Hello Chefs, This is Chef's PSA Podcast.
I'm your host, Andre Natera. On today's episode, we're going
to talk about technical skills that you need in the kitchen.
Stay tuned. OK, let's get into it.
I'll give you a short update. I am currently working on the
translation of all the culinary. Books that I've written so
Leadership, Fundamentals, Kitchen, Art of War, Bad Sue,
Good Chef, How Not To Be The Biggest Idiot in the Kitchen,
and Line Cook Survival Manual. I've already completed three of
them in the translation process. I'm just having a couple of
friends read them. They're going to go into
Spanish. I'm hoping that I will have all
the books done within a week or two.
Max. They will be available.
I'll announce it on Chef's PSA as soon as.
They are ready to go. And then after that, by request,
I will be translating them into Italian Italiano.
So for those of you that are asking for the book in Spanish,
very close. Almost done actually.
Like I said, three of them are already done, it's just a matter
of getting them out and published.
So thank you all for requesting that ask and ye shall receive.
So that's your gift Moving forward.
I want to get right into skills, so I did a chef's PS:.
A the other day. Where I talked about if I needed
to make a super soldier, a culinary super soldier, what
three skills would I ask from them?
And I said Brunois, cook, fish and learn how to braise.
Those would be my top three skills that every cook should
learn. But then I put up a post a
couple of days ago about taking action in your career and the
only way to get better at cooking is to actually cook.
And I don't know, I did some. Images about, you know, a very
depressed chef saying, oh man, now I got to, I got to cook to
get good at cooking. You know, I'm being a little bit
sarcastic here, but a lot of people always ask me, how do I
get better at this or how do I get better at that?
And there's no magic answer. The only way you get better at
something is by doing it, period.
There's no shortcut to success, unfortunately.
If it was that easy, everyone would do it.
If you want to get proficient at a certain skill in the kitchen,
no exception. You have to practice that skill
repeatedly. So then the question is, how do
I get better at something in the kitchen?
Like I said, the easy answer is do it a lot of times, but you
can't just take that approach and say I want to get better.
So I'm just going to do everything.
I think you need to be sniper specific on what it is that
you're trying to accomplish. Now.
I don't know you particularly, I don't know what your particular
goals are in the kitchen. I don't know what your
particular improvements are that you need to become a better cook
and chef. So the advice I'm going to give
right now is very general and I think this is going to apply to
most chefs in most situations. Obviously if you have a pizza
restaurant, maybe what I say might not apply to you, or if
you have a BBQ restaurant or you work on the walk station, maybe
this might not apply. However, for 90% of the jobs out
there, this will definitely apply to you.
When I set the three skills that I think people could improve on,
I want to start there, like if I had to create a super soldier
and so that is. You know, a lot of people are
saying no, teach them organization and time
management. I'm not talking about that right
now. I am talking specifically about
the technical skills, the relationship that a chef has
between themselves, the product, and getting it out on the table
through cooking. So knives, saute, pans, fire,
whatever the case may be, that's the relationship I'm talking
about. I'm not talking about
organization or writing the schedule or any of that other
shit. I'm specifically talking about
culinary skills. So let me expand on why I think
those three skills would teach you the most.
Let's start with cooking fish. When it comes to cooking fish, I
think the most amount of temperature control is needed on
a pan. So I'm just assuming that you
are cooking fish in a pan. You can't be too hot, You can't
be too cold. The pan has to have a certain
temperature. You got to know when to put the
fish in. You got to know when to turn the
fish. You got to know when to not mess
with the fish because it's going to get stuck.
Do you oil the fish? Or do you oil the pan?
Do you put the fish skin side down and get it crispy?
Do you put a press on top so you could make sure it stays flat if
there is skin so it gets crisp? Do you cook it halfway and never
turn it? Do you turn it?
A lot of chefs will sear their fish only on one side and then
just kind of flash it in the salamander or an oven really
quick just to get it to where it needs to be.
But understanding how to cook fish is a critical skill for a
chef because. You know, I'm going to use
salmon as an example. Like, you want your salmon meat
and rare, you don't want it well done.
