10.31.06
Posted in 7. Other Fun at 5:51 pm by Chef Matt
OK, today I expected it to be a post about Butternut Squash soup as today was supposed to be the day that we make it in the kitchen. Alas, we didn’t get the butternut squash, which is kind of a key ingredient. The reason for this is that ordering in the restaurant world is really a game of habit. For example, every Monday, you call the bread people and tell them how many loaves of bread you need for the week, and on Tuesday you call the fish people to inquire about weekly specials as well as place your regular order for salmon, and so on.
The thing is, when Sarah called the vegetable people, she went over all the things she usually gets, but totally blanked on the butternut squash because that is not part of the “routine” when she calls those people. So it looks like we will give it a shot next week.
So instead for today, I thought I would include the text of an email I wrote to a friend in reply to her mom asking me (through her) about buying new cookware. I thought it was kind of funny, and hopefully it will help any of you out there who are considering buying something new:
“OK, so for your mom’s question about cookware:
Testing pans for quality is important. And FUN!
Kids, try this at home! |
“My thoughts on the subject really are as follows: There are two main kinds of cookware out there, good and bad. The way to tell the two apart is really quite simple. I wish I could take credit for this, but it was Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential who said “If you take a pan and swing it at someone’s head, and there is ANY QUESTION as to which will suffer more damage – the pot or the person’s head – then throw out that pan.” He is really quite right – pans and cookware first and foremost need to be heavy, solid and sturdy. This will promote even heating of the pan which will give quality cooking results and help prevent spotting and scorching.
“After that has been determined, then the other features just fall into place as far as preference:
“Non-stick vs. “stick” – I would recommend non-stick for a grill pan (the kind with ridges in it for stovetop “grilling”) and an omelet pan, but the rest I would keep with “stickyness” myself, but pick the pans that have what you like.
“Handle feel: This is a good point your mom brings up – the pan should be comfortable enough when lugging it around. It may be hard to tell when you first lift it, but when you have a rolled lamb roast in there surrounded by roast potatoes and assorted winter vegetables, man, you are going to want something that is good for you hand then! But, just like when I gave you the advice about the knives Carrie, there is ONLY one way to tell if the handle feel is good: you gotta go pick it up for yourself and see if it works for you. All-Klad is a great brand with great pots and pans, but if I picked one up and it wasn’t comfortable for me, then it is not the right pan for me – no matter how good Consumer Reports rates them. It is a personal thing that can only be determined by testing.
“The handle issue that is most challenging here is the fact that you want one that is both oven safe AND cool to the touch on the stove top. Those two features I have found usually stand in stark contrast to one another. See, the cool to the touch handles are usually wrapped in some sort of plastic that makes it so you will most likely not burn your hand when you pick them up after reducing a stock down into a demi-glace for the past half hour, however, that same plastic coating makes the same pan no good in the oven (let alone under the broiler. My suggestion: get sauce pans with cool to the touch handles, while your bigger sauté pans and straight-sided pans (the things over 8 inches in diameter) have the metal-oven safe handles. Yeah, you will have to be careful with those on the stove top, but if anything is going in the oven, it is them (unless you are doing a rice pilaf…) My point being, this is a feature that will be hard to find – it is usually a “one or the other” proposition here.
“Material: This is where the rubber really hits the road in my estimation. You want to make sure your cookware is non-reactive, otherwise you can forget about ever making anything with tomatoes in it. So to me the choices really are: anodized aluminum or stainless steel. Personally, I find the aluminum, while it doesn’t look as good, does heat faster and more evenly. (You could do stainless steel with the copper bottoms – that helps spread the heat around better, but is much harder to care for if you care what it looks like. If you don’t care, this is a great way to get the “best of both worlds” from these materials…) Anyway, I personally like the anodized aluminum cookware, and I personally am a fan of Calphalon, which is what I have a set of myself. (They have made great advances with their handles in recent versions as well…)
“But as far as the other brands making “new innovations” and so forth, no, they don’t. They are vessels that hold food and allow you to apply heat to them. That’s about it. All the brands you list pass the most important test - “the skull test” if you will – so they are all fine brands. The key thing after this is to ignore the brand names, and think about the features I mention above, and any others that you may think of – and go with the one that gives you the best combination of those features for the best price. (Look at features first, price second… don’t cheat yourself out of good features to save $50 on a set of pots – the good ones will more than pay for themselves very quickly…)”
Magically makes any handle cool to the touch.
