Still going…

I started training with Kevin on the pizza oven after he found a dishwasher. From the get go it was evident he had no idea what he was doing. I got there early, at six, and he had to miss a meeting in order to train me, so right away a huge piece of his sanity went missing. He had just begun to be unhinged. We first shoveled all the old coals out of the oven with a long handled shovel and into a perforated tin bucket. Kevin launched the first scoop in roughly and was rewarded with a blast of ash in his face. The look came back into his eyes. The scary one that let me know it would be a long day. After the oven was as clean as it could be, we started the fire. A good bunch of logs had been stashed in a large cubby directly beneath the mouth of the dome’s structure but Kevin had me go and grab more from the wood pile outside. 

When I came back pulling the wood wagon I saw he had started a roaring inferno. As I began to stack, he reached into the oven to push the conflagration to the back with another long handled instrument, a clumsy black metal thing, half his body nearly inside the oven. Too close. He dropped the tool and screamed, holding his face, writhing back and forth, bobbing and weaving like a prize fighter. From over on their stations I saw Adam and Teddy stifle their laughs. I asked him if he was ok and when he removed his hands I saw that one of his eyebrows had been scorched clean off, the flesh underneath red and raw but otherwise fine. 

“What does it look like?” he said. 

“Uh,” I bit my lower lip. 

“What the fuck? What the fuck!?!” He touched the afflicted area with his fingers, then his hands covered his face in shame. “What does it look like?”

“Well. Not good.”

He turned to me with his hands down.  Pure insanity. One eyebrow. His chiseled face twisted into a contorted grimace, part horror, part confusion.

“Nothing we can do but continue,” he said.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” I had never seen anything quite so crazy.

“Oh what the fuck is this?”

Kevin fixated on the wall behind the prep table of the pizza station. Filthy with flour, dirt, tomato sauce, and whatever else.

“We’ve got to clean this before service. This entire station. Fucking Bunzer.” I checked the clock up on the wall, 8:30. Lunch service started at 11:30. This would be interesting. Behind me, the fire roared, the flames licking up the curved sides of the brick dome, heat blasting out at us through the tiny opening. Teddy came by to look and gloat. 

“That’s one hell of a fire you’ve got cooking there, Kevy,” he said.

“Fuck you, Teddy,” Kevin said. 

“I like the eyebrow. Very chic.” Teddy walked off to his sanctum sanctorum over by the dish window. I’d heard the other cooks talk about garde manger, the “salad station” and considered it “cushy” and “easy,” the vacation station, as it was cool and there was no giant oven, grill, or huge range to stand in front of. No way to burn oneself and Teddy could chat up the waitresses as they came by to drop off their dirty plates.  

Kevin dismantled the pizza station with my help. We pulled out all the tables, rolled out the cooler, and I stood and watched as he scrubbed with mega amounts of hot soapy, bleachy water where it streamed down and commingled with all the flour to create a goopy mess, a loose paper mache syrup. By the time we finished it was 9:30. 

“Ok,” he said, twisted and deranged with the eyebrow missing, the left side of his brow waxy and orange. “Follow me.” He and I went down to the walk in cooler where he organized while I lugged everything back to the station. Two five gallon buckets of sauce, a case of mushrooms, logs of mozzarella, sausage, pepperoni, a case of onions, a leg of prosciutto de Parma, a case of red peppers. I wondered how the hell all of this would come together in just two hours. I had it all on the station ready to go when Kevin took me into the back where the giant Hobart mixer dwelled. A massive, droid like machine. 

“I once saw a guy get his arm caught in one of these,” he said. “Snapped it right in two. Anyway. Pizza dough. Really easy thing that people always seem to fuck up. Flour, water, yeast. Nothing to it. The recipe is right here.” He pointed to a piece of paper tacked to a tall shiny cooler. Underneath one of the tables sat three huge buckets, one each for the essential base restaurant ingredients, sugar, salt, and flour. “When you do this, always pull the bucket over to the machine and when you measure, make sure it is exact.” Kevin scooped flour into a giant measuring cup and then dumped the payload into the bowl of the machine, the flour shooting up into his face. He sneezed, wiped with the back of his arm leaving a line of flour on his cheek and continued. “Now, the water.” I followed him to the sink. “If the water is too hot it will kill the yeast, too cold and it won’t activate.” He ran the tap and held his wrist under it. “One hundred and ten degrees. You’ll want to use a thermometer for this, they all do, but I can tell the exact temperature after doing this all so long.” He put a gallon into a large stainless steel mixing bowl and then pulled a little packet of yeast from his breast pocket, tore the top off, and emptied it into the water. “The yeast must bloom. Give it a moment.” He used a whisk to stir it all together. “If you add any salt now it will kill the yeast.” We watched as the little brown bits swirled in and dissolved. 

“What is yeast exactly?” I said.

“A single celled organism. A fungi.”

“Like a mushroom?”

“Yeah, I guess. They eat sugar and then they burp. That’s what makes the air bubbles in bread. It’s what makes alcohol.”

“How does that work?”

“ I just fucking told you, the yeast eats sugar and burps out alcohol.”

“But then why doesn’t it do it with bread?”

“Less oxygen. Less sugar. It’s only a partial fermentation.”

“Oh.”

“Any other questions, smart guy? Let’s go, this shit is ready.”

