What did I learn with Vergé? Better to ask, what didn’t I learn? Every one of my cooking skills was honed. I took the beginning steps as a chef de partie, running the garde manger (cold appetizers and soup) station and the braising station. I can still smell and taste his lamb shoulder Provençale that I made so many times. It was braised slowly overnight in a casserole sealed with bread dough so that not a waft of aroma or flavor escaped. It was rich in herbs fresh picked from Vergé’s garden: rosemary, basil, thyme, bay leaf. To this he added spice accents with star anise, fennel, coriander, and orange peel, and a mirepoix with garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, turnips, and celery. The braising liquid consisted of red wine, olive oil, and orange juice, which seemed wild to me at the time. Fresh pork rind tied into small bundles gave body and a satiny unctuousness to the stew. What a novel, powerhouse idea! The result was a sublimely light, heady, and fragrant stew—a marriage of personal touch and tradition that made the dish simple yet unforgettable.
In addition to the deep braising of lamb, veal, beef, and poultry, it was at the braising station where we did the initial prep for Vergé’s sauces, which were the anchor of his cuisine. Sauces are their own discipline. Everything you know about flavor and balance is concentrated to the nth degree. What tastes too strong in the saucepan will play spectacularly on the plate, and you have to be able to imagine the effect of the end result just by tasting what’s in the pan. I remember a velvety sauce for duck made with the blood of the duck, giblets, a traditional mirepoix, Provençal herbs, and figs. It was so complex yet at the same time so focused. For Vergé, to make a good sauce, one had to consider taste, color, texture, shine, consistency, and seasoning. Above all, the length and finish on the palate was the ultimate goal.
To this day, I merely have to see the words sauce au poivre on a menu to think of Vergé’s reinvention of that classic sauce: the sweet and spicy Sauce Mathurini made with cracked exotic pepper, golden raisins, cognac, and extremely full-flavored beef stock. Vergé could move easily from the big tastes of meat and game sauces to a whimsical and delicate Sauce Poivre Rose—a light, creamy emulsion of paprika and sweet Sauternes, brought to a briny finish with Mediterranean rock lobster.
I learned cooking with all my mentors, but just as important, I observed the management side of their cuisine, which is equally valuable to my success as a chef. As you move up through the ranks of a great kitchen, you pick up management by watching the people above you, watching the chef, and understanding his or her responsibility.
You may have all the creativity in the world, but it won’t guarantee you success in a restaurant, because if you cannot run a team, you cannot run a restaurant. You must first learn to manage the requirements at every step in the career ladder. In a classic kitchen brigade, commis is the first rung. One of the commis chef’s primary tasks is efficiently organizing the prep work, or mise en place (MEP). Further up the totem pole you’ll graduate to chef de partie, where you’ll be in charge of a few cooks. If you do that well, the next step is sous chef, where you could be in charge of even more cooks—as many as ten in an upscale restaurant. However high you ascend, it always starts with self-management.
Management is where the fantasy of being a chef runs into the business end. You go into cooking, no doubt, because you find it pleasurable. But business always comes before pleasure, and today more than ever you have to be concerned with the economic side of restaurant management. Learning that fact as a young chef will be invaluable to you later. The connection to your mentor, the understanding of what he or she does to run a successful business—these are things that you acquire over years.
Apparently I did, because after a few years, when I felt it was time to move on from Vergé, he had a surprise for me. “How would you like to go to Denmark and be sous chef at a restaurant for me, teaching the Danish chef my cuisine?” he asked. “I think it will be a good test for you.”
Hello? Denmark? That came out of left field. On the one hand, at twenty-one I still felt very young and inexperienced, yet I had absorbed a lot in my seven years working in the kitchen, including two with Vergé. I had risen to chef de partie. This would be a big jump, though not exactly what I had planned. There were openings at another pair of three-star Michelin restaurants—Troisgros and Chapel—and I felt I had a pretty good shot at either place.
