriculum and instruction, told me that when Coppedge showed faculty and students what you could do with bread, overt passion for bread became possible. Coppedge had made bread cool.
We filed in. Chef Coppedge stood at the door examining each of us as we entered. “You need black shoes,” he said to a student who wore black canvas sneakers with white trim. Come back when you have them.”
“I don’t have any,” the student said.
Coppedge shook his head. “Get some by tomorrow.” He notified all those with long sideburns to get rid of them. Anyone with fingernails, cut them. “Your hands are in the dough all the time,” he said.
When all were in the bakeshop he said, “You’ve got till tomorrow to be in code. These are not my rules, they’re the school’s rules, so don’t gripe at me. If I’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it. If it were up to me, I’d have a beard, I’d be wearing shorts, and baking bread. But there has to be some continuity.
“Welcome back from externship,” Chef Coppedge said, then paused. “We’ll be making all the bread for the entire school for lunch. As you know, this place goes on no matter what. It has to. So turn to page thirty-three and let’s get mixing.”
And that was all the welcome there was time for. Some of the students had returned to Hyde Park as recently as last night. Some had been gone the requisite eighteen weeks, others longer, until they’d saved enough money for the second half of the program. Josh had been gone eighteen months. A guy named Jerry had worked in the test kitchen of Cooking Light magazine in Birmingham, Alabama. He hoped to go into journalism after graduation seven months from now. Another student named Ross had been on the line at Gramercy Tavern while Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic for The New York Times, was reviewing the restaurant. He made three dishes that went to Reichl’s table, everyone at her table having ordered tasting menus. This was exciting, Ross said. The cooks found out what she looked like—if they didn’t already know—after Patrick Clark, chef at Tavern on the Green who had recently been skewered and roasted by Reichl, had sent a copy of her picture with a description of what the woman could do to your restaurant to every restaurant in New York. An exaggeration perhaps, but Gramercy Tavern had Clark’s letter pinned to the board “like a wanted poster,” Ross said. He had seen the same letter in the kitchen of the Union Square Cafe. Serving Reichl wasn’t different from serving anyone else, Ross said, except that for Reichl, you tasted everything twice before sending it out. After Reichl gave the restaurant and chef Tom Colicchio three stars, little changed because they’d been booked to capacity every night anyway.
Anthony had externed at the Hudson River Club under Chef Waldy Malouf and n
ow answered “Oui, Chef!” to every instructor out of habit; he was threatened with termination if he didn’t respond this way in Malouf’s kitchen. Steve had externed at a restaurant outside Cleveland that I had once written about; Steve called returning to the Culinary “a necessary evil.”
And Jason Dante had been at a hotel in Dallas, cooking starch for five months, and was glad to be back in school. Dante was from West Monroe, Louisiana. He pronounced it MON-roe. He said “own” for “on” and “earl” for “oil.” Chef Coppedge had hardly begun before Dante spoke: “Question of the day, Chef. Do we get to eat what we cook?”
“We’re not cooking, we’re baking,” Coppedge said, and that was all the answer Dante got.
Our first stop was the oblique mixer, which could handle two hundred pounds of dough. We would get lean dough number one mixing first. A different team would be responsible for lean dough number one each day. At six A.M. that team would put thirty-six pounds of water into the giant Hobart mixer and dissolve eighteen ounces of fresh yeast in it, then dump in forty-five pounds of high-gluten flour, nine pounds of organic wheat flour, and more than a pound of salt. This would give us a little more than ninety-two pounds of dough. Coppedge wanted his bread doughs kept at 70–75 degrees, something one could regulate by water temperature; Coppedge knew what the temperature of the water should be each day from the feel of the room.
Once the first lean dough was mixing, Coppedge said, “I know you’re used to cooking. Cooking is a mad dash. Baking is different. Baking is regimented. It is disciplined.”
