Dispelling myths
Anthony Bourdain describes what actually goes on in a commercial kitchen, vice, e.g., what you see on celebrity chef tv shows:
"What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that is is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying food repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way. The last thing a chef wants in a line cook is an innovator, somebody with ideas of his own who is going to mess around with the chef's recipes and presentations. Chefs require blind, near-fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield circumstances."Perhaps more entertainingly, Bourdain had this to say about Rachel Ray:
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential, p. 56.
“We KNOW she can't cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She's selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She's a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that "Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!" Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, "Hell...I could do that. I ain't gonna...but I could--if I wanted!" … Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachel uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. "You're doing just fine. You don't even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing...Just sit there. Have another Triscuit..Sleep...sleep...”
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2007/02/food-fight-anthony-bourdain-slams.html
I have discovered my own likes and dislikes.
Like: Quantity production - to include butchering, e.g., deboning and trimming the fat off 10lb chucks, cooking 25lbs of beef stew in a tilt kettle and using a 4 foot-long wooden paddle.
Like: Heat. The heat of the grill, griddle, and frier. Then again, I was a forestry major in college. I walked around Urbana Park District with a drip torch lighting underbrush on fire performing "controlled burns" (prevent too much organic buildup which can lead to uncontrollable fires). I like heat. And I like fire. Throw fire in with knives, and you'll have to find me either in the kitchen, or at the circus.
Dislike: Baking, e.g., waiting for the yeast to rise, realizing you were not anal enough with the precise measurements required, and having to start all over. Then there is the whole sterile environment of the bake shop. Sometimes, its like being in chem lab.