You don't want it raw. But there's a certain sweet spot
when you're cooking fish that it's like the perfect texture.
It's moist, it's juicy, and it doesn't require much effort for
the knife and fork to break apart.
The more you cook the fish, the drier it becomes usually.
And that's not all fish, because some fish are the exception.
The more you cook them. Sometimes they get moist.
Point being is that fish is so delicate.
If you learn how to cook fish really well, you'll start to
pick up a certain level of finesse that will transfer into
all the other things that are a little bit more forgiving, like
meat and poultry. You could fuck up a chicken, you
could overcook it a little bit. It's okay.
You're going to cook it to 165 degrees and to kill any
salmonella or something like that, assuming that you're doing
that. But you might not want to do
that with fish. You also might have a cake
tester or a fish skewer that you skewer the fish that you start
to learn. Where to place the doneness?
Maybe it's on your lip, like a lot of chefs used to put the
skewer on their lip to test temperatures, or they put it at
a sensitive part on their wrist or their hand.
Or sometimes you just learn from touch.
Or like I used to say, they use the chef force the intuition to
tell when the fish is done. Skill #2 would be braising, and
the reason I think braising is such an important skill that
cooks and chefs can develop, especially early on in their
career, is that you're. It's a multilayered skill, so
typically in braising there's a Browning process.
A lot of times there's the addition of vegetables, and then
it's a combination cooking method, so it's dry heat and
moist heat at the same time. And so you're learning
everything from how to get color that you know, the Myard
reaction, get that sear, get that golden, that GB D on the
meat or whatever it is that you're braising.
You're also learning almost how to make a sauce because a lot of
times that braising liquid turns into.
The sauce that's going to accompany the meat that you are
cooking. There's also an element of
understanding doneness. You know if you're braising A
veal Shank, for example, you can't just rush through it.
You got to cook it a certain amount of time.
Are you braising octopus? It's going to be different than
it if you're if you're braising an asobuco, or if you're doing a
quick brace with some seafood or a chicken.
All of that matters. So understanding that everything
has a. A certain doneness, time and
temperature. And so the amount of time that
you have to build flavor changes.
So if you're going to brace something that's going to be
done in 30 minutes, you need to be able to extract the most
amount of flavor in the shortest period of time versus something
that you're maybe braising for three or four hours.
Then you have a little bit more time to develop that flavor.
In addition to learning how to develop flavor, there's that
sauce work that you're going to learn how to do.
Because, again, braising is very similar to making sauces and
stocks, at least in the classical repertoire of French
cuisine. There's a lot of there's a lot
of crossover between a braise and a stalker, a sauce.
So that's why I think learning how to braise is going to bring
out so many more skills in an individual.
So again, first skill I'd say learn how to cook fish, delicate
fish. Second skill, learn how to
braise. The third skill I would focus on
is the. Meticulous knife cut of Brunois
and I, and I don't mean just like getting everything and
chopping it very small. Now the reason I say Brunois is
so important because you're usually going to be working with
more difficult vegetables when you're making a Brunois so
harder. Vegetables like root vegetables
like carrots or potatoes in addition to onions and different
types of alium like shallots and things like that.
But I would have them Brunois everything.
Learn to Brunois onions perfectly Learn how to Brunois
carrots. One of my one of my friends
shout out to Lauren Peters from Cookie Rich and if you don't
know Cookie Rich you should they make they make great cookies.
Anyway, we're getting off subject, but I was talking to my
friend Lauren Peters and she used to have to brun wah
pistachios as part of her training when she was coming up
And I remember thinking about brun wah pistachios.
Talk about level of difficulty there.
They had to be perfect or you know individual leaves of
tarragon. And the reason I say Brunois is
so important because it's a skill that's going to require
two or three skills to get to the end result.
So a Brunois, for those of you that might not know this is the
technical term or the French term I should say for a specific
knife cuts, that's about 116th of an inch.
So it's a very, very small cube, right.
