Savoir faire is a French phrase
that might best be translated as “know how.” In the kitchen, it refers to the ability to complete all the
tasks necessary to make a dish.
If a chef or a recipe instructs the cook
to sauté something, then the cook with savoir faire needs no further instruction.
It’s understood that the pan will be hot, a small amount of fat will be used,
and the product will be finished by de-glazing then pan with some liquid to
pick up the “fond,” which refers to the browned bits of meat or vegetable stuck
to the bottom of the pan.
More than knowledge of specific cooking techniques, savoir faire refers to a
broader understanding of how several different cooking techniques can be
applied to a several different foods to have them all ready at the same time in
order to be served on the same plate. So if a fillet of fish is to be sautéed
and served with a savory flan and a green vegetable that’s blanched in boiling
water, a good cook will have the flan ready and the water boiling for the
vegetables before the sauté is performed. This way, the vegetables garnishes
are hot and at their peak of readiness when the pièce de la résistanceis
ready to plate.
Home cooks can use this way of looking at a meal to achieve mastery. It is
unreasonable to expect that great cuisine will be simple, or that a novice cook
can make even simple dishes perfectly on the first try. However, it is
perfectly reasonable to assume that with a little practice, anyone can produce
great dishes if they apply themselves and pay attention.
This month, we’ll look at two main dishes that incorporate several recipes.
Mise
en place is a French phrase that literally means “putting in place.” For
chefs, it constitutes the bulk of the work in getting a station, or an entire
kitchen ready for service. Equipment is ready; ovens preheated, sauté pans
stacked near the stove. Ladles and whisks are clean and ready to grab. Meats
are broken down into individual, ready-to-cook portions. Sauces are prepared
and held warm in a boiling water bath or “bain-marie.” Vegetables are
washed, trimmed and in some cases par-boiled and ready to finish with a quick
sauté in butter or a plunge into boiling water. Condiments and garnishes are
prepared and placed near the plating station so that they can be scooped or
plucked to order.
Home cooks can use the principles of mis en place too.
Start with a menu. Sometimes even the simplest meals can benefit from a written
list of the dishes and condiments they contain. The menu leads to a list of
recipes. And with the recipes in hand, a cook can make a shopping list and a
prep list. These lists, written or mental constitute a plan for your mis en
place.
Before you start cooking, consider organizing ingredients by recipe. Put all
the ingredients you need for each dish on a separate tray or cookie sheet and
as you complete one recipe, put those ingredients away and move to the next
recipe. Most recipes can be prepared up to a point and finished just before
serving.
In preparing for holiday meals, these advance preparations afford a cook the
opportunity to enjoy family gatherings without stressing over too many last
minute preparations. If the green bean casserole is already put together and
ready to pop into the oven, then there’s no confusing pile of ingredients
cluttering the counter. Sweet potatoes can be cut, seasoned and readied for the
oven too. Desserts and garnishes for the dessert can and should be prepared a
day ahead.
For almost thirty
years, I saved old issues of Gourmet magazine -- all of them. I know it’s
crazy, but until my basement flooded last year and rendered them unusable, I
had almost four hundred issues stacked in milk crates, organized month by
month. Januaries here, Novembers there…
I started saving
Gourmet in 1979 when I was twenty years old.I was working as a cook at ski lodge, and writing short
stories on my days off, when a waitress where I worked suggested that I try
writing for Gourmet.
“You cook and you
write, she said, you should write about cooking. You could travel around the
world and write about food,” she suggested.I think this was her gentle way of saying that my short
stories weren’t going to cut it.“But first,” she advised, “You’ve got to familiarize yourself with the
magazine.Buy a few copies and
study them cover to cover.When
you understand what kind of stuff they print, you’ll have a better chance of getting
them to accept your stories.”
So I followed her
advice.I studied each issue and
after almost twenty years, and five cookbooks under my belt, I felt ready to
submit something. I even imagined at one point that I might become the next
Laurie Colwin, a particularly entertaining writer who wrote a column called
“Home Cooking.” Unfortunately, the editor, Ruth Reichl wasn’t really interested
in my stories.
