Category Archives: Chef

Perspective from and for Chefs

Edible Foraging In Hawaii – Fennel

While driving North towards Kohala from Waimea on the Big Island of Hawaii you drive along the mountain road that winds along at 3000+ feet above the coast. On this road there’s a culinary gem right at hand. However, between watching your driving on this narrow winding road and taking in the scenic coast and pastures laid out below, you might not notice small yellow flowers perched atop slender green stalks. Finding a place to pull off is difficult but once you do you’ll find that lining this route is fennel.

Taking root in this rocky volcanic soil you won’t find baseball sized bulbs below the ground. But this matters little, because the fine green leaves and sweet anise flavored flowers are a prize on their own. Too often discarded or already removed from fennel you find in your local grocery, the tops of the fennel can be used a number of ways.

The leaves can be added straight to a green salad or chopped and tossed with tomatoes. Fennel leaves can also be a final touch to sauces for lobster or even better add a nice touch to lobster stock. They can be quickly sauted with Arugula or Spinach to accompany a piece of Tuna, the uses are only limited by your creativity.

The flowers when in full bloom and full of yellow pollen are also great snipped into a salad for color and a sweet anise flavor. But to preserve the fennel and for some of my favorite uses you should cut the very tips of the flowers and dry them. Collect and save this yellow pollen in a small tin, then when you have a couple tablespoons it’ll be a sweet dry powder with a gentle anise flavor. Take this powder and mix it with a little sea salt, a touch of pepper, and dust it onto grilled pork chops or olive oil poached salmon and its a magic dust that adds unique flavor.

If your lucky and catch the plant in seed, collecting and drying the seeds is a great find. Putting a few of these seeds into vegetable or tomato soup is a way to add a little something special and different. Just toast them lightly before adding them in will bring out they’re oil and flavor. This always make me smile when eating a simple soup I bite into one of these seeds that pops with flavor and I know that I found and saved these little seeds myself. Another use is in muffins and corn bread. Fennel Cheese Corn Bread is an example and one of my favorites is Fennel Orange Muffins. No matter how you use the fennel you’ll also have had the great chance to take in some of the best views on the island.

So You Want To Be A Chef?

When I meet people for the first time I very often get comments about how they love to cook at home, are addicted to the Food Network, and have a secret desire to be a chef. I also get the opportunity to work with students who are going to school “to be a chef”. These people always ask for advice and tips on what they need to do to work in professional kitchens. I always have difficulty explaining what’s needed in a sentence or two of polite conversation. What most are expecting is that chefs cook food, just tell me how to cook, share a recipe, or what knives to buy. But to really offer advice on how to succeed as a chef I want to take them back many years to the start of my career. I had the great advantage of stepping into my first professional kitchen as a 13yr old dish washer. This early start in kitchens allowed me to test my like or dislike for the life before I really needed to “get my career going” or before spending tens of thousands on a culinary education. What I found was I loved the environment, the frank brutal honesty, the competition, the lifestyle, and passion driven crazy people who surrounded me. These diverse and quirky people working beside me were interesting, dynamic, and unlike anyone else I had ever met. I liked the work hard/play hard fanatical aspects of kitchens and the people who made restaurants come alive. However I can tell you most people do not find “the heat” of the kitchen to their liking. Despite what they see on the Food Network or if you own a set of great knives & a robot coup, this is not for most people.

Many people have tried to describe what you need to be a chef. The culinary schools dedicate chapters in books to the philosophy of being a chef and professional conduct and once you work in kitchens you see and hear incomplete conversations with new cooks about what they need to bring to the team. Though many before me have attempted to share knowledge of what it takes, and probably have done it better, here’s my attempt and addition to the conversation.

