HOW TO COOK LIKE THE PROS

Anthony Bourdain

Unless you're one of us already, you'll probably never cook like a professional. And that's okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food unless I'm looking for new ideas or recipes to steal. What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody's anybody's — mother's or grandmother's food. A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown-together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I've been neck-deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home. My mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, 'This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef . . .' She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed potatoes were — being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or truffle oil.

But you don't want to know this. What you'd like to know is how to make your next dinner party look as though you've got the Troisgros family chained to the stove in your home kitchen. Maybe you're curious about the tricks, the techniques, the few simple tools that can make your plates look as if they've been prepared, assembled and garnished by cold-blooded professionals.

Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items — herb oils, crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, pureed starches and veggies — are often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a 25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So, what do you absolutely need?

You need, for God's sake, a decent chefs knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers — all those medium-size 'utility' knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers — not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won't)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I'd forgo the Germans.

Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has — in addition to its many other fine qualities — the added attraction of looking really cool.

Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chefs knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip. Like a pro, you should use the tip of the knife for the small stuff, and the area nearer the heel for the larger. This isn't difficult; buy a few rutabagas or onions — they're cheap — and practice on them. Nothing will set you apart from the herd quicker than the ability to handle a chef's knife properly. If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.

Okay, there are a couple of other knives you might find useful. I carry a flexible boning knife, also made by the fine folks at Global, because I fillet the occasional fish, and because with the same knife I can butcher whole tenderloins, bone out legs of lamb, French-cut racks of veal and trim meat. If your butcher is doing all the work for you you can probably live without one. A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tourneeing vegetables, fluting mushrooms and doing the kind of microsurgery that my old pal Dimitri used to excel at. But how often do you do that?

A genuinely useful blade, however, and one that is increasingly popular with my cronies in the field, is what's called an offset serrated knife. It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a 'Z' that's been pulled out and elongated. This is a truly cool item which, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs — like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on — but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks. It's stainless steel, but since it's serrated it doesn't really matter; after a couple of years of use, if the teeth start to wear down, you just buy yourself another one.

Knives are obvious. What other toys are in the professionals' bag of tricks? Numero uno — the indispensable object in most chefs' shtick — is the simple plastic squeeze bottle. Maybe you've seen Bobby Flay on TV artfully drizzling sauce around a plate with one of these — the man's been making Mexican food look like haute cuisine for years with these things. Sure, it's just ancho pepper mayonnaise he's squirting all over that fish, but it looks like . . . well . . . abstract, man!!! No big deal acquiring these things, they're essentially the same objects you see at roadside hot-dog stands, loaded with mustard and ketchup. Mask a bottom of a plate with, say, an emulsified butter sauce, then run a couple of concentric rings of darker sauce — like demiglace, or roast pepper puree — around the plate, and pay attention here, folks, now drag a toothpick through the rings or lines, and you'll see that all the fuss is about nothing. It should take you about half an hour of dicking around with a couple of squeeze bottles and your toothpick to grab the concept fully. This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do.

But. . . but Chef, you say . . . how do they make the food so tall? How can I make my breast of chicken and mashed potatoes tower like a fully engorged priapus over my awed and cowering guests? The answer is yet another low-tech item: the metal ring. A thin metal ring, or cut-down section of PVC pipe, about an inch and a half to two inches tall and varying inches across, is the backbone of pretentious food presentation. Just spoon your mashed potatoes in here — or better, pipe the spuds in with a pastry bag — and you are in business. Just pile it high, slip off the collar, stack your vegetable, deposit your chicken on top of that, and you're halfway to making that fuzzy little Emeril your bitch. Jam a gaufrette potato into the mashed, maybe a sprig of fresh herb, or a nice pile of ultra-thin julienne of fried leeks that you've cut with your new Global, and you're talking tall.

Gaufrette wha'? That's French for waffle-cut, and what we're talking about here is a potato chip. You can do that. All you need is what's called a mandolin, a vertically held slicer with various blade settings. They make some very cheap, very effective ones in Japan these days, so it's not a major investment. One of these bad boys can help you make those slick-looking, perfectly uniform julienned and bâtonnet-cut veggies you thought they cut by hand last time you ate out — and it cranks out lovely waffle cuts with a twist of the wrist. Dauphinois potatoes cut to identical thickness? No sweat. You didn't think they actually cut those with a knife, did you?

All right, the mandolin won't cut meat, and it certainly won't make paper-thin slices of prosciutto. You need a professional rotary cold-cut slicer for that, like they have at the deli. The home versions suck. But I highly recommend, if presenting sausage or meat on a buffet, that you slip the neighborhood deli guy a few bucks to slice what you need before you arrange it on platters. It makes all the difference in the world. Or if you have a few extra bucks, read the back of the paper for notices of restaurant auctions. As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well. You can buy all sorts of professional quality stuff. I'd recommend pots and pans as a premium consideration if scavenging this way. Most of the ones sold for home use are dangerously flimsy, and the heavyweight equipment sold for serious home cooks is almost always overpriced. Stockpots, saucepans, thick-bottomed saute pans are nice things, even necessary things to have, and there's no reason to buy new and no reason to pay a lot — just wait for that new tapas place on the corner to go out of business, then make your move.

Let me stress that again: heavyweight. A thin-bottomed saucepan is useless for anything. I don't care if it's bonded with copper, hand-rubbed by virgins, or fashioned from the same material they built the stealth bomber out of. If you like scorched sauces, carbonized chicken, pasta that sticks to the bottom of the pot, burnt breadcrumbs, then be my guest. A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent — the victim's head or your pan — then throw that pan right in the trash.

