It's one in the morning and I'm fresh off of a typically stressful night and I now realize that my previous entry did not adequately convey the badness of the bad nights at work. I want to try to capture the magnitude of the badness by recounting the precise details of the night that just ended:
At 3:30pm, I arrive at work and set up my station and start off the night's prep work by slicing three trays of cheddar crackers. Then I'm told to peel shrimp, so I head to the walk-in cooler and there encounter the fifty pound tub that will torment me on and off for the duration of the evening. So I lug out the tub of shrimp on ice and put on gloves to protect my hands and begin peeling. But Steven is a little testy this evening and he decides to single out my shrimp-peeling abilities as the object of his frustrations. First he tells me to remove my gloves because they're slowing me down, and when I tell him the shrimp tear my fingers he tells me to toughen up. So I remove the gloves and continuing peeling, but I'm still slow and everyone in the kitchen seems painfully aware of my slowness, and Steven keeps pacing by and goading me forward by chanting "go, Rachel, go!" in a tone that is one part playful, two parts menacing. Ben and Didier both come back and give me shrimp peeling demos, and I try their techniques but my fingers are clumsy and slow and Steven tells me ominously that I WILL get all my work done tonight ("or else" implied) and by now the thought has crossed my mind that this tub of smug crustaceans could cost me my job.
And before I can even begin to make a dent, the dessert orders start coming in so I have to postpone the peeling and stash away the shrimp, but the back table is packed with pig parts that Bill is curing and I have to make do with one table for dessert plating and shrimp peeling, a dubious combination at best, but not one that can be avoided. So I haul the tub of shrimp down underneath the table and plate the dessert order and then haul the shrimp back up. But then, before I can peel more than three or four shrimp I find out that they burned two of the three trays of cheddar crackers that I sliced earlier and I have to slice more asap. So I pull out the logs of dough and bring out the slicing machine and start slicing crackers, but mid-way through I get more dessert tickets, and I'm balancing trays of crackers on top of the tub of shrimp, which is all on the dessert table, so I have a shrimp-cracker-dessert triple whammy on my hands and I stash away the shrimp and crackers, plate the desserts, then get back to the crackers just as a server comes back and says, whoops, she by accident told her table the wrong sherbet flavor and now instead of roasted banana sherbet they want Meyer lemon. so I tell this server sure, no problem, and curse her privately in my mind and make her two new sherbets, then I finish the crackers and haul the shrimp back up onto the table and I'm about to resume peeling when Joe informs me suddenly that he needs some of the peeled shrimp deveined and marinated and brought to him fast or he's going to run out. So I lose precious peeling time while I prepare him the marinated shrimp, and I'm about to get back to peeling when a double emergency presents itself--the line cooks need grated Grana Padano at the oven station, and more bean cakes at the saute station. So I frantically run to the cooler, find the bean cake mix and churn out a tray of bean cakes, but before I can get to the cheese Didier appears all sweaty and flustered and he needs more picked mint and parsley at the fry station. I can tell he's in a jam but I need to get the Grana grated, so I tell him lo siento but I can't do it right now and he puts Marvin, the dishwasher, on the job, so I go to grab mint and parsley for Marvin and they are high the fuck up there in the walk in and Marvin is no taller than I am so we reach and jump and grab until finally I get them and I shove them into Marvin's arms and then grab the Grana Padano and make a dash for the grating machine. I return to my station with the GP and the grater just as Joe comes back and tells me he urgently needs a six pan of grits, so I run to grab a six pan and head to the cooler. The grits are over in the far reaches of the room and I know that it will take me a while to maneuver the heavy pan out of its position, but luckily the pan is at the top of a stack and the grits are accessible with the pan in place, so I open the top and start grabbing handfuls. I'm awkwardly propped between buckets of gumbo and chicken stock on one side and racks of bacon on the other (the walk-in cooler is its own beast, and I could devote an entire entry to the mishaps that have befallen me in its chilly depths), and my open hand fits into the pan fine but when I make a fist around the grits my hand widens and I can't remove it as easily, so each time I squeeze out a handful I leave a smear of grits on the roof of the shelf, and meanwhile the bottom of my apron is dangling into a bucket of chicken stock. I run the grits to Joe and skid back over to the Grana Padano and it's hard as a rock, and I struggle for longer than I should cutting off a wedge, and then I begin shoving the chunks into the grating machine and it is shooting a spray of Grana in all directions and I'm using a cupped hand to re-direct the spray into the container and away from the pineapple and citrus salad and malt cream that are sitting close by. I finish with the cheese and haul the shrimp back up onto the table, and by now the ice in the tub has melted so the gallon buckets I'm using to hold peeled shrimp have set sail and are floating and careening through a murky gray lagoon. And just when I'm getting close to the bottom of the tub it's time to plate desserts for a party of eighteen, and I've been so tied up with bean cakes and crackers and shrimp and GP that I've forgotten to whip cream or slice lemons, so I rush to do those things just on time to fire the eighteen desserts, nine lemon buttermilk pies and nine apple cobblers.
By now it's ten thirty and I only have a gallon of shrimp left and I've switched out the tub for a smaller pan with fresh ice and things are looking up except that each time I peel a shrimp now there is an excruciating burning in my thumbs at the inner corner of the nail where the skin is raw from tearing open hundreds of spiny shells. So I deviate from the established peeling method and develop a new, less efficient system that relies more heavily on my index and middle fingers and excludes my throbbing thumbs as much as possible, and I get to the last shrimp and involuntarily yell out loud with joy that I'm done. There is still another hour and a half of clean-up work to do, including breaking down my dessert station, wrapping briskets, transferring ribs, packing up rice, and preparing stock pots, but all of this is a walk in the park now that the shrimp are tucked away in bags and the customers are gone and I've snuck back into the cooler to wipe away the grit marks that were the only remaining evidence of the past eight hours of mayhem.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Rite of Sausage
Things are heating up in the Cochon kitchen.