TIME – In North America we often start too late in life for kitchen work. Our parents cook less and expose us less to food culture. We rarely got a job at an early age and so we washed too few dishes, never unloaded produce trucks into coolers, peeled too few potatoes, and prepped under few, if any, tough cooks before heading off to Culinary School. We think we can trade money for experience and this is simply not true. If you don’t spend time in kitchens and food culture it’ll cost you and those you need to support, time is a key to success in professional kitchens. Despite what todays culinary schools will promote and “sell”, you can’t learn and practice even close to what you’ll need to know in two or four years. In fact, you’ll spend a life time learning and refining your skills in a kitchen, two or four years is nothing. But many people come out of school or work a couple years on a line and think they’ll be a chef and unfortunately some will even get hired into the job well before they have the skills, patience, and poise to fill the role. The truth is in school they learned a bit about food, but never learned how to make a mistake in an unforgiving environment. They made a few sauces and produced a couple dinners, but never executed a set of skills repeatedly over time in various conditions. They were taught, but did very little teaching and now don’t know how to develop a pot washer into a prep cook. They were given time lines and resources, but rarely have had to make things happen with no time left, few resources, and come back in a few hours to face the same challenges again. My advice is worry less about the title stitched on your jacket and more about whats in your head. Take the time to develop skills and be honest with yourself about where you really are. But time is a contradiction in kitchens… you need to be patient, but driven… Practice skills until perfected, but be ambitious enough to take a leap at the right moment… Stay and learn all a chef has to offer, but move on to new kitchens & ideas. There is no set formula other than honest self assessment and the ability to glean the truth from criticism and advice from people you trust.

IMMERSION – This isn’t a job, it’s a life. You’ll need to wade in over your head and soak up everything you can from the industry. If your not wanting to think about kitchens, food, and restaurants outside of “work” then you better get out now. The best people I’ve ever worked with were immersed in a culture of food. To do this you’ll need to make friends and talk shop with cooks, chefs, servers, and sommeliers. You need to cook at home for yourself & others. Read everything you can, collect cook books & recipes, subscribe to magazines, and stay current with trends. Travel to various countries and regions and eat what their eating. Go out to eat where you live and really look at the operation rather than just dine. Visit farms, fish mongers, and markets and learn about products and production. After working a 14 hour shift if you find yourself making fresh pasta for Carbonara and working on new menus over a 1am dinner your getting close. Now just read a few pages from the Larousse Gastronomique thats sitting on your night stand as you kill the last of the wine in your glass. Don’t forget to set your alarm, your back in the kitchen in a couple of hours…. Now repeat.

WILLINGNESS TO SERVE – Despite what you think this isn’t a food business, it’s a people business, food is just the canvass. Serving people and wanting to please is a necessary perspective to move forward in kitchens and deal with all the personalities you’ll meet. Guests who are paying for perfection while trying to close the deal with their date or business client. Servers who will be demanding and test your patience. Owners/investor who are making too little or no profit squeezing the margins. Purveyors who need your order phoned in and a check sent out. Cooks who claim “They want to learn, are ready for a promotion, and are the best in your kitchen…by the way I need Saturday night off it’s my girlfriends birthday”. These are the people you’ll serve, each and everyone the “most important person” in your restaurant. Oh yea, make sure you call back that Sous Chef applicant who’s not qualified, they left three messages in the office just today.

PATIENCE FOR GENTLE ABUSE – Working in a kitchen isn’t the “toughest” job in the world. Chefs & cooks aren’t special forces or smoke jumpers. We don’t take a beating in the “Ultimate Fighting Challenge” or make life & death calls in emergency rooms. The stress isn’t like choosing to buy a hundred million dollars of stock on Wall Street with one push of a button. No, kitchens are a more subtle “death by a thousand cuts” type of deal. It’s constantly hot standing over open flames or wet & freezing carving ice sculptures in a walk-in freezer. You’ll spend long hours on your feet often many days in a row to get through a Summer season or holiday constantly being pushed, stressed, and pressed to drive results one service at a time. The team is unconcerned with your back pain, burned arm, or bad nights sleep and will tell you so if asked. They’ll share insightful comments like “You only had 3hrs sleep and your feet hurt? Why don’t you pull up your panties and FIRE THAT SALMON PRINCESS! or can I get you a warm glass of shut the hell up?” You need to understand this is just them expressing Esprit de Corps and understanding of your plight while maintaining an I don’t give a shit perspective. But to show they love you they will buy the first round at the pub in a couple hours and you’ll realize theres no one you’d rather have beside you on a busy Saturday night. This is the crucible that great Chefs are forged in, if it sounds strange perhaps the kitchen isn’t the place for you.

FOOD – There it is, the food, the culinary art, the creativity. There’s no doubt that you’ll need to be passionate about food and creating with food. This is what’ll sustain you through everything else, the chance to make wonderful flavors, compose dishes, and design something beautiful to be consumed by adoring guests. You’ll be challenged though, as this is an ever changing “art”. You’ll have guests with food preferences, allergies, and dietary concerns and you’ll need to change your art to meet their needs. You’ll not just make what you want, you’ll craft dishes to meet food cost, labor cost, and guests demands. Hopefully you’ll find you love the challenge and are able to meet at a cross roads of skill, knowledge, and expectations to produce food that your proud of. If your really lucky you’ll be on the cutting edge, setting trends, the one to be followed. This will bring new expectations and demands like sourcing and enhancing the best products, constantly improving and developing ideas, and mentoring a team to support the vision. In the end the food isn’t yours, it’s what you share with others, it’s changed by feedback, experience, and financial drivers which requires you to be creative in ways you never expected. That’s food, that’s the art.

SACRIFICE – The sacrifices will not be world shaping or life altering on the level of joining the Priesthood. Again it’s far more subtle and sneaks up on you. But you soon realize you don’t go out on New Years because it’s amateur hour and you need to be back to start brunch in a couple hours. Valentine’s day is just the night you run out of two tops causing a wait at the door and long service so you can get home late to watch your girlfriend sleeping. You’ll see your mother on Mother’s Day for two minutes when you leave the kitchen to check her table. You work when everyone else plays and you’ll lose touch with friends that have regular jobs along the way. You’ll slug it out in multi-year apprenticeships or have thousands in student loans to get a pantry job to prove yourself in a new kitchen before getting a promotion.

So why do it? I have a hard time expressing what I love so much about being a chef. It’s something that’s in your blood as the Jimmy Buffet song says “I found a life to suit my style”. I don’t wear a tie, I stay up late, closed more bars than I can count, traveled, and don’t ride a desk. I’m rewarded for hard work and get immediate praise for a job well done. It’s constant change and challenge and I’m doing what I love… if asked theres nothing else I’d rather do, but I ask you… so you want to be a chef?

The Importance Of Salt

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As I draw up several gallons of cool clear sea water from a North Western shore of the Big Island, I laugh at myself for feeling a connection to the history of salt. But I can’t help but think about Cod fishermen driving a world economy on salted cod over 300 years ago or Gandhi leading the Salt Revolt in India. I didn’t start harvesting salt out economic need or as a social revolution. It was simply a thought that all around me are the two things I need to harvest this chemical miracle, the sea and the Sun. It struck me all I needed was some sea water, a pan, and some time.

I started with a measured gallon of sea water wondering how much salt might come forth and how much time it would take. Favoring clean white salt, I started with a glass pan, a simple rectangular 5qt glass baking dish. I also knew I wanted to gather as much heat as possible so I painted the outside surface of the pan black. That was it and so I added the sea water and waited. A day later there was a noticeable reduction in the water level, but no sign of salt. The next day over half the water volume was gone, but still not one crystal. I wonder to myself maybe one gallon isn’t enough water to get a concentration? How much water needs to evaporate before I see signs of salt?

On the third day under the South Kohala Sun I started to get my answers, on the sides of the pan a crust of salt was forming, on the bottom of the pan small crystal shaped white spots appeared. As a breeze blew over the warm brine small “flowers” of salt formed and then disappeared seconds later. But soon those same crystals stayed on the surface and grew. On the fourth day of my new found salt production I had several ounces of flaked white salt. Still wet I pushed the salt into one corner of the pan allowing extra water to run out. I skimmed up the salt into a new clean pan. As if by magic clear water had turned into pure white flakes of salt that glistened and refracted light.

