Talking with My Mouth Full (23 page)

I never wanted to be a chef. I wanted to be a food writer and work in the media. Obviously, I have a deep respect for chefs and their work ethic. But as a career path, cooking can be very trying on your personal life.

Consider this: If becoming a true chef, meaning to be in charge of a kitchen, takes about ten years and you start when you’re as young as, say, eighteen or twenty, you come into your own when you’re around thirty, right? At around thirty, what do women have to start thinking about very seriously? Children.

It’s no great coincidence that there are still so few female chefs in the United States. The difference between the chef world and the corporate world, for example, is that not only do you have the long hours away from your family, but being a chef is also manual labor. You have the hours of a banker and the physical demands of a construction worker. You are on your feet surrounded by knives and fire twelve hours a day, six days a week or more. Period.

Can you name five women in New York with more than one restaurant? I can name a dozen male chefs who have at least five! Gabrielle Hamilton, award-winning chef, owner of the critically acclaimed restaurant Prune, and best-selling author of the memoir
Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
, is very honest about her experience working in the food world. Her book touches on the issue of how difficult it can be for women in the industry. Women are often doing double duty: working just as hard and fast as men, but also constantly trying to create a secure identity for themselves within the context of such a male-dominated sphere.

For some reason, women tend to fare better on the West Coast. Maybe it’s less cutthroat. The quality of life is a little better. That’s not to say that the chefs don’t work just as hard. In Los Angeles, Suzanne Goin has three restaurants with her partner Caroline Styne, and three more with her husband, who’s also a chef. Elizabeth Faulkner has three; she’s on the West Coast, too. As does San Francisco’s Traci des Jardins.

Few women on the East Coast that I can think of, with the exception of April Bloomfield and Lidia Bastianich in New York, Barbara Lynch in Boston, and Michelle Bernstein in Miami, are empire builders in the same way their male counterparts are. Why?

Maybe it’s because women prefer to maintain more control, to do one thing well and not stretch themselves as thin. And it’s more difficult to pawn the care of children off on their partners, especially in the early years. Generally speaking, no one else is going to carry, deliver, or nurse that baby but you.

To be a full-time, working chef, you have to be there when the shop is open. For restaurants that means evenings, weekends, and holidays. That’s when people eat. Sure, you can own a restaurant and find some balance. I know plenty of chefs who take two days off a week, but it’s not easy. Most of my friends who are married to chefs are alone at least five nights a week and most days.

That’s why plenty of chefs, both male and female, have chosen a different path in the food world, at the risk of never having that same kind of large-scale, celebrity success. I’ve already told you about Daniel’s chef de cuisine, Alex Lee. The husband of another friend of mine was Daniel’s sous-chef for years. He is incredibly talented and could have easily gone out on his own to wild acclaim. But he loves to paint and he wanted time to have a family. He took a job running the corporate dining room at a major bank. It’s a great gig. He serves breakfast and lunch only and has full control over a state-of-the-art kitchen, with a budget to match. He leaves by three. Now he has time to paint and has recently become a sculptor, too. He picks his son up from school.

He’s never going to be renowned in the restaurant world like Daniel, but he’s chosen the reward of family and balance instead of fame and glory. Even for men, it’s rare to be able to do it all; you can have both, but not mega-both.

I, too, might make more money and be more successful if I weren’t married and didn’t want a family. I could travel twice as much, work the room at more parties and events, and not worry about spending time at home. But I’d rather have more balance in my life. I have to believe I’m not alone.

There are plenty of women in the food industry—food writers, editors, recipe testers, food stylists, publicists, event planners, and caterers—who have made this same choice of quality of life over empire building. Life experience has always come before material possessions for me. It’s how I was raised.

My father is one of the most frugal men I have ever known. He saves every bottle cap and recycles everything he can. He deplores waste of any kind and has always been an environmentalist. He’s a great advocate for the planet. But he rarely spends money on himself or indulges in anything that is not entirely necessary. He will stand in line for six hours in the freezing cold to buy $2 cheese knives on sale. At the same time, he has an appreciation for high-quality, artisanal cheese.

In a way, this sent me mixed messages. It taught me not to be frivolous, to save money and be responsible and independent, which I believe was one of the best lessons I ever learned. But it also set up this mentality of martyrdom and guilt at any thought of extraneous luxury or occasional splurge, even if rightfully earned. That’s part of the way my father was raised, too, I guess.

I’m all for frugality. I went to school with a lot of wealthy kids who wore fancy clothes and drove expensive cars, and I envied them. We never wanted for anything, but our parents never let us spend large amounts on frivolous things. My father drove the same Honda Civic hatchback for twenty years, which we referred to affectionately as “the shit box.” It was filthy all the time. He didn’t care.