Fall and winter are the restaurant's peak seasons, and each weekend we brace ourselves to square off against an increasingly packed dining room. To prepare for busy nights of service, the guys who head the kitchen--Steven (owner), Bill and Ben (sous-chefs) and Charles (somewhere right below sous-chef)--work insanely hard, often arriving in the morning as early as 8am, staying until 2 in the morning and, in general, doing everything in their power to make sure the kitchen is prepared when dinnertime arrives at 5:30 each night. They'll work with strep throat, with fresh stitches in their hands, on very little sleep, non-stop and at full-speed for the entirety of their very long work days. If they work a sixteen hour shift, they most likely will not sit down once the entire time. Even more impressive than this physical stamina is their consistent ability to make things work no matter what type of unpredictable situations arise. If I mention to Bill that we're low on pear sauce then, before I've had a chance to process this discovery or ponder its consequences, he has peeled and diced several pears and set them on the stove with honey and butter to simmer. If every square inch of kitchen counter is occupied and a large party is in the dining room, then Bill will place salad plates up on shelves, balance them on top of pots, find room for them anywhere he can so that eighteen salads are plated and ready to go on time. If a party of eight comes in five minutes before closing and four of them are vegetarians, Charles will whip up a vegetarian special on the fly (most recently, a roasted half acorn squash stuffed with mushrooms and vegetable hash, served with creamy greens and garnished with fried threads of onion). If the restaurant is unexpectedly packed at 4pm between dish washing shifts, Steven will go back there and wash dishes himself. If I get nine dessert tickets in the course of five minutes, one of the guys will come flying back to my station and provide me with back-up support until the storm passes. The set of skills that this type of job promotes--the ability to think on your toes, to multitask, to work as a team, to plan ahead, to problem solve, to work under pressure--has made a deep impression on me as I watch these guys and learn from them each night.
The kitchen morale, to a certain extent, thrives upon the adrenaline rush of cooking for a packed restaurant. Bill, in particular, seems born for the heat of the kitchen and happiest when things are at their craziest. The man works with incredible speed; it took me a long time to even watch him break down a pig because I would blink and miss it, turn away for some quick task and then turn back to find that the 170lb animal, so recently intact, had been reduced to four legs in a bin and a head in a bucket of ice (Recently, though, I caught him in action: First off with the head, then cut each leg out at the hip socket, then slice away the skin along the back to be saved for crackling, then remove the loins from along the rib cage, then remove the ribs from the spine). When the restaurant is busy, Bill is like a broken record, reminding people with an amphetaminic grin how many reservations are on the books for tonight and how late he worked last night and how many covers we'll have done by the end of the weekend. Then, at the end of the night, he likes to do a recap of who sold the most food, as in "Joe, you sold 38 oyster roasts tonight!" or "I'm gonna have to make gumbo for the fourth time this week!" But even Bill has a limit to how much pressure he can groove on, and this past weekend was grueling enough that finally, mid-way through Saturday night's snafu, he threw his arms up and proclaimed "this isn't fun at all anymore."
In this pressure cooker environment, speed is key, and I'm afraid to say that, four weeks into the job, I am still operating at a relatively snaillike pace. In my own defense, though, I will add that this slowness is not for lack of effort; I am, in fact, working as fast as I can at all times, often in a state of near panic not unlike I Love Lucy in her classic conveyer belt debacle. On a typical night, I will have multiple prep tasks to accomplish in addition to my dessert plating responsibilities--slice five sheet trays of cornmeal crackers, peel a tub of shrimp (their spiny legs rendering the skin on the inside of my index finger the texture of shredded wheat, the upside of which is that I got to wear a latex, contraceptive-like device on my finger for protection), pick a gallon of parsley, rub fifteen racks of ribs, make a tray of beet cakes--and then, in addition, frenzied cooks will come back from the front line with emergency tasks for me--cut more alligator, slice more mushrooms, portion more cochon--and those have to be accomplished lickety split lest the cooks be caught empty-handed when new orders come in. When wringing moisture out of shredded beets goes awry and I spill the bleeding mixture all over the floor and the sink and my white apron; when I set ice cream containers out to thaw and forget about them until they are five minutes away from turning into soup; when suddenly it is 11 o'clock and I haven't yet begun my nightly wrestle to deliver eleven briskets and four pig legs to their braising pans; when dessert tickets come in so fast that Bill drops a ticket on my table and instead of saying the usual "postre" just says "weeds" i.e. you're about to be in them--at these moments I hang on for dear life, scrambling to remedy the situation before anyone discovers what a mess I'm in.
But between my slowness and mistakes and general rookie incompetence come small triumphs and, over time, I feel more and more like a bona fide member of the kitchen staff. On a recent night, Bill came back and told me I needed to make whipped cream for a lemon buttermilk pie dessert special, and I already had. One time, Steven told me my "latkes" looked good (and he actually called them latkes, which might in itself represent some sort of breakthrough). On Monday, I cut up a pan of lemons for Wes (a daytime line cook), and he actually said "Wow, that was fast" when I brought them to him. Hallelujah. But my most triumphant moment, my true arrival, came late last Thursday evening when Steven came back to my station to tell me I needed to make andouille sausage and then added, after a dramatic pause fit for an action movie (When I think about this comment now, I hear Bruce Willis' voice in lieu of Steven's): "Word on the front line is you grind a good sausage."
This rumor, as it turned out, was poorly founded, and fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of the enormous sausage cranker, praying no one would notice the cylinders of andouille snaking across the metal table, bursting open, falling on the floor, running away from me like a cartoon hose gone out of control.
