Sniff, Look, Touch
These are the ultimate tools of the good cook
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 ILLUSTRATED BY SUSAN JOUFLAS |
A FEW YEARS ago, I sat on a panel with several other chefs to discuss how a local community college might improve its facilities to better prepare their students for life in a professional kitchen. One of the panelists was Christine Keff, chef/proprietor of Flying Fish restaurant in Seattle's Belltown.
"You might try taking away all the timers and thermometers," she said. "That way the students would have to use their senses to determine when something is done."
That remark really struck a chord. And I think it immediately affected the way I trained the cooks in the kitchen where I was working. Of course, we all used our senses all the time. With oven doors flying open and slamming shut every few seconds, there was never any accurate way to gauge the temperature inside an oven, so it made no sense to use a timer. Line cooks pop in a breast of chicken on one side of the oven and pull a lamb shank out of the other, relying on an almost psychic understanding of when an item will be called to complete an order for a table.
Once, when I was training a line cook to work the sauté station, I told him that he would have to send his spirit inside a piece of fish to know when it was ready. I didn't mean to be mystical about it. Professional cooks have to rely so much on instinct that at that point, I wasn't really sure how I knew when something was done, I just knew.
If you cook the same dishes night after night, often 10 or 20 times in the same night, then you know at a glance when a filet of salmon has arrived at that delicate point where the flakes of protein have softened and are prepared to slide apart without beginning to dry out and resemble some kind of starchy fiber. When you've prepared a breast of chicken filled with spinach and sun-dried tomatoes three or four hundred times, you know exactly what it looks like when it's done correctly. And generally speaking, the busier the kitchen, the better the cooks are likely to be at gauging doneness correctly every time — at least up to a point.
Rocky Toguchi, who manned the grill at Canlis restaurant for decades, sent out scores of steaks every night, and each was prepared precisely to the customer's liking. Before the restaurant even opened in the afternoon, when he was cutting the steaks, he would eye them to determine which ones would be set aside for "well done" and which would do for "rare." During service, he followed his own clandestine choreography for keeping track of what table the many steaks on the grill would go to. I used to say he had a steak timer for a heart. In fact, he had a capacity for paying attention matched with a level of experience that few of us ever achieve.
When I write recipes for home cooks, I spend some time thinking about how to communicate that kind of skill to those who generally prepare only one recipe in a given night, often making the dish for the first time. I always try to include tips about what kind of pan to use, what temperature to set the burner or the oven to and about how long to cook or bake the dish. But beyond these directions based on equipment, I also try to include at least some sensory clues.
When I'm sautéing carrot, celery and onion to make the foundation for a sauce, I listen for a certain shift in the sizzle that corresponds to the beginning of browning on the surface of the vegetables. When I'm boiling noodles, I take one out and test it with my thumbnail or my teeth to gauge how tender it is. And when I'm baking, I look for a combination of visual clues that let me know if a cake or a loaf of bread is baked through.
And just in case, I keep an arsenal of timers, thermometers and toothpicks close at hand.
Greg Atkinson is author of "West Coast Cooking." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Susan Jouflas is The Seattle Times' assistant art director.
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