One noticed the differences between a kitchen and a bakeshop immediately. This bakeshop, located in the Continuing Education building across from Roth Hall, was large, quiet, and cool, with five rows of wood workstations, or benches. There were no stoves, only ovens. The majority of the ingredients were kept in large rolling bins labeled “white rye,” “dark rye,” “coarse rye,” “King Arthur all-purpose,” “90% organic,” “bleached all-purpose,” “stone ground whole wheat,” “bran,” “1st clear,” “cake,” “milk powder,” “durham,” “pumpernickle.”
One felt an ease in this bakeshop that did not exist in a kitchen. In a bakeshop, you only put things together; you did not break, tear, or cut things apart first. In a kitchen, everything was about speed, and you could regulate that speed by moving faster, cutting faster. Here, everything was determined by flour and yeast, and you had to accept that. In America, a land of durable wheat, ingredients are measured in relation to flour (in France they are measured in relation to water). No matter how much lean dough we’d make, the starting formula was the same: 100 percent flour, 60 percent water, 3 percent fresh yeast, and 2 percent salt. This was called the Baker’s Percentage.
The names of major appliances in a bakeshop were named for their effect on yeast. The refrigerator was neither a cooler nor a reach-in, but instead a retarder; cool temperatures slow yeast. You let dough rise in a proof box. The very term “proof”—letting the dough rise—was in fact a term that originated when bakers needed to prove their yeast was alive, gobbling dough and releasing the gases that leaven the bread.
Here was the crux of the matter: yeast was alive. We would always be working with something that was actively responding to its environment. “A dough waits for no one,” Coppedge would say. “Dough is alive until we bake it. Steak has no opinions. This has an opinion until we bake it.”
Each team of three or four people would be responsible for a different dough. While we would follow recipes, and there were general proofing times and baking times, Coppedge explained, “I’d rather you look at it, listen to it, watch it, see what happens.” Coppedge could tell a dough was properly mixed by the sound it made in the mixer. He cut a chunk of lean dough and began to spread it with his long fingers into a square. When we could stretch the dough so that it would become almost translucent and not tear, he taught us, we had developed a good dough.
“The dough is in your hands,” he said. “It’s not like you’re sautéing. You’re not using a knife. It’s in your hands. It’s alive. You work with it, it works with you.”
“It’s very romantic stuff,” Dante said.
Chef Coppedge said, “That’s why my wife married me.”
Because yeast is alive, it’s possible to overlook the substance without which yeast would be irrelevant: gluten. Here one needed only to turn to the pages of the redoubtable McGee for imaginative explanation. Flour contains many substances—starch, enzymes, sugars, lipids—all rather prosaic constructions. “The one exception,” McGee writes, “is the proteins which, when mixed with water, form that remarkable substance we call gluten.” He defines gluten, which is not water-soluble, as “the gumlike residue that remains after you have chewed on a piece of raw dough for a few minutes.” Without it there would be no such thing as raised bread. Gluten is a network of proteins strong and flexible enough to expand without breaking and therefore contain gas as it is released by our helpful fungi. The more flexible the dough, the more gas it can retain; the more gas, the bigger the volume and finer the texture.
When you read about bread, whether in McGee or any other book that examined the science of the stuff, it sounded terrifically complicated, what with the gluten forming, yeast consuming carbohydrates and releasing carbon dioxide and ethanol, starch gelatinizing at 140 degrees, protein coagulating at 160 degrees. This was not the simple staff of life we had always considered it to be.
For Chef Coppedge bread was an enormously complex physical system and simple at the same time. The man lived bread. When Coppedge took a vacation, he relaxed by traveling to Boise, Idaho, and baking bread with his friend and former student, Gary Ebert, who opened the Zeppole Bakery. When they were not baking bread, they talked about baking bread. The kind of bread they discussed was called artisan bread, which Coppedge said accounted for about 5 percent of all bread consumed in the United States. Most of the bread sold in the United States is white, presliced, and stacked on grocery store shelves in colorful plastic bags. Artisan bread had become enormously popular recently, but, as Coppedge said, “You’ve got to sell a lot of bread to make a little money.”