Fall and winter are the restaurant's peak seasons, and each weekend we brace ourselves to square off against an increasingly packed dining room. To prepare for busy nights of service, the guys who head the kitchen--Steven (owner), Bill and Ben (sous-chefs) and Charles (somewhere right below sous-chef)--work insanely hard, often arriving in the morning as early as 8am, staying until 2 in the morning and, in general, doing everything in their power to make sure the kitchen is prepared when dinnertime arrives at 5:30 each night. They'll work with strep throat, with fresh stitches in their hands, on very little sleep, non-stop and at full-speed for the entirety of their very long work days. If they work a sixteen hour shift, they most likely will not sit down once the entire time. Even more impressive than this physical stamina is their consistent ability to make things work no matter what type of unpredictable situations arise. If I mention to Bill that we're low on pear sauce then, before I've had a chance to process this discovery or ponder its consequences, he has peeled and diced several pears and set them on the stove with honey and butter to simmer. If every square inch of kitchen counter is occupied and a large party is in the dining room, then Bill will place salad plates up on shelves, balance them on top of pots, find room for them anywhere he can so that eighteen salads are plated and ready to go on time. If a party of eight comes in five minutes before closing and four of them are vegetarians, Charles will whip up a vegetarian special on the fly (most recently, a roasted half acorn squash stuffed with mushrooms and vegetable hash, served with creamy greens and garnished with fried threads of onion). If the restaurant is unexpectedly packed at 4pm between dish washing shifts, Steven will go back there and wash dishes himself. If I get nine dessert tickets in the course of five minutes, one of the guys will come flying back to my station and provide me with back-up support until the storm passes. The set of skills that this type of job promotes--the ability to think on your toes, to multitask, to work as a team, to plan ahead, to problem solve, to work under pressure--has made a deep impression on me as I watch these guys and learn from them each night.
The kitchen morale, to a certain extent, thrives upon the adrenaline rush of cooking for a packed restaurant. Bill, in particular, seems born for the heat of the kitchen and happiest when things are at their craziest. The man works with incredible speed; it took me a long time to even watch him break down a pig because I would blink and miss it, turn away for some quick task and then turn back to find that the 170lb animal, so recently intact, had been reduced to four legs in a bin and a head in a bucket of ice (Recently, though, I caught him in action: First off with the head, then cut each leg out at the hip socket, then slice away the skin along the back to be saved for crackling, then remove the loins from along the rib cage, then remove the ribs from the spine). When the restaurant is busy, Bill is like a broken record, reminding people with an amphetaminic grin how many reservations are on the books for tonight and how late he worked last night and how many covers we'll have done by the end of the weekend. Then, at the end of the night, he likes to do a recap of who sold the most food, as in "Joe, you sold 38 oyster roasts tonight!" or "I'm gonna have to make gumbo for the fourth time this week!" But even Bill has a limit to how much pressure he can groove on, and this past weekend was grueling enough that finally, mid-way through Saturday night's snafu, he threw his arms up and proclaimed "this isn't fun at all anymore."
In this pressure cooker environment, speed is key, and I'm afraid to say that, four weeks into the job, I am still operating at a relatively snaillike pace. In my own defense, though, I will add that this slowness is not for lack of effort; I am, in fact, working as fast as I can at all times, often in a state of near panic not unlike I Love Lucy in her classic conveyer belt debacle. On a typical night, I will have multiple prep tasks to accomplish in addition to my dessert plating responsibilities--slice five sheet trays of cornmeal crackers, peel a tub of shrimp (their spiny legs rendering the skin on the inside of my index finger the texture of shredded wheat, the upside of which is that I got to wear a latex, contraceptive-like device on my finger for protection), pick a gallon of parsley, rub fifteen racks of ribs, make a tray of beet cakes--and then, in addition, frenzied cooks will come back from the front line with emergency tasks for me--cut more alligator, slice more mushrooms, portion more cochon--and those have to be accomplished lickety split lest the cooks be caught empty-handed when new orders come in. When wringing moisture out of shredded beets goes awry and I spill the bleeding mixture all over the floor and the sink and my white apron; when I set ice cream containers out to thaw and forget about them until they are five minutes away from turning into soup; when suddenly it is 11 o'clock and I haven't yet begun my nightly wrestle to deliver eleven briskets and four pig legs to their braising pans; when dessert tickets come in so fast that Bill drops a ticket on my table and instead of saying the usual "postre" just says "weeds" i.e. you're about to be in them--at these moments I hang on for dear life, scrambling to remedy the situation before anyone discovers what a mess I'm in.
But between my slowness and mistakes and general rookie incompetence come small triumphs and, over time, I feel more and more like a bona fide member of the kitchen staff. On a recent night, Bill came back and told me I needed to make whipped cream for a lemon buttermilk pie dessert special, and I already had. One time, Steven told me my "latkes" looked good (and he actually called them latkes, which might in itself represent some sort of breakthrough). On Monday, I cut up a pan of lemons for Wes (a daytime line cook), and he actually said "Wow, that was fast" when I brought them to him. Hallelujah. But my most triumphant moment, my true arrival, came late last Thursday evening when Steven came back to my station to tell me I needed to make andouille sausage and then added, after a dramatic pause fit for an action movie (When I think about this comment now, I hear Bruce Willis' voice in lieu of Steven's): "Word on the front line is you grind a good sausage."
This rumor, as it turned out, was poorly founded, and fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of the enormous sausage cranker, praying no one would notice the cylinders of andouille snaking across the metal table, bursting open, falling on the floor, running away from me like a cartoon hose gone out of control.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Fall Menu
Cochon's oyster and bacon sandwich is an embodiment of everything that the restaurant does well. Of the trifecta mentioned in my first entry, this sandwich manages to squeeze the pork, the deep fry and the mayonnaise into one brilliant menu item. And, as I've also discussed previously, this sandwich (besides the tomatoes...) takes full advantage of Cochon's fresh, local and homemade ingredients. The sandwich starts with thinly sliced white sandwich bread which is buttered and toasted on the flat-top griddle. Then both slices are slathered with lemony tartar sauce, made with homemade mayo, homemade pickles and pickled lemon peel, capers, chili flakes, cayenne and (the secret ingredient) pickle juice. The sandwich is then layered with fried oysters--breaded and crunchy on the outside and still very soft and plump and almost raw in the middle--bacon slices, and lettuce and tomato. The sandwich is an ingenious hybrid of the classic blt and the New Orleans oyster po-boy, and it is a year-round staple on the Cochon menu.
