A Blender, a Plunger, and Some Chives: The Two Types of Lessons You Learn in the Kitchen
I wasn’t meant to be a cook. It’s a profession I accidentally fell into one summer between college semesters while looking for an easy job as a waiter. Nobody would hire me as a server, but one restaurant, in desperate need of a prep cook, told me that if I could hold a knife, I could have a job. The minute I stepped into a professional kitchen, I knew I’d found my place.
I worked in restaurant kitchens all through college — family restaurants, a pizza joint, TGIF-style chains — but it wasn’t until I graduated and decided to go into cooking full time that I got my first job at a fancy place.
To be honest, I’m not even sure why they hired me. I walked in the door at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday and told the chef that I wanted to work for her. I was overeducated (which meant I was going to be a guaranteed pain in the ass) and under-qualified (my highest-ranking kitchen position up to that point was as a spatula-wielding monkey with the title “Knight of the Round Grill” at a Mongolian-barbecue joint, which, come to think of it, means that every job I’ve held since then has technically been a demotion). My knife kit consisted of one Global chef’s knife my ex-girlfriend had given me, along with a plastic-handled commodity paring knife that I had “borrowed” from my old fraternity’s kitchen. The only thing I had going for me was a willingness to work for as many or as few hours as they would take me for, and, more importantly, at whatever pay grade they deemed fit.
All of this is to say that on that first day that I put on my whites and clogs and walked through those swinging kitchen doors, thinking that I owned the world (or at least my station), I had more than my share of lessons to learn. Over the years, I’ve discovered that lessons in cooking come in two forms. There are the lessons that you never fully learn; skills that you get better and better at, but never quite perfect. Then there are the lessons that you only need to learn once because the results of not following them will literally scar you for life.
My job on that first day, like for most green cooks, was official kitchen gofer. Whatever any other cook needed doing, I did it. The first task I was assigned was chopping chives for every cook on the line. I grabbed a cutting board and my knife and got to work. A few minutes later, the chef walked by and, without saying a word, picked up my board and dumped the contents into the trash.
“You’re doing it wrong. The chives need to be thinner than they are wide,” she said to me.
Okay, I thought to myself. You got this, no problem.I started slicing again, moving the knife a fraction of a millimeter with each new stroke. A few minutes later, the chef walked by again. This time, without even looking at my board, she said, “Kenji, you’re doing it wrong. Throw them out.”
She could tell just by the noise my knife was making as I cut through the chives that I was crushing them instead of slicing them, rupturing cells, giving the chives a more pungent flavor and making them clump together. No way they were going to end up on a customer-bound plate. She showed me how to hone my knife properly on a steel, then taught me how to back-slice, placing the tip of the knife far in front of the chives and pulling backwards, drawing the full length of the blade through the chives. I watched as they fell cleanly onto the cutting board, thinner than they were wide.
I got into a trancelike state. This is awesome, I’m finally learning something here. Good knife skills are lessons you learn over time. Unfortunately, I was so ecstatic about the quality of my sliced chives that I completely forgot the very first rule of knife skills: Never uncurl the fingers of your left hand. The next stroke I took sliced cleanly through the tip of my finger (sliced it, mind you, not crushed it), depositing it into the pile of chives. I grabbed my fingertip, looked up, saw the chef staring at the blood covering my board and shaking her head.
This time, I dumped the chives into the garbage before she said anything at all.
Strangely, I was still allowed to start working on the line that very first night. (It was then that I realized the real reason I’d nabbed this job: They were seriously shorthanded, and I was the first person to walk in the door.) Needless to say, it did not go great.
The next day, I walked back into that kitchen, determined to prove myself again. I was on the pasta station, which meant that it was my job to serve all the pasta dishes and fried dishes, as well as anything that required the salamander (that’s the industrial-strength broiler that sits right up at eyebrow-singeing level). Mark, the cook next to me, had sautéed dishes and soups coming off of his station. One of those soups was a lobster consommé.
Now, making lobster consommé is not quick. You have to roast lobster bodies, sauté vegetables, make sachets of spices and herbs, simmer everything into a rich lobster stock, then grind up those bodies with more vegetables and egg whites into a sort of lobster slurry. You then whisk that slurry into the pot of strained broth. As the proteins in the egg whites coagulate, they end up forming a kind of protein net that floats on top of the simmering stock. The stock bubbles up and over that net, which, over the course of several hours, captures all of the impurities in the soup. At the end, you carefully lift off that raft of coagulated gunk, revealing crystal-clear consommé underneath. Mark had just made five gallons of the stuff, and it was perfect. I’m talking read-the-date-on-a-dime-at-the-bottom-of-a-five-gallon-bucket levels of clarity.
His only mistake was putting that bucket next to my stuff in the walk-in. Kitchen organization and cleanliness is another one of those lessons you continually learn, and, at the time, I wasn’t far along in that journey. In the middle of service, I ran out of the reduced heavy cream I needed for one of my dishes, so I dashed back to the walk-in to grab it. I pulled it out of the disorganized array of plastic deli containers on my shelf and, in the process, ended up knocking over the entire five-gallon bucket of consommé…directly into a Lexan container of short ribs that had been marinating in red wine overnight, and all over the floor of the walk-in. (You could see that floor perfectly through the crystal-clear consommé, I might add.)
