On Repeat

When I prep food in the restaurant, I find myself consumed with numbers. I count and catalouge the food at each step and keep a vague mental record for future reference. I tuck away numbers like a squirrel preparing for winter. For example, it's helpful, when ordering, to know that there are generally 8 dutch carrots per bunch, 3 plate-sized snapper per kilo, 15 heads of large fennel per box (or 25 if it is baby fennel), enough meat for 40 beef cheek pies in three kilos, and 30 avocados in a tray.

In a professional kitchen counting thus is a good habit to fall into. Obviously over- or under-ordering is not good for business, but the custom has other advantages. I generally know the exact number of portions I have of each dish, and have rarely been caught off-guard when, mid service, the head chef barks “HOW MANY DUCK LEFT?!”



Some numbers, however, I shy away from. When confronted, as we chefs often are, with a mountain of onions to be prepped, I try not to think about how many I must have peeled in the years I've been cooking. Average, say, so many a day, multiply by days I work per week by weeks per... and then my brain shuts down. I really don't want to know. How many eggs have I cracked? Fish pin-bones removed? Tomatoes blanched, peeled, and petaled? Mind balks.

I can't always avoid thinking about the numbers. For example, I can't help but count the gnocchi I make as I go – I need to know how many portions I end up with – and it's no stretch of mathematics to estimate that I've made about 250,000 over the last 6 or 7 years. I wonder how many potatoes that adds up to...

You'd imagine that all this repetition would breed contempt, but that's not necessarily so. I actually look forward to most of these jobs. They are reassuringly familiar; mantra-like in their repetitiousness. I enjoy shucking oysters, even after I once had to pop open 350 of them in one afternoon. I don't mind boning quail. I quite like roasting bones for stock. I've been known to challenge my dish hands to carrot peeling races.



Here's one I must have done a billion or so times: a recipe for an almond biscuit (cookie). At the Italian restaurant I was working in, we served one of these chewy sweets alongside every single coffee our barman pumped out, and pumped he did – the restaurant sat about 200 and we sometimes did over 500 covers in a single day. Some customers would have several coffees, add to that the daily inevitability that the bar, floor, and kitchen staff would consume several biscuits each, and we needed a small factory to keep up. Unfortunately, in place of a factory what we had was an over-worked and under qualified third-year apprentice running the pastry section with a single oven.

The result was that everyone in the kitchen would hop into pastry section whenever we could and help out with the making of various deserts. I was on the busiest section, fish, and found that complicated pastry jobs like tarts and parfaits both took too long and may not be exactly where my cooking skills lie. Therefore, the task of making coffee petit fours often fell to me.

This is my slightly modified version. It has half the vanilla and replaces amaretto with almond essence. I love the bitter, marzipan flavor of almond essence and here it gives the biscuits an “adult” edge. I like to squash these down with a thumb just before baking, it yields the most delightful caldera shape. However, neither “thumb squashers” nor “volcano tops” is exactly evocative.

I call them “Dimples.”

This recipe makes quite a few little almond dimples, but I don't recommend cutting the quantities in half. If you are going to make a septillion of these things in your life time, you might as well make fifty or so on your first go. Also, if you want to try this with the amaretto, as in the original recipe, omit the almond essence and add 50ml (about 3 tbsp) amaretto.



Almond Dimples

300 g sugar
4 egg whites
½ vanilla bean, scraped
1 tsp almond essence
1 tsp baking powder
500g almond meal

Powdered sugar for dusting.

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Whisk the sugar, egg whites and the scrapings from the ½ vanilla bean in a large bowl until they form soft peaks. Mix in the almond essence.

In a separate bowl, mix the baking powder and almond meal. Fold the almond meal mixture into the egg whites.

Using damp hands (this prevents sticking) roll the mixture into 2 cm balls and place 2 cm apart on baking trays lined with baking paper. Using your thumb, indent the tops of each ball. Dust lightly with powdered sugar and bake for 10-15 min. The dimples are done when they just begin to color but are still soft inside. Ideally, when they cool, they will be slightly crisp on the outside and very soft and chewy in the centre.