Osetra and Truffles; Cooking on a Cook's Budget

After that first course at Alinea "Osetra with Traditional Garnishes," I haven't been able to shake the craving for more caviar. On a cook's budget, especially after spending the whole of it on a silly "meal" at Alinea, caviar isn't in the picture. When my family offered to fork over a card for dinner if I would cook it, I was going for it. Any other time I've considered caviar, I also considered the weight in truffle fries I'd have to dip in the fryer to make up for that splurge. Not worth it.The Butcher's Block is the only place in Aspen selling fresh meat or fish and the only place on Earth charging $28.50 a lb. for sea scallops. I had my mind set on Osetra, too. A tiny little tin of Osetra was over $150...I wouldn't be able to sleep if I spent that much money on one ingredient smaller than the credit card I was using to buy it. I opted for the farmed sturgeon roe out of California. I know the cardholders are reading this waiting for the price of that roe.
That little smidge of roe was $98. I hope you all enjoyed it on your cauliflower soup last night, thanks for letting me cook for you! I pulled the inspiration from Gordan Ramsay's A Chef For All Seasons where the caviar is listed as "optional" in the ingredient list. I don't understand what kind of cook actually has that option. "Oh, tonight I'll just opt to spend my weeks pay on a garnish!"
The vast difference between what we serve at work and what we have the ability to cook and eat ourselves is insane. Think about this- This week 1.6 kilos, or about 3.53 lbs of white Alba truffles came in at $5,000 a kilo. On Thursday night we shaved about .75 of a kilo on risotto alone, about $3,500 worth of truffles. Those numbers don't even touch on the amount of black truffles that came in. This guy Coco I work with only eats sushi rice. I don't know if that's because he's accustomed to a line cook's wage or because he's a weird guy. Probably a combination of both. Either way, we don't sear scallops for dinner and garnish dishes with caviar...Well, maybe Gordon Ramsay does.
Do you know what family meal is? If you work in a kitchen, you know it's the food that resembles baby throw up that we get to eat for dinner. A- This stuff is not from the local farm, it's from the local freezer. B- Family meal tends to hang out in a hot box. Definitely not where we put food for service. C- Who ever is making it has a 5 hour long list of things they need to get done perfectly before service starts in one hour. Do you think they care what it turns out like? Thomas Keller has a wonderful spread in The French Laundry Cookbook about what family meal should be, it even includes a nice vinaigrette recipe for family salad. I worked garde manager. I made family salads. I didn't emulsify a vinaigrette and I didn't eat them. It turns out that most of the cooks don't eat family meal. Not only is the food scary, but we just spent all the spare time we had to eat that day making family meal. You should see what happens to left overs that make it back to the kitchen on nights like Thursday. We had an oyster bar with lots of left overs...that our staff housed in 30 seconds. I think the kitchen drank more Dom Perignon at the party than the guests.
It's funny that we can shave thousands of dollars of truffles without thinking twice, but going to the grocery store is a serious hit to our bank accounts and takes thinking twice, maybe three or four times before deciding between the strange hormone infested chicken, or the nice free-range, local chicken and we most likely chose the hormoney chicken to save a few bucks. I'm not sure if it's the same for every cook, but for me, I got into the kitchen because I love food, cooking, and mostly eating. Now that I'm in the kitchen, I can't afford the things I'm cooking, serving, and love to eat. That's irony at it's best.

