Quite often I read posts from individual cooks who express a high level of dissatisfaction with their choice to work in kitchens. In some cases, this dissatisfaction leans towards contempt – loads of anger pointed at the job and those who employ cooks to service their clientele. While many of the concerns expressed by these cooks has merit (rate of pay, lack of benefits, commitment of hours, etc.), much of their distaste is a result of their own doing or lack thereof.
Maybe I am just fortunate, but I tend to feel that the first job in a kitchen is just a springboard toward opportunities that you can make on your own. My journey has certainly been one of exploring opportunities, taking risks and facing challenges head-on. But this didn’t start with ‘finding my feet’ in the hospitality industry. Cooking intrigued me – it was a combination of creativity, chemistry, art and flavour, all held together by a single term – passion. You could say I ‘developed’ a passion for cooking, something that was never on the radar as a scholar or university student, but a term I grew to admire and embrace.
These days I lead our training with passion and try and instil this in our students at the school. Cooking isn’t just a job. You need to have a passion for it, otherwise you won’t survive, and if you don’t have a passion for cooking, you should be doing something else. Perfection in cooking is the ultimate goal.
Cooking isn’t something that will grant you immediate successes. You have to grow with it, feel your way into the spaces that stimulate you, tickle your taste buds and stir your inner being to a point where it needs satiation. The path to perfection in cooking is along one – it’s not immediate, and most likely never will be.
The best we can do is aim for small successes, and each success leads us onto a greater understanding, slight changes in processes that enhance flavours, move the goal posts just a little and shed some light onto the path that we’re moving toward. We research how ingredients are grown, why certain cooking processes are done a specific way, what happens during the cooking process, how to develop a palate, how to balance a recipe or the intricacies of effective plate presentation. Yet perfection often eludes us, not always in the result, but in the mind. We know we can do better, so we push on. Try and try again, until we reach a point of managed satisfaction, not quite perfection.
But perfection comes at a cost. Excessive hours, physical and emotionally demanding work and little opportunity for a pat on the back eventually takes it’s toll, and yet we still push through. Why do we do this? What drives a chef? If perfection is the ultimate goal, then we push forward. If our skills fall short, we simply put in more hours until we eventually arrive at a point where we can put together a combination of ingredients and recipes on a plate that produce magic in the mouth. An orchestration of flavours that all sing in harmony, a perfect balance that stimulates all the senses into a symphony of colour, texture, mouthfeel and tastes that just make your soul come alive.
We look past the long hours of testing, tasting, challenging, changing and trying again to get to the end result. As close to perfection as we can get. We all have stories, we all have a love/hate relationship with the industry, we all feel a lifelong connection to something bigger than us, something that takes control of us and pulls us in directions that we could never have predicted. We challenge our own inadequacies, push ourselves to become better and never think twice about jumping into something new.
This is what we strive for. This is what it means to be chef.
What’s your story?
B. Nussey