- I remember my first day on the job,
I was cutting sourdough for croutons
with a serrated knife,
and I cut myself and bled all over--
- Oh, fun!
- The bread.
- Did you just like keep your hand
in your pocket the rest of the day?
- I took my tape and
wrapped it around the cut.
- Oh, my God!
- And just worked the rest of service.
- Wow!
[upbeat folk music]
- I think everything I know about cooking,
I first learned in restaurants.
- Yeah, there's always
like a little bit of a
better way to do something.
- When they asked me to think of things
I learned in a restaurant
and I was just like,
the list was this long.
So I have to narrow it down to one.
- I don't really consider,
I'm not like, a chef!
- Yeah.
- You know what I mean?
Like, I'm not running a restaurant.
Those guys are insane.
- I got to kind of see the
whole life cycle of ingredients,
going from deciding what to order,
receiving stuff, understanding
what to look for,
how to weigh things,
how to put things away.
- When I started to cook,
before I had ever worked in a restaurant,
I thought I knew what I was doing
and the day that I
stepped into a restaurant
for the first time,
I learned very quickly
that I had no idea what I was doing.
I wasn't cooking in a tight, organized,
thoughtful, methodical way
until I kinda got sent to
bootcamp in a restaurant.
I think the number one
thing that I've taken away
from working in restaurants
is the importance of mise en place.
Which means in French, put in place,
and it essentially refers
to the time you spend
before actually jumping
into cooking a dish,
or cooking through a recipe.
Getting yourself organized,
prepping out all of your ingredients
so that you can cook through fluidly,
and you're not frantically jumping around,
things are on the stove.
You get yourself organized,
you get all your ingredients
your mise en place set and ready to go
and then you can calmly
cook through the recipe.
- Right.
- That's a technique that
I highly, highly recommend
that you adopt in your home cooking.
- It's a good one.
- So this is a big thing
for me at home as well.
This takes up a lot of
room in your refrigerator,
and it's for a very
small volume of products.
So even if it at one
point this ginger brew
was filled to the brim
as you go through it
and use it,
you gotta downsize.
When you downsize,
you're also going from like
a dirty container to a clean,
which is really important.
And then you're also
just taking up less space
which is important
'cause we should be
constantly creating space
in our refrigerators or our cabinets
for other things.
One thing that I do like about this,
I pulled this out of Molly's reach in,
it was already labeled with the date
so I know exactly what it is.
So even if you're not the cook
who created it in the first place,
you can deal with it properly,
label it, still have the date on it.
And then at home,
this I actually brought in from home,
it's just masking tape, my trusty sharpie,
never leave home without it.
And that was lemon ginger brew.
Leftovers that are labeled,
the other people that you live with,
understand what is in there,
and they're much more likely
to go in and eat the thing that's labeled
versus the thing that's not labeled,
that someone's like, "I
don't know what that is,
"therefore I shall never
investigate it or consume it."
So if you label something
delicious meatballs,
the other people that you
live with will be like,
"Oh, I like delicious meatballs!"
This is one of the easiest
things you can do at home.
So get yourself some
masking tape and a sharpie,
and you will throw away less food.
- [Chris] Yeah, is this yours?
- Yeah.
- This is what you need?
What are you gonna do?
- Well it's not really doing anything.
- Are you gonna fold it into a swan?
- No, that's not the trick.
- Or like the fan?
No, you're gonna do the fan.
- I'm not gonna do any of that.
So it's like everyone
has oven mitts, you know?
And I always get burned with oven mitts
'cause there's like weak,
thin spots or whatever.
So instead of oven mitts,
you use kitchen towels to grab hot things.
But you always have two kitchen towels,
you have a dry towel
that you can hold on
your purse in with you.
Like usually it's in the
waistband of an apron,
but here it's just sticking in my pocket.
And you have this, it's like
an extension of your hand,
and it's just to grab hot things,
stuff out of the oven,
there's hot things everywhere
in a restaurant kitchen.
Even if you don't know they're hot,
so it's just a thing you have.
And this towel always stays dry.
And then you have another
towel that you use
for drying your hands or just
drying any kind of surface,
that's your wet towel.
And you don't wanna mix them up
because you always keep
your dry towel with you
because if you use a wet
towel to grab something hot
the water conducts heat
and then you burn yourself.
So it's shocking how quickly
you can burn yourself
through a wet towel.
- Yeah.
- When you grab something.
- Wow.
- So dry, keep it next
to you for hot things
and then another towel
separately wet for drying things.
- Yeah.
- As of course, I learn a lot
but I was working in restaurants
before I went to culinary school.
So I did learn a bit,
I also learned things
that you are not supposed to do,
like buy meat from the
back of a truck, you know?
Things like that, Best Jersey style.
[Alex laughs]
Anyway, sorry.
So the one I constantly talk about it
and I learned this in culinary school too,
it's pooling your eggs.
Like a pool,
'cause you make a pool of eggs.
So basically what you
do when you pool eggs,
is crack them one at a time.
If you get a bad egg,
and trust me you will get a bad egg,
and you are cracking all
the eggs in the same bowl,
what happens is that bad egg
is gonna ruin the rest of your eggs.
- The entirety of the eggs.
- So, you will think I'm crazy
if I do this at home, but I do.
I'm gonna list for Chris Morrocco
because he doesn't know how to do it.
I hope I doesn't break it.
So you always, crack on a flat surface,
and then you do it with one hand,
can I do it?
