Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

I’ve often in recent years run into young people who, upon learning that I went to cooking school way back when, say they are planning on doing the same, that they want to become chefs. Now I have a love of fine food, and I truly love the opportunity to cook for others but I loathe doing it for a living, which is why I quit. I tend to look at these people as if they aren’t quite all there, if you know what I mean, two eggs short of an omelette as it were.

Oh I know where so much 0f this comes from of course. After all, I am a certified Food Network junkie. But the Food Network is to cooking like Disney is to animals, it ain’t real. These kids watch Emeril (shudder - the man is a buffoon, has bad hygeine and zero presentation skills), or Iron Chef (great entertainment and tremendous talent), or watch the Bocuse d’ Or or one of the other stars in ascendant and think , ya that’s what I’m going to do. Oh how little they know what they are really letting themselves in for because I gotta tell you gang it ain’t like that in the real world unless you own your own restaurant and even then not usually. Oh no, Anthony Bourdain, probably my favoutite of the Food Network cooks, tells it like it really is in his book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“What most people don’t get about professional-level cooking is that it is not at all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking—the real business of preparing the food you eat—is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way. The last thing a chef wants in a line cook is an innovator…. Chefs require blind, near-fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield conditions”

and that my friends is what it’s really all about in the bright big world of professional cooking. Sometimes you luck out though. I worked for a 4 star hotel for 18 years (not in the kitchen) but during that time I became “friends” with the head chef (he’s now Executive Chef of one of Sandal’s tropical resorts) and he taught me a lot. He is a traditional Swiss trained chef - methodical, precise, demanding. He was also very innovative and for some time he was the manager of Canada’s Culinary Olympics team that won quite a few gold medals. The Sous Chefs and 1st cooks that worked under him were encouraged to enter competitions and develop their talents (oh did I forget to mention that serious wannabe chefs have zero social life because they are working 12 to 14 hours a day 6/7 days a week and only getting paid for 40 hours a week, especially when they make sous chef and go on salary? the dues you pay babe, the dues you pay).

So when I hear such enthusiasm in youth, I don’t try to squash it but I do try to fimd out if they’ve ever worked in a kitchen and have a clue what they are letting themselves in for. If cooking and food isn’t an all consuming passion of yours then it is going to be a tough job.

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