Month: July 2017

Cook! Where’s my cook?

I remember chefs musing about the future of the business when I was just entering the field.  The message was a Oh, Woe is me.  How will cooking ever survive with this riffraff?  I suspect no craft or skill was ever immune to the worries of the masters for their replacements.

As a chef I held similar thoughts about the future of cooking with the up and comers I hired.  Oh, Woe is me.  How will the craft ever survive?  Well, for better or worse it has.  But, that is part of my question.  When I was learning, the cooks and chefs who were my teachers were as hard as nails. First days, weeks and even months could feel like an emotional gulag.  Rarely was a guard left down among the plebes long enough to reveal humanity.  Kitchens were no place for sentimentality.  The food and the customers didn’t care about your feelings.  Dinner service must, MUST, get done and no disaster was going to interfere with that plan.  The youth of today seem weak.  Physically and emotionally feeble.

Commercial kitchens heat source is gas.  Electricity goes out?  The ovens will not work (funny yet tragic bit of engineering, the pilot is regulated by an electric sensor. No electricity, no oven) but the stoves do.  Gas goes out, get the catering propane burners.  Cooks learn to work around problems in easy stride.  Several traits are needed to accomplish this.  A cool head, a stubborn refusal to see the problem and a willingness to find success.

The chefs who successfully achieve the arduously earned Certified Master Chef spend years honing their skills well enough to compete for the 8 days of testing covering everything–dining room, baking, garde manger, hot food, cold food, butchering, you get the idea, everything–a chef needs to know in the kitchen.  Milos Cihelka was the first to pass.  If I recall the history properly, he escaped his native Czechoslovakia to Canada and then to the US.  In addition to learning English, he was, when I knew him, fluent in at least 4 languages, he mastered the craft in a way few could ever imagine.  He was a DaVinci of cooking, so great were his gifts.  Cool and stubborn and successful.  Chef Milos was the kind of man who shaped you even if you didn’t know it.  He carried himself with pride but was humble enough to learn.

What I miss in my life are cooks.  Cooks had a mission: to serve the customer.  After that there was the quest for skill and learning about the ingredients and how to get the most flavor from them.  But all that education served to make the guest’s experience better.  Where have the cooks gone in the rest of our lives?  Speaking particularly of politicians, I see no cooks.  I see masses of bodies milling about waiting for something to happen then complaining to the news that something happened.  Joseph Heller is laughing at us.

R and D mean little any longer.  There are no principles I can see save bash the other guy.  Libertarians have a position. No aggression.  From that position there is a plan of how that works. The basis of that plan is liberty.  Liberty from regulations and violence in the name of the state and, in some cases, from the state.

A kitchen is a miniature autocracy.  Given that no one cooking in such a kitchen is there unwillingly, it is accepted as the price one pays for obtaining cooking skill excellence.  Excellence in cooking is the liberty to create and make the food what it wants to be.  Cooks at that level are not under the thumb of the chef.  Autocracy has turned to mentor and students, and often enough that is symbiotic, except the chef pays the bills.

In DC the cooks are gone.  There are now professional speakers who occasionally pass a bill to name a tree or post office.  Nearly no one is cool under pressure and solves the issue regardless the obstacles.  More than a few refuse to see the problem, and that is a problem.

I’ve gone long.  Sorry for that.

 

How to Make No-Fail Banana Muffins

What Does That Mean?

Few things bother a baker more than a recipe which gives a quantity which cannot be measured. In particular, a recipe for anything banana which requires 1 banana.

A lady banana? A large banana? A regular banana? I prefer, as do most who bake often, something more specific. Weight, specifically. 200 grams is much easier to acquire than the mystical regular banana. With a proper recipe, little is more wonderful than banana bread. Since banana bread is a muffin (by procedure, a muffin is a thing as opposed to a pancake or a cake), it is easy to make and the batter stores for a up to three days in the refrigerator.

No Mid-rare bananas, please

When using bananas for baking, the more well done, the better. All brown skin but firm flesh is the yummiest for me. For baking, the riper the better. Getting all that stored sugar is best accomplished by freezing the bananas, in the skins, in a plastic bag, till solid. When getting ready to make the mix, remove the bananas to the refrigerator the night before.

Once thawed, simple cut off the stem end of the banana, hold the banana over a bowl and squeeze the inside out. The banana inside will slide out easy peasy. This is what we want for baking. Since they have been frozen, the cell walls of the banana are compromised, giving us easy access to all the banana goodness inside. They pureé easily with just a hand whisk. And, since the cell walls are damaged, the available moisture is free to act as our liquid.

ID please

A muffin by any other name may not be a muffin. The name is less important than the process. Muffin process mixes all the wet, and for muffins, the sugar is a wet item, then pouring the dry onto that, mixing much less than you think necessary and stop. Muffins do not need mixers or food processors or machines of any kind to mix them. This is as old fashioned as it gets.

The process is the key, and its simple. Mix the wet stuff, sugar, eggs, bananas, melted butter and vanilla into a bowl. Sift the flour, salt, soda together and dump on top of the wet stuff. Fold the wet and dry together, not more than twelve turns and that’s it. No kidding.


banana muffins
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Banana muffins

Fresh from the oven banana muffins are a delight. These are so easy and just so great you'll be buying bananas in bulk just to let them go brown for these muffins.

Course Snack
Cuisine American
Keyword Banana, Best ever, Homemade, Muffins, Overripe bananas
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 18 minutes
Cooling time 5 minutes
Total Time 28 minutes
Servings 12
Author Dann Reid

Ingredients

The mix

  • 15 oz Thawed bananas, removed from their skins
  • 10 oz White sugar
  • 2 each Large eggs
  • 3 oz Melted butter, cooled
  • 1 t Vanilla
  • 11 oz All purpose flour, sifted
  • 1 t Baking soda
  • 1 t Salt
  • .5 C Toasted chopped walnuts, optional

Instructions

Mix the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Gently whisk the banana, sugar, egg, vanilla and melted butter together in a bowl large enough to hold the batter.

  2. Sift the flour soda and salt.  Yes, the flour will be sifted twice.

  3. Add the dry to the wet and with a wide, gentle turning motion, scoop down the sides of the bowl to the bottom and pull up the spatula at the center of the bowl and fold the bottom onto the top.

  4. Turn the bowl a bit, repeat the motion. Continue turning and folding not more than 12 times. Worry not if there be lumps.

  5. Allow the batter to stand 10 minutes, then scoop and bake. I generally don't use papers for muffins but do coat the tins well with homemade pan release.

  6. I bake them for about 18 minutes and they come out just right. I like to top the raw muffins with sanding sugar or a streusel dough or even chia seeds. A garnish with a crunch is a nice touch.

Recipe Notes

Homemade pan release is super easy to make and any extra you have can be covered and refrigerated till the next bake.

Melt together 2 oz of whole butter and 1 oz of flour. Use very low heat. The goal is to just melt the butter so the flour gets mixed in. When that has happened, your pan release is done. Brush it into any pan which needs help. If you know you've tricky pans, Madeleine pans, for example, it is a good idea to brush the pan, cool in the fridge 5 minutes and brush again. For a few extra minutes of brushing you get out what you put in as intended, not piecemeal.