the cook in winter
My first two days off in a row in a month and I get the flu. Or food poisoning, can't tell which. I'm back on my feet after a completely miserable and disgusting two days, but I had to call in today for a recovery day. It made the exec cranky, but fuck it. This is what happens to your crew when you work them too hard during cold and flu season.
If it was food poisoning, then I could've gotten it from the portobello mushrooms and asparagus en croute I had late Saturday night after the 1300-plate dinner went off. It was one of the spare vegetarian entrees, and I pulled it straight from the hotbox, but someone could've left it out on a serving tray and put it back in later. It's more likely it was the two blue fingerling potatoes and the thumb-sized piece of duck I stole from the dishup sheetpans while the culinary team put the salads together. I don't think the dessert did it; there's just not much in frozen pink guava souffle with banana-macadamia ganache cones that can bring you low. I know the cream was fresh since I was the one that checked and pulled it and toted it up from the basement walk-in after the gingerbread people stole all our carts. More on that in a couple paragraphs.
We spent all week making 800 of those fuckers and then on Wednesday, the sales team casually mentioned that the numbers had gone up by 500. Five fucking hundred. See, this is how they treat us. And they wonder why we're never happy to see them when they swan by the shop in their nice clean office clothes, run their fingers bashfully over the tabletop, and say, "soo ... whatcha making?" (I usually don't mind seeing one particular guy come down, since I get to make fun of his hair behind his back. If you're thinning on top and blond and baby-haired to begin with, a fauxhawk is probably not the way to go. It's the aging hipster kid's combover.)
It wasn't the mixing that was the problem. A 60 quart Hobart takes care of that, and our evening baker does that shit anyways. It was the setup: picking through our collection and finding 1400 undamaged ceramic ramekins, cutting 1400 strips of cellophane to length, taping a strip around the lip of each cup, and then taking the strips off after the souffles set up in the freezer. That's all I did all week. We had 1400 heavy, cold, slippery ramekins full of frozen pink fluff that had to be re-set on the pans since no one bothered to check beforehand and see if the chocolate stick garnish would fit; 1400 plates (what was he fucking thinking?) to paint with colored cocoa butter and then coat with clear isomalt sugar for the glass effect; 1400 tiny chocolate cones to fill with ganache and 700 strawberries to halve. The entire pastry team had to come in late since the dessert was frozen and had to be garnished just before go time. Our pastry exec had never done the dessert before and for some reason decided that a "trial" run of 800 would be a good idea. Eight turned into fourteen overnight, and last week was as close as we've ever come to watching him walk out. I have to say that this is the first serious tactical error I've seen the exec make. He usually has a much better grip on how long it takes for a given task - something I can't say about the pastry sous, unfortunately. (I'm forming a dim view of tiny bakers from Guam. The Sunday before last was supposed to be an easy short day, but the sous insisted that it was possible to halve, gut, fill, pipe, and assemble over a thousand choux swans in one day on top of the other prep we had to do for a busy week. It wasn't.) The upside is that the frozen souffles are now permanently off the menu, as they should be. (Even if they'd been easy to make, I'm not sorry to see them go. I've never developed a taste for guava or mango, which is my second big failing as a culinarian, my first being an indifference to wine.) There was a brief second of tension when the sous asked us to save and wash off each cellophane strip, but the exec quickly countermanded her. Good call.
The past week was made that much harder by the whole gingerbread village nonsense. Every year, our hotel back-of-the-house staff breaks up into teams with local architectural firms and builds these elaborate gingerbread constructions that we display in the lobby. Every year, the pastry team is so busy that we don't have time to place hands on ours, except for to make and sheet out the gingerbread dough. The architects do all the fun parts. Last year, we were tucked away in our old shop on the second floor, and there was enough room that the team assembled the gingerbread far, far away from our daily paths of trajectory. This year, some genius installed them in the hallway directly outside the shop. The idea is that they'd have instant access to the sheeter. They also became an instant nuisance to the pastry and culinary staff and an instant obstacle for the receiving and steward carts. To a soul, they were loud, oblivious twentysomethings in capri pants or antiqued jeans, funky glasses, and those ridiculous overpriced silkscreened t-shirts you see in boutiques up and down the Hill. They stood in the middle of the hall and talked on their tiny cellphones, completely oblivious to the heaping flatbeds of produce deliveries and exhausted bakers (me) carrying full bains of hot water. They wandered into the shop proper and looked over our shoulders while we worked and told us how fun it must be to "follow our passions". (Yuppies always say this, without fail, when the subject of food comes up. It's an infallible signifier of Food Network-borne ignorance.) They left long notes asking us to bake and roll out batches of gingerbread on less than a day's notice, always signed with "thx" and a smirky smiley face. They stole all of our paring knives, none of which have made their way home. Most of them didn't bother to show up until three days before the deadline, leaving this one poor kid with a squeaky toy voice like Joey Lauren Adams to do the bulk of the glue-gunning while she freaked out on her headset. It was like having the sound of metal scraping on teeth piped directly into the shop on a loop. Their big fancy diorama design? Stolen from another hotel's display. Our room service manager stumbled across the photo in a recent trade magazine, and it was exact, down to the piping. Way to make us look like assholes. And someone - it's not been established who - set a huge pan of sugar on the burner and walked away and left it, setting off the fire alarm and nearly burning down the entire kitchen.
