Welcome to chapter 5 of The Prep List.
Since it’s been a few months and a handful of chapters of this long-term project, here’s a catch up for us all.
The Prep List is my way of documenting the most treasured things I’ve learned as a restaurant cook in London and the Nordics.
But it’s not a traditional cookbook. Each chapter follows the 16-hour shift of a line cook (me basically) in a fictional restaurant called Trösa on the Stockholm island of Djurgården, which is inspired by some of the great Swedish kitchens I’ve worked in.
So far:
In chapter one we were introduced to our line cook protagonist on a pre-shift forage.
Chapter two followed him into the restaurant itself where we explored the working mind of a great cook and how those same qualities can improve anyone’s home cooking.
Chapter three looked at the tools any kitchen will benefit from having.
And in chapter 4 we explored how deep and flavoursome stocks are made.
With chapter 5, I share with you the sauces that are most important to me in my home and restaurant cooking life. These are my “standards”, my “go-to” methods for some true classics.
I'm sharing them because I know they'll serve you well, too.
In this first part of my sauces/condiments chapter, you’ll learn how to make:
Red wine sauce made with our stock from chapter 4
Flour-thickened sauces
The only butter sauce you need…
.. and the way you should be making hollandaise
The Prep List is a genuine passion project for me that I’m sharing with paid subscribers as a thank you for the support.
If you can afford to support me and my writing, please upgrade to read this post and everything that follows. There is (and will be) loads to learn from it over the coming months.
Chapter 5: Calm
A strange calm hits the restaurant about 45 minutes after we’ve started work in the morning.
Elina, our pastry and cold section chef, has finished shaping her bread. Her elegantly tapered baguettes left to slowly rise under a huge translucent tarpaulin next to a warm oven. Our stagiaire, the youngster we call Rabbit, has browned his stock bones and successfully submerged them in water to carefully bubble away. Our self-appointed “grillmeister”, Goran, has finished cleaning his enormous Josper charcoal oven leaving him to portion his steaks while sticking pouch after pouch of snus under his top lip. Other than the rumble of the coffee machine, the kitchen is quiet for the first and last time of the day. The service staff are not yet here. The dish hand is still an hour from arriving. We cooks are alone and settled at our sections.
Prep has truly begun.
It’s never not strange to think that this perfect, unhurried peace will, without fail, be usurped by noise and panic and (occasional) vitriol in the heat of the dinner service rush. For now, in the calm prep hours of morning, it’s all “oh, of course I’ll hold that sieve while you strain the stock, Wil.”
In 10 hours, things tend to sound more like: “If you don’t stop singing “The Final Countdown”, Reidie, I am going to use this mandolin to shave your elbows.”