Tag Archives: Food

March 28, 2014 · 10:01 am

What Amateurs Can Teach Professionals

I saw something last evening that provides the inspiration for our Foodie Friday Fun this week.  If you’ve been reading the screed for any length of time you know that I’m a fan of Hell’s Kitchen.  The contestants are professional cooks (I hesitate to say “chef” since very few of them seem to have the qualities needed to be a team leader in the kitchen).  I believe all of them have been to culinary school but all do work in professional kitchens.  One would think that a work environment that’s filled with opportunities to do damage to one’s self would prompt a pro to make safety an intrinsic part of how they work.  As last night showed, not so much, which also prompted a business thought.

Photo: flickr user abdelazer

One of the cooks was using a mandoline to slice a potato.  As you can tell from the photo, a mandoline is a fabulous way to cut off the tip of a finger or two if you’re dumb enough to hold whatever is being sliced in your hand instead of using the guard/holder.  In a pinch you can hold the veggie against the blade with the palm of your hand pushing it down, but you never expose your finger tips to the blade just as you don’t dice with your fingers straight out.  Needless to say, the professional cook took a trip to urgent care to replace the piece of his finger.

Here is the business thought.  The cook has probably used this tool hundreds of times in just this way and without harm.  Most professionals do things over and over and at some point those things become second nature.  Unfortunately, that routine may incorporate bad habits. Amateur cooks like me have to think carefully when we use dangerous tools.  I’ll admit I think less when using a chef’s knife than when I use a mandoline, but I do pay attention in both cases since I don’t use either tool for hours at a time every day.

The same holds true with our business activities.  Reports become routine.  We do fill-in-the-blank analyses.  That’s when someone – the business! – gets badly hurt.  Business professionals need to learn from amateurs, or at least learn to approach the tasks they do daily with the same care as the person who rarely does those tasks.  Think to when you were given an assignment which involved something new.  You double and triple checked everything and were super careful.  That’s the amateur mindset.

And now it’s off to pull out my mandoline to remind me to be careful today.  Care to join me?

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March 21, 2014 · 9:12 am

Caul Fat And Management

Foodie Friday, and today the topic is caul fat. “Never heard of it” you say?

Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Caul fat is one of those ingredients that is rarely used by the home cook and sort of falls into the “secret ingredient” category along with duck fat.   It’s the web of fatty membrane that encases the internal organs of various animals.  Pork caul fat is the one most cooks prefer but cooks use that of cows and sheep as well.

The cook wraps whatever he’s cooking in the fat before cooking it and it adds moisture and flavor. Most of the time, you see caul fat being used as natural sausage casings in crepinettes (fegatelli for my Italian friends) or to wrap items that lack a great deal of their own fat such as game birds.  It’s also used as an outer shell of sorts for patés when they’re being cooked.

What does this have to do with business?  I think good managers are like caul fat.  They bring things to the business that aren’t always readily apparent unless you dig down into the recipe.  It may be how they set the tone for the business.  It may be how they hold the team together, much as caul fat holds the sausage patties that are crepinettes together.  Caul fat is one of those ingredients for which you have to search.  You probably won’t find it in your supermarket.  Great managers are the same way, and like caul fat, when you first come across a great manager you might be surprised by it.

Secret ingredients are what make any dish really memorable.  After all, if every restaurant cooked the same dish the same way, why would we try new places?  Those ingredients are things that help a dish, a restaurant, or your business stand out in a crowd.  Caul fat’s why one cook’s roasted chicken breast is moist and flavorful and another’s, who cooked it the same time at the same temp with most of the same seasonings turned out a dry, flavorless product.  Great managers are a secret ingredient which, like caul fat, make a huge difference in the finished product even if it’s not clear who that fabulous final product came to be.  They make the difference between a good business and a great business.  That’s my take – what’s yours?

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March 14, 2014 · 8:52 am

Doing Your Mies

Beth via Flickr

I realized as I thought about our Foodie Friday topic for this week that I’ve neglected to write about the most basic, and important, step in cooking. Turns out that it’s a pretty important business subject too. That step is doing one’s mise en place. It’s a French term that means “to put in place” and sounds like “meez  en plahse”. No professional kitchen would dream of opening for the evening without the mise having been done. No other business should either.

Doing your mise means you cut up your onions, mice your garlic, and get all the other ingredients for your dish ready before you start to cook.  It has the added benefit of showing you right away if you have all the components necessary to make your recipe or if you need to rethink your plan.  It means you heat up the pan or turn on the grill so it’s hot before you begin.  When I’m cooking a number of dishes, I do all of the mise at once.  That step allows me to cook the dishes without worrying if my timing will be upset by having to slice or dice some forgotten element. It’s the only way that a restaurant kitchen can crank out dozens of dishes in a reasonable time period.  After all, can you imagine how long you’d be sitting if the cooks had to dice onions or search for a carrot in the middle of the evening rush?

You should be doing mise in the office as well.  Starting the day by taking the time to mentally prepare yourself and your staff for the day’s tasks may seem like an unnecessary waste of time but it helps avoid a lot of crisis situations.  A manager’s job is to make sure his team has what they need to do their jobs and doing the mise by walking around first thing is a good step in that direction.  Diving right in to email is like turning on the stove before you’ve brought the protein up to room temp first and making sure you have the sauce components ready to go.  The pieces of the day won’t go together nearly as well.  Most people’s minds are clear first thing in the morning.  That’s the time to prep.

Everyone knows “Ready, Fire, Aim” is a bad idea in business and in the kitchen.  Doing your mise is both “ready” and “aim”.   It assures that the great product you have in mind is what you produce in the end.  Make sense?

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