Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (33 page)

To the right of them, the previous team cleaned up. To their left, another team continued to cook and began to put up their platter. With the motion stilled in the EMP kitchen, momentum and purpose were hanging like phantoms in the air. In a moment they’d dissipate like a scent.

I was thinking again of what I thought before:
They’ve worked for this moment for a long time, even before they ever knew they’d be here
.

And I started to move away; I was out of the crowd, rounding the corner of the upstairs deck, picking my way along, as far back as I could go. There were chairs there, but no one else was around. I sat down and put my face in my hands. I could feel my eyes pulsing. The hair on my arms stood up. I had gooseflesh. My body was so attentive, so pitched, that I could almost feel the light hitting my skin.

What I’d just seen was a philosophy of life in action. Two guys—two kids—who one day decided they would be excellent; who disciplined themselves, learned everything they could, practiced aggressively, and moved their thinking onto a whole other plane. They might have been musicians; they might have been dancers. In their case, it was about food. And they recognized that at each stage—from the second they set out their equipment through the moment they do their prep to the final assemblage—that there is a best possible way to do everything. Every gesture, no matter how small, was about the individual attempting to be great.

What those guys did—what they do—is attainable. You’ll wind up bleeding to get there, but you can get there. But not me, at least not with the bruises and slights of how I think about myself, with all my hesitations, my timidity, my half-assed methodology of doing what was expected of me but little more.

This is why they yell at you. This is why you’re forced to get up in the morning and go cut fish. This is why they will never give you a compliment. This is why.

And I disagree with so much of how they do it sometimes, the chefs, with their bullying, their brute force. But I understood now the impulse behind it. If you can get rid of all your mental baggage and distractions, all your own doubts and pettiness and bullshit, you can arrive at the clarity of mind with a diamond focus that lets all of a person’s training and skill bloom. Then a person can be great.

I had gotten to see greatness today. Everything that had gone on for me up until now, the exhaustion, the being disciplined, the building
angers, the energy of those angers, the nervous, racked nights of the last summer were all leading to watching this today.

I
HAD A BETTER
understanding of what people meant when they referred to being born again. I looked the same, but my body felt different. My mind had had a bypass done on it. I felt able. I felt electrified. I saw school and everything about it as an opportunity to try and touch perfection, to hone efficiency, to find at every moment a chance to be better, no matter the external pressures.

On our final night of baking, Speiss said that instead of going to dinner, he thought it would be a nice idea to stay in and make our own pizzas. He ordered mozzarella, Parmesan, and ricotta for us, and all sorts of meats and vegetables. “Do whatever you want,” he said. “We’ll all try each other’s wares.” He asked for a volunteer to make a tomato sauce, and he mixed the dough for us as we finished up baking our final loaves of bread and making desserts to take to the faculty lounge and the cafeteria. He cranked up the heat in one of the ovens, gave a quick demonstration on how to stretch out the dough, and then set us loose. It was another moment when our choices spoke loudly about culinary values and interests. Micah, a twenty-year-old from Alaska, tall, thin, with an impish face who had taken to very lightly tickling me whenever he walked by and I was trying to concentrate on something, set about putting herbs into goat cheese and caramelizing fennel. Rocco, a loud, likable kid from New Jersey, who constantly sang, danced, and kissed everyone’s cheeks, covered his dough with sausage, pepperoni, and a little bit of every fresh vegetable Speiss had ordered. I went minimal. I wanted to do a simple margherita pizza. I stretched out my crust so it was thin to the point of tearing. I slicked the dough with a little olive oil and garlic, judiciously applied the sauce—which I had also put through a food mill to avoid any chunks—and laid down uniform slices of fresh mozzarella and a scattering of Parmesan. I tried to deduce where the hottest spot in the oven would be and put the pizza in to bake. I had a little time to think as my pizza cooked.

The world is glutted with mediocre pizza. Most dough is too thick and dense and tastes wet. Most sauces are either too thin and acidic, or too sweet after having been cooked for so long that they become concentrated and sugary. And, further, most mozzarella seems to have been pulled by the handful from an industrial-sized bag of shredded processed cheese sold by Sysco. It’s usually rubbery. You can cheat a little bit by piling all sorts of ingredients on top—garlicky mushrooms, sausage, pepperoni—but if you leave the pizza nude, it’s easy to tell what level your skills were. This was a key point for me. My mind took a sudden turn to a different endeavor, away from pizza and toward chicken.