Also magically makes any chef look like a dork when using them. |
Sure, there are some metal handles that heat up less slowly than others, but I have generally found that all the oven safe ones eventually get hot with time. Anyone who knows of an oven safe handle that doesn’t, I would love to hear about it. I personally don’t need this feature, as I use this great invention called a “towel” when I handle hot pans, so it is kinda moot.
And remember, so long as you buy normal pans with all the right features, and stay away from the truly weird innovations, you should end up being just fine.
Matt
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10.30.06
Posted in 1. The Story at 10:14 pm by Chef Matt
Well, at least I hope so…
I have been working for some time now, and (knock on wood) have not really cut myself all that badly. I have only cut myself very well up until now. (insert rimshot) Seriously though, my injuries have really all been burns, and they have been numerous as well as very painful. But as far as cutting myself, I have been relatively lucky until now, as I have not really done it. Sure, there was the funny slip up on my first day, but that was really really minor.
Well, that changed today as I was setting up the sandwich station. A large order had been placed to be ready by 11:30, and at 11 we were all getting things together to throw this order together as cleanly and easily as possible. There is only so much a space as small as the one we work in will allow us to do at once, so good preparation goes a long way. But just before that, we were doing all the cutting for all the other stations. And on my board, lettuce was being cut in large quantities.
I looked over to my co-chef and asked her, “Is there anything I can do for you to help set up?”
Yeah, so it hurts worse than it looks, but I love the way the line goes through the thumb AND the nail… that just looks neat. |
Well, that’s what I intended to say. The slight lapse in judgment of looking away while chopping lettuce, while thinking about the next things I had to do - instead of what I was currently working on - was all it took. I believe my actual quote was: “Is there anything I can do for…GAH!”
The knife went down into my thumb pretty well and quite frankly if it weren’t for my thumbnail to slow the blade down, this would have been really serious. As it turns out, it was not that much of a bleeder, but I did have to spend a lot of time with the old gloved hand today. God I hate wearing those annoying little gloves.
But that is hardly the worst part. This jagged thumbnail is now going to catch on every piece of clothing I put on and take off for the next month, and that is really going to suck. The upside of this is that the sound of fingernails catching on things drives my wife up the wall. Gives her the heebie jeebies like nails on a chalkboard does to the rest of us. So at least I have that going for me…
Matt
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10.26.06
Posted in 1. The Story at 9:46 pm by Chef Matt
Yes, the soup was well-received and we will be trying it out next week. I think Sarah said she wanted to give it a shot on Tuesday. The trick now is not so much seeing if people will buy it. There are two reasons I think it will sell well:
- It is fall, and this is the season for butternut squash. People will want the warm, rich flavors of this most Autumnal soup, and will be attracted to the new menu item that calls to their seasonal cravings.
- It kicks ass.
The trick is finding a way to make it using the equipment we have in the restaurant, and making it in a way that is easy enough to replicate on large scales. Has to be quick and easy, or it ceases to be cost effective. And at the end of the day, that is the final deciding factor.
As I mentioned before, the real attractiveness of a recipe to a restaurant is if you can add it to the menu using a lot of what you already have in stock. In this case, all we need to do is buy butternut squash (of course) and surprisingly, some brown sugar as well. (I thought we had that on hand for our apple strudel, but it turns out we just use white sugar and cinnamon, which when mixed together do an amazing brown sugar impersonation.) But as it turns out, the amount of brown sugar needed is really not all that much, so one box could theoretically last us through the season.
