Mean Girls Part II or The Devil Wears Chef pants.

The first time I met her, she was merely another instructor at school. I was in the chef's office entering some data into a computer with only about 2 minutes to go before class time when she came bursting through the door. I had never had any kind of exchange with this woman, good or bad prior to this moment but she came screaming like a banshee (in a Southern accent, so from here forward anything I write that she said you must imagine in a Southern drawl) accusing me of unplugging a computer in a classroom. Being that she was so rude about it, I didn't even lift my gaze from the screen and merely answered, "Okay."
In a matter of months though, management canned my boss, the head instructor and in his place put her.
She had been in another department. Turns out she was supposedly trained as a pastry chef.
Oh great.
I gave her the benefit of the doubt because I am a professional. I shook her hand, congratulated her and offered my help with anything she might need. A week or two  later, her father passed away. I took up a collection, purchased flowers and all the chef instructors signed a sympathy card. I placed it on a table in her office so that she would see it when she returned to work.
She never mentioned a bloody word about it. No "thanks y'all" or anything.

Still- the boss is the boss. I forged forward. I tried to be the best that I could be. Soon enough though I noticed that this woman had all the social skills of a wet fart in a sleeping bag. They stunk. Morale went spiraling down among the staff. We started to wonder if our office was bugged or if there was a snitch in there because she seemed to know more than she ought to and constantly berated us for complaining. Now one of the reasons that a faculty lounge exists is so that teachers can blow off some steam from what is a very high pressure job. And if we weren't bitching before, we certainly started to now. She repeatedly told us how lucky we were to even have our roach infested office.

I have been the big cheese before and I know fully well what a difficult job it is. There are a couple of things that are important to remember when you have a staff.

•  Listen to them. Get both sides of the story. Start out with the assumption that your team member is right and have their back. It is really important to workers to feel that their boss respects them, believes in them and thinks that they are valuable.
•  Admit to being wrong once in a while. To err is human, remember?
•  If an employee is valuable give them a warning before firing them. Sometimes a situation can be rectified.
• Try to treat people equally and don't pick favorites. You may like some of them more than others but the playing field should be level for all.

Our leader screamed at us. Humiliated us. I kept a secret list on the whiteboard above my desk hidden behind some papers that I called the S.O.W. (Shit of the Week). I will always try to find humor in a bad situation. It did seem as if every week there would be one particular instructor whom she would dump on especially hard. Once she'd finish hounding that person and stormed out of the office, I'd slide the papers aside and say, "well Chef so-and -so, looks like it's you this week" and enter their name.
Not only was she just downright mean but it was hard to respect her professionally. If she was this great pastry chef it would be a real asset to show her stuff a little. The students always asked and she would snap at us when we would approach her. She made up all kinds of excuses why she couldn't or wouldn't do a demo for them. Her predecessor also used to substitute teach once in a while, a great way to be in touch with the students and to understand the perspective of the teachers. She never did, except for one class that was lecturing only. It became clear to us that she knew nothing. Worse than this was her refusal to listen the the chefs about how lousy the syllabus's were or how the requisitions for food were inadequate. If a chef was caught at the stewarding department trying to get a lemon and she was there, God help you!
Morale sunk deeper and deeper. The students were low priority. Shoddy equipment was put in the kitchens and she would get mad at us when it didn't work. Certain chefs could breeze out the door leaving a disastrous mess in their kitchen, others who were not favorited would get chastised if they left a rolling pin on a table. We never felt supported or like a team.  Once in a while her predecessor used to take the department out for drinks and a meal together for a little bonding. Now staff would run out of there to hide in a bar and bitch to one another, commiserating about our jobs. We never felt secure. People were getting fired constantly, management would lie to our faces, we started mistrusting one another and altogether it became a dysfunctional working environment.
When I was promoted to a management position for the evening shift, she zeroed in on me even more. Every morning I woke up to really nasty e-mails about something that I missed the night before. No matter that the place was cleaner now, in better order and overall a good feeling at the school at night, I'd get a snippy note that there was an open container of mustard in the reach-in in K-5!!!!  I started to dread looking at my  messages in the morning.
Eventually she had a hit put out on me. I know it had to do with the fact that another chef and I were dating on our own time and discreetly. She made it look performance oriented. The cowards started blacklisting me. They wrote up reports that were full of untruths so that they could start a paper trail.
Instead of perhaps approaching me and discussing management's disapproval of my relationship with the coworker, together we might have come up with a solution. Something honest would have been the high road. Instead they threatened us, we lied, they lied and it was ugly. We both got fired.
I had been trying to get out of there, I had been interviewing and doing tastings for other jobs. In the long run it had been my plan to leave because of the abuse. What really hurt though is that she badmouthed me, without my being there to defend myself. I became the scapegoat for everything that had been wrong at that place. There is one problem with that though. I don't want to toot my own horn but, everybody liked me. Toot.  Frankly I don't think they believed a word about what she said in connection with me. The outpouring of support that I got from students and coworkers was great affirmation and truly touching.

