I went to culinary arts school for 2 years before I realized I could never handle the hours of being a head chef or owning a restaurant.

It's literally a 24 hour a day 365 day a year job. No holidays no days off.

I own a business of a far different ilk now where my crews are working 6 to 5 at the extremes and I have a hard time taking a day off. And when I do, I am always on call.

I can't imagine running a restaurant that is running 17-18 hours a day with prep/lunch/dinner service and is open holidays and weekends.

I have insane respect for people that can do it and do it well.

pink pork is all good, but i'll pass on the pink chicken

you people saw partygirls steaks, right?


never forget.

I agree, watching the guys I work for just leaves me in awe of how they do it day in and out. I only work 20-30 hours/week and that wears me out. Plus cooking the kind of food they do is more time and labor and resource intensive

Some things I've noticed that are weakness in the place I work are the planning (rather, lack thereof), organization, costing (if its even done), poor communication and management that causes problems and forces everyone to work longer and less efficiently than they should. I've even seen things being sold at a loss because prices apparently are shot from the hip.

I think the success rate must improve dramatically for those who have both a finance and culinary background like you do.

no sir, whats the scoop?

2/6 Never Forget

Is that tuna?

Fwiw - I'd much prefer the Dean steak over the raw and sear - however I've made both on several occasions while trying different cooking methods. Heck, I even managed to make a medium-well steak yesterday when trying out my griddle plate for the first time (which I THINK I really love, but I'm not sure - time will tell).

That said, strangely, the steak was delicious and tender, though as I was doing another chipotle / onion / brown butter steak, clearly I wasn't looking for the meat to bring THAT much flavor to the party (to jack ABs line).

This was actually the first time I saw the infamous Deansteak, and while I know Dean is a good sport, from all I've heard about it, I expected something MUCH worse.

Had some potatoes, onions and zucchini looking for a place to go - I figured those + smoked salmon, cream, dill and lemon pepper seasoning = smoked salmon casserole. Result:

From my experience restaurants that are started by guys who are cooks (even good ones) with no business acumen do much much worse than restaurants that are started as a collaboration between a cook and a businessman. This seems pretty LDO, but it's worth saying. There's plenty of money out there in the restaurant world if you're good, lucky, and don't do things like sell things at a loss all the time. There's also massive improvements to be made versus the normal restaurant in terms of organization and management. That's not to say any of those things are easy. Also, many restaurant people are big personality people, which means you can wind up with clashes out of scale with what you'd expect when something as simple as business guy makes business decision occurs. Anyway, yeah. Cooking for profit is probably not the easiest job, and the risk factor is non trivial as a career. But it's also probably not nearly as bad in either way as it seems from looking in on a restaurant with no businessperson involved.

The following is a long, semi-pointless ramble. Please feel free to skip.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. With a finance background, I certainly look at risk from all angles. Coupled with logic from engineering and poker, I tend to think I have a pretty solid, well thought out approach to most endeavors.

Unfortunately, while I believe the above, I also realize that I can certainly fall into the trap of overanalysis with a heavy helping of realism (some might read that as neurotic and negative but I like to think that by virtue of choosing euphemistic terms the latter is proven untrue to some extent). Often times, the end result is similar to lazy fatalism where one realizes the road ahead of them and all the places things can go awry, and chooses to forego the journey not realizing the value that lies simply in the undertaking.

**** - I've been reading Focault's Pendulum and clearly I've begun writing like a pretentious a-hole.

In the end, I know nothing about the business side of a restaurant, and while my smart-moron, Yale educated friend said 'dude - it's not rocket science - there are plenty of far dumber people than you out there doin it' - I like to think I'm humble enough to know what I don't know, so the question becomes one of risk tolerance and internal assessment; are you willing to risk everything for something you're not sure if you're good at and know next to nothing about?

Definitely a difficult question to answer.