I’ve now repeated this process many times and learned that if I concentrate and mix the brine from several pans into one that I can get the fine flakes like Flour de Sal more consistently. But other than that little advance and making a few more of my salt pans that was the whole evolution of my salt harvest. I found I get a little under four ounces per gallon and depending on the weather it’s four to six days start to finish. I can now easily supply myself and a few others with all the salt we could possibly use. I’ve also been able to barter some salt for pink pepper corns and some avocados. I’ve always loved reading and learning history so my ability to barter my salt for other goods is another connection to the history of salt and how Roman Soldiers once got paid with salt or at least had a portion of their wage set aside for salt, the exact truth seems to be lost in translation and time. However it’s a fact that “salt” is the root of the word salary and has spent most of human history as one of the most valuable substances known. A fact now lost in grocery stores where it can be found for pennies an ounce. So why go to the trouble to harvest your own?

As a Chef salt has a special value and just like all music is played on the same scale, all food is prepared on a scale of salt. A simple base that when applied different ways produces diverse results. Simply adding a little in the cooking process, in a brine, or curing, to remove excess moisture from pickles or the bitter from eggplant and endive it could be argued salt is the most important ingredient in every kitchen. From croutons & crackers to a sprinkle on a finished dish salt enhances flavor, preserves, and is necessary for life it’s self. So I find that when it’s “my salt” I have a connection to the food and to the world that I didn’t before. Like the first time I made my own pasta or caught and cooked a fish, a dish made with my salt is more “mine”. I’ve heard of a bakery in Oregon that bakes with wheat grown on their own family farm and the thought made me smile and sit in wonder. I’ve seen friends make their own soap, keep bees, and brew beer. In each example it could be asked why? With a pinch of hard white crystals between my index finger and thumb as I watch them fall into the soup pot, I know why….

I Work Where The Wild Things Are

One of my favorite books is “Where The Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendack. In the writing and illustrations it seems that Max played out his role in spaces, like the island, that where too small to hold the things and cast of characters that it did. So many things packed into a small space that you “feel” your way through rather than think your way. Professional kitchens are defined in my head much like this, not as a single thing or place, but more as a collection of senses. I’ve spent so many days in so many kitchens that they’ve taken on personalities of their own. Each one distinct and different, but also sharing common traits as if their all made of the same fabric, a bubble in space and time that’s in sharp contrast to the spaces around them.

Physically a kitchen is four walls and open space populated by islands of equipment. A hard open area made of tile and steel, a composition that makes sound act strange. This is one of the signatures of a commercial kitchen. The kitchen is loud even after service when everything is off, your steps echo around and everything you touch makes a sound that bounces about. When a kitchen is up and running it’s louder still. Being the first person in and throwing the switch to turn on the hood exhaust it comes to life with a loud “thud!” followed by a shrill whine of cold belts, pulleys, and fans crescendoing up until it reaches an impossibly high pitch and stops, turning into a steading hum and shoosh of rushing air. Everything in a kitchen has this type of quality, the click/chunk of a walk-in door opening, or the rhythmic “Za Za Za Za Za Za Za Za Za Za” of a slicer running. All the sounds are alien to most but easily identifiable to anyone who’s worked there. But each kitchen has it’s own cast of characters, like the convention oven that has the double “tap tap” of a misaligned door to being able to tell which of five coolers are being opened with your back turned. Like a cartoon sound track adding character and “action” to the events being played out.

Light and sight are also different in the kitchen. Kitchens are architecturally tucked away in “the back” or in basements of buildings which doesn’t allow for windows or natural light. The light is artificial and harsh that casts no shadows meant to be efficient and create a safe place to work. Strangely though this does’t allow food to look it’s best or look as it “really does”.  When I’m creating a dish I have a sort of imagination that lets me think about how it’ll look in more diffuse lighting. When plated I take a new dish out into the dining room to see how it “really” looks adding to the other worldly feel of the kitchen. When the power is off the kitchen lighting is stranger still. Pilot lights glow yellow like distant camp fires through forests of equipment and hanging pans creating a dark shadowy effect that makes the kitchen feel smaller and infinite at the same time. So no matter when I step out of a kitchen into early morning dark or bright sunlight after breakfast service, the contrast of the lighting between the kitchen and the “real world” gives me a pause like I just finished a good book and I’m realizing I’m not in that world any longer.

