Upper Crust

Everything is bathed in a soft light as home cooks enter the MasterChef kitchen. It looks like a dream.

Stainless steel everything. Ovens have windows so you can peek at your food without letting the heat escape. Flames burst and lick the sides of burners. Hidden from the camera, behind stylish doors, every kitchen gadget you can imagine sits, clean, orderly, functional, on wire shelves. Food processors. Blenders. Pasta makers. Pop out of the equipment room, head past the cooking stations and the stage towards big sliding doors emblazoned with the MasterChef M. Half a step and the logo opens, revealing a gigantic pantry with every protein, starch, seasoning, condiment, and ingredient needed to make the most basic, MasterChef-worthy dish to the most creative, “stunning” dish.

Such marvelous, luscious ingredients require proper tools to measure, slice and dice, mix, stir, and perform any physical function for chemical magic that melts in your mouth. On the inside of drawers at the cooking stations; a cook’s tools and accessories to complement the sharp knives lovingly encased in wood blocks on top of open counter space.

So much counter space.

My kitchen; sparse, small, and counter-less, proves uninspiring. My fridge, its 1980s-style double-doors encased in bland linoleum, barely holds space for food for myself and my roommate. The coils on my electric stove tilt in one direction or other, pooling olive oil and ingredients to the edge of a pan for an uneven cook. There isn’t even a light over the stove. My cabinets double as a pantry and storage for glasses, plates, tea, flour, rice, cereal, and the like. My kitchen is a TETRIS player’s dream instead of a cook’s dream.

The praise Gordon Ramsay gives to home cooks makes me curious. These home cooks, with even less than I, create these amazing dishes for MasterChef tryouts, and throw out terms I don’t know.

Beurre blanc.
Cardamon.
Ganache.
Flambé.
Braise.
Créme fraiche.

And then there are the demonstration dishes! Cooked by Gordon Ramsay himself!

Filleting King salmon.
Scrambled eggs.
Cooking scallops.

Wait. Wait. I know. Scrambled eggs sounds simple, until you watch Gordon Ramsay make them. Look back at that list of terms I don’t know, and read the last one: créme fraiche. When was the last time you made scrambled eggs with créme fraiche? Exactly. My roommate makes his own créme fraiche, and now only makes Gordon Ramsay scrambled eggs. They are delicious, but the pot is a bitch to clean afterward. Gordon Ramsay is an excellent cook, and his instruction videos tell you everything about cooking, but he’s clueless about cleaning up after himself. I toy with creating a line of kitchen cleaning aids targeted at people who make Gordon Ramsay dishes at home. Lord knows, I’ve had enough practice washing the pot after my roommate’s replication of Ramsay eggs.

My roommate is an engineering major so he enjoys tinkering and fixing old sewing machines instead of studying for his thermodynamics exam. He likes to cook as it’s quite similar to engineering. You can tinker with recipes to get different flavors, or experiment with heat and conduction to produce the perfect steak, despite uneven electric coils.

My mother loves to cook. My mother makes the most amazing meatloaf, and she long ago mastered the art of turkey basting. No holiday had dry turkey served to family, and no holiday went without her perfect sweet potato and pineapple casserole. She even made brussel sprouts taste delicious.

As I sit eating cereal for dinner, watching an episode of MasterChef that involves making Beef Wellington, I find myself swirling a series of questions in my head:

• How is it these home cooks can create these “absolutely stunning” dishes?
• Where did they learn about seasoning, purees, and a Google-searching vocabulary?
• How did I not pay attention while my mother cooked…anything?
• How is it that me, raised by a mother who loves to cook, prefers to eat cereal?
• Is there a genetic test that can prove I possess traits antithetical to cooking?

My mouth waters as Gordon Ramsay cuts into a Beef Wellington dish presented by a home cook, the meat cooked “to perfection,” the crust “light and flaky.” The techniques are executed perfectly, and I wonder why I crave Beef Wellington but despise cooking. When I lived in Chicago, I could simply hop on the Blue Line, pop off at the Morgan stop, and go to Swift & Sons for $105 Beef Wellington. The price always gave me pause, though, but making Beef Wellington myself didn’t cross my mind.

Sitting on the couch in the house in Salt Lake City, I think of the kitchen I enjoyed in my Chicago apartment, with its gas stove, ample counter space, and available propane grills on the patio that I always used in the summer for brats, chicken, and hot dogs. What happened?

I have no answer as I drain the last of the milk from the bowl, but remain curious, and so let’s investigate.

Practical Nature and Perfectionist Tendencies

I am a practical person, and cereal is a practical meal. I play sports 4-5 nights a week, and most dinners sit like a rock as I run around for an hour or two. Cereal is light, like salad, but quicker, easier, with fewer dishes, and nourishing enough to satisfy my hunger.

I have perfectionist tendencies, which also falls under the list of common traits possessed by chefs. Unlike scallops or Beef Wellington, cereal is hard to fuck up, and very easy to prepare and eat:

Prep time: Less than two minutes.

Cook time: Mere seconds.