And so in order to get to the Brunois, first you're going to
have to start with the Julienne and then you're going to have to
move to the dicing aspect of it, so.
You're gonna learn two skills in one.
So if you have, in order to have a perfect Brunois, you have to
have a perfect julienne. And so that's why I say Brunois,
is it. Because if you know how to
Brunois very well. And I'm talking about like
perfect Brunois, micro Brunois, the kind that's gonna be used in
garnish learning how to go pedal by pedal on an onion or a
shallot. If you could do that
exceptionally well, then all the rest of the knife cuts are going
to be much easier. So if you know how to broonois
perfect onion, then you know how to slice an onion.
You know how to dice an onion, you know how to dice a potato,
you know how to you know chop a carrot.
Because all those skills are required to get to the end
result of the broonois. It's the furthest down the road
and you have to bypass several other skills to get there when I
used to run kitchens. I would have my cooks practice
Brunois for days on end before they would do anything else,
before I'd kind of release them into the wild.
And, you know, honestly, they used to hate it.
I used to hate it too. The reason I would have them do
that is because once they understood, everything else
became super easy for them. And I remember telling one of my
chefs, shout out to Lauren Pogue that there would be a time when
her skills were so good that they would probably be better
than the culinary school instructors that were teaching
her. That her Brunois skills would be
so good that they will become better than the culinary school
instructors that were teaching her at the time.
And she didn't believe me. But then when she was in
culinary school, she said some of her teachers would come over
and ask her where she learned how to Brunois like that and
they were all very impressed. So the technical skills are
important. So those are my top three
skills, Brunois fish, cookery and braising.
Now if you wanted to learn how to cook.
And I put this in the post the other day.
This is what I would do if if if you want to practice at home,
you could get relatively good at just a couple of things, and I
would say buy whole chickens. They're relatively inexpensive
eggs and potatoes. Now, you may need a couple of
other pantry items like flour and things like that, salt, etc.
But if you think about all the different techniques that you
could practice on with just those three ingredients.
Let's take the chicken for example.
With the chicken, just with the chicken, you could practice so
many different cooking methods. You could braise the chicken,
You could roast the chicken. You could Stew the chicken.
You could Frick see, you could make soup.
You could fry the chicken. You learn trussing techniques.
So again, that's another layered technique on top of the chicken.
You could learn how to trust. And of course, you could learn
multiple ways to trust the chicken.
A lot of different ways to do something correctly.
Depending on who's teaching you, you could learn boning skills,
so. And I mean, taking apart the
meat from the bone skills, you could debone the chicken.
Once you understand, you know, where the joints are, where the
articulation is, you, you really get a lot of practice with the
chicken. Other birds are very similar.
So ducks, pheasant, etcetera, they're all kind of structured
the same. And a chicken, it's not exactly
like a bigger animal. But if you understand how to
break down chickens and you understand where bones, meat and
you understand where muscle meats and tendons and things
like that, then you have a better idea.
As you move on to larger animals like whole pigs or cows, you
start to understand how to break down animals.
But you got to start with chickens, start small, You could
learn how to saute, you could debone your chicken thigh and
you could make a roulade. You could take some of the meat
and you could make a farce. You could then.
Do more advanced skills, like learn how to remove the skin in
its entirety on the chicken. Not to mention, now that you've
deboned the chicken, you could learn how to make stock, right?
Yes, there's some subtle changes going from a white stock to a
dark stock, but you're going to have so many skills that you
could practice just with that chicken.
The next one, like I said, potatoes with potatoes.
Again, you could practice all your knife cuts, your julienne,
your brunois, your tornay, etc. But there's other skills that
that potato could lend to, like making mashed potatoes.
Make potato salad, Make French fries, Make roasty, Make the
Joel Rubicon palm puree with a lot of butter in it.
There's a difference between just mashing your potatoes and
then making a palm puree where you're adding in.
I think it's equal amounts of butter.
Maybe you put clarified butter as well.
Maybe you do cream, maybe you do milk.
I don't know. That's up to you.
But you're passing the potatoes through a food mill.
Maybe you're running them through a Tammy afterwards to
make sure that they are extra silky smooth.