Now I live a peaceful existence without a tyrant over me. And I may not be perfect but I'll tell you one thing, if you sent me condolence flowers, I would sure as hell say thank you.

Mean Girls part I

In my last post I gave my spiel on male chefs. I stand by my opinion.

Now I need to let loose on some of my sisters. Ironically the ones I am speaking of are both pastry chefs, which reverts back to my theory (see "Chefs vs Pastry Chefs" post).

It's women like these who give us a bad name. Whether they are just being the stereotypical bitch, or just plain mean, it's totally unnecessary and unprofessional. Here lies the tale of the first one:

I hired a pastry chef for my cafe. Very attractive, smart and talented. Her work was beautiful. She was expensive but if I could get the mileage out of her in terms of production she would be worth every penny. That was my strategy, but not hers apparently.

Before we opened officially, she came in to test recipes and start building a pastry menu. Light, flaky Danish, good cookies (truthfully mine were better) and an astounding chocolate mud cake. The cake was a show stopper. Once we opened it became a number one request by customers both by the slice and to order a whole one.

Though her large ego loved the fact that her cake was very popular, her artiste mentality did not like the idea of producing more than one cake at a time. "The Princess", (which became my code name for her) preferred using the 6 qt. Kitchen Aid mixer as opposed to the 20 qt. one that I had bought specifically for making quantity. She liked to decorate the top of the cakes with the fudgey chocolate frosting and squawked when asked to write Happy Birthday on anything. One day she had an order where she had to make three of them and one would have thought that I had asked her to run barefoot over hot coals. She bitched and moaned, complained and was incensed that she had to stay two hours late to make the deadline. May I add that I had a fully loaded car outside with the rest of the order with the motor running waiting for the last masterpiece to be completed?

I was taught that a pastry chef should earn at least equivalent to what they produce daily in terms of dollars. For example, if they are being paid $100 in a day, they need to sell a minimum of $100 worth of product. This gal needed to bump up her yield to in order to earn her fat salary.

So while people were raving about the baked goods, she only made what she felt like making. When the customers would discover and fall in love with one item, she would stop making it and replace it with some esoteric experiment. I had built a kitchen that was set up for production. The cafe was where we could hook customers on our food, the kitchen was built to make enough for special orders and hopefully even, wholesale. I had restaurants and caterers starting to come see me about possibly supplying them. Instead of complying, I got whining from the Princess when I approached her on this.

I will also add that she became very unpleasant to work with in general. The other cooks avoided her like the plague. She did nothing but complain and bitch at them, accusing them of laziness constantly.  She did not like having to share an oven with them, or the fact that she had to walk around the wall to get to it. She would comment and make suggestions on how they did everything, but would screech when I did so with her. After a while even I scooted past her area as quickly as possible before I would hear my name called, upon which I would wince as if someone was pinching me.
Why didn't I just fire her, you might ask? Well, I was starting to consider replacing her with someone less expensive and lower maintenance, but something prevented me from doing so.  Her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer. She cried understandably, I gave her time off whenever she needed it. One day she started making cupcakes with ugly scoops of icing on top of them. Not only was it too much icing but it looked weird and unappealing. She said they (the ball shaped scoops) were in honor of "the boys". Ew.
You can't fire someone who's got a loved one with cancer. So we all continued to tip-toe around her. I also gave her credit on everything she did out of respect for her talent. I went so far as to introduce her to the famous "Domestic Doyenne" who was her idol, and my former employer. I was making an appearance on the DD's national television show and brought the Princess to New York along with me and a tray of her goodies, including the mud cake. The DD was visibly impressed and the Princess swooned, her ego filled up like a Humvee with a full tank of gas.
Shortly after this, a producer for the DD's show called me to do a segment about me and the cafe. This was a wonderful piece of publicity for us and caused great excitement among the staff, most notably the Princess. On the day of the shoot, a whole chunk of time was devoted to showing how she made her delectable sticky buns and the no-knead bread that we featured at the cafe.
Easter came along, I had to pressure Her Majesty about creating a menu for our Easter brunch. She hemmed and hawed, bitched and stalled. Finally she came up with 3 choices for our prixe fixe that were very simple and would certainly not require her presence for service.
A few days before Easter though, a crisis occurred. While I was running around, greeting customers, jumping into the kitchen to expedite, managing the usual lunchtime rush apparently there was a cock/hen fight in the coop. My father, who was my partner spoke up to the naked empress. She was complaining about something while he had other business to attend to. She followed him up the stairs to the office,continuing with her nagging rampage when he turned to her and said something to the effect that she was a "fucking bully".
Whoa.
The Princess did not like that. Not one bit. So when I came back into the kitchen, there she was sniveling and red-eyed, packing up some of  her stuff. She would absolutely not stand for this treatment, no one had ever spoken like that to her and she walked out. Three days before a fully booked Easter brunch.
In the immortal words of Winston Churchill, "If you're going through hell, keep going", which is exactly what I did. My Pops and I decided that enough was enough and that we were done with her. She had told me she need a few days to think, well not over Easter you're not. Adios. I told her she was not welcome to come back when I spoke to her later on the phone.