Not only did the chef have to pull lobster consommé off the menu for the night, she also had to take the short ribs off the menu for the following night. Shockingly, I was allowed to finish off the night under the condition that I re-make Mark’s consommé before I left. It was right about the time that the other cooks were all cleaned up and cracking open their after-shift Rolling Rocks that I started blending the lobster shells to make the consommé slurry. The tool I was using for this was a four-foot-long, industrial-strength immersion blender. It was powerful. Powerful enough to turn lobster shells into liquid.
The only-learn-once lesson I learned that night? Always unplug your kitchen tools before cleaning them. I was in such a hurry to get done that I decided to clean out the blades right at my station. This immersion blender was designed with the switch right at the top of the machine. My finger was fully within the blade housing when I accidentally let the machine tap the floor, depressing the ON switch. I didn’t feel any pain as my fingertip was reduced to finger slurry — the adrenaline took care of that nicely — I just remember looking up, seeing the chef shaking her head at me and telling me to get to the hospital.
There wasn’t much the doctor could do — you can’t stitch up 23 parallel cuts in a quarter-inch-square area — but they wrapped it tight and told me not to work for the next two weeks.
Fuck that, I said on my way home, more determined than ever to make it through at least one night with all of my digits intact.
I walked back into the kitchen the next day, knowing that this was going to be my night. I was so confident that I even set a challenge for myself: to make the best damn potato gnocchi the chef had ever seen out of that pasta station. Potato gnocchi are made by ricing cooked potatoes, then mixing them with eggs and flour before cutting and rolling the dough into little ridged dumplings. The more flour you use, the easier they are to work with, but excess flour can also end up developing into excess gluten, making the gnocchi dense and tough. The real trick to getting them light is to use as little flour as possible. I made my gnocchi dough so light and tender that they were held together with little more than willpower and a lot of hope.
Disaster struck as the first order for gnocchi came in that night. I dropped them into a pasta basket and lowered it into the pasta machine — a 25-gallon beast that kept water at a constant boil. A minute later, I went to retrieve them and found myself with an empty basket. I’d used so little flour that the gnocchi completely disintegrated as they cooked. I dropped in another order, and another. Same thing: The gnocchi fell apart as soon as they hit the water.
Crap, I thought to myself. Okay, think on your feet. It’s what cooks are supposed to do. You’ve got more riced potato in your low-boy, there’s plenty of flour and eggs in the pantry, it’s not going to be a super-busy night, just make the darn things to order. It was a stupid plan. What I should have done was bitten that third bullet and told the chef outright that we should cut gnocchi from the menu for the night, but I started doing it anyway, whipping up the dough as fast as I could and rolling the gnocchi directly out of my hand and into the pasta machine as I formed them.
The first batch came out, and they were perfect. I mean, these were the best gnocchi I’ve ever made, before or since. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that by forming them rapidly and cooking them immediately, I was ensuring that there was no time for extra gluten to develop in the dough. Each one was as light and tender as the finest down pillow. I was on fire the rest of the night, hitting all my orders, getting into the rhythm, finally getting my first taste of the complicated dance required to work efficiently in a professional kitchen. I was zen. I called back orders like they were my mantra. I was calm as a Hindu cow, and I did it all two fingertips down.
The last table was served before I even realized it, and I started cleaning, reaching under the pasta machine to open the drain, totally pumped at the night that had just passed. I waited for the water to swirl down, but it never happened. What the fuck? I thought, reaching through the starchy water toward the drain with a pair of tongs. I pulled out a big, sloppy blob of mashed potato. Well, at least I know where those gnocchi went.
Okay, Kenji. You’ve got this. You’ve already dealt with one emergency tonight, this one’s a piece of cake. Don’t bother the chef, just solve this one on your own, think on your feet, and we’ll wrap up this perfect night.
I made my way toward the staff elevator and rode up the three flights to the changing room. I walked into the staff bathroom and saw what I was looking for. I grabbed the plunger, got back on the elevator, and rode it back down. I walked into that kitchen, lifted the plunger up, and stuck it into the pasta machine.
Success! I thought to myself as I saw the water swirling down the drain. You’ve pitched a no-hitter, and now you deserve an ice-cold Rolling Rock.It wasn’t until I looked up, the plunger still in my hands, and saw the chef staring at me, shaking her head, that I realized what I’d done.
I spent the next four hours taking that pasta machine apart piece by piece and sanitizing each one before I finally went home, my tail firmly stuck between my legs. I’d like to say that the rest of that first week went better, but it didn’t. Though nobody has their first perfect night in the first week, learning how not to fuck up is maybe the hardest and longest-learned lesson of all.
I’d also like to say that this was my one and only questionable-use-of-a-dirty-plunger incident. I can’t. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned about good storytelling, it’s that you should always end on a cliffhanger.
An early version of this essay was given as a Porchlight Storytelling Series talk at the Verdi Club in San Francisco.
