It's stuff like this

A lot of cooks complain about things in the kitchen, but they find ways to reward themselves. Sometimes those rewards are blowing the week’s pay at the strip club, like our saucier did on Friday night. Or having familial relations with as many waitresses/cooks as possible, a favorite pastime among some of our cooks. Or chain smoking a series of cigarettes and downing countless cocktails, like all our cooks do.

For me, though, the reward to working at a fast-paced kitchen is that I get to see and learn all kinds of cool stuff I’d be hard-pressed to see or learn elsewhere. The latest incarnation of this is working with whole pigs.

Exhibit A: We now have a new dish on garde manger, a pork head-cheese roulade wrapped with sardines and garnished pickled onions, radicchio, chives fried prosciutto chips, and onion-preserved lemon relish. The dish isn’t one of my favorites—I’ve never been a big fan of sardines, for one; the roulade is ridiculously big, for another—but the prep work involved is interesting.

Once a week we have to brine pig heads. I’m talking whole pig heads that have been sawed perfectly in half. You see the tongue, the brain, the beady little eyes, the floppy ears. They have different expressions (of the four heads I brined last week, two seemed happy to have been killed, one looked bored, the other terrified). It's like a scene from a Nine Inch Nails music video.

The brine is a mix of about ten gallons of water, mixed with several pounds of sugar, salt, chili flakes, peppercorns, celery seeds, and cloves. A cup of curing salt is added to the mix to add color and prevent botulism. It’s brined for a week, and then braised.

After the meat is fall-off-the face tender, it is separated from the fat and skin, and then the “good” parts of the skin (i.e., the parts without hair) is added back to the meat, along with numerous spices. The braising liquid is reduced to gelatin, poured over the meat/skin, and formed into a terrine, which is then rolled with the sardines. Voila, a head cheese roulade.

The head cheese is tasty, and I’ve learned that apparently the eye socket is the most highly prized cut among chefs. Didn’t get to taste it myself (my garde manger compatriot got one, and the chef de cuisine the other from the initial pig head), but I hope to soon.

Exhibit B: This last Friday I got to see chef butchering a couple of suckling pigs. Seeing him take a knife and carve out the breastbone and ribcage of those beasts made me yearn to learn more about butchering. Not in a gay way, or a psychotic way, but rather in a “I want to be that impressive” way.

It’s stuff like this that pumps me up about going into work, keeps me sane while on the line, and stays with me as I hump my knives back home to Jersey on the PATH train.

Tis the season

Recent studies have shown a pretty high intake of salt, blamed mostly on processed foods. There’s no doubt that eating that Big Mac (31% of the suggested daily intake of sodium) or even a Lean Cuisine (often 14% to 29% of the daily intake) is going to up your salt consumption. But let me tell you, eating out ain’t gonna help much either.

If there’s one thing that novice cooks fail at, it’s seasoning food correctly. When I first started at the restaurant, I was constantly being told to season more aggressively. In fact, some dishes I’d have to season every component; in the lobster appetizer I’d have to season the cheese, the tomatoes, the pickled eggplant, the lobster, and then finish with sea salt.

And every restaurant uses salt liberally. You have to. If you want to properly sweat out aromatics for a soup, you don’t want to have to keep stirring. Just throw in some salt to draw out the water and prevent carmelization. This also concentrates the flavor of whatever you’re cooking. And salt to finish is used primarily for texture—sea salt is crunchy.

Just something to think about next time you’re turning your nose up at McDonald’s and eating out at a nice restaurant.

Mother sauces and their many offspring

As somebody who’s chosen to leave behind the world of financial journalism behind, I thought I’d never have to hear the word derivative again in the vocational setting.

Which was true until today, when we began working on derivative sauces, which are the progeny of the withered yet toothy matrons of the culinary world, the mother sauces (also known as grand sauces).

There doesn’t seem to be much consistency on what constitutes a mother sauce. Some say there are five: béchamel, veloute, espagnole, classic tomato and hollandaise. Others think hollandaise is a bogus addition, since it doesn’t include roux (flour and butter), doesn’t store well, and is not made in advance of service. The underappreciated master of French cuisine, Marie Antoine Careme, apparently considered Allemande a grand sauce, though most others (including my professor, Chef M) classify it as a derivative sauce. And so it goes.

But regardless of what is in the mother sauces, here’s what I’ve learned in class about classical sauce-making: it takes a friggin’ long time. The process can easily take days, using gallons of liquid and pounds of ingredients only to produce a quart or two of heavily reduced muck. Great-tasting muck, though the work involved has over the last couple days turned The Aspiring Chef into The Perspiring Chef.

Most sauces are begun with a stock (roasted bones with mirepoix and sometimes roux, then strained and reduced). The stock is then cooked with more roux, other ingredients, and reduced further to create a mother sauce. The mother sauce is then combined with other ingredients (and perhaps other sauces) to make one of its many twisted, inbred offspring, also known as a derivative sauce. Similar to the Book of Genesis, there are literally hundreds of derivatives that were borne from the five or so humble mother sauces.

Home cooks probably need to know little of this. More important is to chant two mantras. First, don’t skimp on the salt. Nearly every sauce my team made this week at culinary school was deemed either “somewhat” or “definitely” underseasoned, and I am not shy about using salt. If you think you don't need more salt, you probably do. And then some.

The second matra is don’t forget the butter. This is especially true when finishing off the sauce (known as monte au beurre to the cheese-eaters). Finishing a sauce with butter multiplies the sauce’s awesomeness exponentially, as I witnessed in the Forestiere sauce we made today. Good god, it was smoother than a Wall Street broker hawking collateralized debt obligations in 2005.

Of course, who has time to do all this? Well, Chef Mike said we should make the mother sauces ahead of time and freeze it in thin Ziplock bags, so they are easy to defrost and can be used to make the better derivative sauces. So that means making a great sauce only takes an hour or less when cooking dinner. Provided you are liberal with the salt and butter, of course.