How I Became A Chef: Misadventures in the Kitchen

lily-da-vine (73)in #cooking • 8 years ago

Having made the recent step to private chef, many people in my community know that I am a good chef, but I haven't always been this way. I started learning to cook 3 years ago, coming with a background of baking. As I've always had a sweet tooth, I've always been a voracious baker of just about everything. Cooking, however was a completely different ballgame. I came from a meat and potatoes perspective to a newly vegetarian diet. I decided I wanted to learn how to cook all sorts of things, reducing my need to go out for good food, or buy prepackaged cheats from the store.

I started with bread, something I expected to be pretty easy considering I was already a baker. Turns out it's a completely different ballgame, as you are using live leavening agents, that is yeast. Not only that but gluten needs to have the right mix of ingredients, right amount of kneading, all of it to make good bread. If you don't know what to look for, you'll get it wrong. I got it wrong by not adding extra water when using high whole wheat flour breads, leading to a dry and dense brick that doesn't rise. I also didn't realized that high whole wheat bread needs kneaded a lot more for the proper chewy texture, as the cracked bits in it literally cut gluten strands once they form.

I moved onto beans, having some difficulty with texture. I was told to soak, but from what I can tell now, soaking my beans makes it pretty difficult for me to achieve the soft texture I look for, there's always a graininess with soaked beans as those beans are technically in the process of sprouting. I was known for making grainy and bland beans for a long time. Now my beans are good enough to where I'll find John at the bean pot with a spoon. He's my toughest critic, so that's saying something in the difference. The other thing with beans I had to learn, was to get good beans you end up having to add water several times during cooking, so keep an eye to make sure the beans are covered at all times. If you're beans aren't soft and smooth, they aren't done, add more water and cook them longer. Another interesting thing to learn, despite their size, black beans generally take longer than pinto beans in my experience.

When I started cooking I had recently gone vegetarian. I was completely unfamiliar with the diet however so learning to adjust to that was tough. I'll admit I made a lot of pasta in the first while, and potato soup. So much so that I have a hard time eating any soup, which is saying something considering I loved soup before. I'd try things here and there to spice it up, like making General Tso's tofu...which I never got right. Chinese cooking is incredibly complex.

One thing I tried when I first started cooking was a recipe John found online. I'm not sure what else this recipe entailed but I do remember black beans and mole. From what I remember, the beans were grainy and the mole was terrible, as I used way too much cocoa in relation to the rest of the ingredients. When seasoning food, ratios of flavors is extremely important, something that has taken me a few years to fine tune. That mole was so bad that we've been afraid to try it since living in Mexico, the land where grocery stores carry between 15-40 varieties of mole.

I moved onto pizza in short order, as it's something we both loved. I had made pizza at home as a kid and found it to be lackluster and doughy, at best. I took to the internet in search of a good recipe and tried many. While they were a lot better than those ones when I was a kid, they still weren't what I was looking for. The difference was in the rise. When I found a recipe that involved long rise time and a soaker(pre-ferment with yeast, water and flour used as a base for bread and pizza), my pizza was suddenly what I hoped for. I make thin crust New York Style pizza with delicious flavorful crust and homemade sauce. My pizza is so good, that a local friend who's lived here a long time and eats out often, always buys pizza when I have pizza night, last night being no exception.

Not long after this, I started the first of several cooking businesses I've had since I've started cooking. This one was one where I basically made a bunch of easy to prepare meals for a friend, who generally was eating fast food or frozen food heated. This was really my first go at entreprenuership. I also started making these big chocolatey granola bars that were really popular. I sold them in huge batches to friends and by the bar when I worked as a telemarketer. Most nights, I made just as much off the bars as I did working.

Even still, at this point I wasn't really a chef. I hadn't figured out seasonings yet and I had a tendency to over salt food. At this point, I generally under salt and allow the guest to add more if they need it, but I seem to do a good job for most people. I spent a lot of my time looking up recipes stoned, absorbing both methods and ingredients and their ratios. We bought many cookbooks from Goodwill in this time that I also used for research.