Thanksgiving will be spent at D.'s house, as usual. I had plans for pumpkin bread and drinking chocolate this year, but the flu has completely thrown my schedule off, and I doubt I'll have time to make anything. I'll likely just buy a pumpkin pie from our shop. Technically, it's still something I made. I might have time to do the chocolate still, if I can get out and buy some decent stuff. muddy_feet and I toured the Theo factory in Fremont a couple weeks ago, and I was suitably knocked off my feet. I really liked the single-origin Venezuela, and with a little ancho chile powder it'd kick ass. Even more kick-ass was the incredibly cute and articulate bespectacled tour guide, who if I'm not mistaken is their wonder woman head chocolatier. It's worth the $5 for that sight alone. Just don't go on the weekends; we had to suffer through a group of Boy Scouts, who weren't calmed down by the amount of chocolate they ate.
My Christmas shopping's done. I've finally managed to get my family on board with online wishlists, which save me an assload of trouble. We'll be meeting at my sister's in Detroit this year. Every time I mention that, someone says, "I'm so sorry."
I bet the Theo girl's mouth tastes like chocolate.
EDIT: Whattya know, it was food poisoning. No wonder chef was irritable - I was the third one to call in. It took out half of back of the house and a good cross section of the office people. The consensus is that it was something they served us for lunch on Saturday. The majority of the 4th floorers are taking vacation time right now, since it's a long holiday weekend; I confess that I'm getting a little schadenfreude out of the image of certain salesreps puking their guts up during their trips to Grandmama's.
If it was food poisoning, then I could've gotten it from the portobello mushrooms and asparagus en croute I had late Saturday night after the 1300-plate dinner went off. It was one of the spare vegetarian entrees, and I pulled it straight from the hotbox, but someone could've left it out on a serving tray and put it back in later. It's more likely it was the two blue fingerling potatoes and the thumb-sized piece of duck I stole from the dishup sheetpans while the culinary team put the salads together. I don't think the dessert did it; there's just not much in frozen pink guava souffle with banana-macadamia ganache cones that can bring you low. I know the cream was fresh since I was the one that checked and pulled it and toted it up from the basement walk-in after the gingerbread people stole all our carts. More on that in a couple paragraphs.
We spent all week making 800 of those fuckers and then on Wednesday, the sales team casually mentioned that the numbers had gone up by 500. Five fucking hundred. See, this is how they treat us. And they wonder why we're never happy to see them when they swan by the shop in their nice clean office clothes, run their fingers bashfully over the tabletop, and say, "soo ... whatcha making?" (I usually don't mind seeing one particular guy come down, since I get to make fun of his hair behind his back. If you're thinning on top and blond and baby-haired to begin with, a fauxhawk is probably not the way to go. It's the aging hipster kid's combover.)