The smells of the kitchen are no less strange and for me they’re doorways to different times. There’re certain smells that transport me back in time to “kitchens past”. I once had a job as a graveyard prep cook which had me peeling 200 pounds of boiled potatoes for home fries nightly. Now, when I smell even one cooled & boiled potato, an image of that old kitchen forms in my head. So powerful is the sensation that I can see the faces of cooks from 25 years ago come through and once again I’m standing in that kitchen. Every detail floods back and I see myself writing my name under a wooden shelf in the storeroom  attempting to forever hold my space in that kitchen. Who knew that it would be the smell of a potato that would best capture that place for me instead. There’s another aspect to smell and time in a kitchen that starts when you first come in for a shift. Kitchens in the morning smell clean, but have a stale melange of scents that simply form the smell of “kitchen”. As the prep day starts the smalls are strong, but simple, citrus, onions, and raw meats, but as the day goes into meal service the smells are more what people expect. The smells of service have depth and complexity like baked bread, roasted garlic & herbs, finished sauces and grilled meats. These smells are rounded, complete, filling your nose with the experience of a full palate of foods. At the end of the day the smells of the kitchen change again. Garbage is being removed, pans washed, and soap and cleaning mixes with refuse as people buzz around to finish their day and leave.

A kitchen is also touch, searing heat and freezing cold changing by the second as you work. The particular difference between how a Medium Rare steak feels and how a Medium steak feels is the difference between a good night or an upset guest and server. Is that Avocado ripe? Did I get all the scales off the fish? Touch gives me that information. The whole kitchen is mapped out in hot, cold, hard, or sharp. Reaching into a refrigerated drawer at my knees I feel for the hard edge of the clams I need to add to one pan, while the heat of the flaming brandy keeps me focused on another. This is what a kitchen feels like, again similar from kitchen to kitchen, but with differences that create personalities. I remember the wood burning grill that made one kitchen so hot and the coldest freezer in another. Even menus from different times and places can be remembered for how they felt. Smoke from blackening spice burning your eyes and nose or the poking of your fingers and hands from cleaning Maine Lobsters nightly add another dimension to each kitchen.

This is what kitchens are like to me, all similar, and yet with their own personality like a group of good friends that you’ve known for years who’ve all hung out together. Spending that time together created common memories and traits, but the story and perspective changes from person to person just a little. A patchwork quilt of kitchens in my mind that seem to “hold space” rather than form a specific memory. The list of specifics too long to remember as data points, so instead their remembered in context more like living things that changed, developed, have strengths, and weaknesses. It makes me laugh, but kitchens are like children’s books by Maurice Sendack, Shel Silverstein, or Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) where inanimate objects take on personality and play the hero or antagonist in a complex play with a huge cast of characters. That’s where I work, in the kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are.

Learning About Food All Over Again, A Chef In Cairo

I’ve had meat pies in London, sipped Oolong tea & ate little dumplings in Shanghai, Poutine & Pomme Frites in Montreal. I’ve snacked on street food while drinking Heineken in Amsterdam, cured fish & remoulade on brown bread in Copenhagen, grilled Salmon and Moose steak in Alaska and I’ve had fish tacos on a beach in Baja Sur. In each of these experiences I had a general idea of what I was in for and was looking forward to the uber-experience in these locals, but in the three months I spent in Egypt I learned about food all over again.

When I was asked to help open a new Fairmont Hotel in Egypt, I checked and calculated it was 8850 miles from Hawaii. I looked at my itinerary and saw I’d be traveling for over 20 hours, but at that moment I still had no idea how far the experience would take me. From the first minutes in Egypt I looked at Cairo with a Chefs eyes trying to get more perspective on my new role. The hour drive from the airport to the heart of Cairo I saw few signs of Western influence on food. A few global brands like Coco-Cola & KFC being advertised on restaurant signs, but in an urban area with a population of 16 million and a density of 35,000 people per square kilometer, fast food and Western brands were almost non-existent by any standard I’d seen around the world. What I did see was wooden carts pulled by donkeys stacked impossibly high with flat bread rolling down busy streets. There were open cafes with people sipping tea and street corner and small shop tables piled high with fruits and vegetable in neighborhood after neighborhood. It was clear from the beginning this was a different place, not just in geography, people, and appearance, but in regards to what I new about food.

