On Cooking in Miniature

Professional kitchens are required to produce great quantities of food. This may sound like stating the obvious, but I'm not sure the uninitiated (that is, those who have not had the great pleasure of languishing in front of an eight-burner stove for fourteen hours a day) really understand what this means. It means that we chefs cook foods in quantities that are otherwise unimaginable. Think massive amounts. When we make caramelized onions, for example, we peel and slice twenty kilos of onions, at least, and then cook them down in a stock pot. Gazpacho special? Half a box tomatoes should be a good start. Braised lamb shanks on the menu? Forty at a time, for the first half of the week.



Hell, I can't even make a normal-sized staff meal. On New Year's Day I prepared a small breakfast (read: Severe Hangover Cure) for the few staff we had on: truffle-scented eggs on toast; I scrambled forty-five eggs with truffle oil and toasted two loaves of bread . We had no leftovers.

My apologies in advance if I have just done the same for you, but knowing that all of this bulk cooking goes on has ruined some of the mystique of dining out, especially at fine-dining restaurants. Whenever I get served a tiny shot-glass of some kind of smoked broth as a degustation starter, or a spoonful of morel risotto at course number six, I try not to, but I wonder: is it a five-litre or a ten-litre bucket of this stuff they've got in the cool room?



The equipment we use suffers no less from gigantism. We've got about two dozen nesting metal bowls in which we mix nearly everything in the kitchen, and the biggest has a diameter greater than that of truck tire. The whisks and wooden spoons we brandish about look more like props from a melodrama than serviceable utensils. Then there are the pots. When I grab a “medium” pot, I'm reaching for, say something that easily contain a labrador. A “large” pot might just pass as a one of those cubicle hotel rooms in Japan. When I ask for “The Big Pot,” my kitchen hand produces a vessel large enough to simmer three men, without danger of bruising. We generally use this one for stock, four or so times a week.

I feel most like a chef when I, say, use a giant balloon whisk to fold 5 litres of cream into 60 egg whites in a bowl that doubles as a bath, and then pour the whole thing into moulds and walk them into a freezer that is slightly larger than my first apartment in Australia.



It gets bigger. A friend of mine worked for a few weeks in a catering kitchen. He sent a photo of himself standing on a stool, oar in hand, stirring a steaming cauldron the size of a family car.

The result of all this oversized cooking is that when I cook at home, I feel like I am play-cooking, as if everything is being done in miniature. I almost feel silly measuring out a total of 100g of flour, or making a custard with two egg yolks. One of my favorite tools in my home kitchen is a minuscule whisk I use to make salad dressings. It could easily pass as a key chain.



Most chefs I know feel more or less the same, and we like, from time to time, to have a play with food and a play with perceptions and really cook in miniature. I've made the smallest and most delicate food in restaurants which feed two hundred people a day. Tiny canapés of salmon tartare, teaspoon quenelles of quail rilletts, palmiers the size of my thumb. Chef's delight in these tiny servings. It's a pleasant change from the brutish bulk cooking we do every day.

No recipes this week, just a few examples of a couple miniature dishes. This is the sort of thing chef's do when they get bored; it was a slow week at work.