Profit

At my current job, we live and die by the spreadsheet. I weigh everything, quantify recipes, and oh god, I know my formulas.
At my last job, when I wrote down recipes, it looked like a shopping list. Everything was to taste, and quantities were reserved for perhaps 20% of the recipes I was given there. By all accounts, Woodfire was in a more comfortable position than Millsy's. What gives?
Honey and I had a couple beers last night and hashed this dilemma out. This is what we came up with:
Years of experience: Tuohy has over 20 years of experience, and worked extensively in hotel kitchens. If you're going to find a costing spreadsheet, it'll be in a kitchen that is as varied and high-volume as a hotel's. I surmise that after awhile, a chef memorizes the costs of certain basic recipes, the same way that we memorize that a vinaigrette is 3 parts oil to 1 vinegar.
Premium price: Woodfire was fine dining. Millsy's? No. Sure, diners were paying a premium for unique, exciting ingredients, but as we were always told, they were also paying for them to be cooked and presented perfectly. If that's the model, then telling the cook (who is to be preparing and plating every dish to exacting standards) to make a sauce to taste assumes some variability, and the higher price covers that. In a perfect world, that means that the cook making your food can accommodate lovely, inconsistent products. Skill costs in every industry: in a restaurant, it costs the chef in wages, and in the dining room it costs the guest. But when a dish is consistently amazing, everyone's happy.
Waste, menu, and stock. We record every gram of wastage at Millsy's, so that the accountants can square our numbers. You can guess how this worked at Woodfire. Woodfire's menu also changed daily. Crate of corn in the walk-in? Guess how many places you'll see corn in the next three days. People tend to assume that a daily menu is some insurmountable task, that every dish on the menu changes daily. A daily menu means that chefs have the flexibility to find as many ways to sell what's in their walk-in before it goes off as possible.
Millsy's is also a bar, and like several of the restaurants where I've worked over here, if we run out of something, we have to buy it from the supermarket next door. It was probably easier to keep track of the kitchen costs at Woodfire.
Any other ideas?

Old post!

I usually get all excited about publishing a new post, as my razor sharp editing skills have...declined since graduation, and I'm a perfectionist.
Earlier tonight though, I stumbled upon a post I wrote after last Mother's Day. for the life of me, I can't figure out why I didn't publish it. Here's a link, if you're interested.

Learning outside the restaurant

I just finished the notes for chapter 25 of The Professional Chef, on cooking vegetables. It was by far the most intensive sitdown with the tome yet. After reading McGee, one thinks about fast vs. slow ways to cook veg and wet vs. dry. I came to the conclusion that were probably about eight different ways to get a vegetable from raw to finished. TPC lists ten. The difference seems trivial, but when committing to memory the advantages, disadvantages and rules for each one, ten feels like a lot. And I haven't even gotten around to the cooking yet.

Restaurant work, especially in a kitchen that doesn't change menus frequently, or approach dishes with ambition, can get tedious, and it's important for a chef to keep learning, even if it's got to be done at home. This week, I've found quite a few motivators to get me cleaning my fridge out at home, and trying things I don't get to try at work.

On working clean: I used to be a damn mess in the kitchen. Then one Saturday night I got the tongue-lashing from the chef. The rest of the week, the sous chef would come over at the correct times during service, and say "You might want to take this time and wipe down." At work now, I don't have a station, and keeping the whole kitchen clean is a sight harder than wiping down one station after every pop. But it makes such a difference, it's breathtaking.

Ratio I didn't get in on the chart and scale giveaway--I need new glasses more than a new cookbook, sadly--but I want this book. So much. Ruhlman's posts about the ratios and the variations one can get from them only fuel my longing. I love kitchen math, and ratios have always been the easiest way for me to make the same thing time after time. I can't wait to see what he's come up with.

Nostalgia?Perhaps. I learned a lot from Tuohy at Woodfire. I remember how amazing the vegetable ragout was, especially as it changed with whatever we had. I also remember the initial tedium of peeling favas, and the accomplishment I felt as I got better and faster at it. Tomorrow morning, I'll be at the market, looking for some asparagus, broad beans (what they call favas here) and spring peas.

Mission: Professional Chef: On Folding

No, I haven't made an angel food cake. Cake bakery terrifies me. Years of cheap ovens in cheap rentals have instilled a solid love of the braise, and an automatic distrust of promised success in anything as unforgiving as pastry.

This is where working as a chef comes in handy. That which I would avoid at home (where I have a functional oven for the first time since I left the nest), I am forced to do as a matter of prep. My love of measuring things has earned me the dubious honor of "dessert queen" in the kitchen, and thus I find myself making tiramisu and chocolate souffles a couple of times a week.

This, combined with the fact that my promised pay rise is tied to our ability to meet our forecasted GPs (gross profits) has made me fanatical about yield. To wit: I costed tiramisus at a yield of 15 from a recipe. My current--delicious--record is 18. But in the hands of a less-practiced chef, we got a grand total of 12. Obviously, this affects our margins.

My secret is in the folding, and Professiona Chef reminded me of finer points of technique that I'd learned long ago from an Alton Brown program. Folding carelessly or roughly deflates the egg whites, reducing total volume from a recipe. Here, as far as I'm concerned is the proper folding technique:

1. Mix all the heavy stuff together. This should really include everything but the egg whites or whipped cream used to lighten the final product. Taste. It should be delicious, if a little intense.

2. Beat your lightener to the desired consistency.

3. Immediately fold 1/4 to 1/3 of the lightener into the heavy stuff. Go for incorporation more than ethereal texture, but don't batter the lightener into flatness.

4. Fold your now-lighter flavoring mix into the rest of the lightener. Pour into the final pan or mold as quickly and gently as possible.

The above technique has the advantage of bringing the consistency of an often-heavy flavoring mix/component closer to the consistency of fluffy, light, and fragile egg whites or cream. It's easier to fold, and you keep the volume. And in a restaurant, that means two things: a guest ecstatic at the juxtaposition of lightness in texture and richness in flavor and higher actual than forecasted profits.

Plus the cook saves time through saved effort combining two diametrically opposed solutions. Also, I feel like a badass when I get more yield than I predicted. Score one for The Professional Chefas a casual reference.