Culinary Foundations III in Review: The Laws of Cooks?

Pancake-flipping robot. Not one of Asimov's.

Isaac Asimov's science-fiction work is famous for the Three Laws of Robotics, rules of behavior that the robot characters would inevitably interpret in different ways. After completing the third of Le Cordon Bleu's three "foundations" classes, it seems to me that cooks should have something similar in place to help us operate. (By the way, Asimov wrote the Foundation series. Coincidence? Er... yes.)

We actually already do. If you consume enough food media, you've probably heard a few operational bon mots from different chefs. One of my chef-instructors paraphrased an oft-held belief in restaurant kitchens: being fast is better than being good. He only had the caveat that a good cook should be both fast and good. A recent Top Chef episode featured one chef saying "fast is slow and slow is smooth" -- in other words, do it right the first time. (Hugh Acheson, however, thought this made zero sense whatsoever.)

I wrote briefly of kitchen multitasking when I was in Foundations II, but in hindsight, those were all simple items. By comparison, Foundations III was a decathlon. Production days typically featured dishes with multiple preparations and techniques. Some days had more than one dish. My most successful days were the ones where I was prepared and efficient. I eventually started timing elements of my chef-instructor's demos so I'd know that, for example, sauteeing mushrooms takes about four minutes, so I shouldn't step away from the stove for six minutes to mince some shallots. I did that. Burned the mushrooms. Had to redo them.

Which brings me back to the Laws of Cooks, which exist but not really. If I had to put them down in stone, they'd probably be something like...

Be Prepared. Know what you need to do before you have to do it. Know when to do it. If something takes 40 minutes to braise, do that first, then go on to chopping stuff. (Thanks, Boy Scouts of America!)

Be Clean. Because shit piles up real fast. I've had a few days where I had to stop and figure out which saute pan at my station was clean and which wasn't. Not a good idea.

Be Organized. I suppose this is the lovechild of being prepared and clean, but it's worth throwing out there. I've had to stop to dig a knife out of my kit because I didn't have them all out together. Not a good idea, though it might make a fun spectator sport.

Be Efficient. I learned real fast never to make one trip for one spice when I could grab all five I'd eventually use. By the same token, don't waste nice knife cuts on something that's going to be removed or strained. Wasted motion is a killer.

Be Fast. It's a carrot, just fucking chop it already.

Food is Done When It's Done. A lot of the chef-instructors love saying this in reply to students asking, "Chef, how long do we cook it?" Mostly because it's true. You can crank up the heat or chop things smaller or whatever, but water boils when it boils, steak sears when it sears, and polenta finishes when it finishes (or doesn't).

Okay, that's a lot of stuff, and not nearly as elegantly tied together as Asimov. Organization is inferred, and efficiency and speed go hand-in-hand, so how about...

Be Prepared.
Work Clean.
Work Smart.
It's Done When It's Done.

I guess I'll see if those work for me moving forward.

Here's a selection of dishes we made in class.

Pan-roasted duck with turnips

Tea-smoked duck breast with ginger-carrot puree (I seared the skin a little much)

Salmon steak with beurre blanc, plus fennel mousseline

Veal blanquette with rice pilaf

Breaded veal escalope (aka veal scallopini)

Sweetbread fritters with tomato sauce, fried parsley

Cored, Scored, & Chopped

The tips of my fingers are still sore. It's that weird hypersensitive numbness, when putting pressure hurts, yet brings a strange relief at the same time. I also have scabs underneath my fingernails, which is not something that's ever happened to me before.

I volunteered at a DineLA event last Friday, my first real professional experience as someone who knows both how to pronounce and actually do a brunoise. The event featured some real heavy hitting chefs – I almost plowed an ice cart into Sang Yoon – that I ogled from afar but didn't interact with. Le Cordon Bleu student volunteers were divvied up among the various chefs at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills, and I ended up in the kitchen at Scarpetta, which might be the most beautiful kitchen I've ever seen. Expansive, organized, and just plain pretty. My stuck-in-a-corner phone camera photo doesn't do it justice...

...although the JJ Abrams-esque lens flare does provide some whimsy, no?

My first task was coring and scoring tomatoes, then blanching and peeling them. Of course I cut my thumb and middle finger inside of ten minutes trying to quickly slice the 'X' into each tomato. And then I didn't blanch them long enough. And on top of that, some of them were slightly underripe, which meant no amount of blanching short of full on destruction was going to loosen the skins. So, for about three hours, I was clawing at tomato skins, hence the scabs in places where I didn't think you could get scabs.