Impressions of Impressives

The closest "restaurant" to my house when I was living at Blackberry was fifteen minutes away and called the "Porn O'Que." It is literally a pit stop on the side of the road that combines an adult super store and a barbeque joint. Needless to say I never made it in for some chicken and the food scene in Tennessee was nonexistent. On my way through Chicago, I made sure to stop at every restaurant I'd taken for granted. I've always loved the atmosphere at Avec, where the line is in the dining room and about the same size, but now I really appreciated the food and the cooks behind it. In one day, I went to Hot Doug's, Xoco, Big Star, and Alinea. Which one had the best food? The one set up like a Mexican-influenced McDonald's, Xoco. There wasn't a fancy presentation, no foams, powders or pillows filled with hazelnut air, just plain old yummy food.
"Eating" at Alinea put an absolute end to any desire I had to eat at Moto, El Bulli, or any other restaurant claiming to experiment with molecular gastronomy. I waited three years to eat at Alinea. I legitimately expected it to be the best meal of my life, but if Rick Bayless's new street food beat out Alinea, you know it was not the best meal of my life. The whole time, I kept thinking...What did he do to my food? At first, I was wowed by the brioche foam, and then I figured out, I knew how to do that. I just wouldn't want to. I'd rather just eat brioche. Brioche is really good all crispy and buttery...it's silly all foamy and bubbly.
The end of the meal really pissed me off. I had to suck bubblegum out of a tube...with creme fraiche. Imagine if you were on a first date, with important clients, your family...and you had to finish a meal by sucking on a tube to get creme fraiche out. Great. I paid this much money to do what?! I'll double what I just paid for you to serve me something edible for dessert.
What I figured out is that eating at Alinea is probably better suited for foodies, not cooks. I'm sure there are chefs out there incredibly impressed with what Grant Achatz is doing, and maybe that's the kind of food they want to end up making. But ask any cook what their favorite meal is. It's pizza, a perfectly cooked steak or their mother's chicken noodle soup. The kind of food I want to make will not manipulate the ingredients to resemble something they're not. Bacon will be bacon, caviar will be caviar, hazelnuts will be hazelnuts...because all of those things are good the way they are.
Mark once told me a story about a line cook who burnt a vegetable. The chef took the guy, brought him to the farm and made him apologize to the farmer himself for burning his beautifully grown vegetable. Respect the ingredients, don't screw with them and your food will turn out just fine- if not great. You tell me- which is more impressive- A chef that can manipulate an ingredient to do something unique to/with with, or a chef that can highlight an ingredient and use it thoughtfully?

The Outsider's View on the Inside of a Kitchen

This cooking adventure started when I began to realize how limited employment would be for a recent economics grade in the worst recession my generation has ever seen. I wanted to learn

more about the thing I love most- food. I called a partner in my family's Rendezvous Farm, and asked him which culinary school he recommended.

I ended up exactly where he recommended- his kitchen in Aspen, Colorado where our farm provides a good portion of the produce and protein. I put in a month a free labor in the banquet department, literally learning how to peel a potato, and then 200 lbs. of them. Banquets are a whole different animal apart from the main kitchen. There's a lot behavior similar to what you'd expect in a frat house. You basically live with each other and definitely see more of each other than your family or friends, so I think you'd be hard pressed to distinguish a frat house from a banquet kitchen outside of the ability to cook.

When Chef let us know that we could spend the off-season at Blackberry Farm outside of Knoxville, Tennesse, I shot him an e-mail asking to go, thinking they wouldn't need a

butter-finger with zero kitchen experience in their kitchen. I thought wrong. I spent the next ten weeks in culinary boot camp. There's absolutely no more beautiful a setting for this boot camp than Blackberry Farm. The kitchen is literally footsteps away from the farm. When we arrived we were still gathering summer squash and vibrant peppers for dinner and towards the end were picking arugula with a touch of purple from frosty nights and countless bushels of collard greens. Not everything was pure bliss, though. Every day around 6 pm, right around when service started, my hands began to shake and the hives that developed on them got a little worse. I had no business making soups, purees, emulsions, or anything remotely technical in a kitchen, let alone line cooking, but it taught me how and it taught me fast. Sulli, the butcher,let me hang out down in the butcher shop and patiently showed me how to break whole pigs down, and even the basics of chicken and fish fabrication. I'd post recipes for things I learned, but its more accurately recorded in the new cookbook and I'm not well versed on copy-writing issues.

The book is gorgeous anyways- check it out at Blackberry or Amazon.

Back in Aspen now, I've graduated from banquets to Bar/Soup station with a goal of learning as much as possible about cooking and the relationship between my Colorado farm and the restaurant it supplies. We gained a butcher while I was gone, and hopefully I can squeeze some knowledge out of him as well. As the title implies, I'm an outsider getting an incredible opportunity at an inside look of a kitchen, simultaneously gaining a free culinary education. I've been in the kitchen for 6 months now and only written one blog. I learn enough in one day to double this entry, so I'll make it a habit to start writing regularly. I'm on twitter these days as well.