- Do it.
- There you go.
In a restaurant also they don't whisk,
they use an immersion blender.
So they keep all the eggs ready,
and when somebody says omelette,
they just have the right size ladle,
and they just instead
of cracking three eggs
every time you in a restaurant order one.
So then you put it in the bowl.
- Okay, so let's see like a seamless,
like a bang, bang, bang.
- Oh, I don't know if I can do that.
- Impress me Gaby, impress me.
- Okay I don't know, I lost it already.
Is this cook?
I swear, is someone gonna use this?
I don't wanna keep breaking eggs.
Don't break my eggs.
[Alex laughs]
Sorry, here Chris Morocco, one hand.
Here you go.
- Is that a known thing?
Morocco can't do a one-hander?
- Well, he confessed to me the other day,
he think he might be able to do it,
but it's not his thing.
- He's too scared.
- All right, that's my trick.
- I don't know if mine's necessarily
like a restaurant tip.
- Did you learn it in a restaurant?
- I don't even think so.
- [laughs] Okay cool, good job.
- But I really like it,
and it's a useful thing
and I think it makes people better cooks
and I think everyone should do it.
So I'm just gonna go with it.
Season meat ahead of time.
I'm talking like a day ahead.
- Yeah.
- Like a big chunk
of like a steak or a big
roast, a whole chicken,
put some salt on that, 24 hours, you know?
And it just makes such a
difference on almost everything.
- I think people know that
about chickens sort of,
but I don't think like,
"Oh I could take a strip steak,
"and a day ahead of time season it."
- 100%.
- The salt penetrates the meat.
People are worried,
they think that it's gonna cure the meat
or change the texture of it.
- And it does in a little
way, but not in a bad way.
- Not in a bad way, not in enough of a way
that it's like, you
shouldn't be doing this.
- Right, it's only gonna make it better.
Especially on a thicker roast
or you're doing a pork shoulder, anything.
You just want that salt--
- A rib roast?
- To penetrate, like you
said, all the way down,
and it's kinda like that
turkey that we did this year.
It's the real takeaway is
just getting salt to the bone.
Salt your stuff ahead.
- You are here in terms
of restaurant experience?
- Okay.
- Right, I am.
- No, no, you know it all.
- Down here.
- You probably--
- No, I've never worked in a restaurant,
I never went to culinary school.
- Eaten at more restaurants than I do.
- Sure, but eating
somewhere is much different
than cooking somewhere.
I'm thinking about this fish is like,
we spent that whole time
getting the skin super crispy.
- It looks beautiful, I
don't know who made it
but it's really pretty.
You girls did it?
- At home it's kinda like,
okay we got the fish,
we put the sauce on, and
then you go to eat it
and you're like,
"Wait a minute, I just threw the sauce
"all over my crispy skin."
- Right.
- I want it to stay crispy.
- So, one of the tricks
from cooking like a pro,
is whenever you do crispy skin fish,
you plate your sauce first.
- What's the sauce?
- So this is just chimichurri,
- Okay.
- And this is yogurt.
Little swooshy sloosh situation.
- Nice.
- And then, more of the sauce.
- Right for color.
- For color.
- That chimichurri looks so good.
I need to taste it.
- Our fish, right on top, right?
- I would eat just these without the fish.
It looks amazing, you getting
that with the upper camera?
[Alex laughs]
- So look, you get with every bite,
you still get the sauce,
but it's on the underside of the fish
and it's not disrupting that crispiness
that you spent so long developing.
- Love it.
Good job!
- And that's a trick from a guy
that never worked in a restaurant.
- Awesome.
- So my trick is basically
to treat your freezer
kind of like your pantry.
I freeze everything, from
a sauce that I'm not using,
I'll freeze that,
I make big batches of
dal, I'll freeze those.
One of my favorite things
to freeze is chilis,
I buy chilis in bulk,
I use a lot of chilis in my cooking,
but I can't always use them.
I just hate leaving produce
to die in your fridge.
And so, I freeze them and they
become like real rock hard.
So, I learned that if you
microplane it when its frozen,
it creates this really amazing chili dust
that you can put on top of your dals,
you can put it in salad dressings.
I like putting it on top of toast.
But it just like feels
somehow very chef-y to me,
like just microplaning anything.
- I've done this before
and one of the things
I like about it also,
is that the seeds don't pass through.
So if you don't want it as spicy--
- It's real nice.
- And I've done this for salsa
verdes where I didn't want
too much spice.
- Oh that's a good.
- And so the seeds stay up
on top of the microplane,
and that's the spiciest part of the chili.
- Really does look really
restaurant-y and fun.
- Chili dust.
- Chili dust.
- The tip I wanted to
do was service lemons,
so like lemons where you
basically you just open it up,
and you cut the vein of seeds right out.
Because generally speaking,
the seeds in a lemon
are right along that central axis, right?
So if you just do one cut
just to get the seeds out,
your lemon is basically
you have to poke one out, no big deal.
But now you have a lemon, most
of the yield of your lemon
and you can squeeze, seed free.
You know?
Who's not winning.
[percussive music]
- I like this
I like that you can decide how to eat it.
I hate when they tell
you how to eat the plate.
- Yeah.
- When they come to the table,
and like, and then you get a bite of this,
and I was like, "No, I wanna
eat it the way I want."
- Totally.
- With my fingers.
- One rule, don't ever
tell me or Gaby what to do.
[Gaby laughs]
Ever.
