Sauces

How fucking things up can facilitate knowledge.

One of the telltale signs of a new cook is they are either too slow or too fast. Either they can’t get their mise en place together in a reasonable amount of time, or they throw shit together just to say they are done. I have been both in my career, usually on the slower end. As I became more experienced I was able to be much more efficient. I was never one of those speedy guys, but I could get everything right from the get-go and not have to spend precious time remaking something or tweaking it constantly until it’s right. For example, one night during service at Spiaggia, I was working sauce/expo station. I had been there a few years and more or less knew what I was doing. However this night I was weeded because the day before the other cook that worked that station left me nothing as far as mise en place, nothing. So I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to make six sauces from scratch and most of the sides as well, I was in the tall, tall weeds. But somehow I managed to get it all done. But even though I had everything done I had definitely rushed my way through it because I was freaking out about being set up one time.

The first hour of service was uneventful but the second seating was getting intense, and the chef looked to be in a bad mood as well, not a good combination. There came a time when I had a lot of tickets hanging and I was having a hard time keeping up, the chef appeared at my side. He tapped me on my shoulder and when I turned around he had a frown on his face and was standing with his hands on his hips. I didn’t even know what I had done to obviously piss him off.

“Did you taste that lamb sauce?”

“Yes, I thought it was ok”

“Oh, you thought it was ok?”

“Well, yes, it tasted ok to me”

He then reached for the ladle and placed some of the sauce on a plate. It was very thin and watery. It also had little black flecks in it. I could actually feel the blood drain from my face and my stomach start to turn as he continued to just stare at me. I sensed the sauce was not right but wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about it right this second. It was the middle of service, the dining room was almost full and tickets were coming in fast and furious.

“This sauce fucking sucks, I’m not serving it.” And with that, he lifted the entire stainless steel six pan out of the steam table and threw it in the garbage can, ladle and all. All the cooks stopped working for a minute to gawk at us, and they figured something bad was about to happen so they all averted their eyes avoiding eye contact. They avoided looking at me like I was the Medusa and my gaze would turn them to stone. Inside I was freaking out. I had orders for lamb hanging, what were we going to do?

The chef called the front-of-house manager over.
”We have a small problem. We are going to 86 lamb for the rest of the night ok? “

“Sure thing chef, no problem.”

He then grabbed one of the pasta cooks, Lalo, who had been there 10 years, and told him to cover my station. He told Lalo to use the sauce we used for quail on the lamb, it was pretty close.

He then looked right at me. “Let’s go in the back.”

I immediately thought I was going to be fired. Although why would he fire me in the prep kitchen? Then again he didn’t seem like the kind of guy that cared about that, if he was going to let me go then how or where didn’t matter. I walked off the line fearing the worst, running through all the things I could have done better in my brain. That 20-foot walk seemed like 2 miles, the dishwashers even looked at me with pity in their eyes, almost as if to say “Sorry dude, better luck next time.”

When I got to the prep kitchen the chef was there waiting for me. He gave me a look of frustration and asked me “Has anyone ever shown you how to make the lamb sauce? Or any of the sauces for that matter?”

“No, not really. The sous chef sort of ran through the process with me but that’s about it.”

“Ok, I’m going to show you how to make the sauce, right now, the way it’s supposed to be done. Understand?”

“Yes sir”

“Grab some lamb bones, mirepoix, a head of garlic, rosemary, and thyme. “

I was in shock, I thought I was going to get canned but the chef himself was showing me how to make this sauce. Working one on one with a chef would seem normal to some people but in actuality it’s rare. Most of the training in the majority of the restaurants I’ve worked in is done by the sous chefs. Sure the chef might talk to you and interact with you, but often it’s the sous chefs who run the show. The executive chef will often train and supervise the sous chefs, and they in turn will train and work with the cooks.

But once we had the mise en place together he told me to start roasting the lamb bones and the mirepoix separately, so I placed them in different roasting pans and threw them in the oven. Then he told me to clean and chop a lot of rosemary and thyme. I started doing this and would check on the bones and mirepoix every few minutes. One of the things he explained to me was that I shouldn’t be in a hurry, that if I took my time and really paid attention to each step of making the sauce, it would come together much faster and much better tasting. For example, when roasting the bones, don’t be afraid to really get some color on them, because you want to render as much fat and impurities as possible but also to give the sauce that deep depth of lamb flavor.

I need to interject here that this was 1994 and most of the sauce we were using at the time was based on stocks and reductions. These are very old-school type sauces, which I adore, but can be very rich and heavy. The other thing that occurs to me is that this was a very Italian restaurant and yet most of the sauces we used were French in nature. Nowadays the style has gone to much lighter sauces and many chefs now borrow liberally from different cultures other than those traditional French sauces. For me, Chimichurri and Romesco are two sauces I use on almost every menu I have designed.

The same can be said of the mirepoix. He told me to take my time and really get some color on the vegetables. Getting that deep caramelization of the vegetables would help add another layer of flavor. We would take the roasting pans out of the oven and stir them together, and when he said they were ready we took them out of the oven. Then we added tomato paste, whole heads of garlic cut in half, and all the rosemary and thyme and returned it to the oven to roast some more. When we open the oven door after a few minutes the smell of garlic and rosemary hit us in the face hard, like a Marvin Hagler uppercut, the deep aroma of roasted garlic and intense rosemary almost knocked us down. We removed the pan from the oven and place it on top of the stove and turned on all the burners. I added some flour, not much, just enough to help give the sauce some body. I cooked the flour for a few minutes stirring constantly. I emptied a quart of red wine into the pan and the chef told me to start scraping all the cooked bits off the bottom of the pan while the wine reduced. He then grabbed the lamb bones and threw them in the pan with the mirepoix and red wine. As he did this he turned to me and smiled. The whole prep kitchen smelled like lamb, garlic, and rosemary, it was intense.

He explained to me how intense the sauce was and we weren’t even finished yet. I turned the heat down a bit, and when the wine had almost all evaporated we added just a splash of red wine vinegar. After that reduced, we added cold water until the bones were just covered. When it came to a boil we reduced it to a simmer, and he told me once it had reduced by half to strain it and cool it down. I could see how excited he was about making the sauce, how much he loved the process, it was painfully clear he was enjoying himself. Every so often he would tell me to put my face over the simmering sauce and smell how amazing it was already. He was almost giddy, it threw me off a bit. He told me to go back to the line and finish my shift. I was feeling pretty good about everything until he stopped me and said :

“Hey Mendez, now that I’ve shown you how to make that sauce you’re never going to fuck it up again are you?”

“Um no.”

“Good.”

“Ok thanks chef”

When I got back to the line none of the cooks would look me in the eye. It was like they didn’t want whatever happened to me to rub off on them. Lalo, though, he looked at me and asked in a very hushed tone;

“What happened back there, Mendez?”
”He showed me how to make lamb sauce.”

“That’s it?”
”That’s it. “

Lalo smiled and slapped me very hard on my back.

“I thought you were fired or something.”

“Me too.”

That day taught me a few things. First making mistakes is okay, as long as you find a way to learn something from it. Now I understand how some of my biggest mistakes led to my biggest epiphanies and helped me become a better chef and/or a better person. Now I can appreciate the process much better. Also, I can still make this sauce if I had to, that’s how ingrained that experience is for me. That happened more than 25 years ago and I can still smell the garlic, rosemary, and lamb bones.