Next, I jumped into gear and put on my baker's cap. I called my friend Chef Dave to come in and lend a hand. Together with the rest of the staff we started knocking out the Easter menu. While service continued in the cafe we worked  so hard until we were punchy. I just remember that by Saturday night when all prep was completed and it was only Chef Dave and myself left we were so relieved that we cracked open a couple of beers and he did his famous pole dance on the supporting beam in the kitchen. Nothing like a goofy looking 6'4" guy in baggy chef's pepper pants doing the twirl. Brunch went off beautifully, without a hitch.

The following Tuesday as I was working the pastry station, the Princess walked in all refreshed. "Well hello there, Baker!" she chirped at me. I looked up from rolling my dough and asked her what she was doing here. She was there to do her job, she said. I told her she did not have a job anymore and to finish packing her things. Goodbye and good luck.

Not long after, the segment on the cafe was to air. I contacted the producer to tell her that the Princess was no longer with us, how would that affect the piece? So much had been devoted to our baked product. The producer said it would be no problem because her part had been shot with no sound and in the edit it would work out fine.

I can  just imagine, the Princess serving pretty little pastries whilst her family (not too many friends, for I don't believe she had many) gathering around the television to watch herself on her favorite program. How I would have loved to have seen her face when the wonderful piece aired with me demonstrating a signature dish, various shots of me interacting with the customers, other staff members smiling and doing their jobs. Oh, and with a voice-over narration by the DD, a scene of a pair of women's hands making cinnamon buns and bread. No face and no voice. Especially not a high pitched screechy one!

Flour Power

I think it may be time to come out of the closet.

I want to be a baker.
There, I said it.
Pastry chefs get on my nerves to no end. I've shared my stories here.  The temperament, the high-maintenance personalities. I am certainly NOT like that.

Bundt perfection!

So then why am I drawn to baking books? Why do I always check out the dessert articles first in the cooking magazines?  Why do I always stop at the King Arthur store whenever I'm in Vermont and check out the new gadgets? What the f---?
Of all the stuff I sold or gave away when I moved from my house to my small apartment, the one thing that I regret parting with is the bundt pan that I gave to my daughter. It was a good one, heavy duty with a smooth surface. Why? Because, Goddammit, I love to make bundt cakes!  I love the shape of them, how perfectly they come out of that pan. The simplicity.  I love to pour icing over them and the way they look when they are done. Among my favorites- zucchini made with olive oil and a lemon crunch icing.  Or the chocolate bourbon.  Or coffee cake with streusal and cinnamon marbled inside. Oh how I miss that pan!
I loved to teach baking class. I loved the look on student's faces when they saw what they were capable of, whether it was puff pastry with thousands of layers and that perfect crispiness or a layer cake that they had decorated themselves. When petit fours were still in the syllabus, it was among my favorite lessons. There were usually a couple of people who had no patience so they washed dishes. But often there were many who got so into it, cutting mini rounds, glazing, making stunning little confections. It was arts and crafts and such fun.
However, my last couple of baking classes were full of students who saw baking as something to just "get through" so they could move on to their next class. I'd had reluctant or insecure bakers before but at least they were open to trying. Most of these folks wouldn't even give it that much. They put no creativity into it and were rude. They only wanted to eat the product, usually right away with out even displaying or discussing. I started to resent them.
Did they not see the miracle that was puff pastry?  That by folding dough over a few times how it would transform once it had baked, with all those layers? Or kneading bread dough, smelling the yeast and feeling the pull of the gluten in their hands? What I found therapeutic, they saw as work and complained about being tired.
They didn't like the good quality baking chocolate either. Didn't we have any milk chocolate?
Compared to the earlier classes that I had, the low energy sucked the life out of me. When I was moved to teaching a different module I was relieved.
Right before I was canned from the job though, another chef and I switched classes one evening. His lesson was pate a choux and my class was serving their dinner menu. I could see his class was hungry for information.  To know a little about how and why. I wanted to give it to them and baking is not the other chef's passion, so we traded.
With gusto I  jumped right in. I went over their mis en place and demo'd how to make pate a choux.  They got it and were excited about it. Then I showed them how to make pastry cream, which is very technique driven. One by one, they all did it. Seeing those ingredients go from their original form to a thick vanilla pudding-like consistency was very amazing to them. No one's curdled, they all came out beautifully.
Unfortunately the oven in that kitchen runs too hot and the pate a choux came out too dark, in fact almost burnt. But the students still got the principles of the lesson and I saw I still had passion for teaching it.

