Personal essays
Crossing the chasm that separates restaurant and home cooking
Ham and Eggs
In the book I just finished, the detective was also a great cook. She spends much of the mystery cooking for her chief suspects who tell her that she should open a restaurant.
Of course restaurant cooking is different from home cooking. Sure, someone from either world could be successful in the other but they are really different things.
I’ve brought lessons from restaurant cooking back into my kitchen. It’s important to know that many of the ideas are the same but the implementations are necessarily different.
So when a guest tells a serious home cook that they should open a restaurant, the home cook should smile and say thank you. The home cook should not consider opening a restaurant. The well-meaning guest has nothing invested in this suggestion.
This is the classic example from Scrum of the chicken and pig planning to open a breakfast restaurant named “Ham and Eggs”.
The point of the story is that the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.
Restaurant cooking isn’t about preparing a single dish or two that you plan and execute on your own time table at home. You need to create a solid menu where each dish is cooked the same night after night while food costs are kept down.
You need to have timing down so that all of the courses ordered by a table are properly spaced and all of the dishes in a course come out at the same time.
The stress level is high and the margins are slim. In other words, there’s no space for chickens in the restaurant business.
Home cooking
As a serious home cook and baker, I’m more interested in the other direction.
When I meet a friend for an outstanding meal, I want to know how I can achieve something like that in my own kitchen.
A waiter at the Barbary in London spent quite a bit of time writing out the specialty spices they use. And then he pointed out some of the equipment they were using to produce these amazing dishes.
Even if I could source the ingredients, I don’t have the specialty equipment or the expertise to use them.
They can spend hours prepping a sauce that is added to a plate because they’re going to sell hundreds of that item this week. It makes no sense for me to put that kind of time into one of many components in a complicated dish.
And yet sometimes I do.
I recently was invited over to help cook a dish with a fair number of ingredients.
I arrived on time at six o’clock and we immediately started the prep.
Tomatoes were boiled briefly and then peeled and de-seeded. Spices were blended and warmed over a gentle flame.
Chicken was browned, onions were diced and sweated along with microplaned ginger and minced garlic.
There were preserved lemons, cauliflower, tomato paste, chicken stock, and ingredients I’m not remembering.
By the time that everything had been cut, and prepped, and assembled, the final dish went in at eight.
Can you imagine getting to a restaurant at six and being told at eight that the dish is just going in.
Twenty minutes later something had to be added to the dish and another twenty minutes later it was supposed to be ready.
But it wasn’t.
Some of the ingredients weren’t quite done and the sauce hadn’t developed.
In for another twenty minutes.
At that point, we’d snacked a bit and agreed that neither of us were that hungry.
This would never fly in a restaurant and yet it was absolutely fine in the context of a home kitchen where we were just cooking for ourselves.
Longevity
As much as I try to bring my experience cooking in restaurants home, restaurant cooking and home cooking are very different.
Last week I took an online pull-noodle class to learn biang-biang noodles and lamien noodles.
I’ve been obsessed with pull noodles for twenty years since I first saw a demonstration in Las Vegas. Last year I took a class on biang-biang noodles but I resolved that this was the year I’d learn to make lamien noodles.
The master takes a rope of dough, stretches it, doubles it over, stretches it some more, and so on. Before you know it, there are 1024 spaghetti thin strands of dough.
I know this takes years of practice and knew we weren’t going to make that. But I thought we were going to get close.
A day before class, the teacher sent us the materials for the two hour class and there was no dramatic pulling.
Sigh. This class is going to be a waste of time. There’s none of that dramatic pulling I’m looking forward to. Even the biang-biang doesn’t have the part where you bang the noodle on the counter.
Man was I wrong.
The teacher was amazing. She had completely thought out the process from the perspective of the home cook.
In a restaurant it makes total sense to use those flashier methods because the process must be repeated.
Not in the home. Our teacher said, oil gets everywhere. There’s no sense in making a mess like that.
The class began on time at seven. We made the dough, rested it, and rolled it into a long log. We oiled the dough, coiled it up on a plate, and went off to make some of the other ingredients for our dinner.
Then we went back to the dough. As we picked up the coil you could feel the dough start to stretch.
The teacher had us pull it in sections until it was about finger width. Maybe it was three feet long at that point.
We folded the dough back and forth on itself in six inch sections.
“Don’t worry,” our teacher said, “the oil will keep the strands separate.”
We pulled at each end of the six inch blob until it was about a foot, doubled it over and pulled again.
We repeated this process several times and then eased the blob into boiling water.
A quick stir with a pair of chopsticks and the noodles separated into one really long noodle. It wasn’t spaghetti shaped and it was thicker than the professionals but it was perfectly engineered for the home cook.
The class ended exactly on time at nine and we had two sets of noodle dishes. The lamien was served in a soup and the biang-biang were coated with a chili sauce.
It was such a great lesson in adapting techniques from one setting to work well in another.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 308. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe