How to work like a chef

Find your own... personal... freezers

Hello and welcome to The Recovering Line Cook. If you’re new, thanks so much for subscribing. If you’ve been here before, thanks for sticking with me. It really does mean the world to me.

Last week I announced a new chapter of my newsletter I’m calling the Notebooks of a Line Cook. In these posts, I plan to write about how I cook and what I learned in restaurant kitchens that made me the cook I am today.

I really hope these “Notebook” entries of mine can be of some help to you as well.

So, where to start with such a massive project…?

Well, today I’m sharing my updated (though by no means exhaustive) list of what seem to me the most important working habits and beliefs of the restaurant chef.

So let’s go…

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Think about the seconds

When I was a 29-year-old stagiaire working weekends while at culinary school Monday-Friday, I’d drive myself crazy watching other chefs.

How did they get their prep finished so quickly?

And why did it take me almost the entire morning just to unpack that day’s potato delivery?

It felt as though a powerful secret was being kept from me. As though the others all had an extra pair of hands or a hidden house-elf or something.

It turned out to be a bit simpler than that.

I was slowly prepping cooked jerusalem artichokes when my first lesson in the mind of the chef was given to me. It came from a very friendly and talented sous chef I was working with at the time called Eddie (now multi-Michelin starred in his own right).

This artichoke job I was struggling with required:

1. unwrapping each artichoke from the foil it had been cooked in

2. slicing said artichoke

3. scooping out the flesh without ripping the delicate skin

Eddie told me to stop, to really think about what I was doing, how I was working, and, here’s the key thing, what I could do to make the job go quicker.

At this point he set me up with the proper number of empty containers (one for trash, one for the flesh, one for skins etc) so I wasn’t stopping to go to the corner bin every 10 seconds. He told me to take each step through to completion as well (unwrapping all the artichokes for example) before slicing/scooping any. He even made me think about my posture (grounded feet, wide stance) for better comfort.

The benefit was moments saved on each j-choke. Minimal gains. But whether you’re faced with an entire shed load of artichokes in a restaurant kitchen, or a big dinner with lots of dishes to fix in your home kitchen, really thinking of those seconds can save a huge amount of time by the end of the day.

Speed wasn’t the secret. The secret was just thinking each process through and making it as smart as I could manage.

Plastic wrap makes a very good temporary (or not so temporary) belt

The best way of doing something isn’t always pretty or glamorous. If you need to use cream to save your Hollandaise, just do it. If you think your soup needs saving with a stock cube, then who’s judging you?

Custard gone lumpy? Blend that bastard.

Cooks take it as it comes. They improvise. They’re pragmatic and won’t let the “right way” of doing something get in the way of creating something that works.

It reminds me of a great chef I worked with in Stockholm. For years he kept his trousers up every shift with a metre of plastic wrap tied around his waste.

What works, works.

Work clean

When I cooked for anyone before I was a restaurant cook, I had one rule. Cleaning up was someone else’s job.

This is drummed out of you the first day you ever spend in a professional kitchen.

Working clean means taking the seconds needed in the moment to save minutes and hours later. In as much, working clean isn’t just about being tidy and wiping down. It’s a state of mind. It’s about taking care as you go. Using time efficiently right now, in this moment, so that the day doesn’t avalanche into an uncontrollable mess.

Working clean may start with getting those onion skins into a waste container quickly, but it ends as a philosophy that helps you achieve more than you’d ever think was possible otherwise.

In a world of pain, find your own, personal Jesus walk-in fridge

The joke you might see on social media, or told among psychologically damaged cooks, is that the walk-in fridge (or possibly dry store room) functions as a kind of safe space. A refuge where stressed-out line cooks can go to cry when everything becomes too much.

I’m not looking for sympathy, but I don’t think I ever had a job in which I was afforded even a few minutes for a good cry.

And trust me, I definitely needed it at times.

But the walk-in, even for me, did offer a moment’s quiet. I may not have had time to cry, but the walk-in was always there to escape the heat of the 400°C grill. It was always there for me to stand and stare for a moment longer than I needed to and sneak an expensive Gariguette strawberry, the type I could never afford with my line cook’s salary.

Those moments in the walk-in would be enough to teach anyone the importance of having a space, even for just a moment, in which to stop, eat a nice strawberry, and to feel safe.

And by the way, I actually preferred the walk-in freezer. It was a bit cold but there was less human traffic in there…

Create parallel versions of yourself

Chefs are masters of using time to their advantage.

Chefs also know instinctively what jobs take more time than others and which of these can be started first and left to run without actively needing to be there.

Take roasting root veg or simmering stock for example.

A chef understands to get these tasks going before chopping chives or filleting fish or anything that requires active attention.

This way, it’s almost as though the chef has several versions of themselves working parallel jobs all over the kitchen at the same time.

Repeat the same jokes over and over (and over) again

Restaurant cooks rely on this. But home cooks can use this technique as well so that long kitchen shifts and repetitive tasks begin to lose all sense of temporality and linear progression. Soon you won’t know if the hour you spent scrubbing potatoes, trimming sprouts, and peeling carrots at Christmas was 3 hours or a mere ten minutes.

Winning!

Remember that everything is impossible until it’s done

When I started as a chef, it felt like every second thing I was asked to do was practically impossible. I was constantly hitting roadblocks I was certain neither I, nor anyone else, could get through.

“This mayonnaise won’t stop splitting”. “The eyeball from this pig head won’t come out”. “I’m telling you, Chef, there is no fennel seed in the dry store!”

And then, for the eighth time, said Chef shoves past you on his way into the dry store, emerges holding said fennel seed jar that didn’t exist 10 seconds ago, and tells you it was in the open your fucking eyes section.

You quickly learn in the kitchen that if you don’t find a way to solve your problem, some other person will for you.

And they’ll do it in your face with a smirk on their own.

Tomorrow is not another day

Maybe it all comes down to the pressure chefs are under. The knowledge that the seconds lost throughout the day add up to some poor bastard’s food being an hour late.

But I was shocked by how productive cooks are, even after a 6 hour service at midnight on a Saturday.

The first restaurant I worked, for example, used a lot of pickled vegetables. Carrots in particular. One long Saturday had come to an end and the Head Chef realised our supply of beautifully preserved baby heritage carrots was running low. At midnight, I was asked to clean and pickle some more.

In my past life, a task like making pickling liquid, cleaning, and then pickling carrots would have been a leisurely Sunday afternoon’s activity.

Now it was a job that needed fixing in minutes.

To have pushed this task to another day, possibly making it another line cook’s problem as well, would have been to start undermining that day’s already carefully considered plan.

Chefs have a special ability to reframe the coordinates of what is possible in the time they have available to them.

Because, in the kitchen, sometimes tomorrow just isn’t another day.

Tomorrow is absolutely another day

“The thing about being a restaurant chef is that you’re only as good as the last steak you cooked. That sounds kind of depressing, but really it’s quite a freeing thing.”

Those are actually my words from this memoir entry I sent out a few weeks ago. I know it’s cringe as fuck to quote yourself but it’s an idea I genuinely believe in.

In the stress of a busy kitchen and service, it’s easy to question your worth if you have a bad day or make a stupid mistake or fail to put the sauce on the side even though you’ve been told 37 times by your sweaty head chef that’s how the guest ordered it.

What I learned in restaurant kitchens is it doesn’t matter what came before. It doesn’t matter if you did things a certain way at your last restaurant, or if you burnt a $100 steak the previous shift.

What matters is you turn up today, and go again.

You’re only as good as the last thing you cooked.

So get cooking.

Thanks again for reading. Did I miss anything out?

What’s your most valuable kitchen lesson I should know about?