Under the Table (25 page)

I returned to my little group of Jackie, Wendell, Philip, Ravi, and Penny. We would be preparing the dough for the baguettes made with the liquid
levain
. We stood by our enormous Hobart machines, adding first the flour and water, then a block of soft fresh yeast and the cool, gray slick of tangy liquid
levain,
and finally the sea salt, watching the enormous dough hook, a vicious thing that would have made Captain Hook green with envy, churn the ingredients together and then begin to knead the dough with an efficiency that human hands could not compete with. While it lacked some of the romance of making bread totally by hand, we were working with almost twenty pounds of dough, and it would have taken forever to knead the dough to the correct, elastic consistency. It would also make for a better loaf, in the end. As the dough came together and became more elastic under the punishing spins of the hook, it began to make a rhythmic slapping noise against the side of the enormous bowl.

Wendell grinned and spoke—one of the only times I had heard him talk in the months we had been in class together—saying, “Hey, Ravi, Philip, I know you dudes know that sound! Whoo hooo! Oh, yeah! Sounds like a gooooood time.” I looked at Jackie, and she shook her head.

“Wendell has a
quirky
sense of humor,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and rolling her big brown eyes.

That was an understatement. In the words of my English friend, Wendell was a total wanker. Literally. I began to understand why Wendell was here, after flunking out of every other institution for higher learning out there. He had finally found a calling where his
sex jokes would be encouraged rather than stymied. Wendell began making bump-and-grind motions to further elaborate on his joke, fondling his spatula for good measure. Chef Hel ignored Wendell's antics completely and demonstrated how to check the consistency of the dough—when it is ready, it is springy and elastic, and smooth like a vintage leather handbag—and showed us how to use our large plastic bench scrapers to scoop huge folds of dough out of the machine and into a well-oiled plastic bin. It took some major finesse, which is hard to conjure when several pounds of sticky dough are hanging from your hands, but we managed, though I ended up with my fingers glued fast to Penny's with gooey dough when it was all over. As I unstuck myself, Penny looked up at me with her watery blue eyes and said, with devastating simplicity, “What are we doing again?” Oh, no. Penny was forgetful, but I wasn't sure I could deal with someone who forgot which recipe they were working on, mid-preparation. Taking her to the sink to wash her hands, I explained what we were doing all over again to her, and then gave her the notes I had taken during class so far. Penny looked over the pages of writing, mostly from Chef Hel's lecture on the history of bread, and instead of thanking me, merely clucked, like an unhappy chicken. This would be an uphill struggle, I was sure of it.

While we waited for the first rise of dough, Chef Tina lectured us on the importance of temperature and timing for bread making in the kitchen. Bread does best during its long preparation if the dough is the desired temperature of 75°F. In order to achieve that temperature, the room temperature must be measured, the temperature of the flour must be taken, and, if additional leaveners are being used, they must have their temperatures recorded as well. The water that will be added must now have its temperature adjusted so that when all the ingredients come together, they will be at the right temperature. While occasionally, in a very hot kitchen, perhaps, the water could be room temperature, most often the water should be very warm or even hot when it is added to the other ingredients so
that the yeast can begin working right away in these ideal conditions.

Timing is critical as well. Dough rises at a fairly constant rate, and while it will rise faster in a warm room and more slowly in a cold room, there isn't a lot of tinkering that can be done with how quickly yeasts work. That said, bread makers develop a certain rhythm of making dough, letting it rise, folding it over, letting it rise, folding it over again, portioning the dough into servings, letting it rest, forming the dough, letting it rise, and then finally baking it, cooling it, and selling it. This rhythm is immutable and informs every other aspect of a bread maker's life, from when he gets up in the morning to when he sneaks an afternoon nap to the last folding over in the evening before bed, preparatory to the next day's fresh loaves.

By the end of Chef Tina's lecture, it was time to fold our own dough over—spilling it out of its large plastic tub, folding its outer edges back to the middle, and tipping it back into the tub upside down for the next rise—all to give the dough a more even structure. Structure is very important to a well-baked, well-formed loaf. Structure technically means the development of small air bubbles in the crumb of the loaf, giving the bread proper texture. A loaf of bread that has not had the right structural development will not rise as evenly, which leads to large, uneven air pockets in the finished product. Some breads are more airy and light, like a baguette or a Pullman loaf, while some are more dense and chewy, like a rustic
pain de campagne
or a pumpernickel, but all share the same sort of crumb, well honeycombed with tiny pockets of air.

