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A Private Chef: Four Star Cooking In Your Home

by Joe Ouellette

250 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-1087; ISBN 1-55395-372-X; US$28.00, C$32.00, EUR23.00, £16.00

If you're a craftsman, a lover of the finest food who cooks from passion, this book is for you.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts or Table of Contents      catalogue info

About the Book For most readers, this will be a "special occasion" cookbook. A Private Chef: Four Star Cooking In Your Home will make those special occasions what you always intended them to be. How many times have you planned a special dinner party, shopped for a couple of days for the ingredients, lovingly put together a beautiful menu, and carefully put it all together in the kitchen- only to feel, at the end of the night, that the food really didn't measure up to your dreams? More show than substance? Lovely-but at its heart, under the sauce and spice, just sort of plain? With this cookbook, that won't happen. If you're the sort of host or hostess who loves the planning, shopping, and cooking, who loves feeding others and watching delight spread to the depths of their souls, you need recipes and techniques as fine as your intentions. That's what you'll find here. I give you a manageable number of menus, for different kinds of occasions, and I tell you how to make them. You don't have to make any huge decisions-just master the meal. Just choose a menu and do what I say.

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About the Author Joe Ouellette resides in Manhattan, New York with his wife Marie. After five years of working in four-star restaurants he is now the private chef to Chris Browne.

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Sample Excerpts or Table of Contents

WHAT IS THIS?

More than a decade ago, I became a private chef, after five years of restaurant work-hard work, in the kitchens of such fine New York restaurants as Park Bistro and Bouley. I work in Manhattan - and, in the summers, the Hampton's - for Christopher Browne, who owns and manages value funds for Tweedy Browne & Co.

The demands (and opportunities) of the job keep me on my toes. I've done everything from familiar weekday meals, like a sage-roasted chicken and baked potatoes for two, to roasted racks of veal for a fundraiser of sixty-five people.

What's a private chef? Just what it sounds like: A chef who works exclusively for one household. This differs from a "cook", mostly in what's expected of you. I'm expected to deliver the quality of food every day that my boss would get in a fine restaurant. It also differs from a "personal chef", who - like a personal trainer - has many clients. A personal chef is basically a caterer - someone who makes meals for a bunch of people and delivers them. A private chef serves the needs and tastes of just one client.

So what does that have to do with you?

I produce four-star meals in a private kitchen - usually without legions of helpers and tons of extraordinary equipment. This book is for anyone who'd like to do the same.

When I first took this job, I knew nothing about cooking in a private home. I looked for a book on "how to be a private chef" but couldn't find one. I needed some advice but searched to no avail. Left to my own resources, I just cooked.

The book you hold in your hands is the sort of book I wish I'd found back then. This book isn't just for private chefs to the wealthy, though. It's for anyone who wants to cook extraordinary meals. Not fancied- up ordinary meals ‹ as in the "quick and easy" approach to gourmet cooking. Extraordinary meals. Meals where quality, not speed, is the point.

If you want to gussie-up ordinary cooking to make it seem elegant, that's fine. A nice slip-cover can make a ratty old couch more pleasant, and a few spices and a simple sauce can make a piece of chicken less boring. Wonderful. But that's not what this book is about.

This book serves true excellence.

For most readers, this will be a "special occasion" cookbook.

This book will make those special occasions what you always intended them to be. How many times have you planned a special dinner party, shopped for a couple of days for the ingredients, lovingly put together a beautiful menu, and carefully put it all together in the kitchen - only to feel, at the end of the night, that the food really didn't measure up to your dreams? More show than substance? Lovely - but at its heart, under the sauce and spice, just sort of plain? With this cookbook, that won't happen.

If you're the sort of host or hostess who loves the planning, shopping, and cooking, who loves feeding others and watching delight spread to the depths of their souls, you need recipes and techniques as fine as your intentions. That's what you'll find here.

You don't have to be rich to serve four-star meals at home. Though I've included a couple of pull-out-all-the-stops-and-break-the-bank menus, most of these recipes fall well within an ordinary budget.

You don't have to be some kind of gourmet prodigy, either. I'm certainly not. I'm a former actor and computer geek who loves food. I trained at the French Culinary Institute, then apprenticed at Chanterelle in New York and, in France, under chefs Antoine Cadinu, Roger Verge, and Georges Blanc. In this cookbook, I give you a quick course on what I have learned - though executing these recipes demands that you take no shortcuts.

What you have to be to use this book is an "amateur" of cooking, in the literal sense of the word - "amateur" is Latin for "lover". As the Romans understood it, love serves a higher purpose. If your cooking serves a purpose greater than making a good impression with minimal effort - the purpose, say, of turning a meal into one of those moments when you feel privileged to be alive, just to have partaken - this book is for you.

If this book is right for you, you're a craftsman, not necessarily (yet) an artist. Those of us who love four-star cooking are crafts people working out of passion. Even David Bouley, as we were working shoulder-to-shoulder one day, whispered to me that he is not a chef but a craftsman.

All you need to cook four-star meals is a love of food and a willingness to serve its demands. You can't force food to be great. You have to do what the ingredients demand. If you love the ingredients and the process, though, and do what they want of you, cooking rewards you with some of life's finest pleasures. Great food is, well, great food. I don't care if it comes out of a box or a can. Four-star eating is about quality, not bragging rights - much less martyrdom.

My techniques and recipes come from my professional training, cookbooks, my boss, his friends who have eaten my food, and fellow chefs. Some of these recipes I created myself. Some are probably 300 years old. I can't, and don't want to, "reinvent the wheel," but to interpret recipes with my experiences, soul, and palate.