I don’t know what I will do to make the soup, but at least this thing will help people eat it. (Thanks to the late, great Rube Goldberg) |
To that end, the problem is the steaming of the squash. I am not sure what kind of steaming equipment is available in our restaurant, but I am great at rigging things to do stuff it wasn’t meant to. Hell, I could steam it all in a china cap with skewers running through the holes to hold the stuff up if need be… The trick is making sure everyone is comfortable with my jury-rigging. Not everything I make looks as stable as it should be, and, well, that just makes some people nervous.
So I have a few ideas of how we can make this soup in the kitchen, and I have a feeling we are going to have to try a few of them as we go. Actually, that seems like the most exciting part of all this - the discovery of something new. Sort of like Junkyard Wars. Make a great butternut squash soup using only what you have in this room. Now let’s just hope what I come up with is suitable for public consumption…
Matt
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10.24.06
Posted in 1. The Story, 3. Recipes at 9:26 pm by Chef Matt
I have achieved a new level in the kitchen which has come about much sooner than I expected. It actually happened by accident this morning, but whatever the series of steps were that landed me here, I am happy that they have come about.
So allow me to reflect on this morning’s happenings to put it all in context.
I had finished the heating of the soups and sauces for the day, and the pasta cooking was minimal to say the least. As we hit the slower winter days, there is just not as much prep needed each morning, since by comparison to the hectic summer days, it is easy to feed the small crowds that come through our doors now. I was taking it a little easier by prepping the sandwich station (getting all the mayo ready for the steak and cheese subs… ugh) and a hand-scrawled note attached to the line caught my eye. On it was a list of sandwiches that we currently didn’t offer, but looked like somebody was planning on offering soon. There were cross-outs, revisions and price calculations on it as well. This was the work of someone who was planning on expanding the menu.
But one item caught my eye and made me shudder to my core. Even more than a steak and cheese with mayo. There in the middle was pastrami on rye (yum)… with American cheese. I read this and re-read it since I figured I could not have been reading right. Yes, I had read it right. My reaction was swift:
“Oh. HELL. No!”
One of my favorite sandwiches - but the cheese of choice is Swiss. Sometimes Muenster. But NOT American. |
I called Sarah over and explained that the preferable cheese to go with Pastrami on rye is undoubtedly Swiss cheese - a cheese we don’t currently order. She was at first reluctant since ordering new foods is indeed harder, and Swiss is (for obvious reasons) a more expensive cheese than American. The trick to expanding a menu is to use as much of what you have in house already in the new items so that you can offer new big options on your menu without having to store 15 new items in your fridge.
Here is where the crossing point came. It is Sarah’s restaurant, and it is my job to do as I am told. But I was persistent on this point. I explained (politely again) that American cheese with pastrami would taste only mildly better than licking the restroom clean. (I of course was more diplomatic than that, but I was thinking it…) I also showed her that while she was considering offering corned beef in a sandwich as well, all that would be needed to make a Reuben is Sauerkraut (which we already have) and Thousand Island dressing and again, the Swiss cheese - so now she had TWO sandwiches to order the Swiss for… wasn’t THAT worth it?…
She agreed. And thereby I protected the world from a truly scary sandwich creation.
No, that is not the revelation that came about though. What this moment gave me as a status of “able to provide input into the menu”. I was later talking with Sarah and I mentioned how I made a butternut squash soup the night before, and how it was really great, and this was a great season for it. Her reply “Yeah, bring it in, and let’s see if we can make it here!”
This picture is relevant to the subject matter. But it also makes me giggle. |
This was not a throw away comment either - she seemed really interested in what I had come up with, and is thinking about it as a new specialty soup! Wow! My first recipe that would be sold to the public! How exciting is that?!?
