Chefs Won T Tell Me Essay

There is a secret that chefs won’t tell you.
It’s not the recipes. There is nothing so unsacred as the recipe for a restaurant’s top-selling dish, and chefs will sell their souls, let alone recipes, to any food publication that promises them a feature article or cover photo. The secret is not a chef’s favorite kitchen gadget. Walk in any Williams Sonoma to find Emeril Lagasse’s face plastered on a stocked shelf of dutch ovens. The secret is not even a business model. You can read all about Danny Meyer’s no-tipping policy on any generic food-based website. The secret, the unholy vice that chefs don’t want their cult followings to know about, is American cheese. American cheese, not artisanal aged cheddar from Vermont or stinky blue from Southern

Real people like Tang, and Zebra Cakes, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Real people eat vegetables, but they have a once-a-week limit on the unpronounceable ones like kohlrabi. Broccoli is a reliable everyday vegetable. Real people appreciate American cheese. They take advantage of the fact that it comes dehydrated and foil-packed and that it can be microwaved into a creamy bowl of macaroni. They love the way it melts between two pieces of buttered, griddled white bread and that it makes sense to dunk this masterpiece of a sandwich into a piping hot bowl of tomato soup. Real people don’t ask questions when they see a baking dish full of cheese grits. They know there’s processed cheese in that dish, and they’re OK with it. For a long time, I did not eat like a real person. It started the summer after tenth grade, when I decided that a boy had dumped me because I was too fat. There was no way this was true because I was not fat and had never been, but nevertheless, I removed french fries and non-diet soda from my diet. This was soon followed by the exile of cheeseburgers, recipes that included mayonnaise, birthday cake, fried chicken and more than two slices of pizza at a

gorging on Waffle House did I regain my competence of eating. At a certain point, I got sick of having to stir the oil back into the peanut butter every day, and then having it get stuck to the roof of my mouth. Jif peanut butter never requires stirring, and it never gets stuck to the roof of my mouth unless I eat too much of it, which is its own sort of happy problem. I got sick of avoiding biscuits and croissants and other flaky pastries. Sinking your teeth into a gluttonous, glutinous food that has butter sandwiched between each layer is the definition of