Other parts of the menu undergo seasonal changes, and last week the restaurant transitioned to its fall menu. In New York, the arrival of fall ingredients on restaurant menus is an exciting and welcome change; the air gets cold and the leaves change color and it feels natural to move from berries and tomatoes and basil to apples and beets and butternut squash. In New Orleans, by contrast, the mildness of the seasons tempers the urgency of transitioning to heartier fare (temperatures here are still in the mid 70s, so it feels like even delicate summer vegetables could grow if they wanted to). Also, the summer menu at Cochon wasn't exactly light to begin with; the restaurant's signature dish, the Louisiana cochon, is a hockey puck of shredded pork that is pan fried and served with a lardon-studded cabbage and turnip mixture and garnished with crackling. So more exciting to me than the actual seasonal shift itself was witnessing the creative process of changing the menu. I, being a lowly prep cook, was almost entirely excluded from this process and, for example, was told to julienne an entire ham leg without being explained what for. But I did get to observe the action from afar, eavesdropping on conversations between Steven and the other head cooks, listening to them whisper about deviled crab or toasted pecans or mustard breadcrumbs, and watching Steven tweak new dishes until he deemed them menu-worthy. Once he plated a new salad dish and then swept the whole thing dramatically into the trash. Maybe he just wanted to see how it looked on the plate?
New additions to the fall menu include: a sweet potato and andouille pie baked in a cornmeal crust and served with an apple and mustard green slaw; shrimp and julienned ham (aha!) sauteed in lard, then finished with a satsuma juice reduction and chili butter and served on top of a corn meal and lima bean cake; a mixed green salad with roasted onions and toasted pecans; mac and cheese; a creamy broccoli and rice casserole; a deviled crab dip served with cheddar and thyme crackers; and braised pork cheeks served on top of a beet cake. Regarding the beet recipe, in a rare moment of creative input I declared myself a latke connoisseur and suggested that onions be added to the shredded beet mixture, and Steven and Bill seemed to genuinely consider the idea, though I haven't yet seen any changes be made.
I think my favorite kind of food tasting, though, is not the exciting new menu items or specials but the little morsels of food that present themselves at unexpected times throughout the work night: a pork rib fresh out of the smoker; a piece of beef jerky pulled directly off the rack of the food dehydrator and still slightly moist; a thin slice of a country ham that has just been cut open after two years of aging. These foods are like the meat equivalent of a fresh-picked strawberry or an apple directly off the branch and, no matter how melt-in-your-mouth the ribs on the menu (roasted off in the wood burning oven and served with pickled watermelon rinds), they can't beat the texture and taste and enjoyment of a fresh-smoked rib eaten standing up at your prep station during the beginning hours of a long night's work.
Other parts of the menu undergo seasonal changes, and last week the restaurant transitioned to its fall menu. In New York, the arrival of fall ingredients on restaurant menus is an exciting and welcome change; the air gets cold and the leaves change color and it feels natural to move from berries and tomatoes and basil to apples and beets and butternut squash. In New Orleans, by contrast, the mildness of the seasons tempers the urgency of transitioning to heartier fare (temperatures here are still in the mid 70s, so it feels like even delicate summer vegetables could grow if they wanted to). Also, the summer menu at Cochon wasn't exactly light to begin with; the restaurant's signature dish, the Louisiana cochon, is a hockey puck of shredded pork that is pan fried and served with a lardon-studded cabbage and turnip mixture and garnished with crackling. So more exciting to me than the actual seasonal shift itself was witnessing the creative process of changing the menu. I, being a lowly prep cook, was almost entirely excluded from this process and, for example, was told to julienne an entire ham leg without being explained what for. But I did get to observe the action from afar, eavesdropping on conversations between Steven and the other head cooks, listening to them whisper about deviled crab or toasted pecans or mustard breadcrumbs, and watching Steven tweak new dishes until he deemed them menu-worthy. Once he plated a new salad dish and then swept the whole thing dramatically into the trash. Maybe he just wanted to see how it looked on the plate?
New additions to the fall menu include: a sweet potato and andouille pie baked in a cornmeal crust and served with an apple and mustard green slaw; shrimp and julienned ham (aha!) sauteed in lard, then finished with a satsuma juice reduction and chili butter and served on top of a corn meal and lima bean cake; a mixed green salad with roasted onions and toasted pecans; mac and cheese; a creamy broccoli and rice casserole; a deviled crab dip served with cheddar and thyme crackers; and braised pork cheeks served on top of a beet cake. Regarding the beet recipe, in a rare moment of creative input I declared myself a latke connoisseur and suggested that onions be added to the shredded beet mixture, and Steven and Bill seemed to genuinely consider the idea, though I haven't yet seen any changes be made.
I think my favorite kind of food tasting, though, is not the exciting new menu items or specials but the little morsels of food that present themselves at unexpected times throughout the work night: a pork rib fresh out of the smoker; a piece of beef jerky pulled directly off the rack of the food dehydrator and still slightly moist; a thin slice of a country ham that has just been cut open after two years of aging. These foods are like the meat equivalent of a fresh-picked strawberry or an apple directly off the branch and, no matter how melt-in-your-mouth the ribs on the menu (roasted off in the wood burning oven and served with pickled watermelon rinds), they can't beat the texture and taste and enjoyment of a fresh-smoked rib eaten standing up at your prep station during the beginning hours of a long night's work.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Raw Talent
Let me take a moment to comment on a genetic gift from my father's side. We Arons' are blessed (or, in certain situations, cursed) with highly acute senses of smell, I'm talking police dog olfactory systems, attuned to the barest sprinkling of aromatic particles in the atmosphere. The corollary is that I have one keen-ass set of taste buds and, as a result, have been detecting hidden flavors all over the Cochon kitchen: a savoriness in the apple pie crust (lard); a musty taste in the andouille sausage (file powder, made from sassafras leaves and used as a spice and thickening agent in gumbo); molasses in the fig sherbet (the fruit is cooked in Steen's cane syrup); a hint of blue cheese in the honey custard. This last flavor struck me as odd. I called Bill over to have a taste, but the moldy overtones were lost on his tongue. Suspecting that years of nicotine abuse may have compromised his sense of taste, I sought a third opinion and, sure enough, the creole cream cheese in the custard was spoiled. What a disappointment that my DNA codes for a talent so expert and yet so utterly unmarketable--that I may be doomed to stand in walk-in coolers sniffing honey chocolate cakes for spoilage while Michael Phelps' webbed feet and endless torso take him straight to the stars.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Big Apple vs. Big Easy
I've been thinking quite a bit about the differences between New York and New Orleans food cultures, and I'd like to share my thoughts. The two cities are so different in so many ways that this might be a bit of an apples/oranges comparison, but I think it's an interesting one nonetheless and one that helps to explain Cochon's success and popularity as a restaurant.
