Cook Like a Rock Star - Anne Burrell [4]
From the very beginning of my career, my mantra was, “I will work harder than any guy; I will stay later and be better than anyone. And no guy is ever going to have to pick up a stockpot for me!” So I worked like crazy to prove myself. You have to be tough in a professional kitchen—playing with fire and knives is dangerous, and I do it wearing a skirt and a smile. I feel very lucky to have found my passion and I love the path I’ve chosen. I can go anywhere in the world and do my job. I love the people who work in restaurants—they’re intelligent, creative, and have a different take on life. And my education is never over. In this business there’s always something new to learn.
LOOK AT YOU, BECOMING A CHEF!
Being a chef is a matter of having a good basic foundation—an understanding of the principles and techniques of cooking. Sure, there’s talent involved, but the majority of it is simply learning the process, knowing the techniques, and practicing them over and over again until they’re ingrained in your being. Cooking is about learning what to look for, what to listen for, how a dish should smell, how it should feel, and, of course, what it should taste like—you use all your senses when you cook and those are tools that we all have at our disposal; we just need to use them.
For the home cook, it’s not so important to know a bunch of culinary terminology. So I’m going to skip a lot of the technical kitchen terms and put everything into everyday language so it makes sense and becomes part of your daily existence in the kitchen. For example, a recipe might tell you to brown a piece of meat and then deglaze the “fond.” But what the hell is “fond”? It’s the crud on the bottom of the pan—the flavor, the stuff you want to scrape up and use to develop your rich brown food! By ditching the fancier cooking terms and speaking in plain English, I’m going to help you to understand why you brown the crap out of things (because brown food tastes good), and how to get the crud off the bottom of the pan (deglazing).
I’m simplifying everything here because I want you to cook! If you’re new to cooking, I want to help you get over the fear factor and bump up the fun factor. If you’re someone who already cooks, then I want to share some of my hard-learned lessons with you so you feel even more empowered at the stove. I have a little saying: Food is like a dog; it smells fear. If you’re nervous, scared, or bunched up when you’re cooking, your food will sense it. But if you embrace cooking with a sense of confidence and an air of fun, your food will taste SOOOOO much better. If you change a recipe, the recipe police are NOT going to be on their way over. If you want to use three cloves of garlic instead of one, knock yourself out. What I offer you here are my opinions as a professional chef. You can take them or leave them (but I recommend you take them).
A FEW WORDS ON RECIPES (AND WHY YOU SHOULD READ THEM BEFORE YOU COOK!)
Have you ever had a dinner party and told everyone to come over at seven, but you didn’t sit down to eat until ten because dinner wasn’t ready? I have, and it wasn’t because I was running fashionably late. It was because I was making braised short ribs and hadn’t read my recipe ahead of time. I didn’t realize how long those guys had to cook. The result was a tipsy group of friends hoovering down a delicious dinner that no one even tasted because it was so late, and everyone was tired and ready to go home by the time it was ready. All my effort was in vain because I hadn’t read the recipe.
Or, have you ever been happily cooking along, excited