Tag Archives: Foodie

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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March 7, 2014 · 9:59 am

Getting Your Business On A Scale

One of the most basic kitchen skills is our topic this Foodie Friday: measuring.  If you cook, at some point you use standard measures – cups, tablespoons and such.  Even those chefs you see on TV grabbing pinches of salt know how much they’re pinching (you use your thumb and one finger, then two fingers, then three fingers and measure each result to have a sense).

English: Kitchen scale, electronic, household ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Baking, which is basically chemistry, requires very precise measuring to ensure success.  Sometimes, however, something doesn’t come out the way you’d like even though you measure carefully and that’s our topic today.

If you ask 10 people to measure out a cup of flour and then weigh each result, you’ll find that there is a huge variance in the amount of flour.  That can be fatal to a cake or in making pasta.  One thing I find incredibly useful in my kitchen is a scale.  I use it for cooking as much as I do baking (OK, I really don’t bake) and I seek out recipes where the measures are by weight and not just volume.  After all, the cup of grated cheese called for in a recipe could be finely grated and weigh more or relatively coarsely grated and weigh a lot less.  100 grams, however, is always 100 grams.  I find recipes that call for “1 medium onion, chopped” or “two ripe bananas” to be pretty useless since what I consider a medium onion or the size of those bananas may vary considerably from what the author had in mind.

It’s incredibly useful to have standardized measurements that are truly standard when you’re trying to get the best results.  Which is, of course, the business point.  One thing I spend a lot time with clients on is identifying and measuring the business in a standardized, objective manner.  Putting up a new website may cause you to think it looks better but that’s not measurable.  What is measurable and actionable are thing such as bounce rates, time on site, page views, and conversions.  If the new site causes those metrics to improve, it’s a better website.

The same is true about other business elements.  Presentations that look nice and flow well are good; presentations that result in decisions made in the presenter’s favor are excellent.  “Look and feel” is the cup of flour.  Data driven decisions are flour measured on a scale.   If you want success in the kitchen, get a scale.  If you want it in business, find ways to take subjectivity out of the process.  You with me?

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