pastry chefless kitchens

Coming from a background of only baking and pastry, and working in restaurants that had separate pastry stations, I never saw myself venturing over to the savory side of things.

Pastry chefs are an added cost that many kitchens cannot afford.  It is much easier for a savory chef to execute some simpler pastry dessert than it is for a (strictly) pastry chef to take a savory dish from start to finish.  Pastry chefless kitchens often have their executive chefs that draw from books and the internet.  With that said, I do not think that pastry “stations” are necessary to put out bangin’ desserts; but, they are an added benefit. (I may have just dug a grave for my future hope-to-be-re-employed status.)  When Justin has an idea for a dessert, he likes asking me how to make it because he most of the time has no clue. (Yes, he will agree with me on that statement).  With that said, I hope I have a job when I get home because the best kitchens should have us. (There are always exceptions.)

The way and how much you fold something is important.  The way you temper your chocolate is important.  A temperature range for sugar does vary for your surroundings. A well composed, well thought out, pastry plate with good technique is hard to come by.  Bread – – that’s a whole different story.

My experience at Kiin Kiin

At Kiin Kiin, I have a huge learning curve to climb.  (Apparently, so does Justin since he was assigned to the pastry station at AOC. Hah.)  At Kiin Kiin, everyone has to know how to do everything because no schedule is the same every week.  Tonight I was in charge of the quail dish.  It was the third day I broke down quail – I decapitated it, removed the legs, boned the leg, and made boneless skinless breasts.  It’s may be an everyday thing for most savory cooks, but for me, as someone who can’t stand the sight of roadkill, it’s an accomplishment.  I will admit, the first day I was sick to my stomach – I don’t handle blood so well, nor the cracking sounds of bones detaching from the ligaments.

As for service, I had to sear off the quail leg and saute some mushrooms.  Sounds simple, right? Not so much when there’s someone who’s used to working with cold food. It’s like wearing a sweater that looks exactly like your favorite one, only it’s not yours. Savory cooking is an uncomfortable feeling, though I’ve seen it many times.  The night was a success (or so I believe) since the staff was giving each other high 5’s for a smooth service. I’ll never forget this experience, and look forward to my 2nd week.  I think this will make me a better pastry chef.

However, I believe and now know, that it is not in my blood or passion to cook on a hot (or cold) line.   Pastry has a very different mis en place schedule because many items have a “longer shelf life” or can be taken 90% of the way.  Unless there is “cooking” to order (like saute-ing fruit,  caramelizing cake, frying doughnuts), it really comes down to speed of plating up.  I am a much more methodological person.  Sometimes I tell Justin I am spontaneous and I like unplanned vacations or even dinners, but I’m starting to see that that is not the case.  And he must really love me because he hasn’t ever tried to tell me I’m crazy for thinking that I actually like spontaneity.

Karen

My first day and my last thoughts on In de Wulf

A little excerpt on my first day at in the In de Wulf kitchen (which was highly debated in my head on whether or not to post), and some closing thoughts on our foray into Belgium:

First days are always exciting. Nerve-wrecking, but exciting. And this being our first full day in Europe, my stomach was doing flips, not only from adrenaline but because I may have had a little too much fun the night before with my first sips of Belgium brew while being heavily jet-lagged.

Oh yeah, buddy.

But at the very least, I think my first day went pretty well. I got my first experience at cleaning the little film off of sepia that makes it chewy, which goes down in my books as some of the most patience-pushing tasks on this trip, and I got my first, first-hand experience at an European 1-star kitchen (I feel there is a difference between European/Japanese and “the other” Michelin guides, but that’s for another discussion) as well as what goes along with it.

But if there was to be a starting point for my stages, it happened on this night. And that starting point was that you *have* to be humble. I had learned this from Chef Pera a long time ago, but on this night, it was not to be ignored.

Its starting to be an interesting and positive trend where the chef and his cooks start to run food to the customers. I’ve heard that noma does such things out of general interest to the diner, and at Schwa in Chicago, Trio in Sweden, and when we did the Just August Project, the cooks ran the food out to the diners out of pure necessity. I think at In de Wulf, it was a hybrid of both. There was one member of waitstaff, one sommelier/manager, and a back waiter, so for a mostly tasting menu format which included at the very least four amuses and three desserts, there were a lot of plates to go out to the guests and not a lot of hands. As such the cooks not only needed to take the plates out, but it many times enhanced the experience because they had instant answers and (most of the time) enthusiasm about the food they’d been working hard at all day. It was everyone’s job.

