Hell's Kitchen: why the incompetence?

[Just_Some_Guy]

Yeah, Kitchen Nightmares is great since unlike other so many other reality shows there’s something really at stake and they’re trying to do something positive about it. Ramsey can still go around being a jerk but he’s a jerk who’s heart is in the right place.

Hell’s Kitchen on the other hand uses the standard reality show gimmick of finding unlikable people, dangling a prize in front of them, and letting everyone be a jerk.

[BurnMeUp]

I really dislike the Fox version because of the fact that he’s always buying them a whole new kitchen or a whole new dining room. The UK version he just goes in to help them out, maybe gets them a new sign.

[VinylTurnip]

@jtgain

The editing of this show is worse than any reality show I’ve ever seen. I’m used to the misleading segments into commercial. They make it look like something is really happening and it never does.

I noticed (and was irritated by) the same thing while watching an episode of “Last Comic Standing” last week. Before each commercial they’d imply that some kind of mental breakdown/screaming match/physical confrontation/mass nude self-immolation was going to take place, and when the show resumed absolutely nothing happened. What an annoying convention.

Granted, the show was pretty lame, so I can see why they’d resort to cheap ploys to prevent flipping.

[Chimera]

@jtgain

Cooks at Denny’s don’t have a guy screaming at them, throwing food at them, and breaking plates near them while calling them a bunch of donkeys.

On the plus side, all that broken china would come in handy for a little throat slashing. Yours or his, depending on your mood. :eek:

[ouryL]

@Ferret Herder

I wouldn’t say it’s hard to make, but a classic risotto is labor-intensive. You very slowly add a bit of broth to the arborio rice in the pot, and stir until the broth is absorbed. Then add a bit more broth, stir, repeat until the rice will not absorb any more broth. This not only gets a lot of flavor into the rice but also “beats up” the very starchy short grains of rice and makes it very creamy and rich through releasing that extra starch from the outside of the grains. At home, this can take 15-20 minutes of near-constant attention for me to make this process happen. I can step away to put something else in the oven, stir something else, etc., but I have to always remember to quickly return to the rice to give it a good stir and add more broth if it’s ready for it.

Now they may or may not use that exact method in Hell’s Kitchen, but even if all the broth goes in first, there’s bound to be a lot of stirring to get the best creaminess.

This is why burning the rice was so bad, because it takes so long to get a risotto made under standard methods, and also because this means someone was definitely not paying attention to the rice. In this case, it sounds like two people weren’t paying any attention since it was on the wrong station for an hour, and I’d think I’d notice if someone else’s pot was there for that long.

Elton Brown on Good Eats claims that stirring isn’t as important as using a really heavy pot and watching it so it doesn’t burn.

[ouryL]

@Captain Amazing

It’s also because of Ramsay. Different foods, obviously, take different amounts of time to cook. So, in a lot of kitchens, if something gets done early, it stays in the kitchen in a warmer until everything else is done. Ramsay doesn’t believe in that, though, because that’s not that good for the food. So, in Ramsay’s kitchens, and on the show, the food all has to get done at the same time. This requires an enormous amount of coordination between the people in the kitchen, and if they don’t cooperate or communicate well, or if one of the dishes gets screwed up, it can cause major delays, because the whole order is now ruined and has to be redone.

BTW I has never eaten a good risoto.

[ralph124c]

@ouryL

BTW I has never eaten a good risoto.

Restaurant chefs DO NOT make real risotto-they do it the easy way-with heavy cream! Yeb, stir in enough heavy cream into your cooked rice and musrooms, and your “risotto” tastes great! It is cheaper than standing around and stirring all day!

[dropzone]

I cannot imagine a good risotto. The more I know about it the more it sounds like puke on a plate.

I saw part of one episode of Kitchen Nightmares and I realized the real Gordon Ramsey is the soul of patience because I’d’ve effing killed everybody working at that restaurant.

[Cervaise]

I make excellent risotto. I have had people tell me, “This isn’t just the best risotto I’ve ever had, this is one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.” So it can be done.

@Manduck

I Read Somewhere that homemade risotto is nearly always better than restaurant risotto for this reason. Restaurant cooks have too many balls in the air to hover over a risotto for 15 minutes, so they don’t get the texture right, even in good restaurants.

The thing is, a restaurant kitchen doesn’t produce risotto the same way a home cook does. At home, it’s 25 minutes start to finish, if you’re not doing anything else: heating the broth/stock, melting the butter, softening the onions/shallots/garlic, adding the rice, stirring, stirring, adding the wine, stirring, stirring, and then beginning the infusion of the broth, stirring, stirring, before it’s ready to serve.

25 minutes in a restaurant, from ordering to delivery, is an eternity. Risotto is not made from scratch, even if the kitchen has the luxury of multiple courses (i.e. serving an appetizer and a salad will buy you time before the risotto comes out), because sometimes you do need to get the risotto on the table in 10 minutes.

So what restaurants will almost invariably do is par-cook the risotto. They’ll start a huge batch of it, fifteen or twenty servings worth, or more depending on the size of the joint and the number of tables they’re expecting to turn, long before dinner service begins. If the house recipe calls for four infusions of stock/broth, they will do three, and then set the whole thing aside. When the order comes in, they scoop out a serving’s worth, put it in a pan to heat it, and after a minute or two, dump in the last quantity of broth. If there’s another component to the risotto (shrimp, asparagus, mushroom, whatever), this gets quick-sauteed during this stage, before getting combined at the last minute. They can thereby turn the order around in five or six minutes, instead of the 25-30 minutes the dish takes when made from scratch.

Naturally, this can produce a fairly wide band of quality in the finished plate. The big batch of parcooked risotto continues to evolve while it sits around; a serving from the end of its lifespan will be mushier and less specific in taste than one from the beginning. (And this is probably where the “is there cream in this?” question comes from: the longer the rice sits in liquid, the more the starch is leeched out, and turns into gummy sauce. No halfway decent restaurant deliberately uses cream in their risotto. It simply isn’t done in good kitchens. It’s a trick of the truly shitty cook to shortcut the starch development, and if you’re going to a restaurant does this, you have shitty taste in food.)

Just, y’know, for the record, and stuff.