Back to me now.  As I pour through the help wanted ads on Craiglist I don't even open the executive chef ads. Sous chef, line cook- nah, not for me.  Baker keeps catching my eye. Then I feel a touch of remorse for the gorgeous bakery that was once mine, with the deck oven, double stacked convection, 20 qt and 60 qt mixer, etc, etc.  Now I'm looking at junior level baking jobs?
I guess it goes back to basics. At that bakery I frantically ran the hot line and tended to catering and HR issues. Once in a while I got to make some cookies. For the most part though, I never got to bake, especially with an egotistical partner who was the true baker.
Yet, he taught me a lot. I admit, I have heard his voice inside my head many times when I am creating something delicious. Teaching baking also drummed in more technique and process for me. I did things that I  had always been intimidated by and had never had the chance to practice. Now, I am really good at those things.
Perhaps during this period while I am figuring out next steps- I go for the baking jobs. I will reach out and test the waters and see about a part time position. Maybe I am ready to step away from the flaring fires of the macho hot-line. The greasy spills and raw chicken.  Could it be that now in these uncertain times that I need precision- weighing ingredients, tempering chocolate and blooming yeast? A little quieter pace and room in my head to think?
I think it's time to find out...

Chefs v Pastry Chefs

They are two different breeds entirely. I'm a chef. I like to bake but I'm not a pastry chef. Pastry chefs have to work very precisely and there is also a fair amount of science involved with measurements, temperature, etc.. We chefs (cooks ) can throw something in a pan, sear it, toss it, throw a handful of stuff in there and it's done. Making a wedding cake for example is incredibly time consuming and requires much patience. Chefs don't have this. We don't want to have to spackle and wait and spackle again and measure and be real precise. So don't get me wrong, I do give props to the pastry chefs. Somebody's got to do that job.

The real difference is temperament. The pastry chefs are the delicate geniuses of the business. They prefer to work when no one else is around in very quiet surroundings with no distractions. Chefs wouldn't be able to work if they didn't have distractions- we constantly have to communicate with each other, the waitstaff, the dishwashers.

Pastry chefs are very high maintenance. They must have the best and they must have all the tools. I had a gal who worked for me who didn't understand why I didn't just put in a whole other oven (which of course would need a hood- the most expensive part of the whole deal) right where she worked so she wouldn't have to walk all the way to our ovens and have to share them with the cooks.

Another one that I started a business with had to have the state of the art bakery equipment. This included a 4 deck bread oven with all the bells and whistles, imported piece by piece from Italy for the mere sum of $70,000. Meanwhile we met a guy in another part of the state who made amazing bread using a souped up pizza oven and a spray bottle. Must have been trained as a chef.

Chefs make it work. We can jeri-rig anything and produce what we need. We're like the Mr. Wizards of the industry. We don't care if we have to use a food processor that's duct-taped together and you have to stick a knife in it to make the connection for the motor to work. We don't care if we have perfect Lexan containers- that's why we order yogurt and feta cheese so we can re-use the plastic tubs they come in. My crew and I were catering an outdoor wedding (in a hurricane, I might add) and the stove in the house stopped working. We had a grill for cooking but we used it as a warmer and got every hors d'oeuvres out on time. Cooks can make a bain-marie out of anything. Tongs are an extension of our hands. We laugh at heat and fire.

Pastry chefs need quiet and solitude. Chefs are known for pants-ing each other. We also have a lot of big sharp knives.

Chefs dig the adrenaline. We like heat and we like speed. We need to get busy with a row of tickets up for us to get out. We like the pressure. Call us crazy but at least we are low maintenance.