Including Karen and I.

It was a long day, my energy had been worn down from lack of sleep and my unwillingness to ask for water the first half of the day (stubborn? yes. dumb? really yes.) and the last plates were going out for the last table. I had started to clean my prep station where I had been hovering over sepia for the last few hours, stopping only occasionally to run plates to tables and to observe the cooking and plate up process. And the last few plates came to the pass. Anxious to get it out and the kitchen scrubbed down, I hurried to the pass to follow Johnny, the cook from Wallonia, who had taken the last main out to the dining room. I wasn’t sure if these plates were to follow, so I looked at Chef Kobe, who urged me to hurry so the food didn’t reach the table far behind.

Now I have had a bad habit my entire life. I drag my feet. My mom has always fretted on me about, Karen hates it, and Seth once told me when I was doing my stint at C-House to stop dragging my feet because”not only does it bother your wife– you’ll have to buy new shoes faster, but it drives me f**kin’ crazy.” It’s just something I haven’t been able to stop.

Welp.

I grab the plates off the pass, and whether it be my weariness, my over-enthusiasm, or just the fact I drag my feet, I take about three long strides.

And trip over the step leading up to the dining room.

Smash!

The two plates hit the ground, and in my mind, blow up into a bajillion of pieces because it was the loudest sound I had ever heard in a kitchen. I pretty much land on my face.

I must’ve been on the ground a good five seconds wondering whether or not I should just die right then and there. Then in my head I start to wonder what I just had done. What if this was a Michelin inspector’s food. Or if they had another piece of duck seared off so I wouldn’t be stuck in the corner, never to touch the food again.

But in the end the first words out of Chef Kobe’s mouth were to ask if I was okay. Johnny came back and probably did the fastest replate-up I’d ever seen in my life. There was a little bloody scratch on my finger, but mostly it was a bruised ego. Not to say it didn’t really, really, *really* suck for all parties involved, but in the end, everything turned out alright. I didn’t let myself touch another plate till the second half of service the next night. The step I tripped over became my biggest worry in the kitchen, most of the time.

You really can’t start much more humble than that.

——-

I start my stage at AOC on Thursday, but I can’t say enough about In de Wulf, what they stand for, and the people that they are. It’s a business about the people first, and the common goal a very close second. Just like every restaurant, there are things you like, and things you don’t always care for, but at In de Wulf, much can be looked over because of the way they take care of their staff and the food. There’s a Chef that’s constantly curious and not afraid to take new steps and listen to his peers and staff, and people there that are passionate, witty, and talented. Heck, they were even willing to try the sweet potatoes with marshmallows we made for our Belgium Thanksgiving dinner for staff meal. There were lessons there I couldn’t have ever learned anywhere else:

Local isn’t the trend. Cooking within the boundaries of where you are shouldn’t be a point you’re trying to make, it is what it is because its right (plus it makes you a better cook and your food a helluva lot more interesting).

Not everything needs a long cooking process with a lot of steps. The shortest path is the best one if you walk the path.

Be serious about every plate you put out.

The stars and the press don’t make the restaurant, it’s the staff and food that the restaurant strives to do that makes the restaurant.

And most importantly:

Pick up your feet.

Thanks guys.

Kitchen Staff: Martijn, Pooltje (the machine, up every morning to pick up our produce), Karen, Chef Kobe, Willy, Johnny, Me, Marcel

And because I’m sure some of you want to see more of the food. A few more food pics courtesy of Karen, our photographer.

Flemish whelk shells, with the whelk sauce in them ready to go. (Another bane of my existence)

Crisp beetroot, yogurt, rose petal

Oysters poached in buttermilk, cabbage stem, mustard

Sepia, ashes, and sauce made from the heads

Roast skate, roasted and raw cauliflower, elderberry capers

Wild hare, beets, and a sauce finished with liver

last day in Heuvelland, Belgium

This gallery contains 5 photos.

It has definitely been quite and experience here in Dranouter, Belgium.  After spending a month in Kobe Desramaults’ kitchen, I have learned to really appreciate what they are doing here.  How often do you have a chef that considers their … Continue reading →

Stages and Staging. Refining and Refinement.

