Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

by Gibney, Michael

  But anger that arises during service is short-lived. It is the result of frenzy, and it’s often forgotten before the last guest is served. Anger that arises before service, however, is a different beast. It is the slow burn, a wicked seed that sprouts like pea tendrils and strangles you until the end of the night.

  When you are made angry before service—during your morning walk-through, say, or your afternoon prep—it is as though a small fire has been started somewhere in you that swells by the minute. A sense of increasing urgency accompanies each new task you take on, and before long you find yourself erupting vulgarly at the most insignificant things. You bump your head in the walk-in box and curse out the vegetables; your peeler slips and you rocket a handful of turnips into the trash. It’s very easy, when you’re busy and irritable, to begin believing that the whole world is against you. But it is critical at these moments to rein in your aggression, or else there might be serious consequences. Blue flames and steel blades don’t forgive. If you allow your anger to distract you, you could burn or cut yourself. And, among serious cooks and chefs, burns and cuts are terribly unfashionable. The only thing worse than a burn or a cut is the need for medical attention. Abandoning your fellow linesmen because you lost focus and flayed a finger is an unforgivable offense.

  To make someone else angry before service, though—especially if it’s our capricious chef—can be pandemonic. Not only do you risk impairing the rapport of the cooks, but also you chance bringing out the despot in Chef, which invites a less obvious kind of stress into your day. It’s not rage, but a dull, throbbing trepidation that takes hold, like a stiff neck that makes you fear turning your head the wrong way. You become preternaturally aware of Chef’s location in relation to your own, expecting him to pop out at every turn and find you doing something improperly. You consider the possibility that all your technique is rubbish and that everyone knows it. Thinking about it makes it worse. A prep list becomes a minefield of possible mistakes, and the more concern you give each task, the longer each one takes, and the closer you get to service, and the less time you have, and the more stress you confront, and the more poorly you perform your work. It’s an infinite regression.

  And now Chef is heated. He went from jolly to crabby instantaneously when he found the samples you tasted torn open, chewed up, and scattered about the desk. The fact that they were opened doesn’t matter to him, but the fact that they were left out has dialed him up. Sure, he’s not the angriest you’ve ever seen him, but he certainly isn’t happy. His mood has definitely shifted. You felt the elephant enter the room.

  But isn’t he overreacting a bit? The samples were free, after all, and failing to store them properly has no impact on the business, or even on an evening’s service, for that matter. Nevertheless, in the mind of the chef, it is a failure. It is a betrayal of a certain trust and a disappointment of certain expectations. You should know better, and the fact that you don’t reflects poorly on your character, and poorly on Chef even, because he thought you were better than that. And planting that seed now will influence his reaction to the little things later on. But it’s a wheel of cheese and a sack of pistachios we’re talking about here. And it wasn’t even you who left them out. Still, it should have been you who put them away.

  This is where your mind wanders as you butcher the fish. Your hands are on autopilot—they slice and weigh and wrap and chill, portion after portion. But your brain is elsewhere, preoccupied with gauging Chef’s level of anger. You want to know what to expect for the night, and in order to calculate that, you must first diagnose Chef’s mood. The whole operation hinges on your relationship with him.

  He hasn’t said much. He hasn’t asked you what needs burning out. He hasn’t sat you down to bounce around ideas for specials. He certainly hasn’t made conversation. He’s distant, focused, in his own head, thinking about who knows what. And it seems he’s been this way for hours. But the repetitive, meditative nature of butchery always modifies your concept of time. He hasn’t even been here an hour yet. It’s not even 1300 and he’s already coming to you with the specials.

  “All right, papi chulo,” he says, handing you a printout. “Let’s get this party started. I got the terrine A to Z. You get started on the monkey and we’ll see where we’re at after that. You know how I like it. But don’t fuck around. Check with me first before you start anything you haven’t seen before. Make it nice not twice, right, baby?”

