If you cook and are a fan of the great chefs, you must have worked out by now
that no matter how much you spend on their expensive cookbooks (and all fancy chefs now publish recipe books that claim to reveal their culinary secrets), you will never be able to reproduce their dishes in your home kitchen.
I’ve searched high and low for explanations for this phenomenon. Here are some of my findings.
Chefs Lie: I’m sorry. But there is no other way of putting it. They love their own signature dishes so much that they hate the idea of everyone being able to reproduce them. They are not so concerned with home-cooks but can be paranoid about rival chefs.
So, they leave out a couple of ingredients or a few key steps in the process. When you try the recipe, the dish will seem almost the same but it’s never quite right.
The worst offenders are traditional Indian and Pakistan chefs. They never, ever part with their recipes. If there is a masala that is the key to a dish, they will always lie about its exact composition. The dish will only be passed on from father to son.
Cooking knowledge: There are many things that we can’t be expected to do but which professionals take for granted. How many of us understand tomatoes well enough to know which months they will be the sweetest in? Chef’s know these things and will always adjust the recipe, adding less or more tomatoes depending on the time of the year.
Then, there’s the whole business of animals. When we buy meat, we expect it to come ready-packed. But the best chefs all understand butchery. If a recipe says “take one poured of meat, cut into cubes,” we will go and buy the meat from a supermarket. But a chef will know which kind of cut is better for a korma and which one is right for a biryani. So they will always select the right cut using knowledge we do not possess.
| "No home kitchen can ever give you the temperature of a professional Chinese kitchen. So no matter how hard you try, or how religiously you follow the recipes, your stir-fries will never taste as good as the restaurants’." |
The most famous instance in North Indian/Pakistani cookery is the kakori kabab. Its softness comes from the fat. But a good chef will discard the fat that comes with the meat from which the kakori is made. Instead he will use lean meat from one part of the animal and fat from the kidney. Most great Indian chefs know which kind of fat goes with which dish but to you and me, it is all just fat!
Ingredients: The great restaurateur Terence Conran used to always tell his chefs that no ingredient in his kitchen should be one that customers can go and buy in the Supermarket. Chefs spend a lot of time finding the best suppliers and persuading them to part with high quality produce that is not available to you and me.
I first became aware of this in the mid-1990s when Richard Neat who had just been awarded two Michelin stars sold his share of his London restaurant and became a tax exile in Delhi where he ran the Longchamp restaurant at the Taj. One of Neat’s most popular dishes was made with imported lamb. One fine day, he took it off the menu. His bosses at the Taj were mystified. They were importing plenty of good quality lamb, they said. Why wasn’t Richard satisfied?
Well, he said, it was because he needed Normandy butter to put into the dish, he said. And though the Taj had offered him New Zealand and Australia butter, that wouldn’t do. The dish would not taste the same without Normandy butter.
Would you and I ever do that? Probably not. That is why our food never tastes as good.
Kitchen Equipment: I once saw Michel Rostang, a famous French chef (many Michelin stars at many restaurants) struggle to cook in the Miele show kitchen at the Singapore Gourmet Summit. Miele had equipped the kitchen with its top of the line home kitchen appliances. But for a professional chef, a home kitchen, no matter how fancy its gadgets just did not cut it. Good chefs need professional kitchens. And we, who work out of home kitchens will never get it quite right.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in a Chinese kitchen. The best stir frying is done in minutes (seconds even) in very hot woks. No home kitchen can ever give you the temperature of a professional Chinese kitchen. So no matter how hard you try, or how religiously you follow the recipes, your stir-fries will never taste as good as the restaurants’.
There are other reasons too. But I’ll save them up for another piece!
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