The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  A quiet voice, I knew not whose, said, “Taste it?”

  “TASTE!!!” the chef shouted, his index finger zooming into the air, veins popping in his neck, his whole frame lifting several inches into the air. “THE ONLY THING WE’RE DOING! I SAID YESTERDAY! HERE YOU ARE! ALL THAT TIME!” He paused. “To make it taste good.” He held his hands out. “Taste. Taste, taste, taste, we have to constantly taste it. And when it tastes,” he dropped to a whisper, “sooooo good that it HURTS! You know you’re there. Then you know you’re there.

  “Now!” he continued. “It may or may not be the correct consistency. Most of the time it’s too loose. What did you just mention, Paul, about putting it on a plate? Well that would be the perfect way to check consistency. Not on a ladle, because you’re not gonna serve it on a ladle. You’re gonna serve it”—whisper—“on a plate. Probably a warm dinner plate. Put a portion on a plate and move it around on the plate. If it has a nice light consistency, that is a judgment call—but if you put it on a plate and it sits there like chocolate sauce, you got a problem, you got a big problem. You need to thin it. Taste, that’s the most important thing, check consistency on a warm dinner plate, then we strain it, it’s ready to use. It’s a finished product.”

  He paused, satisfied.

  “Any questions? O.K., so it’s a finished product. It’s ready to use. We can just take it, warm it up, put it on a plate, out the door, don’t have to do anything to it. So here you are.” His lips curl into a sinister smile. “Hot. On the line, million pans, plates goin’ out the door. You’re turned around, you’re plating it, you turn around, and that sauce that you’re just warming up in there just to serve suddenly looks like chocolate sauce. It’s too thick. What do you do? What do you add to the pan?”

  “Water,” said John.

  “Water! Why?!”

  “Because that’s what cooked out of it.”

  “Right! Don’t reach for the stock. Water’s cheaper, it’s always at the tap, and all you did was cook the water out. We just said it’s at the flavor profile we wanted. Add water and it will be right back up to that flavor profile you started with.

  “So, we really hammered that recipe around, didn’t we?” he said, smiling, this time playfully. “But that’s a way to look at something like this. I could have just taken a recipe and said, why, when, where, and how. Well, there’s also a concept behind it. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that thing. This is what cooking’s about, right here. There’s intuition and feeling and other things, gut feelings, that you’re dealing with, but if you look at it in these ways and you always come back to this one right here, it’s always going to work right for you. And that’s the base right there, that’s what you always have to work on is that base.

  “This is an ideal,” he concluded. “What we just went through, that is the best way to go. Not all of you will follow career paths that will allow you to do that. You will walk into places and they will have containers of base, and that is what you—will—use. Now, you can turn your nose up at it, and say this is no good. Or, you can be a chef and say, ‘How can I make that stuff taste better?’ Because you’re gonna have some vegetable trimmings and meat trimmings, you’ll have a variety of seasonings and herbs and stems. You can really boost the flavor of those bases and make them something.”

  He asked for questions.

  Bill Scepansky said, “Do you always take it in a certain flavor direction or would you serve it just like that?”

  “The beauty of it is,” De Santis said, “by itself it tastes great, but it picks up flavors”—snap!—“just like that. So if you had some venison bones, and you roasted them off, and you put them in a pot and add some fond de veau and simmered it, no reduction, just simmered it for about fifteen minutes, turned the heat off, put a lid on, let it sit there for forty-five minutes, strained it out”—snap!—“tastes like venison, with all those characteristics, tastes just like venison. That’s the beauty of that one. It’s got a certain neutrality, but by itself still tastes delicious. All right, I’ve killed that one. I’m runnin’ out of time. I luv talkin’ about that. That food is good as it gets. Let’s shoot over to one ninety-two.”

  And for the rest of class he ran through base recipes from Techniques of Healthy Cooking, fascinating, even ingenious recipes. This was not a health-food book, not with items like “Sausage-Stuffed French Toast with Winter Fruit Compote” and “Grilled Quail Wrapped in Prosciutto with Figs and Wild Mushrooms,” but it was concerned with making good food reasonably healthful.