  He claps you on the shoulder and walks away. His tone is heartening. You feel welcomed back into the fold. You smile and have a look at the plats du jour:

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7

  TERRINE OF BOUDIN BLANC AND SQUAB CONFIT

  rocket, filbert, quince, verjus

  •

  CHARRED HERRING

  mustard potato, pickled ramp, boquerones fondue

  •

  VEAL TONGUE AGNOLOTTI

  winter mushroom, preserved lemon butter

  •

  MONKFISH ROULADE

  foie gras, beluga lentil, endive, carrot, caraway

  •

  BLACK HERITAGE PORK LOIN SOUS VIDE

  guanciale, chestnut, turnip, sapori forte

  It is more than just a list of specials he’s given you; it’s punishment for your negligence with the samples. Your prep list has expanded logarithmically. With only four hours before service starts, pulling this whole menu together is nearly impossible, and he knows it. He is putting your mettle to the test. More important, he is seeing how well you can delegate responsibility.

  If he is on the terrine, as he says he is, that leaves you with four dishes to gather. You’ll get started on the monkfish, as he told you to, but not before resolving a couple of other issues first.

  Stefan is in back on the pasta machine, so it makes sense to transfer the entire agnolotti dish to him directly. It’s simple enough and he can do it all himself, hungover or not. He needs to make another batch of dough right now. After he’s done rolling out the pasta for the regular menu, and by the time he’s finished making the veal tongue farce, the new dough will have rested long enough, and he can sheet up the agnolotti. In the meantime, Rogelio can clean the mushrooms and brunoise the preserved lemon for him. He can handle the rest from there. If he has any questions, he can take them up with Chef.

  “Claro, baby,” Stefan says when you show him the menu. “I got that shit.”

  Now for the herring. You saw them in the fish box, but you can’t remember if they are clean or not. It’s safe to assume the worst, but safer still to not even worry about that now. Brianne can clean them later on, if necessary. More important to that dish are the potatoes. You know that when Chef says “mustard potatoes” he means essentially his version of a German potato salad: boiled potatoes tossed with whole grain mustard, truffles, and chives. In order for the potatoes to chill amply, they need to go up now. A quick glance at the menu indicates that they are probably the most urgent thing, so you grab a large rondeau and begin filling it with cold water. As the rondeau fills, you figure out the rest of the dish: the pickled ramps are already in the box left over from spring, so that’s a no-brainer. You can imagine Chef will either fold them into the potato salad, or dot them around the plate, or whatever. If he wants to do something more extravagant with them, like puree them into a fluid gel, he can exercise the foresight to tell you. Otherwise, you’ll run with the idea that the ramps are already done. As far as the sauce is concerned, you remember Chef telling you one time about his boquerones sauce, which is basically a beurre blanc with white anchovies, finnan haddie, and a touch of xanthan gum buzzed into it, which can be handled later, too. The rondeau is full now. You salt the water until it tastes like the sea, and then you load it up with potatoes and put it on the stove. You use fingerlings, of course, given that the only other potatoes in house are king-size Yukons and Idaho 90s. You approximate that you have enough sardines for twenty orders so you shoot for somewhere in the neighborhood of seven pounds of potatoes. You drop them in the wat
er and throw the rig up on the stove.

