Working as a Cook

Cooking and working in kitchens taught me many surprising things, not in the Bourdain style of "wow my bread is dirty!", but how different disciplines require very different skill sets. Baking is a game of calculations, where a small variance leads to huge differences. A good baker is as much of a nightcrawler as they are an alchemist of yeast. For all the attention to detail, there's a separate artistry required. Shaping dough/bread is the opposite of technical, more like learning the footwork of an intricate dance that takes many repetitions to feel natural.

I also learned how fun it is to work in a flow state and optimize with constraints. Given 30 tasks as a prep cook, how can I optimize across six burners, industrial mixing bowls, and five oven racks. It was an incredbily chaotic game of chess with people shouting, 500 degree ovens, tight spaces, and hard deadlines. Finishing my prep list in 4 hours on my final shift is an enduring moment of pride.

I've always liked resourceful people, and cooks are the best at making the most out of nearly nothing. The prep cook I worked under, Mario, had all these ingenious tricks for making our 5am starting shift habitable. He'd order the line cooks to make us chilaquiles or french toast, methodically plan out tasks, and cut plastic bags so that you could twist them shut. Waste was his enemy. He'd see around the corners of our busy shift, pre-stocking the cinnamon, thinking about how it could all go wrong. He was an incredibly savvy and brilliant cook from a process perspective.

Oddly, restaurant jobs also gave me a love for utilitarian hardware. My ideal kitchen would have cambros, striped rags, and steel mixing bowls. The busiest times always required that level of simplicity. Ever since I stopped working in restaurants, I've been looking for the simplest versions of things and I think that's where that started from.

Overall, working as a cook taught me empathy. The early mornings, the grease burns up my arms, the aching back from too many long shifts standing, it's all quite exhausting, but it was at minimum useful and at best wildly entertaining.