New York food, like New York City itself, is defined less by a particular regional tradition than by the elaborate patchwork of ethnic enclaves that exists within the city. In the week before I left for New Orleans alone, I enjoyed Szechuan food in Flushing, Vietnamese sandwiches in Sunset Park, El Salvadoran food in Yonkers, smoked fish on the Upper West Side, and tacos tacos tacos anywhere I could find them. This access to authentic food from virtually anywhere on the globe is one of the great luxuries of living in a city as diverse as New York. Then, alongside the vast range of ethnic food, there is the ever-growing focus on farmer's market-driven cooking, where restaurants partner with local farms to source high-quality and in-season raw ingredients for their menus. This attention to the source and quality of ingredients seems to be becoming the norm among high-end restaurants in New York, and I realize now that I've left that I was beginning to take such practices for granted. These two aspects of New York's food culture--the range of types and the quality of ingredients--are what I love most about eating out in New York, and they are often quite separate from each other (I don't go to most taquerias hoping to dine on pasture-raised carnitas), but I think sometimes the real magic happens at the intersection of the two. Chefs like Michael Psilakis or, especially, David Chang, whose menus have distinct ethnic identities but also heed the local/sustainable movement's emphasis on high-quality ingredients, have captured the current zeitgeist of New York food with particular success and have enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim as a result.
In New Orleans, something very different is going on. The food culture here centers almost entirely upon a particular set of regional cooking traditions: the Creole cuisine from within New Orleans itself, and the Cajun cuisine of surrounding Acadian Louisiana. Creole food is fascinating because it blends together the culinary styles of the various groups who settled in New Orleans during Louisiana's colonial and post-colonial period. Predominant among these is the French influence, evident in techniques like using a roux (mixture of butter and flour) to thicken soups and gumbos, in foods of French origin like beignets and remoulade, and in French names for dishes like etouffee ("smothered," in French). Also significant are the Spanish influence of rice and beans, seen in dishes like Jambalaya and dirty rice; West Indian ingredients like cayenne and hot peppers, brought to New Orleans by Haitian immigrants of the early 19th century; African okra, introduced to the Americas by slaves; American southern staples like cornbread, grits, greens and country ham; and the abundance of shrimp, crawfish, oysters and other seafood due to New Orleans' position at the mouth of the Mississippi River. This complex blend makes New Orleans perhaps the only region of the US with a truly unique regional culinary tradition.
But Creole food has in many ways fallen victim to the larger American phenomenon of commercially processed food products, and to the economic rules of a globalized food system. When I sifted through a stack of Creole cookbooks from a collection at Tulane University, I was struck by the number of recipe ingredients that would fall into Michael Pollan's category of "edible food-like substances": canned mushroom soup in a shrimp dish, instant coffee powder for a cake, Sure Jell to thicken jams and jellies, ketchup all over the place. Also, many of the ingredients listed were brand-specific, like Knox gelatin or Lea & Perrins worchestershire sauce or Philadelphia cream cheese, reinforcing the supermarket shelf mentality. Meanwhile, many New Orleans restaurants are forced by high local prices to buy crawfish from China, eroding the ties between Creole cooking and the unique geographic location that helped define it in the first place. The result of these factors, and probably others as well, is that many New Orleans restaurants are cooking mediocre food, Creole in practice but drained of the indigenous ingredients and methods that make Creole cuisine an authentic regional specialty.
I think part of the reason Cochon has gained so much national recognition is that it is reconnecting Louisiana recipes with the local ingredients and methods upon which those recipes were founded. The restaurant uses Louisiana grits and "popcorn" rice (smells like basmati to me), local shrimp, oysters and crawfish, and places a large emphasis on home-made foods, from pickles to bacon to mustard to moonshine. Cochon has thus struck that magical culinary sweet spot, having both a well-formed ethnic identity and a self-consciously ingredient-driven philosophy that elevates Cajun food without making it fancy, and I think that, as much as its devotion to pork, is why Cochon warrants Frank Bruni's comparison to Momofuku. Certainly, it places Cochon in a league far above the vast majority of Creole and Cajun restaurants in New Orleans.
In my opinion, though, Cochon could go even further. I would love to see the restaurant pay more attention to the quality of its produce. Meat definitely takes the center-stage on Cochon's menu, but vegetable accents like the tomato slice in an oyster bacon sandwich or the arugula in an andouille salad have the ability to really enhance a dish when they are delicious in their own right. For whatever reason--perhaps because partnering with small farms is hard to do in Louisiana, perhaps because keeping food costs low is a priority--Cochon is not following its commitment to top-notch local ingredients through to the vegetable corners of its menu. I wonder if it could get away with such slackness among the demandingly locavorous diners of New York...