When I became an adult, I realized my parents had so much more than so many of the people around us. Not just financially. My parents spent their money on travel, not on designer brands. That was something they could give us as a family, something more valuable than a BMW on your sixteenth birthday. This, I came to understand only years later, was true wealth.

Because of my parents’ financial prudence, we were all able to go to college, and then I was able to go to culinary school, debt-free. No student loans (even the best universities in Canada are government subsidized and significantly less expensive, so we don’t typically carry the student loans that Americans do, but still).

Partially because of what I do for a living, I often don’t question spending money on food. It’s my job, but it’s also my passion. I love the act of sitting down with friends to enjoy a special meal, whether cooked at home or in a restaurant. So a $500 bill for dinner doesn’t bother me, but it’s hard for me to wrap my head around a $500 bill for a sweater or shoes. It’s counterintuitive. At least with the shoes, you get to wear them for a while. No matter how good the meal, you still have to eat again in a few hours.

Not a day passes without a reminder of how fortunate I am. And the gross dichotomy between the extraordinary access I have to food and the fact that so many others, even in my own city, go hungry. Approximately 3 million people in New York alone have trouble affording food for their families, and as a member of the culinary community, I feel a strong responsibility to be active in the fight against hunger, both here in the United States and abroad. I make a point of spending as much time, energy, and money as I can on the problem. I sit on the board of several anti-hunger organizations, including City Harvest and Common Threads. I donate to the Food Bank for New York City, Share Our Strength, Oxfam, and the Red Cross on a regular basis. And I hope using my voice to this end will help others do the same.

My parents set a strong example for me with their activism. My mother helps run a winter soup kitchen and does a lot of work with an anti-hunger organization in Canada. My father spends countless hours volunteering every week for wildlife and environmental conservancy groups. They made it clear that giving back starts at home. Part of raising us was preparing us to go out into the world and do our best to make a difference.

Finding the time and budget for causes other than those that affect my own daily life takes a bit of effort and the constant checking of priorities. It makes me reexamine just how complicated it must have been for my own mother. When you’re young, you don’t see the pressures. You take for granted that your parents’ lives revolve around you, around making sure your needs are met. My mother made it look easy. Now that I’m creating a foundation for my own family, I can’t help but think back to the way my mother balanced her multifaceted life. She found a way to take care of herself, her family, and her community. I only hope I can one day set the same example.

FOURTEEN

Sugared Up on
Just Desserts

THE PANTRY BUILT
for
Top Chef: Just Desserts
is packed with every gadget and confection I’ve ever dreamed of. It looks like a science lab, but for unicorns. There are edible colored paints, glues, glitters—and, of course, “disco dust.” An endless array of flours: all-purpose, bread, whole-wheat, cake, buckwheat, self-rising, hazelnut, rice, almond, semolina, pastry. Polenta and cornmeal. Barley malt powder. Chocolate with every ratio of cocoa from 40 all the way to 85 percent. Extra-dark, extra-bitter, manjara, guanaja, couverture, modeling; in every possible shape: callets, blocks, pearls, flakes, chips, shavings. Gelatin in sheets and powder, edible lacquer spray, edible color sprays, edible gold flakes. Pastillage, gum paste mixes, meringue powder, coconut oil, peanut oil, olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, buttermilk, yogurt. Dextrose, sorbitol, citric acid, tartaric acid, silica gel, active dry yeast, instant yeast, fondant, isomalt crystals. Calvados, dark rum, amaretto. Filo dough. Rose water. Puffed rice, sodium alginate, sodium citrate, calcium chloride. Colored sugars, silver and gold dragées, regular and Dutch processed cocoa. Taro, baby fennel, and rhubarb. Smoked paprika. Marshmallow fluff. Tapioca maltodextrin. Sugars: brown, white, muscovado, turbinado, demerara, confectioners’ (10X). Acetate sheets, airbrushes, food colorings, piping gels, liquid nitrogen. Pop Rocks, Phizzy, agar, lecithin, baking powder, baking soda. Lavender, key limes. Chewing gum base. Guar gum. Carrageenan. Xanthan. A blast chiller that freezes anything in seconds, and a $30,000 ice-cream machine flown in from Italy. A sugar-pulling station with special lamps that keep everything warm. A big marble countertop for rolling out dough that stays cold. The walls are bright and pink and shimmering, just waiting to be dusted in flour.

After I had completed six seasons on
Top Chef
and two seasons of
Masters
, having eaten somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred meals on camera, Bravo asked me to consider hosting a spin-off series. It would be called
Top Chef: Just Desserts
.

I’d never particularly thought of myself as a “dessert girl,” but who wouldn’t get excited by the prospect of eating chocolate every day? And I do adore desserts. Every kind. At culinary school I did my mandatory six-week stint in bread and pastry, so I comprehend the basics. And at Daniel I spent endless hours in the bread and pastry kitchens, watching the chefs work their magic.