I moved into an off the grid living situation a year or so after I started cooking, with my only stove being the potbelly wood stove in my living room. I'll admit, the first many meals I made on that thing was terrible, as I either couldn't get it hot enough, or got it so hot that it burnt everything. Just as I was starting to learn what I was doing, life had thrown a challenge at me to face.

It got easier through time, especially when I had my wood burning rocket stove on the porch built out of bricks. It used a lot less wood and I had a lot more control over the flame, which made cooking easier. I made everything from omelets, to pickles to jam on that stove. Canning was not easy, but it was rewarding and it gave me an idea of what people used to have to go through to preserve their food. We sold the jam made on that stove to friends and John's coworkers. They were made from local mulberries I picked myself and the jam was so good that John had rockstars coming up to him saying "I hear you've got the jam". At the time, he worked in the music business. The whole wood stove experience gave me insight as to just how much energy it takes to cook food, as I had to prepare the wood for the excursion a lot of the time.

The best pitas I've ever made have come off of a wood stove, as even the sealed ones seem to leave some sort of special wood stove flavor that makes everything taste better. I used a wood stove to cook again when I lived in Oregon, having a much better time at it as I knew the ins and outs of wood stove cooking by that point. I learned how to make baked beans using a wood stove, and I've made the best baked beans I've had on a wood stove.

My three cast iron pans, with the dutch oven with it's broken handle.

In the beginning of our off grid excursions, John bought me essentially an entire cast iron pan set using Bitcoin, to use on the stove. After adjusting to using the stove, my cooking became a lot better, and I think it has to do with the consistency a good seasoned cast iron pan provides. It holds a lot of heat very evenly so food just cooks differently using one. I love cast iron pans so much I brought my three favorite from what was left of that set all the way with me from Ohio. This includes a grill/griddle pan, a dutch oven and a giant frying pan I acquired in Detroit.

I also ended up getting a library card in this time and that's where I took advantage of cookbooks. I only have some of the digital copies left at this point, but I scanned almost 100 books of all kinds with my cell phone, for later use. A lot of those were cook books, and in the process of scanning them I picked up a lot of information. I have them as reference now, but I understood cooking a lot more after I read through 50 or so cookbooks on everything from "Campfire Cookery" to "The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook".

I moved to Mexico recently, with my cast iron pans with me. I didn't bring much from home but I though these pans were important enough to where I was planning on backpacking with them. My dutch oven lost it's handle from a huge tope, or speedbump, somewhere in rural Mexico. This same tope also destroyed everything in our cooker, including a fancy bottle of tequila. Shopping was a different experience, as I don't speak spanish even now. I know all the food words at this point, and finding out what things were was fun. I found the best butter I could by smell, la gloria in the green package. I honestly will say my cooking hit the next level when I started using that butter, as butter is an important part of my cooking. Mexican sugar changed the baking game as it too is just plain better.

We got an apartment with a friend, who was helping to support us at the time. To help cover costs, I agreed to cook all meals. After eating a few meals, he was down for the offer and it soon blossomed. Our swedish friends on the top floor mentioned the fact that they, or rather she, hates cooking. We invited them to our dinners for a fee and before long we had an apartment full of community members, all there for chili or Paprikash or Fried Chicken. I haven't made a lot of money doing this, but it has helped to cover food costs for us.

When we moved up to our house on the hill, the cooking business flourished, then floundered for a few months as people were broke from a vacation. After awhile, we started back up again and meal night is as popular as it's ever been, almost. Recently, I've moved onto delving into the world of being a personal chef, starting with a member in the community in need of both comfort food and a chef able to help immediately, as their chef is away. My niche is that I cook food from home, a lot of it considered "American" food. From what I can tell, I'm the only one producing these foods here, which is a big part of my business model.

So as you can tell, I didn't become a good chef overnight, and I haven't been a good chef that long. I share this to show that anyone from any starting point can achieve what they aim for. Something I didn't realize before, as I was a try it and give up kind of person before, was that to get good at any one thing takes a lot of time, thought and practice. Learning glassblowing is reminding me of that process once again, but it's doing so in a way to keep me interested. No one that has any skill is lucky, they worked their ass off to get to the point where they are. While some people are better at certain things than others, by no means should this limit you in what you want to do, just accept you'll have to work harder to get to the same point and move on.