  Page 192 described a basic creamy velouté that used evaporated skim milk for body and texture—a technique.

  Twenty pages later, another technique, this one for a vinaigrette. “Now here’s what we’re doing in this place,” De Santis said proudly. “It uses stock in place of two of the three parts oil. Still got four parts finished product, only five grams of fat, trace of cholesterol. My recommendation is to use vegetable stock. When you got that reduced chicken stock and start pouring it over your nice little greens, it tastes like cold chicken soup with lettuce. It’s no good, believe me. Vegetable stock is nice; it’s got a good vegetable flavor that goes nice with salad and all those things.” Simply thicken hot tasty vegetable stock with a pure starch to the consistency of oil and cool it, he said, then add half as much oil. “If you stop at that point, if you combine only these two, I call it a vinaigrette base. Because all I need to do is take three parts of base, add one part of vinegar or any acid to it, I’ve got a vinaigrette, I can make all kinds of good stuff, just like you would take oil off the shelf. And yet it’s different than what we do traditionally, but we’ve got a great product.”

  “I like it better,” said Theresa, who was on garde manger with Russ.

  “Yeah, I love this thing, too,” De Santis said. “I think this is the way to go. It’s lighter on the palate, you don’t have that real oily feel to it. You have the same characteristics, because you’ve thickened it, and it coats the leaves real nice.”

  St. Andrew’s ice cream was called glace, because there wasn’t any cream in it. It replaced all cream and milk with ricotta cheese and yogurt, all the sugar with maple syrup. St. Andrew’s used ricotta in creamy dressings, in pastry dough, in ice cream and dessert sauces—it had the binding properties of eggs and the feel and texture of fat. Simple. All you had to do was purée it to death.

  “Dairy base,” De Santis said. “Again, here’s that ricotta cheese action going on. First step, purée the ricotta cheese. That’s the important step. If you take the ricotta cheese, then you add your yogurt, maple syrup, and vanilla, you have vanilla sauce.” Evil whisper: “It’s ready to go. You just have to turn on a processor, blender, make it all smooth, pour it on a plate, and you can serve it as vanilla sauce! And it tastes really good all by itself, just like it is; you don’t have to do anything to it! You can add some flavorings to it, maybe some instant coffee, dissolved with a tablespoon of hot water, so it’s really intense; you’d never want to drink it; pour it in there and make a little cappuccino kind of sauce. You can do all kinds of craziness with it. But it’s a base recipe. You can use it as your sauce. It’s got a beautiful consistency for that.”

  Put it in your ice cream maker—snap!—you got glace. I had tasted this glace, as passion fruit glace, chocolate glace, and raspberry glace, and it was every bit as satisfying as ice cream. But there was a problem, De Santis said.

  “It’s not a stable product. What that means is if you leave it in the freezer overnight, and you come with your scoop the next day, it’s gonna be like scooping this tabletop.” He smacked the table with his knuckle. “That stuff is very hard because it’s very low in fat.” It was important to put it in the refrigerator the night before you wanted to serve it, he said.

  And on he went—forcemeats (rice instead of fatback), the gumbo (a dry roux, baked flour), a soufflé that used skim milk, cornmeal, and puréed fruit—till it was time to head up to the kitchen and start prepping for the tasting and for service.
We would stuff ourselves with bites of gnocchi, salmon, beef, the pork, the chicken and shrimp in saffron broth, and then we would break that down and put family meal up and eat again. And then we would cook some more for people who had come to taste the food and dig the scene.

  “Now is the time to plan, now is the time to get ready for the graduation,” Chef De Santis said. “The industry is a lot different now than even five years ago, and you’ve got some serious challenges in front of you. You need to be aware of what’s expected of tomorrow’s chef. Things you will need to do and to know when you get out in the field.”

  We sat in the quiet lecture room on our final day in St. Andrew’s, and Chef De Santis launched softly at first, but with gathering volume, into the lecture he delivered every seven days. The food world was changing rapidly, he told us, and he wanted to touch on a few ideas that we might want to turn over in our minds before we graduated and moved into the field. For a man or woman trained as a cook, there were today far more dangers and opportunities than ever before.

