My Morning Chocolate

Bill Buford's Heat goes behind the scenes at Mario Batali's Babbo

In Heat, writer Bill Buford decides to see how he will fare in the professional kitchen of Mario Batali’s Babbo (and also apprentices with a butcher in Tuscany, Dario Cecchini, who is profiled in this Gourmet article).

This book is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the kitchen of a famous restaurant: we see the kitchen hierarchy and how the chefs and cooks interact with each other. What is it like to work the sauté station during a rush? Why do you need to be young to work the pasta station? This book answers those questions.

And more.  Here’s a list of 5 things I learned from Heat:

1. When you buy a restaurant cookbook, you are not buying the recipes used in the restaurant. Restaurants do not measure ingredient quantities in a language we would understand.  At Babbo, Buford says garlic and onions are measured in pinches – a small pinch of garlic, a medium pinch of pepper.  Therefore, when you buy a restaurant cookbook, you are buying recipes that are close to the restaurant versions, but have been written by a tester.  Which brings me to the next thing I learned…
2. A tester translates the process of producing a dish in a restaurant to quantities that will be recognizable to the home cook. After picking up ingredients from the restaurant, the tester will go to his or her kitchen, where he or she transfers the restaurant pinches into quantities we would recognize (a pinch of garlic becomes two cloves, for example). This can create problems, according to Buford. For example, the restaurant quantities used are often so small, they “don’t seem accurate when they’re assigned a specific measurement.”  In The Babbo Cookbook, small pinch of garlic is translated into four cloves for linguine with eel and two cloves for lobster spaghettini.
3. Don’t use a colander; do save your pasta water. The colander is “an evil instrument”. Remove pasta from the boiling water with tongs, then reserve the pasta water to use in your dish.  (My tip:  I use pasta water when a pasta dish is dry.  Add a big spoonful to your dish, mix, add more if necessary.  The water will give your dish life.)
4. Your pasta water at home will never be like the pasta water at Babbo. At the start of an evening, Babbo’s pasta water is clear and very salty.  But as pasta is cooked throughout the night, the water becomes more and more murky but also more and more flavorful.  By the end of the evening, the kitchen staff is essentially “flavoring the pasta with the flavor of itself.” Buford thinks pasta water should be bottled, but in a darkly tinted jar because you might not want to look too closely at the water that has cooked hundreds of servings of pasta.
5. Orecchiette is one of the easiest pastas to make by hand. Orecchiette is made with semolina flour and water only, rolled into a tube by hand, then chopped into bite-sized pieces. You then “crush each one on a ridged piece of wood with your thumb”; when done, the pasta will be shaped like an ear with ridges underneath.  When Buford first made orecchiette, his pieces were fatter than normal and did not produce the desired degree of “squish” against the piece of wood.  Though this is one of the easiest pastas to make, it took Buford some time to perfect his “squishing technique.”

To learn more, read this New York Times book review of Heat.