My tastes often run to the simple. Like a lot of people involved in cooking, my favorite meal is roast chicken, preferably with roasted potatoes. I’ve been making it once a week for years. And I’ve seen a million variations on it in cookbooks: tamarind glazed; rubbed with Mexican spices or Indian spices; with all manner of things forced under the skin, from a citrus peel and bread-crumb mix to goat cheese and pine nuts to truffles. I’m sure that a lot of these are pretty good. But—I was asking myself as I checked my pizza; the crust had begun showing flecks of gold. I closed the door again—why mess with a naked chicken? Because a lot of people out there haven’t ever really learned how to roast a chicken well. And many of us have always relied on Perdue for the chicken itself. If you simply shove a crappy factory bird in an oven—and do so without the right amount of seasoning, without the right oven temperature, and so on—the results will be bland for certain, and probably awful. It’s almost as if playing with a roast chicken were similar to how spices were used in medieval times: with an ungodly heavy hand, all the better to cover the rank taste of off meat.

But also, I reasoned, simplicity is hard. Really hard.

I recalled that when Fernand Point wanted to judge the skill level of a cook, he’d have the cook fry an egg. Daniel Boulud allegedly asks him or her to make an omelet.

Once, I remembered, while I was working at Martha Stewart, I scoffed at a recipe we were putting online for basic boiled rice.

“Put the freaking rice in a pot,” I had said, dismissive. “Pour in twice the amount of water. Boil it. Boom—you’re done. What state have we reached when we need to spell all this out in recipe form?”

Melissa, one of my editors, said, “Actually, that isn’t the right ratio of water. And furthermore, have you ever actually had a serving of perfectly cooked rice?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never even considered it.”

“Then you haven’t.”

An old Buddhist koan came to my mind as I pulled my pizza out:
How many flavors can you detect in a single grain of rice?

I remembered Viverito saying to me, “So many of these kids tell me about things they want to try making: ‘Oh, I want to do shrimp with a pine needle foam and pea gel.’ I want to tell them, ‘Okay, so you’ve made a foam. Now, explain what this adds to the dish other than demonstrating that you can make a foam? How about learning inside and out how to cook that shrimp so it isn’t pure rubber?’ ”

The underside of the pizza was a beautiful light brown. I shoved a pizza peel under it to pull it out and slid it onto a cutting board to cool. After a minute, I used scissors to cut pieces of ripe basil over the top.

You get a perfect roasted chicken by following directions close to this: Dry the skin of the bird with a paper towel; you don’t want moisture. Remove the wishbone. Salt the cavity of the bird. Truss the bird—there are a hundred dozen ways to do this; choose one—and salt the exterior of the chicken as well. Have your oven at around 425. Put your chicken in a pan, up and off the pan’s floor. Some people use a rack, I roll aluminum foil up, wrap it around my fingers into a coil, and perch the chicken on top. Put it into the oven and let it go for twenty, twenty-five minutes, until the skin begins turning color. Drop the heat to 375 and let it go for another thirty-five minutes. Tip the chicken; red juices will run out. Close the oven on it for another four or five minutes. Tip again. There will be less red in the juices, and they will be darker. Close the oven. After a couple of minutes, tip again. The juices will be a dark, cooked red with some gray. Take the bird out; it’s done. Let it rest, uncovered, for twenty minutes—no less. Then cut it up.

This represents an accretion of steps. None of them—in and of themselves—essential, none of them complex. Could you not truss the bird and still get a good chicken? Yes. Could you skip trussing and salting the cavity? Yes. Skip the trussing, cavity salting, elevation off the pan, and seasoning the exterior? Now you’re pushing your luck.

If you do it right, the chicken is tender, juicy, and really
tastes
of chicken.

Culinary mediocrity is an accretion of shortcuts.
Take a shortcut now and you’ll be taking them for the rest of your career
.

Kent and Allan knew that there is a way to handle every single element, no matter how small, that goes into a dish—
there’s a right way to do everything
, Ty had said at Tabla—and they didn’t take shortcuts.