I’d come to Cairo, joining a skeleton F&B team, to get a kitchen open and start hiring staff at the new Fairmont Nile City. The hotel would soon be a five diamond luxury hotel with views of the Nile from every room and seven + food and beverage venues. However I quickly discovered that the hotel was still in the middle of construction and the F&B team had about 30 days to get the kitchen equipped and a restaurant ready to serve “inspection meals” to the Tourism Ministry of Egypt. After a couple days staying in the Conrad Hotel, I moved into an apartment on an island in the middle of the Nile River called Gezira which had a neighborhood called Zamalek. This would be my home for the next few months providing me with an opportunity to live, an admittedly posh, but more regular life in Cairo than a hotel could provide. I would shop at local markets, cook my meals, and get myself back and forth to work each day. I would get a taste of Cairo and Egypt traveling and exploring on my days off and be immersed in my new world.

Zamalek was cut in half by 26th of July Street which was lined with small shops, restaurants, and stores with side streets off the left and right lined with apartments and gated Foreign Embassies. It was an upscale area of Cairo and if there was anyplace you would expect to find western style food it would be Zamalek, but apart from a small KFC and Dominos Pizza, that lacked pepperoni, it didn’t really exist.  There was a small grocery store which has limited selections and virtually no brands I recognized. However, there were six or seven fruit and vegetable vendors, three butchers, two fish mongers, several bakeries, and a dozen or more cafes with tea, turkish coffee and the ever present water pipes filled with flavored shisha. Making an evening meal required a visit to several small shops to find fruits or vegetables at one, bread at another, beans or rice at a third, and perhaps a little meat or fish from still another shop. Inventories and supply changed daily so if you had a specific desire it would often require a trip out of Zamalek to find a particular item. In short every meal was an adventure in food, selection, and vendors.

Ive always been able to see how geography, economics or tradition have influenced food where ever I’ve lived, but in Egypt these factors dictated the offerings stronger that I’d ever seen. In fact Cairo made the differences between Hawaii and Copenhagen looks homogenous by comparison. In Egypt religion dictated that there was no pork products and little alcohol to be found. The climate meant that greens were non-existent, as the sun would wilt them in the ground and shipping time, distance, or import taxes eliminated the rest. Politics and history made some items, not just impossible to find, but an offense. A fact I discovered for the first time when someone read and old recipe I brought with me in a notebook calling for “Kosher Salt”. Tradition placed pigeon and lamb as protein on almost every menu, but with that said, vegetables formed the base of Egyptian cuisine with small amounts of meat supplementing on rare occasion. The 100+ degree temperatures and sun changed how everything was processed, cooked and stored, making dairy more likely be ghee, yogurt, and cheese than milk or cream. The low wages paired with the bright sun and long days to offer a supply of spectacular fruits at the lowest prices I’ve ever seen. Everywhere could be had peaches, mangos, and melons that had sweet juice dripping from your chin for .50 cents a kilo. Economics and rich Nile Valley silt also created an unexpected bonus. When meeting local small farmers I was trying to find “organic” vegetables. Through a translator my hope was finally communicated to great laughter and a semi-condescending pat on the back, when it was explained that the farmer couldn’t afford pesticides or chemical fertilizers, “everything Egypt organic” was shared in his best English. This I came to find was mostly true, and in particular, on small farms and plots throughout the country.

The entire culture of food was different here. Salads were composed with cucumbers, tomatoes, cheeses, and/or fruits. Preservation methods such as brining and pickling adapted to the climate and salted vegetables and olives were served at almost every meal. Pastry was baklava and Basbusa (dense semolina wheat cake with nuts and flavored beet sugar syrups). This wasn’t just different local dishes, but a different way of looking at food driven by needs and forces that where uniquely Egyptian that had been adapted from one or more strong drivers like culture, climate, and religion. But no matter what was being served, stuffed pigeon, Ful Madames (fava beans & veg with hard boiled eggs), or lemon garlic fish from the Mediterranean. In Egypt there was an absolute connection with food, family and the land. This was “slow food culture” that was never lost, most everything was sourced and prepared locally with traditions that had been created over time shaped by history and geography. Being immersed in this system allowed me to see these threads all over the world and back home. It allowed me to more clearly see and touch the reasons we cook and the way we source or select the products from any given region. I had a chance to learn about food all over again.