Don't Name Your Business After a Pepper

Amish. Hipster. Burritos. If that doesn't give sufficient hints as to which quick serve restaurant I worked for, nothing will. Since I'd been eating at this tasty local chain for years, when a friend told me he could pretty much hand me a job there, I jumped on it. I figured it'd be a cool environment and the shop had a far better kitchen than my apartment, so I would have a chance to experiment with recipes. Having done retail and service before, I was expecting the usual hassles and patterns, but I planned to move up and have my own shop. I did.

Tangent time: If you haven't worked on the other side of the counter at a food service job, there are a couple things you should be aware of.

1. Asking the near minimum wage employee "How fresh are your ingredients?" is not only a hassle during the 16 seconds she has to construct your meal during the crazy pressure of the lunch rush, it is also a somewhat unanswerable question. Without specifically naming an ingredient, she has no idea what sort of answer you will be satisfied by. The tomatoes are fresher than they will be tomorrow;
they show up in a box on a truck. If the comparison is between fresh, frozen, or canned, she probably knows that, but it wasn't what was asked.

2. Haggling about prices because you know the owner or because of how little beans cost or because you are "in here all the time" is a great way to get less food for the same price. That college freshman who is scooping cheese sauce onto a tortilla is not willing to deal with getting fewer hours because his overstressed manager caught him giving you the hook up. If that happens, he won't have enough money for tickets to the Firefly Music Festival and that's why he got the job in the first place.

2b. Everyone at the restaurant knows how to make this at home and knows that you could too. It would cost you less at home (maybe). Here's the thing: You are not at home. You went out. There are prices based on plate cost, labor, expenses, and profit. Of course the business is trying to make money. That's what businesses are for.

Vaguely related to 2b--Cooking at quick serve restaurant (I don't have direct experience at a more traditional chain like, say, Carrabba's) is quite different from cooking at home. For instance, if I make a batch of salsa at the house, I'm expecting a few folks for dinner and want to end up with around a quart of finished product. At work, an unmodified batch of Pico de Gallo made between 3 and 3 1/2 gallons of salsa, depending on how well the tomatoes were drained.

 I also learned that employees are great test subjects for recipe innovations. I would take the ingredients we had at the store, especially if it was produce that wasn't going to survive past the next order, and make things that weren't on the menu. A prime example is my current profile picture.

These stuffed peppers were entirely made from on hand ingredients in the shop, except for some wholesale club bacon and panko breadcrumbs I brought in from home. It took 3 tries to get the par cooking of the peppers exactly right, but even the failures were treats for my employees, because it wasn't the same food we all made and ate every day.

I learned three big things from this:

1. Don't be afraid to screw it up. As long as it doesn't burn to ash, someone'll still eat it. Then take what went right and try another batch.

2. Changing up how you put together ingredients you've grown bored with (and maybe adding just one or two new ones) can make all the difference.

3. Expensive, high end kitchen equipment, while not necessary, sure is easier to work with than the appliances most of us have at home.

So, have any of you put the same old stuff together in a new way and been amazed by your results? Share those strokes of genius in the comments. We can all use new ideas. It's the techniques that seem obvious that are often the most profound, especially for anyone who is learning by experimenting. More on that next time.