The life of the stage isn’t pretty.  In fact at times, it gets downright grimey.

For both the restaurant and the stage.

For the stages themselves, you can spend years upon years busting your ass from the ground up in the nicest restaurants you can manage to shimmy your way into, only to be stuck with the most menial, nerve-pinching, and patience-testing jobs in the world.  Chef Kobe was telling us how he got stuck juicing pea leaves or something when he took a trip to Manresa this past summer and staged for a day. The whole perspective of being in a new country and in a new kitchen with new equipment threw him off so much that one of the cooks came up to him while he was doing the job to ask him if how long he’d been in the business, as if this was his first job out of culinary school. So needless to say, flipping a world on its head can ruffle even the most talented of chefs.

For the restaurant, a single stage can nearly throw off an entire service, not to mention cost you a lot of money. I once remember asking a stage to strain the veal stock only to come back to a bin of cooked meat, bones, and mirepoix next to the sink where he’d dumped the stock. It was a fun task trying to figure out how to get through the day without veal stock. And here in Dranouter, I can only imagine what it costs the restaurant to have us here, feed us, and house us. It can’t be cheap.

At In de Wulf, I try to take these rugged tasks at hand with enthusiasm. It’s a lot of grunt work. Shucking oysters, which I’ve never been great at, has become a time test for me. Working with new ingredients such as fjord shrimp that are about the size of a penny and whelks, which are sea snails have been extremely interesting as I try to figure out the best way to process them. It’s taken me a couple weeks, but I think I’ve finally gotten down my favorite technique. But in the end most of these jobs are busywork; jobs that need more nimble fingers and enthusiasm rather than trained technique.

Fjord shrimp, the bane of my existence the last few weeks

So why stage? So why have stages? It costs the stage time, and the places of stages money.

Well.

Stages and staging are tools of refinement.

I know that when I walked into In de Wulf and when I will walk into AOC and Geranium, I’ll be lucky if I ever sniff the cook’s line during service time. I’ve been very lucky to get to plate up alongside Kobe and the cooks during service, but I knew that I would be doing a lot of picking of herbs, punching out of little garnishes, and all those little tasks that make the machine run a little smoother. There would be a lot of doing the “little things” that make a starred restaurant, a starred restaurant. But to stage, for me is to refine my ideals as a cook and hopefully one day a chef. Seeing another man’s kitchen and listening to their their thoughts and watching their techniques and how they work and treat different products really makes you think about how you want to run your kitchen and how you treat your food, staff, and service one day. While I may not have learned any brand-smashing new techniques here, there are things I that I see that I’ll most likely use for the rest of my life in my repertoire from here. One of those being on how they treat the sepia (large squid) and use a technique to really get to the point of the product’s texture in the dish. And as much as always felt the restaurants around me were like family, the setting here where the cooks, the chef, and the staff almost *are* family just solidifies that.

For the restaurants?

For many restaurants that strive for Michelin-starred style dining, it just isn’t possible to heavily refine your food with only paid cooks. I can only imagine what it would cost In de Wulf to even just have a young cook come in to do the job that the stages come here and do. The menu with the more finite techniques and probably more of the interesting dishes would have to be heavily edited to do less menial work. And lets not even start talking about the foraging and cleaning of all the garnishes.  Remember rooting around the woods when you were a kid looking for three leaf clovers? Imagine that except it’s a group of grumpy guys, probably hung over, cold, and tired from their previous 16 hour day. Its times like this that I remember a Yelp post back from my Ubuntu days about this guy complaining that, “a plate of beets, even one a pretty as this one, should never cost 11 dollars” when it was a plate of tiny forono beets that only grow to be about the size of a golfball, and took the cooks and stages probably half the day just to clean from the ground, roast perfectly, and peel. It only goes to show you, the cost of food is a lot. 12 dollars (and that’s being generous) an hour and a lot of patience. I can’t think of many other industries that look down at you if you don’t do at least a little work for free.

So remember, people: before you start complaining about how expensive high end food is, remember you’re also probably paying for a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.

One more week here. Thank you to In de Wulf for treating even the little guys like they matter.

