Pride cometh before an amputation: a public service announcement

Sorry for not posting in a few days, but last week was kind of hectic. We had our written and practical exams for the first module, which meant a lot of studying and practicing at home, in addition to freelancing and whatnot. We haven’t gotten our written exam grades yet, but I’m confident I did well. I ended up doing fairly well on the practical, losing points mainly on my mayonnaise, which had too much mustard in it. And my knife skills were deemed “perfect” by Chef M, netting me all 10 points on that section.

Perhaps it was some resulting hubris, then, that led me to partially amputate my finger on Friday while prepping steak and pommes persillade. As I was slicing up the parsley, I turned away to say something to a teammate about another recipe we were working on, and … off came a huge slice from the side of my left index finger. The result was a severe avulsion of my index finger, which I was told will grow back but will be unsymmetrical. So much for a backup career as a hand model.

Long story short, the Aspiring Chef had to go to the nearby Beth Israel medical center to get his mutilated finger sanitized (very painful), numbed with Novocaine (strange feeling of “heavy weightlessness,” as if my finger suddenly did not conform to Newton’s law), and cauterized (my favorite part was when the Eastern European doctor warned me that it might smell like BBQ in the room).

But this might be a good time to reference the three rules of knife safety:
-- Always curl your left hand fingers when cutting (and use the knuckles as a guide)
-- Never look away when cutting
-- Keep your knives very sharp, because a somewhat dull knife can skate off the surface of some food and bury itself in your flesh.

Making the case for the little-known filleting knife

Cooks like to show off their scars and burns as if they are rehearsing the scene between Quint and Hooper from Jaws. As a chef, it's inevitable that a nasty knife wound will occur, but gruesome wounds seem to garner a little respect, as long as it doesn't hamper your ability to keep working. I still pride myself on a cut I made a few months after getting married in 2006: slicing through my thumb nail like it was butter with a brand-new santoku, a wedding gift from a friend. Afterwards, my wife refused to touch the "cursed" blade, for fear it would turn on her next.

A good chef can minimize these wounds, especially with the right equipment. For the minimalist and the frugal, the chef's knife can pretty accomplish any slicing task, much like a good golfer can play a nice 18 holes with nothing more than a putter and a driver and maybe a 9-iron (a paring knife and bread knife are pretty useful, too).

However, when it comes to butchering once-living beings--in particular, fish--I've found that one other tool is indispensible: the filleting knife. Because it's flexible, it can bend to cut along the rib cage of both flat and round fish fairly well. I find it almost impossible to carve fillets out of a flounder or other flat fish without a filleting knife; as an experiment, I tried using my boning knife, and ended up with scraps. I also watched as an assistant manager at my local grocer tried to eviscerate a flat fish for me. He also used what looked like a rigid boning knife, and ended up giving me three-fourths of a fish, destroying one whole side of the bottom fillet. Strangely, I received no discount for the mutilated remains.

By using a flexible knife, you can bend it upwards towards yourself as you scrape along the ribcage, pulling the fillet away from the backbone. I've also found it pretty useful for cutting up chickens. Meat, you probably need something sturdier. And if you're properly able to fillet a whole fish, you can carve yourself some nice fillets while making some great fish stock (only takes an hour to cook, as opposed to chicken and veal, which can take all day).

And let's be honest, it's really cool to lay out a bunch of knives on a cutting board next to your halibut, preparing to play carve up that big-mouthed bastard.

Best ingredient ever (but biggest pain in the ass)

Everybody has a favorite meal, the thing they'd eat on death row or on a desert island. But how about favorite ingredient? Mine changes often, but lately it's been onions. Any kind. All kinds.

The best part about onions is that they are the base for so much else. They are the main ingredient in mirepoix (one of the most common bases for stocks, soups, purees, etc.). I load up my tomato sauce with the suckers, sometimes overloading on them (think Vinny from Goodfellas). One of my favorite soups is vichyssoise, made with the venerable leek. I'm about one step away from eating the damned things like apples.

My love for onions is tempered by one fact: I'm not good at cutting them. Only a few days into my culinary program, we've already diced a number of veggies--potatoes, garlic, green peppers, chilis, carrots, shallots and sweet onions--to learn different techniques. I like to think I'm pretty good, and even expedient, at cutting most of these. But when it comes to dicing onions, I'm pretty inconsistent, even though cutting onions is one of the most basic knife skills.

Inconsistency is the thing you don't want to be in the cooking world. Innovative chefs that create masterpieces are all well and good, but if you can't make that masterpiece exactly the same 500 times in a row, then you better go back to peeling potatoes at Applebee's.

I've learned, though, that you can get away with inconsistent cuts when making mirepoix (two parts onion, one part each celery and carrot) and when you're trying to "sweat" them for a dish. That's because mirepoix gets strained out and chucked, so a perfect dice is unnecessary (though you want small pieces to maximize how much flavor leeches out into the stock). When sweating onions and other veggies for a stew or sauce, a lot of times you can get away with a "rustic" look because the vegetables are hidden by tons of other ingredients. Hell, the rustic look may even be preferred (you can just tell your friends you were trying to cut the onions in a rondelle or something equally ridiculous that few would call you out on).

If you're going to carmelize onions, you want a perfect dice, julienne, whatever. Small onions will burn while the larger cuts get only partially soggy and develop a mild brownish color. In other words, you get inconsistent crap.

A little trick I tried (which is good for home cooking but would be ridiculous in the commercial kitchen) is to reserve the really small pieces of onion--which come off the edges of the round shape--for the mirepoix, while using the cuts from the center of the onion for carmelizing and sauteing. If you don't need a mirepoix, then I toss in those smaller pieces after the bigger pieces have already started to cook. It's kind of a Rachel Ray-esque bullshit method, and I'm sure somewhere Anthony Bourdain is putting my name on some kind of poseur list, but so far it seems that cooking is all about what you think works best.

Or, what your executive chef tells you to think.