It wasn't the mixing that was the problem. A 60 quart Hobart takes care of that, and our evening baker does that shit anyways. It was the setup: picking through our collection and finding 1400 undamaged ceramic ramekins, cutting 1400 strips of cellophane to length, taping a strip around the lip of each cup, and then taking the strips off after the souffles set up in the freezer. That's all I did all week. We had 1400 heavy, cold, slippery ramekins full of frozen pink fluff that had to be re-set on the pans since no one bothered to check beforehand and see if the chocolate stick garnish would fit; 1400 plates (what was he fucking thinking?) to paint with colored cocoa butter and then coat with clear isomalt sugar for the glass effect; 1400 tiny chocolate cones to fill with ganache and 700 strawberries to halve. The entire pastry team had to come in late since the dessert was frozen and had to be garnished just before go time. Our pastry exec had never done the dessert before and for some reason decided that a "trial" run of 800 would be a good idea. Eight turned into fourteen overnight, and last week was as close as we've ever come to watching him walk out. I have to say that this is the first serious tactical error I've seen the exec make. He usually has a much better grip on how long it takes for a given task - something I can't say about the pastry sous, unfortunately. (I'm forming a dim view of tiny bakers from Guam. The Sunday before last was supposed to be an easy short day, but the sous insisted that it was possible to halve, gut, fill, pipe, and assemble over a thousand choux swans in one day on top of the other prep we had to do for a busy week. It wasn't.) The upside is that the frozen souffles are now permanently off the menu, as they should be. (Even if they'd been easy to make, I'm not sorry to see them go. I've never developed a taste for guava or mango, which is my second big failing as a culinarian, my first being an indifference to wine.) There was a brief second of tension when the sous asked us to save and wash off each cellophane strip, but the exec quickly countermanded her. Good call.
The past week was made that much harder by the whole gingerbread village nonsense. Every year, our hotel back-of-the-house staff breaks up into teams with local architectural firms and builds these elaborate gingerbread constructions that we display in the lobby. Every year, the pastry team is so busy that we don't have time to place hands on ours, except for to make and sheet out the gingerbread dough. The architects do all the fun parts. Last year, we were tucked away in our old shop on the second floor, and there was enough room that the team assembled the gingerbread far, far away from our daily paths of trajectory. This year, some genius installed them in the hallway directly outside the shop. The idea is that they'd have instant access to the sheeter. They also became an instant nuisance to the pastry and culinary staff and an instant obstacle for the receiving and steward carts. To a soul, they were loud, oblivious twentysomethings in capri pants or antiqued jeans, funky glasses, and those ridiculous overpriced silkscreened t-shirts you see in boutiques up and down the Hill. They stood in the middle of the hall and talked on their tiny cellphones, completely oblivious to the heaping flatbeds of produce deliveries and exhausted bakers (me) carrying full bains of hot water. They wandered into the shop proper and looked over our shoulders while we worked and told us how fun it must be to "follow our passions". (Yuppies always say this, without fail, when the subject of food comes up. It's an infallible signifier of Food Network-borne ignorance.) They left long notes asking us to bake and roll out batches of gingerbread on less than a day's notice, always signed with "thx" and a smirky smiley face. They stole all of our paring knives, none of which have made their way home. Most of them didn't bother to show up until three days before the deadline, leaving this one poor kid with a squeaky toy voice like Joey Lauren Adams to do the bulk of the glue-gunning while she freaked out on her headset. It was like having the sound of metal scraping on teeth piped directly into the shop on a loop. Their big fancy diorama design? Stolen from another hotel's display. Our room service manager stumbled across the photo in a recent trade magazine, and it was exact, down to the piping. Way to make us look like assholes. And someone - it's not been established who - set a huge pan of sugar on the burner and walked away and left it, setting off the fire alarm and nearly burning down the entire kitchen.
Thanksgiving will be spent at D.'s house, as usual. I had plans for pumpkin bread and drinking chocolate this year, but the flu has completely thrown my schedule off, and I doubt I'll have time to make anything. I'll likely just buy a pumpkin pie from our shop. Technically, it's still something I made. I might have time to do the chocolate still, if I can get out and buy some decent stuff. muddy_feet and I toured the Theo factory in Fremont a couple weeks ago, and I was suitably knocked off my feet. I really liked the single-origin Venezuela, and with a little ancho chile powder it'd kick ass. Even more kick-ass was the incredibly cute and articulate bespectacled tour guide, who if I'm not mistaken is their wonder woman head chocolatier. It's worth the $5 for that sight alone. Just don't go on the weekends; we had to suffer through a group of Boy Scouts, who weren't calmed down by the amount of chocolate they ate.
My Christmas shopping's done. I've finally managed to get my family on board with online wishlists, which save me an assload of trouble. We'll be meeting at my sister's in Detroit this year. Every time I mention that, someone says, "I'm so sorry."
I bet the Theo girl's mouth tastes like chocolate.
EDIT: Whattya know, it was food poisoning. No wonder chef was irritable - I was the third one to call in. It took out half of back of the house and a good cross section of the office people. The consensus is that it was something they served us for lunch on Saturday. The majority of the 4th floorers are taking vacation time right now, since it's a long holiday weekend; I confess that I'm getting a little schadenfreude out of the image of certain salesreps puking their guts up during their trips to Grandmama's.