The Road to my first genoise.
Welcome.
I hope to entertain and appall more then just a few of you with my hypersensitive and judgemental remarks about the world around me, which consists of caffeine, sugars, proteins, starches, and fats in all of their glorious forms. I intend to promote the use of butter, the consumption of wine and coffee at their appropriate times, and the success of we, the sweaty, passionate, over-tired, and ambitious students, prep guys, dishwashers, line cooks, and baristas who intend to make your lives taste the way they should.
It's undoubtedly impossible for me to pinpoint either my first culinary memory or the moment I decided to dedicate my life to food, but I can certainly smell and taste, clear as though it were in my hand right now, slices of cucumber with salt and pepper, still warm from the sun beating down on my Grandma Palczewski's garden. Just as vividly, I can see my Grandma Barrett and I dragging the microwave cart away from the wall to free open the spice cabinet, a secret stash of wonderful little magic boxes and bottles to open and smell, each one completely different from the next. And of course, our kitchen at home: my mother and father equally proficient in keeping beef stew in the oven, or freshly caught fish on the grill. It was a natural move for me to pick up an ice cream scoop at my first job at fifteen. Exactly ten years later at twenty-five years old, and possibly to the day, I learned to make the ice cream myself at the French Culinary Institute in New York, where I am struggling to continue my journey into the labor love we call cooking.
Between fifteen and twenty-five, I have had my share of crappy kitchen jobs. Back home in Buffalo, to the soundtrack of much AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, I prepped, dishwashed, tossed, sauteed, and garnished my way through the bowels of the kitchen. I have the scars, both mental and physical, to show it. I've no-call/no-showed, I've walked out, and I've quit. I've been yelled at by chefs, and yelled at the incompetent waitstaff. The kitchen scene in Buffalo was a pit of coke sniffers and Jack Daniels in a coffee cup stealers when I was there, and most of what I learned was in terms of how not to behave. And yet last week, I showed a classmate, a dedicated and more experienced bullheaded smartass Italian to whom I look up and adore, how to make crisps out of Parmagiano-Reggiano, a technique I learned back home in a place where my job was 75% Romaine chopping and 25% Caesar dressing making. Surprise.
When I stepped into my first professional kitchen in New York, things were different. In Buffalo, anything that isn't awash in bottled blue cheese dressing or battered and fried is considered "gourmet". I remember the first time I saw the "sundried tomatoes" on a menu. It was at Flying Tigers, a now-defunct spot that was near the Buffalo International Airport. After some discussion, we decided that the word "sundried" in reference to the tomatoes they described, meant "covered in sundries", therefore the past-tense form of a verb we created right there at the table, "to sundry" meaning that these tomatoes would show up covered in something exotic like dried basil and garlic.
That being said, kitchens in New York require their vegetables to be cut a certain way, the lettuces to be torn and not just hacked with white-handled "Globe" knives. Somehow I faked my way into impressing the rest of the staff and making my way to owning the garde-manger station, and working it out like a pro. The kitchen staff was diverse. No more gaggle of stoned white teenagers. The soundtrack changed from classic rock to disco. I loved it. It was there, in that kitchen, that I set out to conquer these here New York kitchens and get on track.
And here I am.
Needs salt,
jp
draft
by John Palczewski