Jacky was at my shoulder. “You had all those vegetables here, all those sausages, and you made a margherita pizza? You are so ambitious, aren’t you?”

“Do you like roast chicken?”

Jacky looked puzzled. “Of course I do.”

I lightly slapped his forehead. “Then eat the freaking pizza and shut the hell up.”

The two of us stood eating my pizza. Maybe I could have taken it out a minute earlier, but it was really good.

We had spent that day and the day prior in a state of light heartbreak over leaving Speiss’s class. “It was like a womb in here,” I’d said, and everyone agreed. But we’d gotten good news on the morning of our final day. The next class was Cuisine of Europe and the Mediterranean. It covered basic Middle Eastern, Spanish, Italian, and French cooking. Everyone was excited. The best lunch and dinnertime foods came out of the Mediterranean kitchens. And our instructor was the recently promoted former Skills teacher, Robert Perillo.

“A
LL RIGHT
,” P
ERILLO SAID
. We were gathered in a semicircle around him in the Mediterranean kitchen, which looked identical to most of the other kitchens, except there were a few more ranges and ovens, each stretching parallel against opposite walls. Behind us there was a cart loaded down with that day’s order, and trays of meat and fish on table-tops nearby. “A lot of you I remember from Skills I and II. But we’re all going to get to know each other even better. I love teaching this class. I love the food, I love passing on what I know, I love learning tricks and techniques from you guys. You’ve all been out on externship, and you all picked things up. And I’m excited to see what you can show me.

“I think we’re going to have a really great time together. Everyone has their assignments? Okay, then. Start cooking.”

There is something difficult to describe about how different you feel working under someone who doesn’t have too many other places he’d rather be, who wants you to do well, who is genuinely excited about imparting information, who loves cooking and assumes the same about you, who watches every move you make—not to nail you for an error, but to be sure you’re doing it the best possible way—and who is having a truly good time doing it all. It’s like being given permission to succeed, and you operate fueled by a low, constant ebullience. It was great working with Perillo.

Not that he was easy, or tender, all the time.

It’s simpler to cut an onion in half and then pull away the peel than it is to cut off the tops and peel the whole thing first before slicing it in two. But it’s cleaner to peel the onion first. Perillo told us to do it that way. He didn’t just get excited when things went right; he was just as emotionally invested when things went wrong.

“Okay,” I heard him say to Bruce, his voice animated. “When I say peel the onion first, how many different meanings does that have? I’m certain there is one meaning. I think there’s no room for interpretation on this one. Peel. The. Onion. First. Please don’t make me tell you again.”

Or, a little later that first day, Sammy and I had finished our prep work and were putting together a demo plate for Perillo to critique. We were doing ghaliyeh maygoo, an Iranian dish of sautéed shrimp in a tamarind-tomato sauce. I was sautéing shrimp. I didn’t have a spatula near me, so I was tossing the pan to make the shrimp jump and bounce and turn over.

“Jonathan,” Perillo called out. “Have you ever eaten flying shrimp?”

“Are they a Mediterranean shrimp?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of flying shrimp before.”

“Me neither. Keep the damn pan on the stove.”

But then when things went right …

I’d been following the hummus recipe and noticed something. “Chef Perillo. There’s no cumin in this recipe.” He scanned my recipe sheet.

“Very good, Jonathan. You’ve assessed the recipe correctly.” He started moving on.

“Can I put cumin in?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because …” He stopped and seemed to think about it. “Actually, I don’t have a good reason. Okay, go ahead. Just don’t make it overpowering.”

I immediately toasted some cumin in a pan. The flavor of the cumin is intensified and transformed by toasting it—something I’d picked up at Tabla. I ground it up and put it aside. I minced some garlic, got the
chickpeas out (someone from the previous class had soaked and cooked the beans for us), and put them right into a food processor. The recipe didn’t call for my next step either. The skins of the chickpeas are tough, and usually make hummus grainy. I pulsed the peas into a paste and then put them twice through a tamis, which looks like a drum head covered with fine wire mesh. The flesh of the peas came out the other side; the skins stayed behind. I put the peas back in the processor with the garlic and cumin, some tahini paste, and lemon juice.