Well, I am stoked at least - and so tomorrow my soup makes its debut in front of my boss. Keep your fingers crossed. (If it makes it to the menu, I will be sure to let you all in on the recipe…). If all goes well, I will have taken my first step towards becoming chef of my own place someday. One step down, 2.9 million left to go…
Matt
PS Recipe for the soup is in the comments.
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10.19.06
Posted in 1. The Story at 11:57 pm by Chef Matt
I promised to talk about some of the changes that happened in the restaurant while I was gone, and so even though it is late, and I am tired, here is a bit of what went down:
“Hey everybody, I’m back! Did I miss anything?…” |
First off, there was a lay-off. One of the employees had to be let go because we are entering the slow time of year for the restaurant. As the weather gets colder, places like ours with primarily outdoor seating tend to get less business. The slackening of traffic at dinnertime has been quite pronounced. Anyway, this fact, combined with the fact that Sarah feels much more comfortable with how she should be running the place (and her skills in doing so have markedly increased as well) means that we just had one person too many in the kitchen. So alas, she had to go. (Name withheld intentionally, though I do wish her a ton of luck in finding new work, as she was very sweet.)
Next, we had another “mutually agreed upon termination”. Hard to call it a “firing” in this case, I think it was more a realization by both parties that the relationship with the new ownership just wasn’t going to work out. And this I think is pretty typical of any restaurant that is in its early stages of development.
Aside: Sure, it may seem that this restaurant is well-established, since we have a rich and loyal clientele and have been in the Washingtonian’s Cheap Eats List for 6 years running now (or is it 7?…). But new management means new faces, new ways of doing things and in general, a whole new feel to how a place is run. When a restaurant is starting out, it is not uncommon for there to be a total turnover of the staff (if not two turnovers) in the first year. And that is what is going on here. It is not that the new people are firing the old staff to bring in just who they like, but it is just that change is not what everyone likes to deal with in the workplace. So the turnover cycles that we are seeing here are, I guess, just part of the territory of new ownership. Hell, if it weren’t for the new ownership, I wouldn’t be there, so it can’t all be bad, huh?
Anyway, the main waitress of Cafe Tirolo was comfortable with how things were before, and was not on the same page when it came to the changes that the new management was making, so while I was gone, she left to find new work. I of course was not able to hear her side of the story in this situation, so I will just approach this as a case of the two sides not agreeing on how the job should be done, so a split had to be made. I can’t pass judgment one way or the other on this one. Though I can say again that I am sorry to see her go as she too was sweet. (Cute too…)
And then there were some cooking style/menu changes that took me by surprise as well. They are for the better though I have to admit. For example, we pre-cook the peppers and onions that go with the Italian Sausage - this is simply because the sausage takes long enough to cook on its own without having to worry about cooking peppers and onions with it as well. The method we used to use was the super-easy short-cut of dunking them in the deep-fryer for about 30 seconds. I was never a fan of this myself as I thought they got way too greasy, but hey, it’s not my restaurant. Well Sarah took the right step that we now cook them in pans with much less oil - it is a much better product as a result.
Mmmm… the cornerstone of any delicious sandwich. |
The other one took me by surprise as I was preparing the sandwich station on my first day back. I got out the iceberg lettuce to start cutting it, and there was a commotion wherein it seemed everyone was freaking out that I was daring to cut lettuce for the sandwiches - as I have been every day for several months now. Sarah explained that we now use romaine lettuce for the sandwiches now because it looks better (which it does), tastes better (right again) and because we have enough of it leftover from the salad bar with the amount we regularly order (I’ll have to take her word on that one…). Again, a step in the right direction as the sandwiches just look so much better with the better lettuce.
OK, so that last one was not the most ground-breaking change in the history of mankind (you can now return from the edge of your seat), but it is the little things that you notice when you return from being away - even if it was only for a week. Maybe changes like that are happening every day, and I am just not noticing them - it is only when they come to me en masse like this that I actually have the chance to notice how big a change it is from the way it used to be.
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