A non-stick saute pan is a thing of beauty. Crepes, omelettes, a delicately browned fillet of fish or tender skate wing? You need a nice thick non-stick pan, and not one with a thin veneer of material that peels off after a few weeks. And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don't use metal in it, use a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss whatever you're cooking in it. You don't want to scratch the surface.
I don't want to oversimplify here. Obviously, if you have no sense of taste or texture, and no eye for color or presentation — hell, if you can't cook at all — then all the equipment in the world ain't gonna help you. But if you can throw together a decent meal, can read a cookbook, well then, you can do a lot better if you spend some time playing with the toys I've mentioned.

There are also some ingredients that separate food at home from food in a restaurant — stuff that we in a professional kitchen have on hand that you probably don't — and I'll tell you now which of these make all the difference in the world.

1. Shallots. You almost never see this item in a home kitchen, but out in the world they're an essential ingredient. Shallots are one of the things — a basic prep item in every mise-en-place — which make restaurant food taste different from your food. In my kitchen we use nearly 20 pounds a day. You should always have some around for sauces, dressings and saute items.

2. Butter. I don't care what they tell you they're putting or not putting in your food at your favorite restaurant, chances are, you're eating a ton of butter. In a professional kitchen, it's almost always the first and last thing in the pan. We saute in a mixture of butter and oil for that nice brown, caramelized color, and we finish nearly every sauce with it (we call this monter au beurre); that's why my sauce tastes richer and creamier and mellower than yours, why it's got that nice, thick, opaque consistency. Believe me, there's a big crock of softened butter on almost every cook's station, and it's getting a heavy workout. Margarine? That's not food. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can. If you're planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won't be able to help you. Even the Italians — you know, those crafty Tuscans — spout off about getting away from butter, and extol the glories of olive oil (and it is glorious), but pay a surprise visit to the kitchen of that three-star Northern Italian, and what's that they're sneaking into the pasta? And the risotto? The veal chop? Could it be? Is it. . . why, I can't believe it is butter!!

3. Roasted garlic. Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago, garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please, treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas, don't burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellow and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown. Try a Caesar dressing, for instance, with a mix of fresh, raw garlic for bite, and roasted for background, and you'll see what I mean. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

4. Chiffonaded parsley. Big deal, right? Restaurants garnish their food. Why shouldn't you? And parsley tastes good, too. Just don't chop it in a machine, please. Dip the picked sprigs in cold water, shake off excess, allow to dry for a few minutes, and slice the stuff, as thinly as you can, with that sexy new chef's knife I inspired you to buy. I promise you, sprinkled over or around your plate it'll give your chow that striking professional touch it's been missing.

5. Stock. Stock is the backbone of good cooking. You need it — and you don't have it. I have the luxury of 30-quart stockpots, a willing prep crew, readily available bones and plenty of refrigeration space. Does this mean you should subject your guests to a sauce made from nasty commercial bases or salty canned broth? Make stock already! It's easy! Just roast some bones, roast some vegetables, put them in a big pot with water and reduce and reduce and reduce. Make a few months' worth, and when it's reduced enough strain it and freeze it in small containers so you can pull it from the freezer as needed. Life without stock is barely worth living, and you will never attain demi-glace without it.

6. Demi-glace. There are a lot of ways to make demi-glace, but I recommend you simply take your already reduced meat stock, add some red wine, toss in some shallots and fresh thyme and a bay leaf and peppercorns, and slowly, slowly simmer it and reduce it again until it coats a spoon. Strain. Freeze this stuff in an ice-cube tray, pop out a cube or two as needed, and you are in business — you can rule the world. And remember, when making a sauce with demi-glace, don't forget to monter au beurre.

7. Chervil, basil tops, chive sticks, mint tops, etc. What does it take, for chrissakes?! A nice sprig of chervil on top of your chicken breast? A healthy-looking basil top decorating your pasta? A few artfully scattered chive sticks over your fish? A mint top nestled in a dollop of whipped cream, maybe rubbing up against a single raspberry? Come on! Get in the game here! It takes so little to elevate an otherwise ordinary-looking plate. You need zero talent to garnish food. So why not do it? And how about a sprig of fresh herb — thyme or rosemary? You can use the part not needed for garnish to maybe actually flavor your food. That dried sawdust they sell in the cute little cans at the super market? You can throw that, along with the spice rack, right in the garbage. It all tastes like a stable floor. Use fresh! Good food is very often, even most often, simple food. Some of the best cuisine in the world — whole roasted fish, Tuscan-style, for instance — is a matter of three or four ingredients. Just make sure they're good ingredients, fresh ingredients, and then garnish them. How hard is that?

Example: here's a very popular dish I used to serve at a highly regarded two-star joint in New York. I got thirty-two bucks an order for it and could barely keep enough in stock, people liked it so much. Take one fish — a red snapper, striped bass, or dorade — have your fish guy remove gills, guts and scales and wash in cold water. Rub inside and out with kosher salt and crushed black pepper. Jam a clove of garlic, a slice of lemon and a few sprigs of fresh herb — say, rosemary and thyme — into the cavity where the guts used to be. Place on a lightly oiled pan or foil and throw the fish into a very hot oven. Roast till crispy and cooked through. Drizzle a little basil oil over the plate — you know, the stuff you made with your blender and then put in your new squeeze bottle? — sprinkle with chiffonaded parsley, garnish with basil top . . . See?

Written by Anthony Bourdain in "Kitchen Confidential - Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly", Bloomsbury USA, New York,2000. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.