I'm going to, I'm going to digress for a minute.
I'm going to tell you a story. I had a sous chef one time and
he gave me some potatoes to try and he said, what do you think
of these potatoes? I said, yeah, they're fine.
And he said just fine. I said, yeah, they're fine.
They're, you know, he's like what?
He's like, these are excellent. And I could tell he was a little
bit annoyed by me because I just thought the potatoes were fine
where he thought they were excellent.
And so I said, well, let me teach you how to make this style
of pompere, like the Joel Rubicon style potatoes.
And so I taught him how to make it.
I said, now taste these and then taste those and tell me what you
think. And he says they both taste the
same. Now at that point I realized.
He couldn't tell the difference between the two because an
experienced palette will tell you one was significantly
better. So I told him, do this, then do
me a favor. I want you to make potatoes like
I just taught you. And every day I want you to
bring them down. And we're going to taste them
together and we're going to critique, is it too much butter,
Not enough butter, too much salt, not enough salt, etcetera.
And for the next 30 days, I only want you to try these potatoes
that you're going to make with me.
And we're going to constantly tweak and adjust so that it has
the perfect flavor. And he said okay.
He didn't understand the assignment, but for 30 days he
made these palm puree, didn't taste anything else, no other
style of potatoes. And we'd sit there and we'd
adjust and we'd have a conversation on needs more salt,
maybe a little bit more butter, maybe put some clarified, maybe
add a little bit of cream or milk.
Maybe we're putting white pepper.
I don't remember. We were probably put on white
pepper. I'm not.
I'm not a big black pepper fan and and mashed potatoes anyway,
point being 30 days later we come back to the potatoes and I
say now the potatoes that you made, make them the way you used
to make them but don't taste them.
Then he made them, I said okay now try them side by side and
when he tried them side by side he was like oh shit these
potatoes are significantly better and I said you see he's
like I didn't know and that. Illustrates you know there's
this, there's the story about the king that has the best cake
and so it goes like this. I'll share the story with you.
There's a king and he wanted to experience what his Kingdom was
like so he had to put himself in a disguise and experiences
Kingdom. So he's wandering through the
streets and he saw a sign on the shop window that said best cake
in all the Kingdom. The king went and spoke to the
Baker and said. I heard you had the best cake in
all the Kingdom. I want to try it.
So the Baker says, OK, gives him the cake and he has the king.
What do you think? And the king says that's a
little dry, could have used it, a little of this, could use a
little of that. And the Baker was highly
offended and said, what are you talking about?
This is the best cake at all the Kingdom.
And started to get a little puffed up.
The king was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm the king. And the, you know, the Baker was
very apologetic after that. I'm sorry.
I didn't know you were the king. He's like, it's OK.
But here's what I want you to do.
I want you to come to my castle and I'm going to put on a
banquet. And we're going to try cake
together that my pastry chef makes.
So the Baker thought, well, I don't know why I got to do this.
I make the best cake in the Kingdom, whatever, let's go try
and, you know, placate them or whatever.
So they go, and the king puts on this lavish banquet, brings over
the cake that his pastry chef makes and gives it to this
person. And as they were trying it, then
they began to weep and the king says, what do you think?
And the Baker says I had no idea.
And the reason I tell that story is because a lot of times you
don't have a frame of reference of really what excellence or I
should say to what level of excellence, Perfection,
something. Or to what level something of
excellence can be attained if you haven't really tried it yet.
Sometimes you just don't know what you don't know.
But anyway, we digress. Back to potatoes.
You can also learn how to make gnocchi and all sorts of other
things. And then.
With regards to the next thing I would bring in, I would bring in
eggs and again with eggs you could learn all sorts of skills.
We were talking earlier about the temperature control.
With cooking fish, well the same thing applies when cooking eggs.
There's a big difference in the heat between an over easy or
sunny side up and an over hard and everything in between.
Or the difference between an American style omelet which has
curds that are browned, or a French style omelet which has no
curds and it's silky and smooth and it doesn't have holes in the
pockets. On the outside, you shouldn't
see holes that should be perfectly smooth.
