Chefs and home cooks

Caution – this may turn into a rant!

I love watching Top Chef but every once in while, I see something irritating.  On a recent quick-fire challenge, the chefs needed to transform one of their signature dishes into something that could be handled by home cooks in 30 minutes.  I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but there clearly was a sense among the chefs that they were being asked to dumb it down.

Yesterday I was watching Chef Bill Briwa of the Culinary Institute of America who has recorded a series of lectures/demonstrations for The Great Courses (by the way, The Great Courses is a terrific collection of video lectures available for free if your library has an arrangement with Kanopy).  Chef Briwa was doing an introduction to vegetable cooking as part of his instructional series for home cooks.  The first couple of dishes were interesting but the final one, braised carrots, involved browning the carrots, creating a braise with diced onions, celery, tomato concise, and homemade chicken broth, more than an hour of braising, all topped with a freshly made gremolata (recipe below).

I have no doubt that I’d agree with Chef Briwa that the carrots were delicious, but we’re talking about carrots.  Who has time to spend close to 90 minutes making carrots, especially when plain roast carrots with salt, pepper, and an herb or two or stovetop carrots with olive oil and North African spices can be just wonderful?  And who has time to spend 90 minutes on a vegetable when you’ve come home from work and have to produce a main course and two sides in a half hour?

There is a fundamental difference between chefs and home cooks.  A restaurant chef is competing against hundreds of other cooks to attract diners who are willing to part with their credit cards for an elevating culinary experience.  A home cook is competing against Domino’s, Instagram, Hot Pockets, Netflix, Xbox, and all those chef-driven restaurants to provide nutritious meals that taste good.  As you can see, the motivations are somewhat dissimilar.

I love cooking and I’m in heaven when my true love says she likes something I’ve made with my very own hands (and knife and skillet).  When I have the opportunity to cook for someone else and they tell me they like what I’ve made, I could be walking on the moon.  But I’ll never be as skilled, creative, or prolific as a chef but that’s OK – I recognize my limitations.

I don’t have the same tools, I don’t have access to the same ingredients, I don’t have a bunch of prep cooks or line cooks, my stove only has three burners (one is currently broken), I have to clean things up myself.  So spending hours chopping vegetables to cook in six separate pans or preparing multiple sauces is not really an option.

When I watch cooking shows on television or buy cookbooks, I’m not trying to duplicate their dishes. I’m looking for techniques that will help make me pack more flavor into the food I can prepare with the given constraints of time, tools, and ingredients.  Seeing someone demonstrate how dredging a piece of fish* or veal in seasoned flour before pan frying transformed my life almost as much as the day I learned how to properly chop an onion.  And don’t get me started on seeing how to sear a steak before finishing it in the oven to get a perfect medium rare.

Those are basics. James Peterson‘s tutorials on soup or the books by Tom Colicchio and Sally Schneider on creating/improvising from a template are tools on a whole different level, providing a new way of thinking about cooking.  These are the things I crave. I’m not looking for the recipes or techniques that separate a two-star Michelin chef from a new rising culinary star – I’m looking things that make me a better cook (not a potential chef).

(*) This might be the exception that proves the rule.  My favorite restaurant is Bistrot La Minette, a French bistrot in Philadelphia.  My true love and I have regulars since the day they opened their doors in 2008 and since 2011, I’ve nearly always ordered the same thing – truite a la meunière, a crispy piece of trout placed over a small mound of green beans and fingerling potatoes covered in a butter-lemon-caper sauce.  I tried to duplicate it for the longest time but never could get the fish right.  I got close on the sauce, got the potatoes right and figured I was close enough on the haricots verts if I could get good fresh beans – but the fish eluded me.  I got the courage to ask chef/owner Peter Woolsey and he generously instructed me on the technique of dredging fish in seasoned flour. It worked!!!! Well, it worked except that I can’t get my skillet as hot as his and I can’t get ingredients as good as his, but I got close and I used that technique to figure out veal/chicken piccata and any number of variations of flour dredged pan frying.  Thanks you Peter!

Recipe – Gremolata

Ingredients

1 small bunch flat-leaf parsley

zest from one lemon

3 cloves garlic

Directions

Finely chop all ingredients separately.  Then mix all ingredients together in a mortar and pestle or a mini-food processor.  If those aren’t available, mixing the ingredients together and continuing to finely chop them will work.  If you want a salty note, add a couple of mashed anchovies.

The gremolata will add a welcome note of freshness and acid to grilled beef, grilled/panfried fish, or almost anything braised or stewed.