New York food, like New York City itself, is defined less by a particular regional tradition than by the elaborate patchwork of ethnic enclaves that exists within the city. In the week before I left for New Orleans alone, I enjoyed Szechuan food in Flushing, Vietnamese sandwiches in Sunset Park, El Salvadoran food in Yonkers, smoked fish on the Upper West Side, and tacos tacos tacos anywhere I could find them. This access to authentic food from virtually anywhere on the globe is one of the great luxuries of living in a city as diverse as New York. Then, alongside the vast range of ethnic food, there is the ever-growing focus on farmer's market-driven cooking, where restaurants partner with local farms to source high-quality and in-season raw ingredients for their menus. This attention to the source and quality of ingredients seems to be becoming the norm among high-end restaurants in New York, and I realize now that I've left that I was beginning to take such practices for granted. These two aspects of New York's food culture--the range of types and the quality of ingredients--are what I love most about eating out in New York, and they are often quite separate from each other (I don't go to most taquerias hoping to dine on pasture-raised carnitas), but I think sometimes the real magic happens at the intersection of the two. Chefs like Michael Psilakis or, especially, David Chang, whose menus have distinct ethnic identities but also heed the local/sustainable movement's emphasis on high-quality ingredients, have captured the current zeitgeist of New York food with particular success and have enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim as a result.
In New Orleans, something very different is going on. The food culture here centers almost entirely upon a particular set of regional cooking traditions: the Creole cuisine from within New Orleans itself, and the Cajun cuisine of surrounding Acadian Louisiana. Creole food is fascinating because it blends together the culinary styles of the various groups who settled in New Orleans during Louisiana's colonial and post-colonial period. Predominant among these is the French influence, evident in techniques like using a roux (mixture of butter and flour) to thicken soups and gumbos, in foods of French origin like beignets and remoulade, and in French names for dishes like etouffee ("smothered," in French). Also significant are the Spanish influence of rice and beans, seen in dishes like Jambalaya and dirty rice; West Indian ingredients like cayenne and hot peppers, brought to New Orleans by Haitian immigrants of the early 19th century; African okra, introduced to the Americas by slaves; American southern staples like cornbread, grits, greens and country ham; and the abundance of shrimp, crawfish, oysters and other seafood due to New Orleans' position at the mouth of the Mississippi River. This complex blend makes New Orleans perhaps the only region of the US with a truly unique regional culinary tradition.
But Creole food has in many ways fallen victim to the larger American phenomenon of commercially processed food products, and to the economic rules of a globalized food system. When I sifted through a stack of Creole cookbooks from a collection at Tulane University, I was struck by the number of recipe ingredients that would fall into Michael Pollan's category of "edible food-like substances": canned mushroom soup in a shrimp dish, instant coffee powder for a cake, Sure Jell to thicken jams and jellies, ketchup all over the place. Also, many of the ingredients listed were brand-specific, like Knox gelatin or Lea & Perrins worchestershire sauce or Philadelphia cream cheese, reinforcing the supermarket shelf mentality. Meanwhile, many New Orleans restaurants are forced by high local prices to buy crawfish from China, eroding the ties between Creole cooking and the unique geographic location that helped define it in the first place. The result of these factors, and probably others as well, is that many New Orleans restaurants are cooking mediocre food, Creole in practice but drained of the indigenous ingredients and methods that make Creole cuisine an authentic regional specialty.
I think part of the reason Cochon has gained so much national recognition is that it is reconnecting Louisiana recipes with the local ingredients and methods upon which those recipes were founded. The restaurant uses Louisiana grits and "popcorn" rice (smells like basmati to me), local shrimp, oysters and crawfish, and places a large emphasis on home-made foods, from pickles to bacon to mustard to moonshine. Cochon has thus struck that magical culinary sweet spot, having both a well-formed ethnic identity and a self-consciously ingredient-driven philosophy that elevates Cajun food without making it fancy, and I think that, as much as its devotion to pork, is why Cochon warrants Frank Bruni's comparison to Momofuku. Certainly, it places Cochon in a league far above the vast majority of Creole and Cajun restaurants in New Orleans.
In my opinion, though, Cochon could go even further. I would love to see the restaurant pay more attention to the quality of its produce. Meat definitely takes the center-stage on Cochon's menu, but vegetable accents like the tomato slice in an oyster bacon sandwich or the arugula in an andouille salad have the ability to really enhance a dish when they are delicious in their own right. For whatever reason--perhaps because partnering with small farms is hard to do in Louisiana, perhaps because keeping food costs low is a priority--Cochon is not following its commitment to top-notch local ingredients through to the vegetable corners of its menu. I wonder if it could get away with such slackness among the demandingly locavorous diners of New York...
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Making Head Cheese at Midnight
My week reads like a calendar of meat handling events.
On Friday, the restaurant braised 300 pounds of beef cheeks for an off-site event, and I spent most of the evening removing the cheeks from their braising liquid. On Saturday, I carved seven enormous briskets (a whole brisket is actually made up of two separate pectoral muscles which are separated by slicing through the fatty layer that runs between them. In the supermarket you would usually buy the leaner and more attractive of these two muscles, the "first cut", but Cochon doesn't discriminate). On Monday, I sliced a substantial amount of bacon. Using the fancy commercial slicing machine, I had a Jewish New Yorker fantasy that I was working at Katz's Delicatessan, carving pastrami by hand. On a less Jewish note, during this fantasy I indulged in a piece of raw bacon. This brought back a childhood memory of catching Ella Sternberg's parents eating bacon straight from the package on Fire Island, an act that seemed to me at the time almost cannibalistic in its flesh-eating grotequeness (I think I ran home terrified). But this house-cured and house-smoked bacon was so beautifully red and marbled that I felt compelled to taste it fresh off the slicer and, hey, the Sternberg's may have been on to something--it had the delicateness of prosciutto, a sweetness from the brown sugar in the cure, and a deep smokiness common to all meat that spends time in Cochon's smoker.
These meaty toils reached a climax on Tuesday, when my final task of the evening was to assist Bill, Cochon's main meat man (he does the majority of the restaurant's butchering, curing, smoking and sausage-making), at making head cheese. Bill brought me a tray pan packed with several roasted pig heads and instructed me to tease them apart, discarding the bones and saving the meat and most of the skin. I must admit feeling a bit squeamish at first; there was something unsettling about the process of dismantling heads into their subparts, prying jaw bones full of teeth from their tongues, tearing chunks of meat from cheek cavities, separating ears from skulls and removing piggy snouts (to be chopped up and used in their entirety!). When the heads were broken down I was left with a pile of face, still vaguely reminiscent of a pig, in a Picassoesque sense. Joe, another cook, came by and hacked off a piece of tongue to munch on, so I girded my loins and followed suit and, WOW, pig tongue is delicious! Who knew. The meat has a unique softness and richness of flavor and, if you remove the outer membrane containing the taste buds, you would never guess it used to be a tongue.