  Pork. The problem with this dish is Chef’s sapori forte sauce. Rogelio has already started bringing down the demi-glace, so you’re out of the woods there, but the rest of the mise en place is a little tricky—there are many components. You need to dig through the storeroom and find mustard oil, cornichons, and golden raisins, which you may or may not have. If you don’t—which is a distinct possibility—it is your fault for not maintaining those pars and you will have to sneak to the store to buy some without telling Chef, which will be difficult because he’ll see you leave. Beyond that you’ll need to make a tarragon butter (for which you should get a couple of pounds of butter softening now) and slice the chestnuts (“the brain way,” as Chef says—thin vertical slices that look like cross-sections of a brain). You’ll also need a brunoise of carrot. But it has to be nice because the carrots, cornichons (which need to be sliced into rounds as well), and raisins are supposed to be decorative, so you can’t have Rogelio or Brianne do it, because they’d mess it up. If one of the line cooks has a shorter list, you can make him do it. If not, it’s going to fall on you or Stefan, which probably means it’s going to fall on you. What the prep cooks can do, though, is prep the turnips. Regardless of what Chef plans to do with the turnips, you know no matter what that these steps will have to be taken. Whether they’re warmed in soubise or seared in duck fat, they’ll need to be peeled, turned, and blanched first, and you know he’s not going to puree them because pureeing baby turnips would be like cooking twenty quails for Thanksgiving instead of just making a turkey.

  The protein, the actual pork itself, can be cleaned by Julio, whom you’re pretty sure you just saw walk in. It just needs to be denuded, which is to say, boned, chined, and trimmed of its fat cap, so it shouldn’t take him long. He’s also plenty used to sous vide, so he can take care of vacuum-sealing the meat, and you can trust him to get it into the circulator on time so that it’s fully thermalized by the time service starts. The only question mark is what Chef plans on doing with the guanciale. Perhaps he will dice it up and cook it with the turnips, but then the bits might get lost in the sapori forte. Perhaps he will make chips with it the way he makes salami chips, but then with the amount of fat that would melt away, you wouldn’t get much yield, and so it would be cost-ineffective. Perhaps the best guess is that he plans to roll it into the bag with the pork loin before it gets vacked, to scent the loin with that distinctive aroma unique to guanciale. Either way, that’s something you can ask him the next time you see him, but there’s probably no reason to hunt him down right now.

  Assuming again that Chef’s got the terrine under control, all you’re left with is the monkfish. Fortunately, you’ve made this dish with Chef before, so you know exactly what he is looking for; unfortunately, it’s the most complicated dish.

  The wording for dishes on the menu is slightly deceptive by intention. A good chef always strives to imbue the dining experience with an element of surprise. Provocative verbiage is one of the easiest ways to do this. While some eaters might go in for lavish description on a menu, the sagacious chef recognizes the power of concealment. It’s a more tasteful approach, which excites a spark of curiosity in the adventurous diner when done right. This way, the arrival of the food presents a revelation to the diner, and the experience of finally decrypting the menu through actual ingestion allows for a welcome degree of what we’ll call audience participation.

  But you’re an insider and these tricks don’t fool you. You know that the “roulade” consists of not just the monkfish, as the title of the dish would have one believe, but also the foie gras and caraway mentioned with the garnish. It basically works like uramaki sushi (and requires about as much finesse to produce), where the flesh of the monkfish takes the place of the rice and the foie gras takes the place of the filling. You simply cut the monkfish into sheets, fit it with strips of foie gras, swab the concoction with a slurry of meat glue, and roll it up. The result is a shaft of protein that gets speckled with ground caraway, wrapped tightly in plastic, and placed under refrigeration to set.

  Meat glue—known as transglutaminase in more sophisticated kitchens, or Activa in the purveyors’ catalogs—is an enzyme that, when applied to two different cuts of meat, activates a covalent bond between the proteins, joining them together, in theory forever. The most notable feature of this transaction is its thermo-irreversibility—the fact that the bond formed is capable of withstanding the application of heat—which means that your meat-glued product will not break apart when you cook it, which makes the technique perfect for the monkfish roulade. The only rub is, the meat glue needs ample time to set up—at least four hours, generally—so you know that if you want to be ready for service, you’ll need to get those roulades wrapped up on the double. This is especially problematic because monkfish and foie gras take probably the most time to clean of anything in the kitchen. You take a breath and go to work.

