Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Thank You, Chef!

Recently my schedule was "opened up" for me...much to my chagrin.

This development is OK as working was cutting into my job searching time, (and free time in general...I haven't posted in yonks!)

SO...I found myself sitting.  Staring at the googler...so I decided to go look at chef/restaurant websites.  Not unusual for a chef to check out what other chefs are doing, after all.  I started with Jimmy Bradley's Red Cat Food Hall in Manhattan, and as I was scouring the online menu, I realized that I hadn't checked out Chef Sat Bains' website in a very long time.

Off to a virtual Nottinghamshire I went.  Restaurant Sat Bains is a two-Michelin starred restaurant and inn situated in Lenton Forest...just off the A52 carriageway.  Chef Bains serves modern English cuisine, and uses a lot of "molecular gastronomy"/modernist/avant garde techniques in his cooking; much of which he picked up while working in Spain at el Bulli.  He is also a locavore, and one course of his menu is called NG7, taken from the restaurant's post code NG7 2SA, as all ingredients for this course are sourced from within 10 meters of the restaurant!  (which also proves that avant garde and local CAN coexist).


As I had not been to the website in a while, I was poring over the home page...and I noticed a little badge on the page that drew me in.  I clicked on it.  I was directed to another Sat Bains website, this one devoted to creativity.  I went further down the rabbit hole, and I found the journal for his recipe/menu item development.  (Having el Bulli on his CV this seems almost natural; Ferran Adria was fanatically meticulous about record keeping).

Well, after reading cooking techniques, tasting notes, general ideas, and equipment suggestions (I still want a centrifuge...) into the early morning hours, light dawned on Marble Head: why not put notebook material online?

For those unfamiliar with the practice, or the obsession of chefs...we keep notes, to-do lists, menu ideas, techniques and recipes in notebooks.  For some chefs it is a necessary evil or even a convenience.  For other chefs it is a full blown case of OCD and a compulsion.  The artist/author Jeff Scott has published a gorgeous two-book exploration of this practice "notes from a kitchen."  (He is currently working on the next volume).  In "notes," the relationship between chef and notebook is explored, and the reliance on notebooks of the chefs executing at the highest levels is laid bare.  Heck!  Rene Redzepi from NOMA Restaurant is publishing his second cookbook as a series of notebooks...

Being a chef, I have kept notebooks since I was a commis at LaFayette Country Club, (it was in fact required that every cook keep a notebook!)  I have boxes of of them accumulated over the years...so I am not surprised to hear of, and see other chef's notebooks.

Here's the rub, finally: his notes were there, for the whole world to see.  For free.  For a little bit of leg work, you are rewarded with a glimpse into the mind, and creative process, of an outstanding chef.  And it is not self aggrandizement; his notes are there with typos, warts, failures, and successes all put in the public domain.  He is sharing his knowledge so that others can learn from his experiments.

This sharing of knowledge is a relatively new development in the evolution of "chefdom."  When I first started cooking, you kept a notebook because, 1) you had to, 2) the only way you could reference the recipe or formula the chef gave you as he walked through the kitchen was to write it down, and 3) the more knowledge you had accumulated in your notebooks the bigger your "leg-up" on the other cooks in the kitchen.  It was highly competitive, and closed.  Now it is just as competitive, but much more collaborative and open.

Chefs share ideas much more freely and we contribute to each other's knowledge with a generosity unseen before.  I am hoping to capture the spirit of Chef Bains, and start sharing notes from some upcoming projects in this forum.

Cheers

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