Denmark, though, was a whole new world. It was really my first chance to indulge the chef’s fantasy of taking his skills anywhere and making a living while learning a new culture. Our profession is one of the few that affords you this freedom. If you are a lawyer or a doctor or a stockbroker, you will find it difficult to just pull up stakes and start over in a new country. As a chef, however, you take your knives and your passport and you chop onions in any country that will have you.
My year and a half in Denmark was a happy time. I rode my bicycle everywhere. I learned a lot about using spices like caraway seed, cumin, and other dried seeds that play such a large part in traditional Nordic flavors, and about curing fish. (This was well before the appearance of Noma and the resurgence of foraging for lichens, mosses, and seaweed.) I learned independence away from the womb of French cooking. I picked up a good deal about managing people, but after a year and a half, I said, “I’ve done it. That’s it. I’ve learned a lot, been fairly compensated, and had a great time, but my education is not over.” Again it was time to go back to the grind. I wanted to work in another three-star.
I heard from a friend whom I knew through Vergé, Didier Oudill, about an opening at Michel Guérard (see what I mean about friends and connections you make from one kitchen to the next?). I thought about it and decided, “Hey, I’m still young. I can afford to make (practically) no money and learn from the best.” So I made the decision to work my way back up the totem pole and take a big pay cut to do it. In the long run, I figured it would pay off.
Guérard, in Eugénie-les-Bains, was the high priest of lightness and ingredient-driven cuisine. He had taken an unusual route to chefdom: the pastry kitchen. Only after a successful pastry career in Paris did he embrace and advance the emerging style of nouvelle cuisine. Not only that, but when he opened his first restaurant, Le Pot au Feu, it was in a very blue-collar neighborhood. The food was so astonishing that soon this bohemian bistro became the rage of Paris. Guérard learned from his mentor, Jean Delaveyne, an underrated but hugely influential chef who was among the forefathers of nouvelle cuisine.
So my new mentor had his own mentor. And you could trace Delaveyne no doubt back to Escoffier, Curnonsky, Gouffé, and so on, all the way back to the godfather of haute cuisine, Carême. Many musicians, painters, dancers, and actors do the same type of studying along a lineage of style. In any art, to connect with the great chain of masters stretching back through history is both humbling and exhilarating.
Guérard, partly by personality and partly by virtue of his background, was meticulous to the point of obsession over the tiniest details. We made a rabbit casserole that included young turnips (both the root and the delicate greens), sage, savory, garlic sprouts, and ognoasse, a sweet spring onion found in the southwest of France. The vegetables and the rabbit cooked together, but in separate stages: their juices were constantly reduced, concentrated, and combined. The same attention to detail characterized the preparation of every part of every recipe according to its requirements, with all steps perfectly marrying into a finished whole.
At the same time, Guérard was almost spiritual about cooking, and in that regard I have always thought of him as the poet of French cuisine. Precision in technique and poetry in approach—at the time I could not think of two better qualities for a chef. He taught me about sensibility, good taste, perfect ingredients, and the mission of the chef to present the true, pristine flavors of each ingredient. Take his Salade Gourmande (in the 1980s, the fine-dining world’s most copied salad): a green-bean salad, the haricots as thin as needles, with shaved foie gras poached in duck fat, white asparagus showered with slivers of black tru
ffles, tossed with chervil, chive, and crisp heart of radicchio. Very simple, but if it didn’t have the crisp bean, cooked perfectly, the rich foie gras, the most pungent truffle, the freshest asparagus and bitter lettuce, then the result would be pretentious and not very good. Every step had to be precise and perfect. Guérard was very demanding and would not settle for less than your best. If you missed one step in a recipe that called for thirty-five ingredients, he would always know it—and you were dead meat.
With Guérard I arrived at a golden moment, in February, two months before his restaurant was to reopen for the season. Guérard had plans for a shop in Paris at Place de la Madeleine, right next to Hédiard and Fauchon, the world’s greatest épiceries. So there were four of us—Guérard, Didier Oudill (executive chef), Jacky Lanusse (chef de cuisine), and me—in this small town in France in the middle of nowhere, and Guérard had enlisted us to work full-time on the creation of new dishes and products for the restaurant and shop.