As the head cheese story indicates, Cochon never fails to incorporate every last bit of the pig into its menu. Yesterday, to make use of an extra pork butt, Steven devised an impromptu menu special: slices of roasted pork with a mizuna salad, a fried yard egg (provided by a friend who has laying hens in his backyard) and a satsuma chili hollandaise sauce--a Cajun riff on eggs benedict?--which, in a moment of something approaching mentorship, Steven asked me to assist him in making. In lieu of the usual lemon juice base, we used a combination of vermouth, cider vinegar, and satsuma juice that gave the hollandaise a slightly sweet and citrusy flavor.
There is something deeply satisfying about the process of rendering an animal part, sometimes quite anatomically distinct at the outset, into an elegant menu item. To the mess of chopped up head meat Bill and I added scallion, parsley and seasonings, then poured the mixture into pans with a gelatin broth and chilled it into loaves of head cheese, served on the menu in delicate slices beneath a salad of mustard greens and garnished with crispy curls of fried pig ears. I heard a rumor that there used to be a pork tongue salad on the menu, too, and I'd like to find out the recipe and replicate it at some point in the future.
On Friday, the restaurant braised 300 pounds of beef cheeks for an off-site event, and I spent most of the evening removing the cheeks from their braising liquid. On Saturday, I carved seven enormous briskets (a whole brisket is actually made up of two separate pectoral muscles which are separated by slicing through the fatty layer that runs between them. In the supermarket you would usually buy the leaner and more attractive of these two muscles, the "first cut", but Cochon doesn't discriminate). On Monday, I sliced a substantial amount of bacon. Using the fancy commercial slicing machine, I had a Jewish New Yorker fantasy that I was working at Katz's Delicatessan, carving pastrami by hand. On a less Jewish note, during this fantasy I indulged in a piece of raw bacon. This brought back a childhood memory of catching Ella Sternberg's parents eating bacon straight from the package on Fire Island, an act that seemed to me at the time almost cannibalistic in its flesh-eating grotequeness (I think I ran home terrified). But this house-cured and house-smoked bacon was so beautifully red and marbled that I felt compelled to taste it fresh off the slicer and, hey, the Sternberg's may have been on to something--it had the delicateness of prosciutto, a sweetness from the brown sugar in the cure, and a deep smokiness common to all meat that spends time in Cochon's smoker.
These meaty toils reached a climax on Tuesday, when my final task of the evening was to assist Bill, Cochon's main meat man (he does the majority of the restaurant's butchering, curing, smoking and sausage-making), at making head cheese. Bill brought me a tray pan packed with several roasted pig heads and instructed me to tease them apart, discarding the bones and saving the meat and most of the skin. I must admit feeling a bit squeamish at first; there was something unsettling about the process of dismantling heads into their subparts, prying jaw bones full of teeth from their tongues, tearing chunks of meat from cheek cavities, separating ears from skulls and removing piggy snouts (to be chopped up and used in their entirety!). When the heads were broken down I was left with a pile of face, still vaguely reminiscent of a pig, in a Picassoesque sense. Joe, another cook, came by and hacked off a piece of tongue to munch on, so I girded my loins and followed suit and, WOW, pig tongue is delicious! Who knew. The meat has a unique softness and richness of flavor and, if you remove the outer membrane containing the taste buds, you would never guess it used to be a tongue.
As the head cheese story indicates, Cochon never fails to incorporate every last bit of the pig into its menu. Yesterday, to make use of an extra pork butt, Steven devised an impromptu menu special: slices of roasted pork with a mizuna salad, a fried yard egg (provided by a friend who has laying hens in his backyard) and a satsuma chili hollandaise sauce--a Cajun riff on eggs benedict?--which, in a moment of something approaching mentorship, Steven asked me to assist him in making. In lieu of the usual lemon juice base, we used a combination of vermouth, cider vinegar, and satsuma juice that gave the hollandaise a slightly sweet and citrusy flavor.
There is something deeply satisfying about the process of rendering an animal part, sometimes quite anatomically distinct at the outset, into an elegant menu item. To the mess of chopped up head meat Bill and I added scallion, parsley and seasonings, then poured the mixture into pans with a gelatin broth and chilled it into loaves of head cheese, served on the menu in delicate slices beneath a salad of mustard greens and garnished with crispy curls of fried pig ears. I heard a rumor that there used to be a pork tongue salad on the menu, too, and I'd like to find out the recipe and replicate it at some point in the future.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
First day on the job
In recent days I've undergone something of a transformation to the extent that I may now be unrecognizable to my friends and family up North. I live in a rundown shotgun-style house for $340/month, wear an oversized black cook's uniform with the nickname "Rhino" printed on the front (borrowed from a former Cochon employee until my set of "Rachel" shirts arrives), carry a machete-like Japanese chef's knife, and ride a blue moped from the '80s.
Saturday was my first official day as a cook at Cochon and a real crash-course on the madness and excitement of working in a professional kitchen. I went in at 3:00pm to set up and do prep work and finished 9 1/2 hours later at 12:30am, the restaurant having done 250 covers in approximately five hours of dinner service. Whew.
Cochon has an open kitchen with a wood-burning oven, a big set of stoves and a deep frier up front where the customers can peer in; this is the front line, where all the appetizers and hot food get prepared and plated. In the back is the back line, invisible to the public, where the prep work and dessert plating gets done and, behind that, the dishwashing area and the walk-in cooler where a huge quantity of raw ingredients and prepared foods occupy a relatively small space.