But I still considered dessert-making a sort of wizardry. I knew enough about the field to appreciate how incredibly difficult it is—but not enough to be able to do it myself, at least not on a professional level. Perhaps this had something to do with why they asked me to host the show. I speak the language, but the science of pastry still mystifies me.

We’d always felt there was a void on
Top Chef
when it came to dessert. Savory chefs usually aren’t that competent in the pastry kitchen. They have a totally different set of skills and training. Pastry is a whole different science, much more precise and exacting. I liken it to the difference between a psychiatrist and a surgeon. They may both be doctors, but you don’t want them to do each other’s job.

We never had high expectations of desserts on the original show, but the public didn’t quite understand that. Desserts became a stigma. At best, we were served what’s often called a “chef’s dessert.” All savory chefs should have in their back pocket a few basic desserts, like a simple tart, molten chocolate cake, basic ice cream, poached fruit, or bread pudding—things that aren’t complicated in pastry technique and can be made quickly. There are very few chefs who have a mastery of more complex pastry. That’s why, on the dessert menus of small restaurants with no pastry kitchen, you often see the same few offerings: crème brûlée, panna cotta, chocolate cake, apple tart, rice pudding, sundaes. All delicious, but not very original.

Top Chef
viewers started to complain: “They’re supposed to be chefs! Why can’t they make a good dessert?” Or: “Pastry is so much more beautiful. Since we can’t taste the food, give us some architectural creations we can look at!”

Pastry chefs groaned about it, too: “You’re giving our craft a bad name. Give
us
a chance to shine!”

Thankfully, Bravo decided to take a chance on the show.

Once I agreed to host, the next step was finding our judging panel. The producers wanted to keep the same basic format as
Top Chef.
The head judge would be a professional heavyweight—in this case, an acclaimed pastry chef. The third seat would alternate between two passionate industry insiders. The fourth spot would be filled by a different guest each week.

Johnny Iuzzini had been the pastry sous-chef at Daniel for several years and was practically Daniel’s adopted son. He had left right around the time I started, accepting a prestigious job as the executive pastry chef at Jean-Georges. At the time, he was only in his mid-twenties—a prodigy, to say the least.

In between jobs, Johnny came back to Daniel to work on a friend’s wedding cake. The pastry team did their chocolate and sugar work in a small, temperature- and humidity-controlled room near the pastry kitchen. Georgette and I used part of that room to store our printed materials. One day I walked in to grab some press kits, and there was Johnny. He was handsome and had great energy, not to mention an exhaustive knowledge of cocktail mixology. We’ve been friends ever since.

With his experience and charm, Johnny was a natural choice as our head judge. I can only imagine that Daniel loves seeing two of his surrogate offspring hosting a show together so many years later.

I met Hubert Keller on the very first episode of
Top Chef
, Season 1. He was our inaugural guest judge. The producers brought all our chef-testants to Fleur de Lys, his restaurant in San Francisco, to work the line during dinner service until they messed up. The next day Hubert joined us to judge the Elimination Challenge, where the chefs had to cook their signature dishes. He’s very regal and soft-spoken, with an Alsatian accent and a mane of long silver hair—a true gentleman.

We were shooting in an industrial part of Emoryville, over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. The makeup artist, wardrobe stylist, and I decided to go for a drink during our two-hour break. We invited Hubert to come along. Suddenly we were having a cocktail with one of the greatest French chefs in the country, in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe this show won’t be so bad after all,
I remember thinking.

The feedback Bravo received from viewers that first season was that
everyone
loved Hubert Keller. How could you not? He was everything people thought a chef should be: authoritative, charming, and French.

He came back as our guest judge for the Season 1 finale in Las Vegas, where he owns Fleur Restaurant and Burger Bar, as well as to Hawaii and the Bahamas for finales that followed. Then of course he was a finalist on the first season of
Top Chef Masters
.

When the producers were putting together the original cast for
Just Desserts
, they learned that Hubert had a background in pastry. His parents owned a bakery in Alsace, and he had a strong emotional connection to desserts. With Johnny as the head judge, Hubert was the perfect complement: a sage savory chef with a love of sweets.

It was trickier to pinpoint who should alternate with Hubert at our Judges’ Table. Bravo wanted a woman, if possible, for balance. They didn’t need a trained pastry technician, since they had our two professional chefs.

“Do you have any ideas?” Dave Serwatka asked me. “We need a woman who’s fun, funny, and extremely enthusiastic about dessert. If she has TV training that would help, too.”

I gave it some thought, put together a list, and reached out to my food-industry network for additional ideas.

Back at the
Food & Wine
offices, Chris Grdovic—who was now the magazine’s publisher—suggested Dannielle Kyrillos, a close friend and the wife of J. P. Kyrillos, the publisher of
Travel
+
Leisure
magazine, our sister publication. Dannielle was the editor-at-large of
Daily Candy
at the time, and had been there since its inception. She’d made frequent appearances on TV as their brand ambassador. Aside from being witty, smart, and beautiful, she was an accomplished home baker and an aficionado of all things sweet. I suggested her to Dave and they screen-tested her.

