{you know what? today is 05 05 05!!!!}
For the past week I have been working at a catering company. A big one, with a grand reputation and a city of a kitchen. There’s a saying in the restaurant business, “if you want a vacation, quit your job.”
The restaurant business, in fact, has many sayings. Or many voices and rules, some whispered, many silent. One of them is that catering is for the weaker cook. Catering is (considered) fast & easy money, akin to some of the messages that come with the sex industry. But I say that catering is just another breed of cooking professionally. It needs a different thought process, a way with math and memory, like playing bridge, and the ability and stamina for large scale production.
Just to give you an overview, here are some of the projects I was assigned to in the last 5 days.
Day one: scooped 1100 coconut macaroons, sheeted about 5# of gingersnap dough, cut out 140 gingersnap stars, in the 80 quart mixer made a 4 sheetpan sized batch of blondies and baked, (what was really hard about this was that this mysterious recipe had very few eggs making it more like a gigantic chocolate chip cookie that resisted spreading and had to be forced into submission), scooped and rolled 25 truffles and whipped up a small batch of banana pastry cream.
Day two: spent the entire day from 7am to 1:30 pm egg-washing puff pastry rounds, scooping caramelized onions onto them, patting onions into perfect circle with a good sized border for pastry rim, baking & packing them. I think the count was 3000. (these were for Sisters of Mercy, a foundation, not the band as I had asked.)
Day three: cutting sheetpans of blondies and frozen brownies into 2”X2” squares: 96 per pan, sheeted about 7# of extremely sticky chocolate and walnut dough, (ahhh the joys of sheeting dough with chunks in it…not), and then cutting tiny flouted circles—69 per sheetpan. The cutter had no edge so I went home with flouted bruises on my palms. Pretty.
Day four: Sheeted tons more gingersnap dough, cut about 300 stars, & cut chocolate sandwich cookies, (always remembering that if you need 300 sandwich cookies, 600 need to be cut.) To be honest I don’t really remember day four because even after one day of being away it is all starting to blend together.
Day five: Best for last? Starting at 7am, trayed (= took once frozen cookies all packed together and arranged them orchard style so that in a convection oven they will bake evenly), and baked coconut macaroons until 9am, then melted “coating chocolate” and dipped my fingers into this warm liquid, sprinkling Jackson Pollack-style, these little mounds. This took 6 ½ hours. In the end I had a speed rack with 2800 packed coconut macaroons. Before lunch I was more than half way there and I thought I would pass out from seeing and doing the same thing for too long.
The food at this company is stellar. {I'll give you a hint: the back of the T shirt says, "Perfect is just fine"} The kitchen is tight: light, open, clean, organized and efficient. Learning how to make food in massive batches is a skill set unto itself. I saw really nifty things. Yesterday the starter table made hundreds of beautiful green pea ravioli, the sauce table created about 50 gallons of Caesar dressing, and I saw tiny little taco shells being fried in racks I wish I had a picture of. One day a fellow cut asparagus on the bias for 8 hours.
I have worked at all sorts of catering companies. One was an illegal storefront on the Lower east side of Manhattan and they told me in the interview their standards were high. This was a lark, as I witnessed people cutting raw meat on the same cutting boards as fish, and one day I came to my table (pastry only) and it was covered in scales.
Two years ago I worked for a big SF caterer and the company itself was smooth running but I was scared for the people who had to eat the food. It smelled icky and wasn’t treated well. We “banged it out,” as the dreadful kitchen saying goes.
I have enjoyed working here. I have seen all sorts of interesting tricks and it’s been great to watch a company that is so serious, friendly and organized. The other day the pastry chef was asked how long it would take for us to bake the 2800 macaroons. She pulled out the calculator and entered in how many cookies, how many racks are in the oven, how many minutes it takes to take to bake them and came up with an answer. It was intriguing. Everyone knows how many pieces each batch/recipe makes and there is a huge system that figures out the cost of each item. You’re lucky in a restaurant if one person understands numbers! And it’s incredibly important because many places fail because the chef him/herself has no comprehension about how all the percentages need to fit together.
In the cooking world one silent saying is that restaurant work is at the top. Catering, hotels, teaching, cookbook writing etc. all fall to the bottom and cooks who are trying to be chefs are warned against these fields. Years ago at an event where Carlo Petrini (the leader of The Slow Food movement) was speaking I met Judith Ets-Hokin (sorry, exact spelling unknown) the woman who owns the Home Chef cooking school empire. She said that she believed that the machismo and army/ military-like mentality of restaurant kitchens exists because the work is in desperate need of something that makes the cooks overly proud of what they do so that the hard work, long hours, dangerous conditions and little pay will have an ego reward.