I'm always talking to people who love to cook. We talk about experiments and ideas. Of course, my biggest influences come from the kitchens where I've apprenticed and worked hard. These days, my job with Chris gives me plenty of time to help in other kitchens - for instance, The Quilted Giraffe, Le Bernardin, Daniel, and Danube.

My most serious research consists of eating and working in fine restaurants. Chef Christian Fauche told me once, "Have big eyes, big ears and a small mouth when you're in a four-star kitchen, so you can learn to cook."

In this cookbook, I'm reporting to you what I've learned.

And if you are curious about who my boss invites as guests to these dinner parties, well, I have cooked for a prince's girlfriend and a state governor, and I cook for at least three important fund raising events a year. But mostly life here is pretty quiet with Chris and his extended family, with whom he likes to share.

Now you know the answer to the question, "What's this?" A simple book, giving you sophisticated recipes and techniques clearly and quickly, that you'll use to prepare four-star meals - where quality, not quickness, matters most. If that sounds like a good idea to you, this book is for you.

HOW TO USE THIS COOKBOOK

This isn't an encyclopedia like Julia Child's The Way to Cook or The Rombauers' The Joy of Cooking. This book will not tell you how to make ice cream, temper chocolate, and skin a squirrel, or anything like that. You won't find a glossary or list of conversions or caloric values.

The book is simpler. I give you a manageable number of menus, for different kinds of occasions, and I tell you how to make them. You don't have to make any huge decisions - just master the meal.

Using this book couldn't be simpler, then. Just choose a menu and do what I say.

I tell you about some cool four-star techniques and tasty things I've experienced in life so far. I only give you the four-star explanations or recipes for things. Leave your ego at the kitchen door. Pretend you are learning from me, as I have learned from the great chefs who taught me. After you've mastered one of my recipes, then you can start tinkering with it - and I encourage you to do exactly that. Put your personality and soul into the recipe, after you've really gotten it. Use your intuition and don't limit yourself to olive oil, lemon, sugar and salt. Instead use fats, acids, sweetness and brininess. There are only four tastes but millions of flavors, which we cooks strive to use. Asians identify a fifth taste, 'umani' I am working on that one.

I read an article once about "kitchen disasters" that resulted from following recipes. That won't happen here, if you really follow the recipes. Some professional cookbook writers are just that - writers. They don't test all their recipes, much less perfect them. I've suffered disasters from following other people's recipes. As soon as one recipe in a cookbook proves to be a disaster, I use the pages of the book to start fires in my fireplace. The flames look pretty since fancy cookbooks often have big, slick, chemical-saturated pages and beautifully colored pictures.

The recipes here are my life. This is what I do every day. This is a chef's book - not a cook-book writer's book.

But if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, contact me thru my website http://home.nyc.rr.com/aprivatechef/

In every chapter, I give you a "menu progression," telling you the order in which to do things. Then I break down the recipes and present their components as close to the order of the menu progression as possible, and I give instructions on how to assemble the components when it's time to serve.

To use this book, read the recipe, and then read the recipe again. Reflect on what you've read. Think it through to be sure you get how the parts fit together. I walk you through the steps from start to finish; just be sure you've gotten clear on the steps I've laid out.

Do yourself a favor and plan ahead. Give yourself plenty of time to do what needs to be done. Do your shopping early. If you're rushing around at the last minute, you'll tire yourself out - and you may discover that you've overlooked some crucial ingredient can only be gotten mail order.

Work in a clean, organized fashion. Organize everything until it hurts, and you'll create magic in your kitchen. When you're cooking multi-course meals, using fine ingredients and first-rate techniques, you simply cannot have dirty pots and pans stacking up.

Julia Child says repeatedly "If you're not going to do it right, don't do it." I've done my best to give you recipes that, done right, will delight you and your guests.

Some things I don't bother telling you in this cookbook. I don't tell you what drinks to serve, with a couple of exceptions. That's your choice, and easy enough without my input. I don't point out that you need to serve bread or what kind - again, with a couple of exceptions. You already know when to serve bread and where to get it in your neighborhood.

I don't give you advice on wine (once more, with a couple of exceptions) for two reasons.

First, choosing which wine tastes good with which food is too personal to be prescribed. For goodness sake, forget the ridiculous notion that you only serve white wine with fish and red wine with meats. I've found that many huge, thick, rich Chardonnay or Alsatian Gewurztraminers taste like they were made for grilled wild boar chops and legs of all sorts of animals that roast on my rotisserie. Some light reds match any seafood exquisitely.

Second, I don't know what's available in your neighborhood. What good would it do to prescribe wines, since only the very generic ones- w hich I'd almost never recommend - are always available everywhere?

If you want, you can read the wine magazines, then go to the best wine shop in your region and ask for specific wines. Good luck. Most likely the salesperson will look at you like you're nuts, then explain that the ten cases that made it to the U.S. certainly never made it to his shelves.

So what do you do about wine? Experiment! Try lots of things and use your "gustatory imagination" to figure what enhances what. And nurture a relationship with the salespeople at your favorite wine shop. You may have to try a few advisors to find one whose tastes match yours, but once you've found a salesperson whose advice works for you, keep going to that person. He or she will get to know your tastes, think of you when things you like come in - and maybe even order stuff especially because he knows you'll appreciate it.

Finally, drink wine every day, so that you really learn about it.

serves four
AUDITION MEAL

amuse bouche
FIGS, WRAPPED with FRESH BASIL LEAF and PROSCIUTTO

appetizer
ROASTED ROOT VEGETABLES and HERBED MESCLUN
with CEPES VINAIGRETTE

main course
PAN-ROASTED SALMON FILET
HAZELNUT GREEN BEANS
CONFIT CHERRY TOMATOES

desserts
TARTS OF PEACHES POACHED IN ROSEMARY SYRUP

petit four
PECAN DUSTIES

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Catalogue Information

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