Day seven: Cooking meets reality

Posted on | October 22, 2009

There is a scene at the start of the movie Broadcast News (if you’ve never seen it, sign up to Netflix, now, and get it) where the smart kid, who is getting beat up by a school jock, says:

“You’ll never make more than nineteen thousand dollars a year.”

This, of course, was meant as a scathing retort. The school jock, however, says:

“Nineteen thousand dollars … Not bad.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot today.

Thomas Jefferson introduced French fries to America
The other day, Chef Pigtails was talking about the incredibly low profit margins at restaurants (typically no more than 3.5%) and the incredibly high failure rate of eating establishments.

I find that shocking. After all, you can earn more by investing your money than you can opening a restaurant!

So I started researching numbers and the most terrifying one I tripped across (yes, even more terrifying than the above) is that the average line cook never breaks $10 an hour.

They earn $9 and change.

That means you can graduate culinary school with a student loan of $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 or more, depending on where you went, and be faced with an hourly salary of, say, $7 something (What? You did realize you have to work your way up to that $9 + didn’t you?).

And that paycheck likely comes with no benefits. Especially no health care, which is critical when you work around fire and grease and very, very sharp knives.

Forget savings. Forget owning your own home. Forget a retirement account. And forget affording a family, taking a vacation, even going to the dentist for a check up.

Heck, forget student loan payments.

But all this is not even the real scary part. What is scary is, when a bunch of students were gathered around the prep table, mincing onions and talking about restaurants, I mentioned that I just learned that the average line cook only earns about $9 an hour. And you know what Mr. Big said?

“Nine dollars an hour … Not bad.”

Which is why I was thinking about Broadcast News (tell Netflix I sent you).

A medium potato has 35 % of an adult’s daily requirement of vitamin C
Of course, I don’t feel “Not bad” about those numbers. After all, I’m not a 20-year-old delighted to live a subsistence, hand-to-mouth existence. I’m an adult. With bills and commitments and responsibilities.

Of course, there’s the whole living the dream thing. And I believe everyone should live their dream. But it should not cost them to do so.

Oh dear.

Potatoes are only 20% solid. The remaining 80% is water
Don’t mind me being all pessimistic. I’m not enjoying my third term at school.

For one thing, our cooking time has been cut from three hours a day to two. And I always hungered for more than three hours a day. So this is a change for the worse.

And not only am I spending less time in the kitchen, but I am learning less, overall.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Chef Peacock is a wonderful instructor. But we are going at a snail’s pace and covering a lot of territory we have already covered. Like this week. Where we are doing duck breast and duck confit. Both of which we did in the second term. Ditto the salad we are making. And the pate.

In fact, the only new thing we are making is a sauce for the duck. I’ll have the recipe, below, so if you followed my instructions on how to saute a duck breast in my last post, you’ll have a sauce to go with it.

But this sauce is, yawn, uninspiring (in all fairness, I’m not fond of duck a l’orange, liking neither the duck nor the orange sauce).

So, while it is nice that we are slowing down and taking time to build the components of a plate, there is no talk about why we are doing this. Why we are putting these items together. And what the flavor logic is behind this food combination and how to use these components to build a visually stunning, aromatically appealing dish.

And I really, really hate that we get no syllabus for this course.

In fact, the only direction we’ve received to-date is a package of recipes. We got these on day four of our instruction and they are to be used on days five through nine. Only we didn’t end up using all the recipes and we did use at least one recipe that was not in the packet.

Beyond that, we are flying blind, with no idea what is going to happen, if we should read anything, do anything, prepare anything.

Most of the nutrients in a potato are just below the skin
And the classroom time is equally trying.

For one thing, classroom time has increased from two to three hours. And, so far anyway, it has focused solely on how to build a successful business, the vast majority of which consists of formulas and accounting.

Now, I’m certainly no math wizard, but most of this stuff, while incredibly dull, is also pretty self-explanatory. Let me give you an example. Today we were studying managing inventory. Say the kitchen gives the bar 5 lemons to use in drinks. As far as the kitchen inventory goes, is this a plus or a minus?

The kitchen inventory of lemons is now minus those five lemons. So it is a minus. Of course.

But my fellow classmates struggled with questions just like this for the better part of three hours. Three hours jam-packed with non-stop talking while the chef struggled to teach, flinging dead bugs from the windowsill at each other and giggling like three year olds, discussing sexual acts in excruciating gutter detail, one discussion on killing cats, another discussion on who went to bed later, another discussion on the best movie lines. This was beyond flying a paper airplane across the back row, shooting staples an open stapler at each other, texting each other, arranging times to go drinking, and complaining that Chef Pigtail would not let them walk out in the middle of the lecture to go to the bathroom / go get a coffee / go for a smoke / go get something to eat.

My heart goes out to the Chef. I’ve been teaching for years and years and these, without fail, are the worst, most disruptive, most whiny, disrespectful students I have ever seen.

But I think she is getting fed up with them. She locked a bunch of them out of the classroom today when they were late returning from break. She eventually capitulated and let them in. But they instantly returned to their noisy, disruptive ways. Which is why it takes them three hours to learn what should take about twenty minutes.

Hence my profound boredom and misery.

Mr. Potato Head was introduced by Hasbro in 1952
Yesterday, I promised you a recipe for your duck breast. Here’s the one we made at school. It’s incredibly easy and if you like duck a l’orange, this is a good, modern version.

Recipe for Sauce Bigarade
First, you have to make a gastric. This is a flavoring ingredient for your sauce. Then, of course, you make your sauce.

Gastric
4 ounces white sugar
1/2 cup vinegar
Splash of water (say two tablespoons or so)

Put your sugar in a small saucepan. Add just enough water to make it look like wet sand. Turn your heat high.

Once your sugar starts turning brown, use a spoon to gently drag the sugar from the edge of your pot toward the middle (to cook it evenly). When it is a nice, even color, add your vinegar. But, hey, be careful when you do because that vinegar will splatter once it hits your hot sugar. So stand back, just a bit.

Stir, gently, until your sugar is dissolved. Then, when your gastric is a nice, deep caramel color, take it off the heat.

This whole thing should have taken just a few minutes.

Sauce Bigarade
Juice from four oranges, reduced by half
1 cup duck stock, made from your duck bones (see yesterday’s post), reduced until it has a light syrup consistency
Gastric
Butter, if you like
Cognac, if you like

Mix the reduced oranges and duck stock. Add a few drops of the gastric and taste. Add more gastric, if necessary, bearing in mind that this is powerful stuff and should only be added a drop at a time. I added, maybe, an 1/4 – 1/2 a teaspoon in mine.

(I’m afraid you won’t need any more of the gastric. And I do apologize for having you make so much; it is just too tricky to make a smaller amount. And, alas, I don’t know what else you can do with the leftover gastric. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.)

Strain your sauce.

Add 1-2 teaspoons Cognac, if you like. You can also finish it by whisking in 4 tablespoons of butter for a richer taste.

Pour, of course, on your duck breast. And enjoy!

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