A baker adjusting to a foreign kitchen

We are coming into our last week and it’s a little bittersweet.  We feel at home in the kitchen and are starting to have some sense of belonging.  We’re becoming an integral part of the team.  We’re here to work and learn when we come to stage, not expecting to make friends who you actually intend on keeping in touch with.  Kobe, the Chef, is like a friend to all his staff.  His attitude is so refreshing.

As for the pastry side of things, I am learning a lot.  I had never heard of speculoos or melocakes, and both are specialties of Belgium.  It was a little harder for me to adjust to a kitchen than Justin since I had spent the last year in a bakery.  I had to reteach my feet to handle standing in one spot all day.  (The first week I went home almost crying my feet hurt so bad.)  I had to readjust my  brain to work in restaurant mode.  In a bakery, you’re constantly following a schedule, and if you lose a few seconds, that could add up later in the day.  In a restaurant, the deadline is service (or staff meal).  How you get there doesn’t always matter.

Recipes that I bring with me don’t always work as they should here since the ingredients are all from different sources.  It makes you realize that everything is very regional.  Bread in one city with the same formula is never going to taste the same as the other in another city unless they import their water, control the yeasts in the air, have the same humidity, use the same flour, etc.

Hospitality here has been incredible.  Not sure if they were just raised better or their culture just demands it.  It reminds me a bit of my parents.  They always want to make sure I’m doing good, slept enough and ate well, etc.  Here it’s the same way.  We are considered as guests and they want to make sure we slept well, ate well and feel well.  I’m starting to think I’m one of those guests that never want to leave.

Karen

A peek “In the hills” (In de Wulf)

1, Our walk to the restaurant.

2. The dining room

3. The kitchen

4. What in the world is a stage doing plating the food?

5. Rilette of crab and cod, winter purslane with winter purslane juice, potato, and wood sorrel

6. Chocolate, beets, and granite.

Not a lot of time to really update. Our weekends have been pretty full.

Last week, we were in Antwerp where chef did an event, and yesterday, his book released so we threw a party at the farm where they get a lot of their interesting produce. There’s not currently an English version, but one can only hope. Today was the premiere of a television documentary about the restaurant, and next week, the Michelin guide comes out.

Here’s hoping to two stars for In de Wulf, Chef Kobe, his dedicated staff, his loyal customers, and all the stagiers that put in time here.

As they say here: Sante!

Creaky bones

I had a “ah ha” moment after working with people who were mostly younger than me.  That moment was You’re Old. These 21-24 year old males had exponentially more energy than I.  I can’t keep up with their fast twitch muscle fibers.  They walk faster, talk faster, stir faster and don’t seem as tired after 16 hour days when they go out after work.  I go to bed and have a hard time getting up in the morning.  This isn’t to say that I can’t keep up the workload.  I just use my energy wisely and conserve it at every possible moment.  The kitchen wasn’t supposed to be familiar to us – this is why we came out to Europe.  Justin thinks kitchens in Europe are just younger because the cooks start younger and there are fewer career changers.  I guess we’ll confirm this after the conclusion of our trip.  Despite all this, I envy the younger years.  I wish I had that energy to go hiking, running, or something athletic after a long week of being on your feet, but I (by I, I mean we) sleep the whole weekend and wake up only if the hunger pains wake us.  Unfortunately for us, we are really in the middle of no where and would have to walk a couple of miles to the nearest sign of civilization (minus the restaurant and where we are staying) to give us some caloric intake.  We try to freeze left over staff and smuggle it home so we don’t seem so pathetic.  Sometimes, MTV, National Geographic and European music video channels can divert the mind from hunger.   All in all, at the end of the day, at least I won’t gain any weight living out here even if my caloric intake is higher every day.  My body can afford it.  The gives and takes of being old-ER.

<sigh>

Karen

 

A breath of fresh air.

Being here is like nothing I could have ever imagined. When I originally said that this place was in the middle of nowhere, who would have thought that to get to the restaurant I would have to step out of our apartment to the smell of the donkey that lives behind the apartment (a literal one, not a figurative one), walk down an unpaved muddy road next to the farms that grow our turnips and salsify, and endure the aggressive playfulness of the chef’s dog, who lives right outside the kitchen?

Literally, nothing even resembling a villiage is within 20 km of here.