Cleanup time: Less than 2 minutes.

Ingredients: Cereal, milk

Utensils: spoon, bowl

Instructions:

1. Remove a cereal bowl from the cabinet.
2. Pour enough into the cereal bowl, almost filling completely.
3. Close the cereal box and place in the pantry.
4. Remove a gallon of milk from the fridge and open it.
5. Pour milk into the bowl, allowing cereal to float, nearly overflowing.
6. Cap the milk and place in fridge.
7. Remove a spoon from the drawer, dip it into the bowl of cereal.
8. Eat.

Simple, straightforward, always turns out perfect, what’s not to like?

I hear Gordon Ramsay in my head, as if a home cook who has excelled just delivered the worst dish: “Crap!” He bends down to look me in the eye: “Is that your best?”

No. Challenge accepted.

The Answer is in the Crust

Wikipedia defines Beef Wellington as “a preparation of fillet steak coated with pâté and duxelles, which is then wrapped in puff pastry and baked.” Like his scrambled eggs, his Beef Wellington isn’t Wikipedia Beef Wellington.

Excuses will not get me any closer to making Beef Wellington. Cooking things that slowly chip away at my list of excuses while cultivating patience might: fried eggs and sausage; a skillet of eggs, sausage, onions, and green pepper; penne pasta with shrimp, olive oil, and parmesan cheese. Simple dishes, and more flavorful than cereal. But none help develop the techniques needed to make Beef Wellington.

During an episode of MasterChef, empty cereal bowl in front of me, the home cooks are confronted with a pie-making challenge. Pie making is baking. Pie crust is pastry.

Beef Wellington is wrapped in puff pastry and baked…wait, wait. Puff pastry. Pastry. Crust! Pie crust! I must first master pie crust.

I crack open The Pie Cookbook from Williams-Sonoma my mother gave me for Christmas. In the table of contents are your typical pies: apple caramel pie, peach pie, and cranberry pie. It also has pages devoted to making different types pie crusts, one of which I’m betting will be like puff pastry.

So. Much. Pie. Baking. Information. Best to start simple, so I copy the list of ingredients I need to make basic pie dough and the first pie recipe: Caramel Apple Pie.

Having experimented making pumpkin pie with store bought pie crust for Friendsgiving last year, and the accumulated knowledge that pie baking on TV is not like pie baking in real life, I expected this to be easier.

#Expectationfail.

Lessons from Making Caramel Apple Pie from Scratch

1. Creating pies by hand, including the dough, is a lot of work.
2. Gratifying work as flour, salt, butter, water, and patience become sticky dough beneath the warmth your fingers.
3. Sometimes it’s better to ask cooking friends on how to do things, like core an apple, than following an online video.
4. When the recipe calls for letting the filling reach room temperature before putting it into the pie crust, take this advice seriously. Otherwise you get a soupy mess.
5. Roll out pie crust the same way you made it: first one first. It’s practice so you know the next one will be better, and probably belong on the bottom.
6. Brushes for egg washes, along with a complete set of measuring tools help, but detracts from learning things like 3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon, and the recipe calls for 3 tablespoons so you have to do some math, and count as you add the ingredient.
7. If you hate math, get the right tools. If you’re an English major, get the right tools. If you’re drunk, get the right tools.
8. Eyeballing works too, as does tasting.
9. Taste, taste, taste! as they say at Le Cordone Bleu.
10. When baking in a small kitchen with limited counter space, you’ll appreciate cleaning as you cook.
11. It helps to dry the dishes you need later in the recipe, like the only measuring cups you have.
12. There are a lot of moving parts that require timing, and sometimes doing the recipe out of order is beneficial.
13. Patience! Which is becoming my lesson for the year. Let the sauce caramalize, let the filling cool, let the pie cool all the way so the filling congeals.
14. Making pies from scratch is fun! It’s fascinating to watch flour, sugar, salt, butter, and a little bit of water transform into a sticky, gooey substance that, with some additional flour on the board, can be molded into a shape. It is equally fascinating to see how the warmth of your hands warms the dough when you remove it from the fridge, and then watch the dough expand in odd ways as you roll it with a Hyroflask (creative problem solving!) until it becomes imperfect pie crust.
15. A nine-inch pie is huge! Ready-made store bought crust is decidedly smaller.
16. I have another nine-inch pie dish but need more apples. I’m tempted to make another. Is there such a thing as too much pie?

I can bake a pie! And it tastes delicious! My roommate and myself devour it before the week ends. He prefers it warm, with a generous helping of vanilla ice cream. I prefer it cold, tasting the texture of the crust, the filling dissolving on my tongue, the apples softening again as I chew and swallow.

I hear Gordon Ramsay in my head: “Wow. It’s delicious. Well done.”

Well done indeed. I take note of things, like too much air in the pie because I didn’t poke vents in the top, making the crust more like a tent, and the edges are uneven. I order The Art of the Pie from Amazon on the recommendation from a friend, and vow to “do my best” in perfecting pie crust in my quest to make Beef Wellington.