  “You need to have good technical skills,” he began, “and I know that people who graduate from here are great technicians. I’d be willing to argue with anybody that formally trained American chefs are the best in the world. I say that because when I graduated, I went to Europe and worked elbow to elbow with first-, second-, and third-year apprentices, and chefs, and after I was there for a number of years, I trained apprentices, and I’m still convinced that formally trained American chefs are the best chefs in the world. And this technical ability is part of what really helps us to do that. Great technical skills, to know the where, why, and when of things—not just, ‘Hey, do it because I told you to.’

  “Where you’ll have to continue to grow, continue to practice, like knife skills, is your conceptual skills. Those are the ones we don’t work on a whole lot, so they’re not real comfortable, but, like when you first picked up that knife in Skills, those of you who hadn’t been cooking for years, you started to handle it, it was a little awkward maybe, maybe a little uncomfortable. And now it’s second nature to have that knife at the end of your hand.

  “Well, things like conceptual skills are things you can practice and build on and learn to use as well. Conceptual skills, things like vision and creativity. And vision is something that you will have to be able to explain and talk about when you go out into the field. As tomorrow’s chef you’ll have to have certain philosophies, certain convictions, ideals, to be able to see where the heck you personally are going, and where your staff and the operation and everything else is going to go also. You’re going to have to have some vision in terms of what your life should be like. And along with that, you’re going to have to be more creative.

  “And not just in terms of putting food on a plate, which we’re still real good at. But other things—how to get people in the door. You gotta be creative with that. How to keep people on the job, that’s going to be a huge challenge for you. You do not want employee turnover, that’s not a good way to go. You’ll find it’s very time-consuming, very expensive. So you need to be creative to keep them there. You can only pay people a certain amount. You’ll find that out real fast, too. You’ve got a certain limit on what you can pay employees, so you’ll have to have other incentives to keep people, front of the house and back of the house as well. There’s a lot that has to happen under these conceptual skills. You’ll have to realize there’s a whole lot more to management than having people work together to get food out the door.

  “You’ll have to have financial skills,” he said, writing the words on the board. “Gave you a little piece on Day Two, the gross sales analysis and how to use the mix percentage to plan, forecast—that’s a piece of financial management. You’ll have to be able to read, understand, analyze, and act upon a profit and loss statement. See, the days are gone where, ‘Hey, their chef is great, the food is delicious,’ and that was enough. That doesn’t fly anymore, it just doesn’t work. You better know how to make the bottom work. You have to be able to do that. ’Cause if you can’t, see ya later, we’ll find someone who can. Maybe that person’s food is just a little bit lower quality than yours”—De Santis pinched his thumb and index finger together, squinting—“but the bottom line works.

  “You’ll have to know certain things about marketing. Start with marketing you. How to sell you. Every single individual here, you gotta sell you. Take what you’ve learned here, understand it, and sell that to people. Sell you. And that’s just the beginning of marketing.

  “We used to have pizzas mixed in with the other things. Did I tell you about that?” De Santis recounted a story about a friend of his in the industry who came to look at St. Andrew’s and later talked about how to improve business at the restaurant. Once again, De Santis became the actor, playing both parts with equal vigor.

  “We got together that evening and he said, ‘It was really good and I know the nutritional thing, but what’s something unique about St. Andrew’s?’ I said, we got pizzas. He said, ‘You got pizzas?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ He said, ‘Where are they?!’ I said, ‘They’re on the menu!’ He said, ‘Where ARE they?!’ I said, ‘In the starter category.’ And he said, ‘What is the matter with you?! Highlight it! Put it someplace where people are gonna open it up and say, ‘WHOA! They got pizza here!’

  “So they took that, on his suggestion—menu item, placement, marketing—took it from the bottom of the starter category, lifted it out, said St. Andrew’s Cafe, lunch, slammed it right smack in the middle! Wood-fired pizzas, top middle—we sell wood-fired pizzas.