Even where I feel most comfortable, the kitchen, is like another world to me. I have started in “new kitchens” more times than i can even count now, but it wasn’t until I walked into the kitchen at In de Wulf did I not feel immediately at place. Normally there are whirrs of blenders, the cranking of the dish machine, the mixture of smells of gas stoves, burnt iron, and bubbling stocks that gives me an innate sense comfort. But not here. It was obvious here that a chef designed the kitchen. There is a place and location for everything: trashcans have their own pullout drawer, bain maries are built into the counter for both spoons and immersion blenders, and even the dish pit is somehow quieter. There are no gas stoves, only induction, and every piece of equipment you would need to fully concentrate on making the best food you possibly make is there: combi ovens, thermo mix, auto shaam, and a hotplate to keep pots of sauces a perfect temperatures. The kitchen is quiet, only with the sound of determined cooking. For me, its like breathing new air into a place i know so well.

May be the biggest breath of fresh air that I feel, however, is the people and philosophy itself. While Chef Kobe’s kitchen philosophy is on his website, more than any other aspect, his views on food are expressed on the plate and not on media networks where it’s trumpeted with the beating of drums and thumping on chests. Around 80 percent of the herbs ans garnishes that go on the plate are foraged, but nowhere on the menu does it proclaim that. The tiny wild ducks that hunters specifically hunt for him and are matured in house arent blasted all over the internet and are simply explained at the table as “matured wild ducks in hay.” With each plate that goes out, the chef and cooks here make that point by just making the food the freshest and best and more creative that they can do it. If customers can taste the difference, they’ll not only ask where or how it was done, but also make an exceptionally out of the way trip to come back and eat.

Its been a great first week. Even doing the menial tasks like shucking oysters, cleaning sepia, and pulling meat from and polishing whelk shells has given me new perspective. And that is a very refreshing drink to sip.

Staging in Europe (a quick update)

So we’ve travelled a long way to find out our euro power converter doesn’t work (apparently each EU country have slight differences), and our knives haven’t arrived; but when we got in on tuesday morning, no matter the circumstances, this trip would be like taking a breath of fresh air.

We have been really busy working 16 hour days with three other cooks and one head chef. The amount of work required to prep for the services is quite impressive. The restaurant is closed on Sunday and Monday.  Lunch AND dinner is served all other days except Saturday when it is only lunch.

I have been helping out mostly with pastry and Justin has been prepping for both hot and cold stations. On busy nights like tonight, we both have to jump in and plate up. The cooks and chef here all walk plates out to the dining room with the help of a small front of the house staff.

They have been extremely hospitable to us. On our first night I drank more beer that day than I have all year. We are building up our tolerances on Belgium’s finest, made by monks. This Trappist is ranked one of the top in the world!  Not a bad way to start off a stage, except if you’re hungover and jetlagged.

Goodnight,
Karen (and Justin)

Fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into here…

I’m sure there are a few questions.

“Where are you going again?”

In de Wulf in Dranouter, Belgium will be our first stop. Then we head to Copenhagen, Denmark where I’ll be at AOC and Geranium for a month each. She’ll be at Kiin Kiin and Bo Bech, when it reopens. To finish we’ll spend a week or so wandering around London.

“Why Belgium and Copenhagen?”

I just like the style of food and the movement that’s going on up there. Call it New Nordic, call it new natural, call it overly-complicated and too weird. There are many labels to it– none of which I find particularly encompassing of whatever they’re doing up there. They do, however, use methods and products that are very specialized to their region, an ideal I hope to one day integrate into a restaurant of my own. (Whenever that is.) From reading menus and looking at pictures, however, it always looks like there’s an intense, complicated sort of simplicity to the food. I don’t understand it. So I’m going to go find out what the deal is.

A big thing is that they speak English up there. I felt at least it would be useful for me to be able to understand what they’re saying when they yell at me.

“How did you get these stages?”

Email does great things these days. Offering to work for free doesn’t hurt either.

“How are you going to pay for all of this? Don’t cooks make next to nothing?”

Yes cooks make next to nothing. It’s not really much of anyone’s business how we pay for this, but I will say that not having a drinking, drug, or gambling habit really helps. Plus, calling my wife frugal would be the world’s biggest understatement. Probably my only vice is eating out, and we cook a lot at home so we can spend money on meals that really count.

“How often will you update this?”

I’m not even sure I’ll have internet up there. So this may be it. Fingers crossed though.