Mission: Professional Chef: Eliminating Waste

Chefs who like employment quickly learn to limit waste as much as possible. Any scrap that can be used should be. In a restaurant kitchen a wide variety of techniques is needed to get the most out of what you buy. Whole chickens are ordered, and broken down by cooks, to yield the usable cuts at half the price, plus material for stocks that go into sauces, risottos, soups, or staff meals. Vegetable scraps are saved for the same purpose. Restaurants that budget for staff food can use excess to feed the staff, and through the magic of accounting lose less than if the food were wasted. Specials are created to use excess food.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of wasted food in the West comes from the home. With the recession upon us, and my ambition to incorporate the chef's techniques in every facet of my cooking, avoiding waste becomes mandatory. So when I tired of taking notes about what I'm cooking, I looked to the bananas on the counter.

Bought for Honey's breakfast, I knew from their dull allover brown that they were gorgeously ripe. Unfortunately, I still haven't exorcised my food prejudice against bananas, and years of uniform, blemish-free, flavorless food in megamart produce departments have conditioned Honey against brown fruit. So banana nut bread it was. I got a couple of loaf tins and ingredients for the PC's recipe and then I weighed my bananas, a preliminary step that probably should have been undertaken before I left for the shops.

I had 1/6th of the banana needed for the recipe. This was fine; it worked out to one loaf, would get plenty of flavor and moisture from four bananas. I even tried a little of the raw fruit while I was making the batter. I'm not buying a bunch for myself anytime soon, but it wasn't disagreeable.

For the purpose of my project, I learned the blending method, mixing solid and liquid ingredients separately, and then quickly combining. As soon as they come together, they go in the pan and then the oven. Generally, the blending method is used for chemically leavened quickbreads that are supposed to be moist and tender. Mixing thoroughly works against this in two ways: liquid activates the leavening before cooking--since it's a chemical reaction, each recipe has a finite amount of lift-- and overmixing develops gluten in the flour. And nobody wants tough muffins.

The resulting bread convinced me that bananas could be delicious. Especially when the bread was toasted with butter--Grandma's poundcake treatment. Or toasted and turned into a peanut butter sandwich.

Mission: Professional Chef: More than you can chew

The early stages of any project are marked with vast ambition. Last year I planted about ten different tomato plants of four or five varieties, and three kinds of peppers in our friends' back yard.

Professional Chef was no different. I saw no reason that every part of my meal couldn't contribute to my ultimate goal. Sooner begun, sooner done, right?

What I'd forgotten since my university days is that everything has a process and laying the foundation is the most labor-intensive part of learning. In the case of Professional Chef, taking notes about steaming vegetables, braising lamb and making chicken stock would be terribly disjointed if I neglected to cover the details of mis en place and prep technique. I decided this after buying for our dinner and starting the meal.

The lamb stew was good, the steamed sweet potato and rutabaga played nicely with it, and the brown rice pilaf was...edible. I'm allowing myself some do-overs in the name of perfection. I've gotten about halfway through the relevant sections of the text, finishing the veg mis en place chapter the other day.

Veg mis en place was really helpful. That's where I found the basic knife skills, information that isn't complex or difficult to remember, but is vital. It made for easy and highly productive note-taking, and even found me, Ms. anti-superfluous garnish, fluting a mushroom the other night when we were slow.

I still need to cover the actual cooking of the veg, and the mis and method for the rice. Since then I've cooked quickbreads (notes taken), bechamel (not yet), and I'm finding it much easier to cook through the book than to keep up with the notes.

But the slog continues. There are only so many mise chapters after all. Surely my pen will catch up with my pans eventually.