Dannielle emailed me shortly afterward. “Thank you so much for connecting me to the team at Bravo!” she wrote. “I
bombed.
It was horrible, but I was thrilled to just be considered. Good luck with the show!”

Simultaneously, I received an email from Dave. “Dannielle is amazing! Thank you so much for sending her our way. We’re going to offer her the job.”

Hubert, me, Dannielle, and Johnny on the set of
Top Chef: Just Desserts

So our little group of sugar addicts was set, and it was even better than I could have imagined. I just had a little more say in things, a little more pressure, and a lot more standing around in high heels.

Our first season was a roller coaster, to say the least. Wolfgang Puck’s longtime pastry chef at Spago in Los Angeles, the venerable Sherry Yard, consulted on the building of the pantry and the kitchen, and it was a hall of marvels. We were pretty confident going into production. We had the same extraordinary team from Magical Elves, the same director and crew, and we figured we all knew exactly how it would all work. This was just
Top Chef
with whipped cream and more ovens, right?

Wrong. As it turned out, this was not like
Top Chef
at all.

First of all, the insanely tight time constraints we were so used to for Quickfires and Elimination Challenges were not applicable to pastry.

To make professional-caliber desserts, you need to preheat, mix, cook, cool, glaze or frost, garnish or decorate, slice, and serve. In pastry kitchens, the schedule works much differently from on the hot line. You simply can’t bake most pastry
à la minute
the way you cook savory food in a restaurant. You can’t bake an apple pie from scratch in fifteen minutes, between the time you serve your guests their main course and the time they expect their dessert. The baking alone takes forty-five minutes or more. That’s why bakers start early in the morning. They make all their cakes, ice creams, and cookies in advance. They cut and fashion all their petits fours, glaze their candies, and coat their truffles long before dinner service begins.

If we wanted our pastry chefs to produce high-quality, elaborate dishes on
Just Desserts
, we would need to exponentially increase their cook times or find ways to work around it. We learned this the hard way. In a wedding-cake Quickfire challenge, for example, we gave the chefs an hour and prebaked basic sponge cake, called
génoise
, in vanilla and chocolate, so all they had to do was assembly, layering and fillings, and decoration. If they’d had to bake their own cake layers from scratch, it would have added anywhere from three to ten more hours to the challenge. It can take days to make a wedding cake when you factor in baking the base and creating intricate designs and details in sugar, chocolate, fruit, buttercream, fondant, and even flowers.

“Your time starts now,” I announced.

Forty-five minutes later, we were watching the monitors and noticing that barely any of them had made a dent in their cakes.

It was like asking them to run a marathon in twenty minutes.

I went into the kitchen and gave the chefs another hour, but by that point it was hard for them to readjust their plans. From then on, we knew we had to be more generous with time.

Then there was the recipe question. That first season, we gave the chefs a constraint that wound up throwing them for a major loop: they couldn’t bring any recipes with them. We modified this rule for Season 2.

Taking away a recipe from a contestant on
Top Chef
makes sense. As I’ve explained, if you know how to sauté, you can sauté anything, from broccoli to chicken livers. You need far fewer exact recipes if you are a professional chef who cooks every day and truly understands the savory kitchen. You can taste as you go, touch and feel your food, add or temper or change direction to adjust the seasoning.

But pastry doesn’t work that way. You mix a batter and put it in an oven. When it comes out, it’s done, and there’s no way to go back and fix it if it didn’t turn out as planned. If you’re even a single gram off in your formula, the cake may well be ruined, and you don’t have time to bake another. Basic recipes are vital, at the very least, so pastry chefs get their ratios right.

Pâte à choux
, for example—the dough with which you make éclairs, gougères, and profiteroles—is always the same basic ratio. It’s made with one cup of water, one cup of flour, one cup of eggs (four large), and half a cup of butter. It’s always I:I:I:½. You can memorize the ratio and apply it as needed, so a cake for one hundred is the same as a cake for twenty. Pastry recipes are usually written in ratios like these, and a chef is never without his or her recipes. It’s all about
exactitude
(or the more serious-sounding, made-up word “exactilation”).

Putting pastry chefs under time pressure upsets them; putting them under time pressure
and
taking away their recipes makes them utterly volatile.

When chocolate guru Jacques Torres, M.O.F. (the highest honor bestowed on pastry masters in France), came on the show as our very first guest judge, we mentioned that we’d taken the contestants’ recipes away.

“Are you out of your
minds
?” he asked. “Why have them stumbling through the basics? They’ll revolt, and you’ll be stuck eating the same four pastries all season long!”