Kevin carried the yeast and water over to the mixing bowl and carefully poured it in. Sort of amazing, actually. All of it. How the hell anyone ever figured this out was beyond me. That a dried and ground plant, once reconstituted with water, and supplemented with a sprinkling of yeast could create something that pretty much every culture in the entire world subsisted off. The endless variations that came from it. Add shitloads of butter and you have a croissant or brioche. Keep the butter and add sugar and voila, cookies. Fry it and you have a donut or a churro. Breadsticks. The many different shapes and varieties depending on where you were in the world. All from three basic ingredients. Toss out the yeast, dry it, and you have pasta. 

He shoved the dough hook into place and turned the machine on, the giant auger making lazy turns in the bottom of the bowl. A hypnotic task, watching this. It all came together. Always quick and surprising. Just a mess of dry white flour and some water turning slowly, becoming a sticky mass, and then as Kevin turned up the juice and the hook really got rolling around it became one massive ball. It all came together just being tossed around inside the bowl, flopping from one side to the other. 

“If you let it go too long, the gluten will overdevelop and it’ll get too rubbery” he said, shutting the machine off. 

“What is gluten?”

“It’s what makes it all pliable. A protein in the flour. Any other fucking questions smart guy? Let’s get to work.”

He pulled the hook off and handed it to me. I walked it over to the dish pit for the new guy who was busy scrubbing the pots. For a second, I felt a tinge of despair watching the guy, knowing what awaited him. Kevin unhooked the bowl from the machine, squatted down, and hoisted the bowl up and into his chest, the veins standing out in him everywhere, the burn mark on his face red and angry, and brought the bowl over to the back prep table. 

“Ok,” he said, the sweat coming, dripping from his nose onto the table. He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, leaving another chalky smear. “We start with flour, lots of flour.” He had extra flour in a pile, grabbed a handful, and began sifting it down in his fingers to coat the table, then he turned the mixing bowl onto this protective layer. “Grab me that scale.” I handed it over, he coated the surface of that too. “Grab those dough trays.” I walked over to where the dough trays were kept. I was very familiar with these, having scrubbed them everyday, off white, surprisingly heavy, hard plastic trays with high lips that stacked well on top of one another. I brought them and with a dough knife Kevin cut a small amount of dough and placed it on the scale. 

“Eight ounces, on the money,” he said. “Now, you have to roll them, like this.” He took the portion and rolled it down into the table with the palm of his hand, forming a nice ball and then placed it in the far corner of the first tray. “This is where the dough has to sit and relax. You can’t make a pizza out of this shit right now. It’s too elastic. It has to sit and expand a bit, relax. The yeast has to do its work. Now you try.”

I cut off a bit of the dough, weighed it, added a touch more to bring the weight up and then balled it together in the same manner, but mine was lumpy and misshapen. Kevin laughed. 

“It takes a few reps,” he said. “Try it like this.” He showed me again and then placed his perfect ball next to the first one in the tray. My next attempt was better but he still adjusted it. After the fifth or sixth try, I had it down. 

“Ok,” he said. “Do all the rest and then clean this shit up.” 

The entire dough ball made about five good trays. Roughly seventy five portions. We didn’t have much time now before service, just forty five minutes. While I had weighed and rolled the dough balls out, Kevin had gone to town, setting up everything for the pizza station. He had come back just once during my dough portioning to tell me, “I’m a fucking prep machine!” He had sliced the case of mushrooms and onions and put them to cook in rondos, large, wide, short cylinders, put all the red peppers and the sausage onto their respective sheet trays, portioned the buckets of sauce into square plastic lexan containers that fit snugly into the cooler, and he had done it all while keeping the pie station immaculate as well as busting the chops of Teddy and Adam. They had to use the oven too and every time they tried to go in, Kevin inspected the work they had done, sniffing, prodding, asking them questions, pinching their cheeks with his hands coated in raw sausage fat or slick with onion juice. The shiny, hairless skin of the burn above his eye a ghastly, comedic patch bulging at its core as the vein pulsed, infusing the glossy area with a life and hue all its own. His presence on the line horrified the others. Normally he was away, doing paperwork in his office and only came out to make stocks and soups or do the occasional walk through, but now he was among them, intruding in their element. Joking with them. Slapping their asses. Snatching their arms and pulling them toward him if they tried to walk away. Inspecting and questioning the details of their work. Every chef sooner or later became bogged down with all the bureaucratic intricacies of the job, the numbers, the paperwork, the hiring and firing, the constant justifications to the top dogs about the fluctuation of their food and labor cost numbers when all they really wanted was to cook a little, to be in the trenches. That’s what got them there in the first place. The chef position was more money, more stress, more responsibility, but they were all just cooks deep down. Creators. There really was something to all of it. To take a bunch of raw ingredients and with the help of fire, make something delicious out of nothing. The reason why pizza remained such a mysterious and amazing food. You could put anything on it, such a wide variety of ingredients that always did well in it’s environment. But despite this, complications were unnecessary. Even just cheese, sauce and dough was enough. A sort of miracle food. Just like its carb laden cousins, sandwiches and pasta, the pizza had an infinite amount of ways it could be pushed into your mouth. A pizza dough without sauce over the top of it, when allowed to cook and rise in the oven became a pita and could be stuffed with meat, cheese, veggies, whatever. Or when the ingredients were wrapped on the inside it was now a calzone. Roll it and it becomes fucking Stromboli. All of it delicious and wonderful.

Five minutes before service, Kevin presented me with a brand new, white cotton chef coat. I took the thin, short sleeve dish tee off and pulled my arms through my new threads, taking a moment to button up the double breast.

I was no longer a scullion, a dog, or a pig. I was a cook.