The prep hours before dinner time have a certain frenetic quality as cooks scramble to set up their stations before the first dinner reservations start trickling in at 5:30pm. For me on that first Saturday, those hours were more of a battle to maintain five fingers on my left hand while I diced thirty pounds of onions. I might have been more optimistic about my chances for success except that the Honduran guys who make up the rank-and-file of the kitchen staff were dropping like flies around me. First Francisco, a fellow onion dicer, cut his finger, then Didier cut his, and then Marvin, a dishwasher, had a sudden allergic reaction that left his face and neck swollen like a latino Elephant Man. I also had a bit of a quality control problem on my hands because my knife skills are weak at best and I hadn't yet bought my own chef's knife so I was using an old dull one from the kitchen stash. Steven, the restaurant owner, a large and softspoken man with a baby face who nonetheless looks like he might kick some ass at any moment, came by and fingered through my pile of ragged and uneven onion chunks, which I'm convinced became more ragged and uneven under his gaze. He then demonstrated on a fresh onion how the pros do it: halve the onion, deft slices in three directions and, bam, perfect dice. If I master just that one skill during my time as a prep cook I will be satisfied.
After onions, it was potatoes, a whole fuckin' lot of them, to be peeled and diced for potato salad. I prepared an enormous pot full and, determined to prove myself as competent as any of the more masculine cooks (I am the only female in the kitchen during the dinner shift), hauled it up front towards the stove where Steven warned me not to hurt myself and then added, somberly, "There really are no heroes." I'd like to attribute this comment as much to Steven's military background as to my own shameless quest for approval but still, it stung, and I sulked unheroically back to my prep station with a slipped disk and a bruised ego.
At 5:30 the guests started trickling in and the kitchen activity began a slow crescendo that would climax around 8:30 when every table in the restaurant was full. Somewhere after 6 o'clock the first dessert orders began to roll in, one of the cooks up front yelled "postre" and handed me a ticket, and I began my routine dance back and forth between the walk-in cooler, the freezer, and the dessert table where I performed the necessary slicing, scooping, and garnishing. On an individual level, dessert plating is a rather quaint task; pop the pineapple upside down cake in the toaster, an artful drizzle of caramel sauce on the plate, a scoop of coconut sherbet on one side, warmed cake on the other, garnish of diced pineapple e voila. When the orders come in rapid succession and each one includes multiple dishes, however, it is a total shit show. Pop the pineapple cake in the toaster, grab the honey chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie and a glass of parfait from the cooler, pull three plates off the pile and get the caramel sauce down, cut slices of the cakes and plate them, get the pear sauce and a drizzle of honey onto the chocolate cake, a slice of lemon onto the pie plate, a dollop of malt cream and a maraschino cherry and a shortbread cookie onto the parfait, pull the coconut sorbet and the ice cream du jour (banana brown butter) and a frozen ice cream bowl from the freezer, get the hot pineapple cake onto the plate, scoop the sorbet and the ice cream, which is so hard it gives me a hernia, garnish of effin' diced pineapple and then I yell "I need a dessert runner please!" and members of the waitstaff come and whisk the desserts into the dining room just as I hear the word "postre" and another ticket lands on my table.
But this postre business is nothing compared to the madness that goes down up front on the line during peak dinner hours, a type of work that requires a level of coordination, focus, and physical stamina not unlike a high impact team sport. Up there, one cook acts as an "expediter", calling orders off the tickets--"fire", as in "fire brisket", means cook and plate right away whereas "on deck" means start the dish but wait to plate--which the cooks then echo back ("fire brisket, rabbit, two catfish, two roasts") in a call-and-response that seems to require a remarkable degree of short-term memory, which then begs the question, Are all cooks geniuses? The cooks fire dishes and plate them and slide them onto the wide counter at the front of the kitchen where the waitstaff runs them to their respective tables. This counter is, to me, a particularly beautiful sight to behold, the plates glistening under the heat lamps in all their porky, deep-fried glory (Cochon's trifecta is the pork product, the deep fry, and the mayonnaise or other unapologetically emulsified sauce).
The night whizzed by in a frenzy of prep work (for example, doing a flour/buttermilk/ breadcrumbs number on an enormous bowl of sliced pigs' ears) and dessert plating, punctuated by some serious eating. Throughout the evening, bits of food kept miraculously making their way back to my station: an incredible appetizer of fried alligator in a remoulade sauce--a reptilian version of the rock shrimp tempura appetizer served at some Japanese restaurants; a chunk of soft-shell crab soaked in a chili butter that tasted like a mild and more nuanced version of buffalo sauce; a plateful of duck cracklin'; an appetizer of grilled shrimp with a pickled tomato relish; a single wood oven-roasted oyster in an anchovy butter sauce; a taste of beef jerky here, a boudin ball there, and on and on, with a plate of crunchy pickled cucumbers providing the only respite from the relentlessly lipidic dishes. I thought surely this omakase special I was enjoying was part of my initial training, a way for me to acquaint myself with the menu before the real work began. But, in fact, I have since been instructed to never eat before work, always arrive starving and it seems as though I am free to order food whenever I please. I fear this nifty arrangement might eventually do the impossible and exhaust my appetite for pork but, for the moment, I am knee-deep in cochon and loving it.
At the end of every night so far a moment has come, almost abruptly, when the madness dies down and the mood in the kitchen relaxes and Steven changes out of his chef's uniform and comes around and passes out cans of PBR. On Saturday, this moment was accompanied by the other cooks discussing their (ambitious, I thought) plans to wake up early and start pounding beers in preparation for the Saints game, a conversation that highlighted my position, being neither a Saints fan nor an early morning beer pounder, as a cultural minority in the Cochon kitchen. For the next hour, we scrub tables and wrap up food and drink our beers and accost the dishwashers with bowls and trays and silverware. Once the doors of the restaurant are locked up for the night, waiters and bartenders congregate on stools at the bar up front and smoke cigarettes and joke loudly. Witnessing this scene feels a little like going backstage at a play and catching the cast out of costume, and it is during these after-hours moments when I am most aware that I have become part of a strange and wonderful restaurant kitchen subculture.
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