“Perfection - The thrill of the chase”
Posted: 1/12/2011 1:06:54 p.m.
As a young chef in training, a lot of other young chefs around me idolised culinary pioneers like Fedran Adria of El Bulli & Heston Blumenthal. I always read their books and looked at their food in awe, but it never made me hungry. It was food porn: something nice to look at, but for most of us, simply not attainable. Don’t get me wrong, I could never do what they do - chefs of that nature are inspiring, they look at food in such a unique way, and manipulate food to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And we’ve got some fantastic chefs of world class calibre doing the same thing here in New Zealand.
I’m just more rock n roll. I see perfection in simplicity. It’s the product that excites me, not what it can be manipulated into.
Personally, I idolised Anthony Bourdain & Marco Pierre White. Perhaps it was my initiation into cooking. I started in a little bistro In Wellington called Ford’s Café. I washed glasses and listened to hard rock music at the tender age of 17, while the chefs roasted chickens and did everything ‘old school’.
Perhaps it was my time at Logan Brown. There, nothing was done with the food that was unnecessary or overly complicated for the sake of it. Al and his team would drill into us that the food had to be honest, it had to serve a purpose. Since I’m a perfectionist by nature, I see details in minutiae, but this doesn’t mean I cant serve generous portions.
I have to admit, I haven’t had this view throughout my career. I did the travel thing and worked in some amazing restaurants that dabbled in molecular gastronomy. I wanted to learn the techniques that everyone was talking about. I wanted to be the best, I wanted to come home and show off.
I flirted with espuma - cream chargers filled with purees, emulsions, and sponge cake batters – and I worked with chemicals and gelatins, making gels and sauces that would blow your mind.
I became a vacuum packer, stuffing beautiful pheasant, lamb loins or beef fillets into plastic sealed bags, and dowsing them in water baths with set timers until they were cooked to ‘ultimate’ perfection.
It was so new, it was unusual, it was beautiful, it was perfect. It was also missing something. In the end I realised I felt removed from the food.
Where was the touch, where were all the senses, where was the challenge? I remembered service where I’d feel every piece of meat. I remembered the satisfaction I would get from cooking each piece by touch, juggling countless pans in the oven. It would take my constant attention to cook each piece evenly and to the requested degree. That whole process involved risk, fear and adrenaline. This is why I was a chef, and I missed it.
By creating a fool proof method of cooking, had these advanced techniques essentially removed the most essential tools a chef has -his senses - from the cooking process?
Why hide all those small imperfections that give the food we cook such character? Who doesn’t love the slightly burnt corner pieces of mum’s potato gratin? Who can say they don’t fondly remember the time dad got the steak just right for once?
In restaurants today, the number one key to success is consistency, and these tools (when used correctly) have created the ultimate replicable solution to this problem. But it means cooking without the thrill.
These days I run a brigade of 16 chefs at Depot, and it gives me great pleasure to see them learn about fire, heat, taste and touch. It’s an absolute joy to teach the chefs how to check if a chicken is cooked by squeezing the thick part of the leg and it being firm to the touch. Or testing the hapuka belly with a spike, and knowing that when it just about stops giving resistance it’s cooked perfectly. Or learning to manage their fire to get the perfect char on their steak.
They don’t get it right all the time, I don’t expect them to. After all, as chefs we are all constantly learning. But my senior team and I are here to stop mistakes going out to the restaurant.
It’s not easy. But I’m vigilant. I’m alert, I’m full of adrenaline. I’m always watching, always tasting and I am so happy.