The prolonged, single task did give me the opportunity to observe the general flow of things. Scarpetta executive chef Scott Conant – yes, the Chopped guy! – was in the house. At one point he walked by as I was blanching tomatoes, pointed at them, and walked on. I'd like to think this was the Finger Point of Approval, but I figured he was checking a mental checklist.

The running gag of the event was the various line cooks asking me "So, how long are you here?" We were told we'd work until dismissed, which is what I told them, which they thought was hilarious in a you're-never-going-home-sucker kind of way.

Which was fine by me. I eventually moved on to other tasks and even got to sample some really fantastic food. A fried cheese appetizer on a bed of cherry tomatoes – I halved some of those, thank you very much – and a cavatelli pasta with braised and smoked chicken, mushrooms, and green beans. 

My general takeaway from the experience is that I'm still not fast enough in the kitchen. One of the cooks told me it comes with time, and watching them, I can tell it's as much about efficiency as quick movement. For example, cutting around the base of tomato isn't nearly as fast as a sharp stab and twist with the knife.

Not cutting yourself and having to deal with constant bandaid changes will also speed things along.

Recipe: Grape Tomato Confit

My two day quasi-internship in a restaurant netted me two things: the knowledge of what a professional kitchen was like, and a basic tomato confit recipe.

I generally see confit used to refer to meat cooked and stored in its own fat. My personal introduction to the confit family was with duck, which I’m guessing is the most prevalent today since duck fat is the Louis Vuitton of animal fats. However, the word itself is derived from the Old French for “preserved fruit.” Sugarplums and whatnot.

Of course, no variety of tomato I’m familiar with grows marbled with animal fat (put your tomacco down and get on that, food scientists!), so tomato confit is slow roasted with olive oil and herbs. The restaurant’s recipe was fired at me while I was halving grape tomatoes, so it’s possible I’m leaving something out, but I’ve found this gets the job done.

Ingredients

• 2 lbs. grape (or cherry) tomatoes 
• 15 basil leaves (a.k.a. a handful) 
• 5 sprigs of thyme 
• 8 or so cloves of garlic 
• 3/4 cup of olive oil 
• 1 tsp. kosher salt 

*The garlic and herb measurements here are all "-ish" measurements. And the ingredients I may or may not hazily remember: onion powder and bay leaves.

Equipment

• Large mixing bowl 
• Rimmed baking sheet 
• Aluminum foil 
• Parchment Paper 

Prepping

Preheat oven to 350-degrees. Line your rimmed baking sheet with foil, then line that with parchment paper. (I initially wondered why all the lining and once thought, screw it. Well, tomatoes are sneakily acidic and my pan can now testify to this fact.)

Peel and roughly chop the garlic. Roughly shred the basil by hand. Combine the herbs, garlic, and olive oil in a large bowl and toss together. Set aside.

Halve the tomatoes and toss in with the olive oil and herbs. Add salt and toss again to mix. Pour the contents of the bowl into the baking sheet and spread evenly. 

Cooking

Bake for an hour at 350. Then lower the heat to 250 and continue to bake for another 2-2.5 hours. The skin will bubble up and crisp, and eventually the tomatoes will turn a deep red color. Where to stop is really a matter of preference.

Take it out early and the tomatoes will have fleshy meat (the skins will slide off). Keep going and it’ll reach a flexible yet juicy marmalade-like stage. After that it begins to resemble a chewy sun-dried tomato. After that is a crispy-sun dried tomato stage. Last and most definitely least is the burnt and inedible stage.

Confit textures from fleshy to sun-dried tomato-esque. Not pictured: burnt.

If your oven is like mine, the entire batch won’t cook evenly. I stop when most of the tomatoes are in that middle range, which results in confit that’s chunky yet spreadable. If you keep going, I suggest checking in every 10-15 minutes, because it’ll cook quickly at this point.

Before and after.

Let cool. Remove the basil and thyme (they’ll be charred pretty good). Unless you’ve stopped at the fleshy stage, you should be able to squeeze the entire batch of tomatoes and some of the garlic into a 12 oz. canning jar. If you have a spare fresh basil leaf, throw that in there, too. Add extra olive oil to cover and store in the refrigerator. I’ve kept it safely for a couple of months before finishing the batch.

Serving

It’s versatile stuff. I’ve reheated it and topped it on toasted bagels, made omelets with it, and tossed it with ravioli and capellini. I’m thinking it’d work on a salad or as a sandwich spread. Maybe with brie and crackers. Really, what can’t you do with a roasted tomato?

To answer my own question: I topped it on vanilla ice cream and the temperature made it gummy, so don’t do that. But, if you pureed and incorporated it into ice cream during the creaming phase...