Although I have enjoyed the adrenalin of service, the push from a hard and demanding chef, the rush of hearing the tickets come out of the machine continuously, the insanity of feeling like you won’t be ready for service, cooking delicious food with beautiful ingredients can be done in any setting. My home, catering kitchens, my aunt’s house in Florida, and restaurants. I have enjoyed opening up my own options for other cooking and baking possibilities. For me it has been important to find and define my own personal Shuna Lydon definition of success because the one that works for Thomas Keller or Andre Soltner (the chef of Lutece who stood at his stoves for 45 years) will not and has not worked for me.
Like I’ve said before, an open mind can fit more in it.
Shuna --
Simply r-e-a-d-i-n-g this made me exhausted. Wonder how many of those rich folks (they're the ones who usually get this caliber of catered food) ever think of what went into what passes between their lips?
When I'm at a benefit or big do I try to imagine the kitchen and the cooks, wondering how they possibly manage without serving cold food or worse, poisoning us!
Out of curiosity: what is "orchard style"?
Posted by: Kudzu | 06 May 2005 at 12:05 PM
I'm glad to hear about your search for success. I frame the question as "becoming a person".
After a fit of nostalgia a comment from an old acquaintance made me think about this when he called me his "favorite personality" from the old days. Which hit it exactly. I was a personality, not a person.
It's great you've had some time to fill in at various places, to see what works for you and how that fits in or doesn't fit in with woh you are becoming.
Posted by: haddock | 06 May 2005 at 12:31 PM
shwew! And I thought my week was busy. It must be rewarding to create so much that people will undoubtedly enjoy. Your post made me miss working in kitchens, darn you!
Posted by: molly | 06 May 2005 at 12:36 PM
Kudzu,
Orchard style refers to how things are lined up on a pan to insure that they are all equidistantally (sp?) apart. And for convection ovens this is all the more important because the wind blowing around inside should circulate evenly. Also the wind picks up the parchment paper if the corners are not held down.
One of the things I noticed at this place was that I was the only one who knew how to load the oven so that baking would be more even. It's a trick I learned at Citizen Cake because we often loaded two full ovens worth of sheetpans. In bakeries and catering shops there are often a lot of people waiting for the ovens.
Thanks for asking great questions!
Posted by: shuna | 06 May 2005 at 12:45 PM
Aha. That's what I thought (I closed my eyes
and saw neat lines of trees). Thanx
Posted by: Kudzu | 06 May 2005 at 01:04 PM
I think Judith Ets-Hokin (yup, that's how she spells it) is onto something--the same thing W.E.B. DuBois called the "psychic wage" that white folk get from *not* belonging to the subordinate caste. And similarly, the rough-tough-asbestos-fingers psychology of the restaurant kitchen also functions to police the boundary against outsiders, in this case women, who--if admitted at all--are subjected to hazing and harassment and must endure this ("What's the matter, honey, cant ya take it?") if they are to have any hope of surviving in the trade.
Posted by: john | 06 May 2005 at 01:23 PM
Hmm, I don't have any great questions to ask. But your title does remind me of how I used to place my order at restaurants years ago. "Big Food please!" says Biggles. I'd ask for a whole roasted chicken and if they didn't have it, only a 1/2 chicken, I'd have them layer on some beef on top. Or maybe a slab of pork ribs. That was big food.
That was then, now it's Amaranth Flakes and lemon water.
Biggles
Posted by: Dr. Biggles | 09 May 2005 at 12:44 PM
From someone who was lucky enough to be (by coincidence) at the party where Shuna's macaroons were served. I would like to say: good job and thank you!
Posted by: Sam | 12 May 2005 at 02:38 PM
I must say, to be true, that those macaroons were not my recipe, although I did finish each and every one of them. It was sort of exciting to realize somewhere in that haze that, hey wait-- I think I know someone who works for this 4,000 person party giver!! And after the hours that you're pulling, you deserve all that incredible food!
Posted by: shuna | 13 May 2005 at 03:01 AM
I really enjoyed reading this post. I love your precise descriptions; I feel like I'm standing next to you, cutting out cookies. Having worked in a restaurant (FOH) for many years, on Friday I started my first BOH gig as pastry cook, and your writing has really inspired me to try to make everything be its very honest best.
Thanks.
Posted by: Lisa | 15 May 2005 at 11:36 AM