Soon it was time to divide the dough and shape it roughly before letting it rest again. Allowing the dough to rest after it has been portioned by weight and preshaped allows the glutens in the dough a chance to relax and the dough to retain its springy elasticity without tearing. Dough that has been torn (rather than cut) causes the yeast cells to stretch and rip, once again impeding the formation
of structure and even rising. Chef Tina produced several enormous sets of scales and, using the sharp side of her bench scraper, began to portion out wads of dough, casually flinging them through the air for each of us to field (some more successfully than others) and mold into a rough snakelike shape. Twenty-five snakes later, we once again let the dough rest and began work on lunch.

While our baguettes rested, we learned to make pretzels and bagels. Later on in the week we would learn to make pizza—Angelo volunteered his skills as an ex-pieman, and we were all looking forward to learning how to toss the paper-thin disks of dough into the air and catch them again, without damage to the ceiling. After a lunch of salad and pretzels hot out of the oven, we were finally ready to form and bake our baguettes. Wendell, still obsessed with his anatomical references, quickly churned out several baguettes that, he professed, were modeled on his own manhood and were made to scale, too. The baguettes were at least eighteen inches long. Somehow, I didn't believe him. Chef Hel was not amused and ordered Wendell to re-form the baguettes, this time without adding any unnecessary flourishes—we were all relieved. While the kitchen is a famously bawdy place, and jokes and references to sex were always rampant, there was something unpleasant in the thought of actually having to eat one of Wendell's “special baguettes,” never mind serving it to one of the patrons in the restaurant. Without further incident, or inappropriately accurate anatomical renderings, we shaped the baguettes and used slim ash paddles to move them onto the large linen sheets where they would rise one more time before being loaded into the gleaming and intensely hot ovens. After the baguettes rose, we began loading them, ten at a time, onto the broad flat surface of the huge wooden peel, or paddle, used to ferry the loaves in and out of the oven. Once the baguettes were loaded on the peel, the peel was shoved into the depths of the oven, and with a quick yank, the peel was retrieved, leaving the baguettes in to bake. A quick shot of steam, and a few minutes later, we were once again
retrieving our baguettes, only now they were golden brown, fully baked, and crying out for a pat of fresh butter.

There were now dozens and dozens of freshly baked baguettes cooling in the wire racks, waiting for us to try the three different kinds made from the different varieties of leavener. As we went back and forth, checking the crispness of the crusts, assessing the structure of the crumb, sniffing the rich aromas, and, of course, tasting each to detect the slight differences in flavor, I thought how lucky I was to be standing there, munching on the best baguettes in the city, which my new friends (even Wendell) had actually made themselves on a beautiful September afternoon, while my old coworkers were no doubt hunched over their desks, staring at a computer screen. This baguette I held had been made by me—had been formed by my own hands, and would be giving pleasure to diners I would never meet. I loved the feeling that I had actually produced something tangible for someone else's enjoyment, for the first time ever.

This was what being a chef was about, I thought, placidly bundling up a cord of loaves, like firewood, to be sent downstairs to the restaurant. The act of creating something that would give someone else pleasure, whether it is a simple slice of bread or an elaborately constructed five-course meal, is a noble and satisfying thing. There was a sense of immediate gratification in the act of cooking, a happy result that I could see within hours of beginning work, unlike my old job, where results in the form of a published book took months, even years, to see. For the first time, I knew I had made the right decision in coming to school. In the upcoming levels, my classmates and I would be creating, feeding people every day, like actual chefs in a real restaurant. I couldn't wait.

Momma's Rolls

These yummy soft rolls are the best thing since sliced bread. Scratch that—they are miles and miles better than a slice from a generic white loaf. My mother has been making them for every family gathering since well before I was born, and has passed the recipe on to me, but my attempts are never quite as good as hers. Which is okay—we all have different strengths in the kitchen.

 

½ cup lukewarm water

¹
/
₃
cup plus ½ teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon yeast

7 to 8 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting

2 cups milk, scalded and cooled

½ cup vegetable oil or 8 tablespoons (1 stick) melted unsalted butter (the rolls will keep longer if oil is used)

1 tablespoon salt

Unsalted butter, for the bowl and baking pan

1. In a large glass measuring cup, stir together the water, the ½ teaspoon sugar, the yeast, and ½ cup of the flour and set aside for 10 minutes or so, until bubbles form on the surface.
   
2. While the yeast is proofing, in a large bowl, mix together the milk, oil, and the
   ¹
   /
   ₃
   cup sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Add the salt and 2 cups of the flour. Stir in the yeast mixture and enough flour to make a soft dough that holds together, another 4½ to 5 cups.
   
3. Turn the dough out onto a work surface lightly dusted with flour and knead until the dough is supple and elastic.
   
4. Grease a large bowl thoroughly with butter and place the dough in it. Turn the dough over in the bowl so that the top of the dough has been greased as well. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a
   warm place until the dough is doubled in bulk, about an hour and a half.
   