A few years ago Houstons restaurant offered iron skillet beans, basically baked beans with some proprietary recipe.

if anybody has that recipe and I can vouch for it (by me preparing it myself) I will wire him/her $100.

pics or GTFO

For people using the Heston method for roasting a chicken. It says to use 300g of salt for 5 L of water. Which according to the internet is 17.5 Tbsp. I only used 4L of water and ended up putting in only 11 Tbsp, which according to Heston I should have used 14 Tbsp if my internet conversion is right. It seemed like a ton of salt and I don't even know if it all dissolved as the water turned white on top as I was stirring it. Is this correct?

btw, I used sea salt and the converter was for table salt if that matters alot. I would think since sea salt is less fine that it would require even more salt than I calculated.

if my math is right, that's a 6% salt to water % (300g/5000g), so 4 liters would be 240 grams (6% x 4000g)

this is approx 8.5 ounces which @ 2T/ounce would be 17 T so if my math is correct, you didn't use enough salt (it should be salty, btw) If you use weight, it wont matter which type of salt you use.

Did you heat the water the salt was 2B dissolved in? If not, thats probably why it was cloudy & didn't dissolve. Be sure to cool the brine completely b4 you throw in your chicken. (LDO, but yours truly had a brain fart & almost threw my meat in without cooling the brine first).

A way to cool the brine quicker is to cut the amount of water u use in half when dissolving the salt and then use ice to top of the hot brine to the amount u need. By the time the ice melts, your brine should be good and cold

I have a digital scale, and used 300 grams of kosher salt.

One other thing - Heston cooks his chicken to 60 degrees C, I cooked it to 70 to make sure my family would not freak out thinking it was too rare. I might try 65 C once to see how different it is, but 70 works just fine.

Yeah, I didn't heat the water before adding the salt. 6% brine is actually a weak brine. At our water treating plant, we supposedly make 18.5% brine using basically cold water.

I was worried about the 60°C thing too. In Canada, they recommend 74°C for safe poultry handling. But you also have to take into account the increase in temperature while it's resting so maybe taking it out at 60°C isn't so bad. I'm cooking for my parents tomorrow, so maybe I should aim a little higher so they don't freak out. Did using 70°C turn out juicy like in the Heston video posted earlier?

70 C (I have no idea how you got the degree symbol) was simply fantastic. It was very juicy and tender. In fact, after dinner on Monday we did not touch the leftovers until last night. We heated them up for about an hour in a 200 F oven wrapped in foil. When we opened the foil, there was more juice released than we expected, but even still, the chicken - keep in mind this is 5 days later, was still exceptional. I am very interested in trying 65 C and then 60 C to see what the difference is, but you can confidently do it to 70 C with full expectation that it will be juicy and delicious.

One word of warning - my bird was pretty big, so it took almost 5 hours @ 195 F to have the thickest part of the breast hit 70 C. I put it in at 3:10, and took it out at 7:55, and it still has 45 min to rest, then the time in the hot oven. We pretty much ate at about 9:00, which is fine for me, but do realize it could take a while.

All this chicken talk got me fired up to make some chicken. Went with a malt vinegar glazed recipe from this month's Bon Appetit. The glaze smelled amazing when I made it, but tear jerkingly potent if inhaled due to the malt vinegar. I also chose to butcher the chicken as the recipe called for it and, to be honest, I enjoy breaking down a bird to see how cleanly and quickly I can do it (the answer is not very - but I'm working on it).

Pairing it with some braised fennel and onions which has quickly become a favorite side of mine.

This month's Bon Appetit is really good for anyone looking for some inspiration. I rarely cook anything from it, but felt moved for some reason.

Wow. That looks amazing. Sides too.

Making biscuits for sunday morning coffee. I get up late.



From Ruhlman's book Ratio.

Finished product:

Next time I will cook them a tad longer, this was 23 min with a couple of peeks (which lowers the temp of my oven). Also, I just cut my dough into 6 pieces, next time I will use a water glass or something to get circular shaped biscuits - the cut edges of the dough are more fluffy and expanded, the non cut edges remained intact. I think the product will be fluffier if I can give water vapor a few more outs. Tasted great, any changes can only make it better.

Best way to make eggs ive seen

Milk??? GTFO!

Made these tonight - they were freakin' awesome. My foil wasn't tight enough around the pan and after 90 mins the liquid was pretty much all gone and instead everything was a beautiful caramelized mess. I did add a little more vinegar and honey for the last 30 mins but the end result looked way different then yours due to the reduction - I'm curious to try it again to see how the flavor would be different with a tighter seal. Thumbs up to the recipe.