  “Pizza sales are now doubled from what they were before that. Now that’s a real simple thing about marketing, but I never knew that. We have to continuously learn those kinds of things, you’ve gotta keep marketing things. A real important thing that management will have to deal with.

  “The big difference for tomorrow’s chef,” he continued, “is a broad-based knowledge. You’ll have to know a whole lot more than just good cooking. You have to know how to research, for a variety of reasons, for a variety of things. You have to be able to write, in clear, complete sentences, punctuationally correct, GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT!” He paused and the walls stopped quivering from the volume. “Come on, everybody, we’ve got to start to write like we’re a group of intelligent professionals. You’ll have to know at least one language, fluently, articulately, completely, so people know what you’re trying to say. When you know two languages, then you’re really rollin’. You know three or more, you can write your own check in places.

  “You’ll have to know a whole lot more about science. You’re gonna be faced with all the things that are going on out there, sustainable agriculture, selective breeding, aquaculture. You’ll have to know about things like genetic engineering. Most chefs don’t have a clue. Find out what it’s about. Whether you think you like it or not, that’s something that you—will—have—to deal with in your careers. You will be faced with the issue of genetic engineering. You need to know what it’s all about.

  “And then it’s good to know some things about the arts. That’ll round you off. That is what tomorrow’s chef is going to look like. The old way of doing business is not good enough anymore. You’re going out into a very different workforce—even as food preparers—than five years ago, ten years ago, and certainly when I went into the workforce.

  “Our food service industry is projected to gross three hundred twelve billion dollars in 1996. Three hundred twelve billion dollars. Some countries don’t have GNPs that big, and we’re doing it selling food.” He dropped to a whisper. “And everybody here wants a chunk of it.

  “Health care is going to be the biggest growing segment, in my opinion, in the food service industry,” he concluded. “Nursing homes as well. Marriott is shutting down their least productive resorts and turning them into nursing homes. Everybody’s gettin’ old! Baby boomers are gettin’ old. They’re gonna need someone to take care of them and feed them.

  “There’s a big change i
n the way things are happening out there. Supermarkets, that’s another segment you might want to look into as more people are looking at HMRs—home meal replacement. Also education. You may consider teaching this stuff that you’ve learned. There’s a lot out there for you. So as you continue and you start to think about your careers, get real broad in your approach to it; there’s a lot of good things to do out there. The industry is big. Three hundred and twelve billion dollars does not come from restaurants. Uh-un, comes from a lot of places. Any comments, any questions? You get all that?

  “Get yourself planned now, everyone. Take a look at the industry and see where you want to go.

  “Anybody, questions? All right, now. We need to have a good prep when you walk out today. I also need demo plates from each station, wrapped with plastic, and we’ll put them on a rack in the walk-in so Monday I’ll have demo plates for the group that walks in. Desserts as well. Anytime you want to do it. But we got seventy-three à la carte on Monday, Day One. I need a heavy setup for the group that walks in here. Oh YEAH!” he said.

  He leaned forward and whispered, “The weekend doesn’t start till we’re all cleaned up in there. Stay focused. Staaaaaay FO-cused.”

  A half hour later, the chef was in back at the pizza station, using a rosewood-handled paring knife to open quail eggs. He did this on the last day of every block. David and Craig worked with him, paddling cream cheese till it was smooth and slicing fresh dill and chives to add to the cream cheese. While everyone else prepped their stations for this day and Monday as well, pizza station worked on a breakfast pizza for President Monday as well, pizza station worked on a breakfast pizza for President Metz. A quail egg and caviar pizza.

  Because it was a graduation day, Mr. Metz entertained the graduation speaker, Dieter Hannig, of Walt Disney World, and guests, beginning with breakfast in his private dining room. Among the offerings at today’s breakfast was a St. Andrew’s pizza. For many months Mr. Metz had favored a smoked salmon pizza, created for him by Chef De Santis. “It was a good pizza,” De Santis said. “He just got tired of it. I said, ‘What would you like?’ He said, ‘Come up with a new one.’”