Humility and Japanese Stones

I used to be a professional chef. What that means varies from cook to cook. some people are purists and set he bar super high for 'chef'. Merely running a kitchen isn't enough. For others, nearly anybody who has cooked professionally gets called chef. There are some (usually incompetent) wankers who want to 'professionalize' cooking and require formal education. I generally think a good sous-chef at a quality place who isn't just scraping by, who is working to master his craft... I have no problem calling him chef. The kitchen manager at a TGI Fridays.... sorry, no. I met the requirements of all but the most uptight of blowhards. Ran a big kitchen, big check average, high quality food, hired and fired people, worked the line most nights, but didn't have to every night... ordering, menu control, specials... etc. The real thing.

Reminds me of a line a chef-mentor of mine used to repeat from time to time, in a bad fake French accent. "All my life, I work in the kitchen... they do not call me 'chef'. But I suck one little dick... I am 'cocksucker' for life." Not funny? Work fourteen hours in a tiny 110 degree kitchen for 6 days a week and it gets funny. Besides, it's true.

Anyway the point of all that is that I thought I knew a lot about cooking, the tools of cooking, food in general, and how to run a restaurant. And I did, really, compared to most people and most cooks too, honestly. But ... more than a decade later .. man, I wish I knew then what I knew now.

Take for example, knives. I though Henkels, Wustaf, and Sabatier were the cream of the crop. God was I wrong. These days I only use those to open tin cans and throw at waiters. The stuff coming out of Japan is so much better it blows my mind. Even a relatively cheap Tojiro knocks the hell out of the European competition. And the affordable stuff from Shun crushes the Tojiro... and that's the BOTTOM end of the market. Google Korin. Google Epicurian Edge. Mind blowing knives.

I have a few good knives now. I know how to use them. What I didn't know anything about was how to take care of them. I mean, I have a steel, and can do the swishy thing with it fast enough to make you peasants ohh and ahhh... but it would be so wrong to bang a Japanese knife, even a Shun, against a steel. It isn't like that actually sharpens, anyway. How could it? The blades are harder than the steel. Enter the world of Japanese sharpening stones. I can't even begin to do the subject justice. I don't know enough except to say I think I may be edging into some seriously cultlike territory.

A Beston 500 and the Bester 1200 arrived yesterday. Two incredibly pretty ceramic waterstones. These are so much better than the glazed little dual sided King waterstones my roommate uses for his chisels. Now I just need a pink 220 and something around 4000 grit... and It's enough to make me reconsider.... was I really a chef? A guy who was that ignorant of the most basic of the tools of his trade... and had no idea how to maintain them?