In this business, rarely does one get to work in the R&D department with such a great chef so closely and so directly in the act of creation. Sometimes when a chef writes a cookbook, a young chef collaborates on testing and refining dishes, so I was not the only one to have this experience, but during this time, Guérard was young and whimsical, at his peak in terms of creativity, and was establishing a solid reputation and following. I felt honored to be a part of it all.
Sometimes Guérard’s team would combine his vision with the techniques we had learned working in other places all over France. So what I said about subordinating your creativity to the vision of your chef is still true, but sometimes it can result in being called on to create in your own right. Our collective knowledge made us able to better execute his ideas and his vision.
This is the way of the world, not only in cooking. Work with a master. Learn to think like the master. And one day the master will have the confidence to ask you to move his or her work forward. When this happens, you are on your way to being your own master—or at least, you have taken a first step.
HEAT
BECOMING A CHEF, like making a good stock, needs unhurried, unpressured time. It takes years to master the basic process of cuisine: heat. Roasting, braising, sautéing, and basting are to my mind the important methods in the foundation of French cuisine. Today, many forms of heat have their uses—steaming, poaching, grilling, broiling, sous vide—but in the classical French kitchen the master of heat is first and foremost one who can roast, braise, and sauté. That’s why thick and heavy copper pots play such a big role. They are the best conductors of heat, and to me they will always be the best partner to the chef.
Cuisiner (to cook) literally means to add heat to food. The idea is simple; the variations are infinite. Your range of temperatures is vast—from roughly 130°F/54°C for a slow confit of salmon in oil or sous vide to 900°F/500°C for tandoori lamb. When you understand heat, you “see” food down to its very molecules. You will sense that ingredients have been transformed by heat into something tasty, sensual, and satisfying.
These mystical gifts of sight and sensation are nothing more than the experience gained from making thousands of dishes so that a simple touch or smell will tell you exactly when something is done. Following a recipe by rote will never allow you to achieve this result. Every ingredient is unique and will respond to heat differently. Developing this sixth sense will give you the confidence of precision and help you adapt to any variation in an ingredient. Each must be watched, prodded, and smelled until you sense, because you have cooked the recipe a hundred times before, that it is done. At its core, this process is nothing more than chemistry. The chef’s job—to employ heat to transform ingredients—is the closest thing to alchemy I have come across. Mastering such intuition comes from years of work and practice, yet the results, when they are right, feel truly like the work of magic, and they instill a sense of pride in the art of mastering the perfect cuisson.
I once made a quail stuffed with foie gras and figs—three ingredients that require different cooking times. I could have roasted everything independently and made a nice dish, but I thought it would be more interesting all cooked together. If I had stuffed the quail and roasted it until the foie gras was done, I might have had perfectly cooked foie gras but a bird with the texture of denim and figs turned to runny mush. Clearly not my goal.
What I needed to do—before stuffing—was to pre-sear and halfway cook the slice of foie gras. I also used ripe figs so that warming them would just soften them. To execute this in the kitchen, logic required three steps in heating. Understanding the interplay between heat and ingredients, however, allowed me to achieve a single combined recipe that produced a roasted whole quail split in half with perfectly pink breast meat, glistening foie gras, and velvety soft fig.
Some years later, in preparing one of my quarterly fifteen-course blowouts for the renowned wine expert Bob Parker and his friends, I decided to up the ante and complicate the whole thing. I wanted to do a Ballotine (a boneless rolled and stuffed roast) of Duck, Foie Gras, and Figs. I made a boneless butterflied duck stuffed with spiced figs wrapped in a thin slice of speck ham, and whole fresh foie gras marinated in Sauternes, salt, pepper, and a spice mix of cinnamon, star anise, powdered clove, and grated orange zest.
