Alison Taafe
It may sound like a tradies workshop, but it's actually a fairly typical restaurant kitchen
TO ONE side, an apprentice is using a blowtorch. Out the back another has a hacksaw cutting up lengths of PVC plumbers tubing.
It may sound like a tradies workshop, but it's actually a fairly typical restaurant kitchen where ad hoc inventiveness is the order of the day. Keen home cooks might not blink at spending up big on kitchen accoutrements which often end up gathering dust in cupboards, but with chefs required to work on tight budgets, they have to improvise more often than not.
Lucky for us they choose to spend money on quality produce, scrimping on fancy equipment and making do with whatever is at hand, rather than compromising on ingredients.
Alison Taafe, a culinary teacher at Southbank's College of Tourism and Hospitality, says while saving money is certainly a factor it's not always just about economising, either.
"Need is the mother of invention. Sometimes it's a matter of not being able to get what you want. You might be in someone else's kitchen or you've forgotten something, and look around to see what you can find as a substitute." she says. " Often when you do, you find they do a much better job than the piece of equipment actually made for it."
The blowtorch is a classic example, having made the transition from welders tool kit to kitchenware stores, via the restaurant kitchen.
Until the 1980s, creme brulee was . . . well, bruleed, using a special iron made from metal with a flat disk that had to be heated up to red-hot on a naked flame and then pressed on to the sugared top of the creme. The name of whoever had the bright idea to use a blowtorch is lost in the dusty annals of culinary history. However, the blowtorch has become an essential piece of kitchen equipment, both in restaurants and these days in the home of every keen cook.
In the case of the now indispensable squeezy bottle, used for dotting and drawing sauces around the plate, and the ubiquitous PVC piping used for moulding food, we might not know the "who" either, but we certainly know why. Both were adopted as tools during the 1980s nouvelle cuisine movement; a time when we stopped putting food on our plates in a fairly random fashion and began, stacking, saucing and decorating them to the nth degree.
Today, the aerosol whipping cream canister is the noughties equivalent of the blowtorch, emanating from yet another food movement, the Ferran Adria school of molecular gastronomy. The canister is being used in restaurants all over town to make savoury or sweet foams, light-as-air mouthfuls that are appearing with increasing regularity on menus.
Travel and the constant shifting of hospitality professionals between kitchens means that there is an ongoing exchange of ideas that keeps cooking tools and tricks evolving.
David Pugh of Restaurant Two cites as an example one of his own favourite tools, hospital tweezers discovered in a restaurant kitchen in the UK.
"I first saw this guy using them in London and thought they were great, so I asked him where he got them from. They aren't like normal tweezers, they clamp on and are fantastic for boning fish. He told me his mum was a nurse and he got them from her. I thought there must be some place you can get them, and finally found a medical supply shop down at Charing Cross. So, you come back home with something like that, then someone else sees you using it, and the next thing you know, they're all over the place."
Philip Johnson of e'cco bistro first learned the art of sous vide (cooking in the bag) from the Roux brothers in their London restaurant in the early '80s. While it's been around in some form as far back as the '60s, the new merging of industrial and commercial food preparation techniques, as used by the molecular gastronomy school of cooking, means chefs have adopted and adapted it.
It's mainly used in conjunction with cryovac machines which hermetically seal food in plastic bags for cooking at low temperatures. It may sound very sci-fi and not all together appealing, but sous vide cooking can change the composition of proteins, fats and starches to create different and unexpected textures and flavours.
"It colours perfectly evenly too, almost setting the meat which then cuts like butter," Johnson says. "All the flavours stay in the bag, instead of being lost in a pan, and there is very little shrinkage compared to other cooking methods."
At e'cco, Johnson uses sous vide to cook duck breasts, chicken and even seafood. At home you can get a similar result by using ziplock bags (see box on opposite page for details on how to use them).
For chefs who can't get out of the kitchen long enough to travel, the internet provides another means to keep up with what's going on in the culinary world and reveal methods they may be able to adapt, plus techniques or tools to suit their own needs.
Inspiration can also come from being under stress: a substitute grabbed in a moment of need, a head chef growling for his plate, waiters hovering around the pass. It can arise from the infrequent but obviously important times when the industry is able to get together – rare opportunities such as this year's Masterclass, where Greg Malouf used a stapler to fasten the paper around a fish cooked en papillote. Or the Celebration of Food & Wine Noosa Style in May when chef Robin Wickens of Melbourne restaurant Interlude intrigued the audience when he poached eggs by first cracking them in plastic wrap, then placing the bundle in boiling water.
Chefs grumble that despite all the fancy domestic kitchenware, there's less available for use in the commercial kitchen. While there are fantastic and heartstoppingly expensive pieces of equipment, the professionals cite a lack of the everyday, useful tools that help them get the job done.
"We use overhead transparencies cut with a Stanley knife into shapes, as a mould for tuille as you really can't get anything fine enough commercially," Taafe says.
"There's an awful lot of kitsch and pointless stuff out there," Caxton St Catering's Russell Cain says. "And honestly, the design of what you can get is not that great in quality. It's rarely ergonomically or well designed and often not cost effective." Cain, a student of industrial design, is hoping upon graduation to fill what he sees as a need for well-designed chef's tools.
In the meantime, chefs must continue to use "left brain" thinking to solve common kitchen dilemmas. No matter how pretty the gadget, if it doesn't make a job easier, faster or preferably both, it might very well be taken apart and used for something else.
As most will cheerfully admit, chefs are notoriously nanna-like in their inability to throw anything out. Thus things we might not even consider useable are part of everyday kitchen life, as they eschew expensive flippery such as custom made templates designed for creating pretty icing sugar patterns using instead DIY versions made from ice-cream container lids and the like.
Substituting, adapting, making do; the tricks and tools chefs use to save time and money are so second nature that when questioned, most will deny they use anything "odd" in the kitchen. Press them a bit and the tricks start to trickle out. It's not that they don't want to share, they just don't see the things in their kitchen or the way they do things as anything but ordinary.
"Well, I do use a syringe for sauces," says Todd Farr of Rydges. "Is that weird?"
It's cheering news for the keen home cook. The expensive gadgets we sometimes imagine will make us better cooks can actually be done without. With Christmas near, it might be the perfect opportunity for some creative "recycling" of unwanted gifts of kitchen paraphernalia. Someone else may develop a completely new use for them.
by Natascha Mirosch, The Courier Mail, November 14, 2006