White poached chicken. Recipe here.
In another life, I worked in a commercial kitchen. I might even have mentioned it a time, or ten.
However, kitchen work taught me an awful lot of things, the least of which is that the amount of energy that goes into getting your meal on your table at a restaurant is astronomical.
For example, a brie cheese and herb stuffed chicken breast, with sundried tomato reduction sauce, chat potatoes and baby vegetables.
A popular dish in the kitchen.
So, a few days before you order your meal, I am chopping enough herbs to see us through the next 3 days of prep, generally 500g of each herb, parsley, dill, rosemary, mint and thyme. I have 40 chicken breasts defrosting in water in the kitchen sink and I am prepping vegetables. This included turning 10kg of carrots into batons, 10 broccoli and 10 cauliflower into florets, top and tailing 5kg of snow peas, peeling 10kgs of potatoes and putting them on to parboil whole, before chopping them into a dice, slicing 7-8 large zucchinis and then blanching the lot, before refrigerating everything.
You see, nothing in a commercial kitchen is done small scale, so while the chicken breast and vegetables is not a hard dish to prepare by any means, it is all done in bulk ahead of time, sometimes up to a week ahead. Prepped vegies were used for most meals, so we prepped the above amounts every 3-4 days.
Once the vegies are done, I’m hopeful that the chicken breasts will have defrosted enough to work with. A quick poke in the icy water lets me know I’m good to go, so I start to set up, stalling on needing to julliene a 20 litre bucket of stirfry mix.
First is the bain marie tray I’ll set the chicken in so I can fridge it afterwards. Then the cling wrap, catering size, set at the top of my chopping board. Then comes the brie – I need to cut 40 pieces of brie from the wheel and maybe an extra bit to nibble on. What? It’s a perk.
I set the plastic container of herbs up next to me, with the brie laid out on another piece of clingwrap, spaced out so they don’t stick together. I work fast, moving backwards and forwards, doing 3 things at once. Somewhere, in a trip to the coolroom, I’ve dumped the semi-defrosted chicken into a colander and set it above a bucket to drain while I finish prepping. I beg the apprentice to sharpen my knife because I’m not fantastic at that yet.
Once I start, I need to hit a rhythym, as fast as I can.
Pull out a sheet of clingwrap. Grab a chicken breast and in one motion, remove the tenderloin and any excess fat. Throw the tenderloin into a spare container, slice through the chicken breast to create an internal pocket, dip a piece of brie into the herbs and shove it into the cavity. Then slice the clingwrap off, wrap the breast and pop it into the metal bain marie container.
Repeat. Forty times.
Then scrub your hands, scrub your chopping block and knife, throw any remaining herbs out (chicken blood, cross contamination issues) and put everything in the fridge, well covered.
That’s the chicken done for the next few days service.
When an order comes in for chicken that that week, I don’t cook it. I’m on cold larder/desserts/dishes/general runner (depending on the night and whether the other kitchen hand is working), but I do run to the coolroom and grab the preprepared chicken from the fridge, in between doing everything else I’m doing – which sometimes, depending on the day, would be scrubbing walls with a scourer. Yay.
A chef grabs a handful of cooked diced potato from the bucket and sets it aside, ready to deepfry. The chicken probably takes the longest to cook of any meal, except well done steak because you can’t precook chicken (unlike the roast meals and various other things). The chicken is panfried to crisp the skin, before being thrown into the oven, still in the pan for 30 minutes.
A minute before it comes out of the oven, a chef drops the chat potatoes into the deep fryer, the serve of vegetables into the boiling water to reheat them and mixes a few tablespoons of pureed sundried tomatoes with some cream in a saucepan. All this while the chef is making another 4-5 dishes at once.
The chicken comes out of the oven, is sliced in half, set on the chat potatoes and the sauce poured over. The vegies are salted, buttered and put on the plate too, parsley is sprinkled and the plate is sent.
The customer, usually, appreciates how much work has gone into the dish, they enjoy it, they pay and they leave.
Let’s now look at cooking for children.
With children, the amount of effort I put into a meal directly corrolates to how much is eaten.
If I spend the morning prepping and then spend 2 hours cooking and bringing the meal together, you can guarantee that they won’t eat a mouthful. They’ll hate it, or be too tired, or too hyper, or SOMETHING.
They won’t eat it.
If however, I make a quick tomato sauce, pour it over pasta and serve it with grated cheese, they’ll whinge that there isn’t enough.
While family cooking means that there is always less work to be done than in a commercial kitchen, I sort of miss the satisfied feeling of seeing an empty plate come back and a quick report from the waitress on how much they enjoyed it. Not to mention missing getting to play with food for a living.
Cooking for children is definitely harder than cooking for a restaurant. Trust me.
However, commercial kitchens are more stressful. Give me a screaming baby over a screaming chef any day. At least I have a chance that the baby is screaming because it can, and not because I fucked up.
What would you prefer? Cooking in a restaurant for appreciative customers, or feeding your children day in, day out?