Once stuffed, the duck was trussed with twine to its original shape. To finish, I had a range of different heat goals. This time I preroasted the foie gras (about one and a half pounds) in its own fat until it was half done. In other words, I didn’t need the foie gras to be as precooked as I did in the quail, because by the time the duck was roasted to moist pinkness, it would allow the partially cooked foie gras time to release its fat to infuse the figs, speck, and duck meat. While the duck roasted, it was glazed and basted with a blend of spiced honey, salt, and reduced citrus juice to give it a glistening crust. So I was striving to achieve different levels of doneness while controlling many ingredients, all with differing textures and flavors. Before serving, we presented it as Escoffier might have done: on a silver platter that glittered like the full moon on the ocean, the glistening, glazed ballotine in the center surrounded by a ring of endive caramelized in orange glaze. Slicing the roast released a puff of sweet, spicy aroma. On the plate you had a golden-brown skin as an outer ring and rosy, succulent duck meat below with a firm and fatty foie gras and a sweet and salty boudin of fruit and ham in the center. A spectacular dish—and one that Bob Parker raved about for years. It is the challenge of transforming a dish like this that excited me.
The fundamental method of transforming food through heat is, to my mind, roasting. If the hearth is the heart of the home, the rotisserie station is the heart of the restaurant. Roasting is not a fast process. When you roast, you cannot walk away from it the way you can leave a stock while it simmers, a dish while it braises, or sous vide in a water bath. You must stay connected to the food when you roast. You need to touch, smell, and baste every so often. You need to add flavors—vegetables, butter or other fat, and aromatics—at certain times so that they are finished just when the roast is finished. This keeps you focused on the line. In a busy restaurant it is a constant juggle, managing various types of meat, their cuissons, and their methods of roasting. It’s a true test of a great cook to master all this with perfect seasoning and doneness.
On the other hand, when I’m at home, a great roast—say, a chicken—becomes the centerpiece of the day, in both the cooking and the eating. The first consideration is the chicken. You need a good, organic bird. Clean it well, pat it dry, truss it, and let it air dry in the fridge overnight so the skin is no longer wet. Season it inside with salt and pepper, and add garlic, shallots, parsley, and thyme to the cavity. When you’re ready to cook it, season the outside with salt and pepper, and rub the skin with soft butter. Set the chicken in a pan that is generously larger than the bird. Place the pan in a 425°F oven and roast for half the allotted cooking time (which depends on the size of the chicken, of course), basting with first-quality butter a
ll the while. Halfway through the cooking process, I throw in a pound of small German butterball potatoes, a pound of cipollini onions, and a whole head of peeled garlic cloves. Then a small bundle of fresh thyme and parsley stems, and some half-inch cubes of bacon or pancetta. Ten minutes later, add a pound of porcini or other meaty mushrooms, and season with salt and pepper. I lower the heat to 325°F, allowing the chicken to release more fat for the vegetables and finish to a golden-brown juiciness. When the chicken is done, let it rest for 15 minutes, and finish cooking the vegetables if they need it. Finally, toss in some parsley leaves. I have been roasting this way at home since I was a teenager, and I have yet to meet the high-tech setup that can do it better.
In the restaurant, the rôtisseur (cook in charge of roasted items) might repeat this process for twenty chickens in a day, yet he or she must give the same care and attention to a half dozen things at once—from duck to chicken to squab to venison. Each has a different process and cycle of preparation. A good rôtisseur must have an intuitive connection to each type of meat.
With only the outside of the meat to look at, you must be able to imagine—very vividly—the transformation of juice, the firming of flesh, and the concentration of flavor that are going on deep inside. And then you must be able to think from there to the plate.
At the same time, you have to deal with the question of seasoning, an essential element in transforming merely hot meat into a precious moment of savory, succulent gastronomy.
Each cut of animal has its own demands. Often you season before you roast, so that as the outer layer of meat caramelizes in the gentle searing of its initial exposure to heat, the seasoning pulls and concentrates flavor to the surface while gently penetrating the flesh. You may also season during the roasting process. If it is a whole fowl or fish, then you season the cavity as well so the seasoning permeates the flesh from the inside. Finally, after carving or slicing the roast, you lightly season the center cut again so that the first thing your taste buds react to is seasoning, opening up your palate.
Letters to a Young Chef Page 3