But with Ruth Reichl at the helm, the magazine became more interesting to me
than ever. Unlike previous editors, Reichl seemed to have a finger on the pulse
of America’s ongoing “food revolution.” She chronicled chefs efforts to make
their restaurants more sustainable; she took readers to organic farms all over
the country, and encouraged us to by sustainable products and consider the
impact our purchases would have on the people and the communities that produced
our food.
Last spring, I was
invited to appear on an episode of Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, a public
television series in which Ruth Reichl travels to various locations around the
globe and takes cooking classes. I was to “instruct” Ruth on how to cook fish.
We prepared several dishes utilizing a gorgeous 25-pound Copper River King
Salmon that we filleted together in the kitchen of Canlis restaurant.
Then, less than a week before Conde Nast, the publishing house behind Gourmet,
Vogue, Bon Appetit, The New Yorker, and dozens of other magazines decided to
close the magazine in the wake of our current financial meltdown, I interviewed
Ruth over lunch at Seattle’s Tamarind Tree restaurant. She was on tour
promoting the magazine’s cookbook, Gourmet Today, a splendid collection of a
thousand recipes that really do reflect the way we cook and eat today.
A few recipes from the cooking show, the cookbook and the magazine follow.
My wife Betsy claims that I can never take a walk in the woods without thinking about mushrooms, and she's right. Lab rats, having once pressed a bar to receive a treat, will go on pressing the bar as long as they are able, hoping for another treat. Having once found chanterelles and morels in the bracken along the sides of the trail, I keep an eye to the side of the trail every time we walk through the woods, searching for the savory prizes I know I might find again.
This time of year, I watch for chanterelles. This golden beauty was the first wild mushroom I learned to recognize with any certainty, and it remains my favorite. Finding a patch of chanterelles is like spotting a wild deer. Like that totem animal, these fungi stand for something wild and free.
Several varieties of boletus, easily identified by the spongy undersides of their caps, also catch my eye; the best of these is that great king boletus that the French call cèpes and the Italians call porcini. Until recently, I had never gathered my own porcini. But all that changed last week when I had the good fortune to take a hike in the Cascades with my old friend John Sundstrom, the chef-proprietor of Lark restaurant, and a new friend, Langdon Cook, the author of Fat of the Land. Fat of the Land is a wonderful collection of essays about foraging for food and establishing a life that’s deeply connected to the earth.
With Lang as our guide, we bagged a dozen pounds of chanterelles and five pounds of firm and fragrant porcini. At home, the porcini were rendered into a garlicky sauté to top toasted slices of rustic bread. Some of the chanterelles were incorporated into a pasta dish based on one of Lang’s recipes from the book. The rest will become a forest mushroom risotto.
Cooking with mushrooms has a synergistic quality. The mushrooms themselves are endowed with delightful flavors and textures; but they also enhance the qualities of whatever they are cooked with. Thanks to the presence of certain glutamines, mushrooms have a flavor-building property reminiscent of monosodium glutamate. They may be thought of as umami makers. Try the formulas that follow with mushrooms from the local market or, if you are confident in your own wild crafting abilities, with mushrooms you gather yourself.
Porcini on Toast Simply sauteed with garlic in olive oil, porcini provide a wealth of flavor and texture. Top them if desired with a sprinkle of grated Reggiano Parmesan or Grana Padano cheese.
Spaghetti with Chanterelles, Chicken and Cream A quick saute in butter, then a generous splash of cream gave these chanterelles a sumptuous quality that transcends pasta into a feast. The dark meat from a leftover roast chicken had a similar texture to the shards of chanterelles when the mushrooms were pulled apart lengthwise.
West Coast Chanterelle Risotto Risotto is at once home spun and gourmet. Here, the contrasting textures of chewy short-grain rice and sinewy chanterelles make for a sensory delight. The flavor is amplified by an unlikely juxtaposition of Japanese soy sauce and Italian Parmesan cheese.
Check out Langdon Cook's Fat of the Land Blog and go buy his book!
Backyard Apples are at their peak right now. But if you are not fortunate enough to have your own trees or access to your neighbors' trees, don't despair. Local farmer's markets are filling up with apples too.
My Gravenstein apples were late in coming this year and not quite as bountiful as in years past, but I did wake up to dozens of windfalls today. i had been wanting to try out this recipe for Slab Apple Pie and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
