Free The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman Page A

going to start losing points as a group, as a table; I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, your board is messy. I’m just going to take points off of you.’ You’re working as a team on that table. You start out with ten sanitation points each day. You can go down to zero . It’s usually not that severe, unless I see somebody tasting with their fingers . Then that’s an individual case. But watch out for each other. ‘Hey, guys, our table’s messy. Let’s clean it up.’ ‘I know you’re busy, I’ll wipe down your area right now, you watch my back later.’ Work together. Pots, good job today. Prep list, equipment list, you’re getting a good idea of what I’m looking for, that’s good; it’s gonna come in handy. We’re starting to pick up a little speed here. It’s still kind of a light load. It’s gonna get a lot heavier. Talk to some of the guys in Intro now about what the load’s gonna look like by the time you’re halfway through Skills Two. They could come in here and knock this out in an hour and a half and go home, something that takes you right up to six o’clock. But that’s O.K. You’ll learn to become more organized and quicker as the weeks wear on.”

    To me, this did seem like quite a lot to get done in four hours. We’d made ten gallons of white stock. We’d cut all our standard daily mise en place and turned our carrots. Then we’d done all the additional fine knife cuts on leeks, onions, celery, garlic, tied up a second sachet with butcher’s string, small-diced our turnips and potatoes, measured out our lima beans and corn, concasséd more tomato, and chiffonaded our cabbage. And then we made the soup and had everything evaluated. I wasn’t out of breath or red in the face, but it seemed to me you could only go so fast.
    â€œNow, American veg soup. Drum roll.” He scanned the numbers. “Everyone had a good soup. Nobody had a bad soup.” He said a lot of them needed salt. He told us how to evaluate the soup, how to think about the tastes. “A little underseasoned, I said? It doesn’t taste bad . It tastes good , right? Good soup, nothing really wrong with it. You add a little more salt, it doesn’t taste salty. But it tastes a little … better . It picks up the flavor, rounds it out a little. That’s the balance you try to strike, and that’s how you start to develop a palate and be aware of those four dimensions—acid, sour, sweet, and bitter. Knowing how to play off those components and round them out is what makes a well-developed palate.”
    And if we think he’s wrong, he added, “Tell me. I want to talk to you about it. Show me. Show me that I made an error in judgment, or convince me. I’m happy to debate this. I’m not always right. Don’t be afraid to challenge me on this stuff. We can both gain something. Any questions on American Bounty soup? I liked it, I thought you guys did a really good job.
    â€œO.K. Let’s go first to page four-fifty-four and talk about this consommé recipe, so we get it broken down for you. It’s one gallon now; we want to take it down to a quart. So we’ll use a small onion brûlé. Mirepoix—we’ll need four ounces. Ground-beef- shank —we’ll use eight ounces. Three egg whites, beaten. Four ounces tomato concassé. Now this will depend if you use fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes. It depends on the acid content of the tomatoes. This time of year, the hothouse tomatoes, they don’t have a great deal of acidity, so I like to use canned tomatoes. Summer, when they’re really fresh and ripe and they’ve got good acid , we use fresh tomatoes every time. But this time of year we’re gonna use canned tomatoes.
    â€œForty ounces of white beef stock. We want to have some room for reduction and loss and you’ll understand why when we talk