On the inside, the curds should be light.
To get to that point requires a high level of technical skill.
You're going to learn a lot like pan control when it goes on and
off the heat, That little tip of just banging your pan once to
make sure that the curd settles. How to roll it?
How to roll it onto a plate? Are you going to fill it?
Are you going to garnish it? Is it just an omelet, or do you
brush it with clarified butter afterwards?
Do you season it with finishing salt?
Do you put chives on it? Are your chives cut nicely or do
you have shit chives? Right.
Another skill that's important. But anyway, back to eggs.
You learn how to poach, ice fry eggs, omelets, souffle custards,
so on and so forth. Like so many skills just from
working with eggs, potatoes, chickens, And then I would throw
in onions, right? Because with an onion also you
could practice that julienne, that dice.
You just sit there and julienne onions all day.
Make onion soup. So much can be done with the
most simple ingredients. Now if you wanted to level that
up and say OK, I've gotten really proficient at these
ingredients. Onions, chickens, potatoes, boom
brunois, cooking, fish braising. I got it down.
Then I would say time to graduate to something more
difficult for me. The way I would introduce the
difficulty setting next to a cook would be from a vegetable
standpoint, I'd say artichokes, because it's like the Achilles
heel of all chefs. Hence why so many people buy
canned artichokes or artichokes that are already clean because
they're difficult to clean. They take time.
You got to you got to have some dexterity with a knife, a paring
knife or whatever kind of knife that you're using to clean the
artichoke. So I would say start working on
artichokes and then cooking artichokes is also a skill.
Do you braise them? Do you cook them sous vide?
Do you blanch them? Do you grill them?
Like how do you cook your artichokes?
There's a different way. And again, that little handy
metal skewer comes in handy to know when the artichokes are
done. So I would say going from those
skills graduate to artichokes, then I would say graduate to
shellfish cookery. So learn how to cook lobsters,
learn how to break down lobsters, learn how to Shuck
oysters, learn how to cook mussels.
Lobsters is one of those things that I think people should learn
how to do. Because when you start to learn
how to break down lobsters or crabs, like there's there's a
certain way that you break them down.
Like when you do, you remove the head.
Do you? Cut the gills out of the
lobster. What do you do with the shells?
How do you make sauce again, one of those, one of those
ingredients that have multiple layers with this, with the
lobster, not only can you use the meat, but you could also
turn the shells into bisque or sauce or lobster butter or
something like that. And then you know, basically
just to wrap it up. I would say the last skill I
would introduce someone in in terms of complexity would be
like doughs and pasta and things like that.
So learn how to make pasta dough, learn how to make
raviolis, learn all the different shapes like.
Pasta's an art by the way. Shout out to Ryan Peters doing a
video with Mr. Beast. I thought that was pretty cool.
I don't know, he had like 10,000 eggs or 20,000 eggs.
There's a lot of eggs. Anyway, I'm not going to make
that much pasta, but learning how to make pasta is a great
skill. You you should learn.
You should learn how to make pasta.
I already know how to make pasta.
Anyway, that's it. The next episode I want to do is
I do want to do something. I get a lot of requests to do
something on food cost. And so I am thinking of just
doing a maybe one to two parter on deep dive into food cost.
If that's something that you all want to listen to, let me know.
You could comment on this podcast or you could leave a
message or something on Spotify so I could read it.
So if you want to hear a food cost podcast, let me know and
I'll do a deep dive on to how to manage food costs and how to
look food cost. And if you want to support the
show, you know what to do. Make sure you leave five stars.
I appreciate it. Nothing less than five stars.
I'm on YouTube now. I'm putting.
I'm practicing my editing skills so you can go watch the podcast
with overlaid video. I'm going back and doing all the
old podcasts. So there's two of the old
podcasts. Episodes one and two are now on
YouTube. Go watch them.
If you're waiting for the Spanish books, they will be out.
Go get the books. Everything's on chefs psa.com.
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Anyway, see you all next week. Hit the porno music.