5. Butter a rimmed baking sheet. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thickness and cut out rolls with a circular cutter or water glass. Place the rolls on the baking sheet and let rise once again until doubled in bulk.
   
6. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Bake the rolls for 25 to 30 minutes. If the rolls begin to get too brown, cover the tops with foil. The rolls are done when they make a hollow sound when tapped gently. Let cool slightly on a wire rack.
   

Makes about 36 rolls

I
f anyone broke my spirit, it was Chef Robert. He seemed to embody everything that is wrong with the essential nature of mankind. He was, in the words of philosopher Thomas Hobbes in
Leviathan
, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Many of the chef-instructors at The Institute were once impresarios of their own restaurants. But restaurant life is hard, and some of the best instructors had come to The Institute after a long career in their own kitchens. Chef Jean had been in the business for almost forty years before he joined the faculty of The Institute, and he would regularly regale us with tales from the kitchen of the famed La Grenouille—one of the first, and best, French restaurants ever to tame Manhattan's concrete jungle. Even funnier were tales of his time as a private chef to some of New York's most high-society (and high-maintenance) matrons. Chef Jean was a lamb.

Chef Robert was not.

He was, in fact, a virtuoso of several of the seven deadly sins, and even Dante would have been hard-pressed to find a circle of hell big enough to contain him. That's what The Institute was for. A perfect den for the big, bad wolf. And we students were like sheep to the slaughter.

Wrath

He would prowl the kitchens, snatching bits of food off cutting boards and sizzle plates and gobbling them down like a feral dog tearing meat from a cadaver. His muzzle seemed to quiver when he sensed, perhaps by sniffing the air, that somewhere in the kitchen a
student might be taking pride in his work. He would circle, gliding slowly closer in his silent black clogs, and suddenly pounce, using one finger to spear the object of pride, and sneer. Then the taunting would begin.

“What is this?”

Only a fool would answer this question. It was, of course, a trick. There was no right answer, so any answer at all would invite scorn. But an answer must be given—no student could be so bold as to ignore an instructor. It was a true catch-22 moment, and I think an opening gambit honed by Stasi interrogators. God knows how Chef Robert got his hands on cold war interrogation manuals, but he certainly put them to good use.

“Carrots, Chef” would seem like a straightforward, safe answer. But nothing in Chef Robert's kitchen was that easy.

“Don't insult me. I know they
were
carrots. I have eyes. What have you done to them? They look like total shit.” The vowel in
shit
would become long, drawn out in that utterly Gallic way that combined the word
shit
with the word
eat,
almost as if he was saying “eat shit.” Which, in effect, he was.

Then Chef would casually pick up the bowl of carrots that had been carefully, meticulously cut into tiny dice or minuscule, ridiculous footballs and casually dump it in the garbage. Sometimes—and this was even more effective at totally destroying the empty shell that was once your self-esteem—Chef Robert would make you throw away the offending vegetables yourself. Your own hands would then be the ones to consign all your hard work to the garbage, where it belonged. A small but brilliant nuance, leaving one more small part of you dying inside. Genius, really.

Greed

It was said that Chef Robert had managed to spawn two beautiful, sweet children. Such are the mysteries of the genetic code, and a compelling argument favoring neither nature nor nurture. The girls were
a favorite of the other chef-instructors at school, while we students never actually saw them. They attained a mythical status among us, like an urban legend. Did they really exist? We were never certain.

One day, while I was in the pastry rotation, Chef Robert sidled into the chill confines of the pastry kitchen. He quickly snagged a half dozen of the delicate almond tuiles we had spent the morning laboring over, and crammed them in his mouth. Through the incipient blizzard of crumbs, he managed to articulate to our pastry instructor that he would like a cake for his daughter—it was her birthday. Chef Paul, the extremely talented and long-suffering pastry instructor, sighed and went to work. While we assembled desserts for the afternoon's service, Chef Paul mixed and baked a beautiful génoise layer cake. We frosted it with mounds of fluffy white chocolate buttercream that seemed like drifts of delicious snow, and Chef was just piping “Happy Birthday” in elaborate script with a cornet of melted chocolate when Chef Robert reappeared.

“Too boring,” he said, looking at the beautiful creation. “She likes pink. Make it pink!” With that directive, he was gone again, pausing only briefly to grab a few sugar cookies for the road.