Chef Coppedge, forty years old, received his culinary education at Johnson & Wales immediately after high school and returned to that school to teach after working throughout the East Coast as a baker and pastry chef; he had been at the Culinary for four years and had been baking for fifteen years. Every now and then he felt an urge to move to Idaho permanently to bake bread with Ebert, but he knew that he was a teacher as well as a baker. Also, Coppedge said, “I like that oven there.” The Culinary had installed in his bakeshop a magnificent hearthstone deck oven—three tiers of refractory cement, two meters deep; two tiers were gas-heated, one electrically heated, and all included steam injection and were computercontrolled. The steam was crucial for great crust. He had never had access to such a good hearth. “You can just leave me here forever,” he said.
As a bread-baking skills instructor, Coppedge taught two things, mixing dough (“I can hear it from across the room”) and fermentation.
Mixing, even with the aid of the massive Hobarts (in olden times, Coppedge said, bakers didn’t need to use salt; the dough became salty from the sweat of the people kneading huge quantities of dough), was not a simple combining of ingredients. Yeast, crumbled into the water, must be dispersed evenly. Flour was added and immediately the water began to bind with it; gluten began to form, and yeast began to feed on the carbohydrates in the flour. The salt, added next, tended to slow the yeast down. If the day were cool and dry and you began with cool water, you could mix the dough long and slow and develop the glutens nicely. But the very act of mixing the dough heated it, as did the gobbling yeast. If the day were hot and humid, you’d want to watch the dough carefully. Coppedge taught us to mix dough not by direction, but rather by “looking at it, feeling it, hearing it.” The behavior of dough varied because it was alive. And it would stay alive until it had nothing left to eat or you brought it to 138 deg
rees. This was called the Thermal Death Point for Saccharomyces cerevisiea.
Fermentation was what made bread baking a science and an art, Coppedge said. Raised dough began with the “chance contamination by airborne yeasts,” according to McGee, probably in Egypt around 4000 B.C. Today this is the method chosen by artisans, and it’s called sourdough; sourdough is not a flavor (throughout most of history, sour bread was as desirable as sour wine). One allows a mixture of equal parts flour, which likely has yeast on it already, and water to become contaminated by yeast in the air; at room temperature, these yeasts feed on the flour and reproduce; if you keep adding more flour and water to this slack dough, the yeast culture will grow, feasting on carbs and releasing gas, leaving lactic and acetic acids in its wake. McGee says American sourdough began in California when gold miners had no access to yeast and had to use leftover dough to start a new fermentation. The air in San Francisco, the city now associated with sourdough, will, it is said, create a different-tasting starter than the air in Hyde Park. Some practitioners of the form believe that the sourdough starters have nuances as rich as wines, depending on where they are from and how old they are. Good sourdoughs will have a deeper, more complex flavor than loaves made from commercial yeast.
When I talked to Chef Coppedge about bread, hoping to get a sense of the spirit of his work, the spirit of baking, and what distinguished it, he spoke of “putting the microflora to work …” but trailed off there, reverentially. Sourdough was, he said, “the pinnacle”—I assumed of bread making, but he trailed off again. Whenever I asked him to locate the source of his passion, he could scarcely finish a sentence, so ineffable was the notion of leavened bread. Chef Coppedge stopped naming his sourdough starters after friends’ dogs, he said, but his oldest starter dated to February 8, 1985. There was a bit of a scare last block when one of his students used the entire starter by mistake in one of the doughs. Coppedge called his wife. They rent a house on twenty-eight acres in neighboring Staatsburg and he’d put a spare sample of that starter in the barn a while back. He hadn’t touched it in years. His wife retrieved the sample, drove it down to the Culinary, and met her husband in front of the school. Liquid had risen to the top, but Coppedge poured that off and the starter was still good; the yeast was dormant, still alive. We would continue to build it daily with equal parts rye and wheat flour.
The Making of a Chef Page 23