  Monkfish is the ugliest fish in the sea. Its skin is like mucus. It comes to you from the fishmonger with no head, no scales, and no pin bones, which is good, but you have to battle through two layers of slimy dermis before you get to the usable flesh. Because of its slippery texture, the skin is incredibly difficult to remove without damaging the meat, so you must take your time, and your knives must be razor-sharp. You must also keep several towels handy, because gobs of sticky skin will cling to everything near you.

  When you do finally reach the flesh, removing it from the bone is effortless. A wide spine splits the fish in two lengthwise, and a drag of the knife down the vertebrae slices the meat off with ease. The resulting fillets are the size and shape of a small forearm.

  Monk fillets are not flaky like regular fish, but meaty like lobster. Owing to the density of the flesh, careful knife work allows you to create your roulade sheets with a few simple glides of your Sujihiki. You press the fillet flat against the cutting board with your free hand and make a half-inch-deep incision, parallel to the tabletop, along its full length. Spread the incision, readjust the angle of the fillet against the board, and repeat the process. If done properly, the fillet should unroll like a scroll with a few quick passes. Your focus should be on the flatness and evenness of the sheet so as to facilitate the rolling process. The meat glue will rectify any errant cuts.

  You cover the sheeted monkfish in plastic and place it under refrigeration to prevent bacterial development. At the same time, you remove the foie gras from refrigeration so it can temper. Meanwhile, the potatoes have finished as you were cutting the monkfish, so you shift your focus momentarily and get them out of the water and into the blast chiller so that they don’t overcook. By the time you’ve finished tending to the potatoes, changing out your cutting board, and sanitizing your station, the foie will be the perfect consistency.

  Cleaning foie gras is like performing an autopsy. A reticulum of unsavory blood vessels weaves among the edible material. It is important to remove all of them if you want to isolate the pure flavor and texture. To do so, you make a small slit at the nexus of the liver’s hemispheres and carefully peel apart the lobes using your thumb and the spine of a Petty knife. The goal is to unwrap the liver like a delicate gift, so that the blood vessels remain intact. Many of the veins still have blood in them, which could stain the tan meat an unattractive pink, so it’s important not to puncture them with the edge of your blade. It’s also important that the organ retain the greatest level of structural integrity possible, for the sake of its freshness, cookability, and texture. To mash it to smithereens would be brutish and wasteful; it would defeat the purpose. It should look like a beautiful brown orchid when you are done. When you’re satisfied that it is sufficiently clean, you roll it back up and place it in the fridge with the monkfish.

  Suddenly you realize it is almost 1400. This task has taken you far too long. A show plate of each special is due up at 1630 so it can be explained to and tasted by the waitstaff during the premeal meeting. The time has come to begin delegating large chunks
of work.

  The first order of business is to account for all the proteins. Most important, of course, is to show Rogelio—who has hopefully finished turning the turnips, cleaning the mushrooms, and dicing the preserved lemon—how to roll the roulades. When you ask him to do it, he will probably make a stink about it, but if you can get him on your side, he’ll stick around.

  “I go home three o’clock,” he says.

  “I give you overtime, baby.”

  “Okay, Chef,” he says. “I stay.”

  The pork is literally in Julio’s hands. He’s taken on the duty with a typical austerity and seems to be plugging through it at a good clip. He’s cut the meat to size and has begun labeling the boilable sous vide bags with the appropriate HACCP information. It also appears that he has resolved the guanciale situation with Chef—it is going in the bag, too, as you suspected. He’s also got a circulator bringing a water bath up to temperature. All he has to do now is seal the bags up in the Cryovac and take the little piggies for a swim.

  You yourself have checked the herring and confirmed that they need to be cleaned, but you resign yourself to the fact that you’ll clean the two you need for the show plate yourself, and Brianne can finish the rest once the smoke clears around five o’clock. You don’t anticipate that they’ll fly out the door, and for Raffy to clean a few orders à la minute, though terribly messy and disruptive, is doable if necessary. So Brie can get to them when she has the chance.