With another, mightier sigh, Chef Paul showed us how to melt scads of white chocolate, which we tinted Pepto-Bismol pink, and pour it out onto the marble counter so that it cooled to a glossy sheet. Then we carefully scored and cut out dozens of pink chocolate buttons, which we then used to festoon the cake. It was a vulgarity—the gorgeous simplicity completely obscured by virulent pink dots of all sizes. But it was a cake that any eight-year-old girl would love.

If Chef Robert managed not to eat the whole thing himself.

Gluttony

Chefs love food. They love eating it, they love thinking about it. They love food in the way that regular people love their pets, or their spouses. Food is that constant companion that never disappoints.
Food never starts an argument. Food never flirts with your best friend. Food never has an accident on your new rug. There are a lot of reasons to love food. But there is also a fine line between loving food and being a glutton. With Chef Robert, there was no contest—he was a glutton of the first order, one of the most impressive I have ever seen. Every morning, he would commandeer a member of my brigade—poor, hapless Tommy, who was eager to please Chef, mainly because he failed every single written test he was given in chef school, and still desperately wanted to graduate—to go up to the bread kitchen and steal one of the freshly baked, fragrant baguettes left cooling on the racks. Then Tommy would be dispatched to the storeroom to requisition a slew of delicacies, from silken slices of prosciutto di San Daniele to tender baby spinach to blocks of salty, nutty Emmenthaler cheese. He would return to his workstation, overburdened by this delicious bounty, and all of our mouths would water. But it was not for us. After whipping up some fresh mayonnaise, Tommy would then proceed to construct a sandwich to shame all other sandwiches in the history of sandwich making. It was always a triple-decker, toasted masterpiece, garnished with a smattering of salty-sour capers.

Tommy would throw his heart and soul into making Chef Robert lunch. This epic undertaking took most of the morning, every morning, and so poor Tommy never had a clue how to prepare the dishes in our curriculum. But Chef Robert never went hungry. In fact, you could actually tell time by the state of Chef Robert's trousers: they started off looking like the innocuous, checked pants we all wore, but as the day wore on, they would creep ever upward in a failed attempt to help cover Chef 's expanding waistline. After lunch, Chef Robert often sported what looked like a houndstooth-checked Speedo.

Lust

Evil, like water, must find its own level, and so I was not that surprised to find out that Chef Robert was having an affair with
Assistant Chef Cyndee, she of the big ass, sour disposition, and gimlet eyes. Somewhat appalling, but not altogether surprising.

In the closed society of a school, or a prison, often there occurs the phenomenon known as “desert island syndrome.” No one around you is remotely sexually interesting at first, but as the days and weeks go by, suddenly even the most physically repellent specimen of the opposite sex holds some attraction. One expected this sort of thing among the students in the classes, constantly being thrown together in stressful situations, where strong bonds were galvanized by the acidic criticism of the instructors. What was unexpected was an affair between instructors, who presumably had the opportunity and inclination to spend time in more congenial surroundings, with company that had not squeezed themselves into chef 's uniforms so tight they could be confused with sausage casings. Even more surprising was the revelation that the affair between Chef Robert and Assistant Chef Cyndee had begun when she was herself a student at The Institute. Yet there were no whistles blown, no official reprimand, not even a gentle reproach for this transgression, one that would surely have ended Chef Robert's career, had he been a professor at any self-respecting college in the country in this litigious age.

No, Chef Robert and Assistant Chef Cyndee were free to, in the genteel words of my upbringing, “carry on.” And so they did, at every opportunity. Luckily, I was never one of the few to actually catch them in flagrante delicto, and so am spared from having the image of heaving, sweaty jelly-like flesh seared on my optic nerve forever, like the
quadrillage
(symmetrical cross-hatching) on a piece of grilled snapper.

 

Chef Robert was a despicable, petty man, one who took immeasurable delight in causing other people emotional pain, but he was truly an excellent chef. He had an eye for presentation—the art of arranging disparate elements on a plate so that it transformed mere food into a work of art. He was also a master at unconventional
garniture. He often came up with incredibly inventive, witty riffs on an ingredient—salmon with turnip gratin might be garnished with crisply fried turnip chips dyed a gorgeous purple with beet juice, perfectly setting off the mossy green of the herb emulsion drenching the orange-red flesh of the salmon. Chef Robert was a maestro of a symphony of colors and textures that all worked seamlessly to elevate the experience of dining, without losing sight of the primacy of taste. The very, very best chefs in the world are able to present an ingredient that has been eaten a thousand times in a way that is both visually stunning and gloriously delicious, creating a wholly new experience. Chef Robert could do that, over and over again.

I hated the man, with his cutting remarks and sly wolf 's smile (“The better to eat you with, my dear”), but I admired and attempted to emulate his cooking, and will for the rest of my time in the kitchen.