What Uke said.
I’m no chef. I’m just a lowly home cook with a good set of knives and an over-active fantasy life.
I’ll read the book. Meanwhile, remember that a chef’s function varies from kitchen to kitchen. You’re talking about an executive chef for a large kitchen. Many, many chefs cook and otherwise get their mitts dirty.
You, my dear sir, are a chef. Green Bean is a chef,a sex goddess, and a gifted raconteur.
Oh, my! :o
I’m a pretty good cook, as far as I know. IMO, being an excellent cook is mostly a matter of someone else’s perception. And that can easily be remedied by your presentation rather than your method.
But, you do have to learn a lot of things in any event. If you’re not a “from scratch” kind of cook you have to know what things to buy, what things can be combined together, and how to actually combine them. For example, pasta dishes can be made impressive by your choice of off the shelf sauces, additional ingredients, and garnishes. Combined with a vegetable dish and garlic bread you can make a great impression with relatively little effort. Your guests may never know that you didn’t prepare anything from scratch, but they’d still deem you a great cook.
But you can ruin a dish by overcooking the pasta, or combining a portabella mushrooms into a white sauce (makes the sauce turn brown), or undercooking the brown rice. Yes, I know because I’ve done all of these things. So it pays to study a little bit and experiment a lot. And practice.
And of course, if you are a “from scratch” kind of cook, which I like doing, you really do need to understand the effects of the cooking process on your ingredients. For example, when preparing a Hollandaise sauce from scratch you have to know how much to heat the double boiler to prevent the egg yolks from frying in the melting butter. For me that was largely a visual thing, learning to recognize when the pan was too hot by how the butter was melting. It took practice, practice, practice. And in the process I learned a lot more about using eggs so now my custards and creme desserts turn out much better.
I don’t think cooking is difficult. But you do have to pay attention, learn, and be patient. You will make mistakes, and some things will turn out disappointing even though you thought they were great ideas. Just requires that one thing that we all have a marginal tolerance for: work. If you don’t like to work a little you won’t be a good cook.
This is an excellent point I just wanted to drag out and underline, since none of us mentioned it much before.
My wife is a pretty darn good cook, but she comes at it out of this 1970s feminist perspective…there’s an undertone of “this is HOUSEWIFE work, so any idiot can do it. As I am a powerful lady business executive, I’ll just turn my back on the stove and make some important phone calls and review these important reports and OH SHIT, THE PASTA BOILED OVER AND THE VEAL SCALLOPS ARE STUCK TO THE PAN!!!”
Good cooking requires love and attention. Don’t try to whip up a three-course meal with one hand, no matter how many years experience you have.
If you want to be truly excellent, as opposed to excellent-within-certain-healthy-restrictions, don’t fear fat. Fat is the friend of the great cook. Especially butter. Butter is the magic ingredient of so many fabulous foods you don’t wanna know. As the chef who wrote “Kitchen Confidential” reveals, after a great meal at a fine French restaurant, you have almost certainly consumed about a quarter-pound of butter.
stoid
I don’t think becoming an excellent cook is difficult, I believe it just takes mucho practice…it takes practice, for example, to know exactly how much to beat egg whites, or to heat the custard, etc.
One major, major thing I haven’t seen in here…a mention of ALTITUDE. If you’re like me, living at a 4500ft altitude, many of your dishes, especially baking, will look horrible, no matter how much you practice. One must adjust for the altitude. It’s extremely important, especially for baking.
Anybody here need tips for high-altitude baking, please email me, I’d be happy to help…
And here is one of the most important points of all.
Truly good cooking does* require a feel for the food you are preparing. Some of the best advice I’ve ever seen is from Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California (this was one of the very first fine French style restaurants on the entire left coast and she is regarded as one of the inventors of California Cuisine).
She strongly recommends that a person literally get their hands on the food that they are preparing. It is a point that cannot be made strongly enough. It is for this reason that I personally eschew food processors and most of the other common kitchen gadgets that are so popular. The net result of most of these contrivances is that you are separated from your ingredients. Just as robinh mentioned about her pie dough and Waters mentioned about food in general, you must remain in close contact with what is being prepared.
When you do so, you are more closely attuned to the aroma, quantity and especially the texture of the ingredients. This is how you catch a hollow heart potato at the starting gate instead of when it sours a batch of mashed potatoes. This is how you spot the various and inevitable insects and other detritus that can creep into your chow. Most of all, you begin to get what is currently termed a kinesthetic sense of the operations and techniques that you perform. As one of my culinary heros, Jaques Pepin said about the trick of (right handed) knife technique;
“Always make sure that the left hand moves faster than the right.”
Anyone who has marveled at the blindingly fast knife work of a well trained chef need only remember these words about getting your hands on your food. It is this sort of direct involvement that plants the seeds of reflexive ability and inate talent when it comes to most of cooking. Again, stay close to your food as you cook it if you ever want to have a good feel for cooking.
I agree with this for the most part. (of course you left out that awful, awful microwave…God forbid…{shudder})…
That being said, Fish Quenelles or a Fish Mousse would be extremely difficult without the Food Processor…
Tying this back to the cookbook thread that prompted the OP, the spate of books over the last several years that go beyond mere recipes to explain the food science involved have done a lot to make it easier become a good cook in (you should pardon the expression) short order. Harold McGee, Pam Anderson, Shirley Corriher, Cook’s Illustrated magazine, etc. have helped make me a much better cook by explaining the reasons behind the instructions. A lot of the “feel” or “instinct” great cooks have acquired through practice is really memory of what’s worked and what hasn’t, and knowing what makes things work can help acquire that sense more quickly. I know I’ve been cooking with a lot more confidence and success since I started reading these types of books and articles. Obviously, there are physical skills that are dependent on practice, like handling a knife efficiently, but mostly it’s knowledge and understanding.
Much of this information has been well known to professional food scientists for a long time, but hasn’t reaaly been communicated to the interested amateur cook until recently (except as “do as I say” instructions and folk explanations without much solid science to back them up). Now that’s changed, and I’m having more fun in the kitchen than ever before.
[emphasis mine]
Once again, I shall mention the fabulous tome, On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. It is a biochemical treatise on the preparation of food. A thorough reading of this work will forever change your perspective on food and its preparation.
An anecdote regarding the precision science of baking:
Years ago, my parents built our new house out in the country. We moved in next door to some really delightful old-time country folks. Loma was well known around that area of the county for making biscuits that could make a grown man weep. When the church had bake sales, you knew you had to get there early if you were going to get some of Loma’s biscuits.
We were over at their house one day while she was making them, and my Mom asked her what her secret was. She couldn’t give a recipe. She didn’t measure anything; she was doing it all by feel. She told Mom that most people thought she could make a good biscuit (quite the understatement), and that she thought that she could make a good pie, but she was a disaster with cakes. She said that the last one she tried just came out so tough that she got disgusted with it, opened up the back door and just flung it out toward the garden. (Her husband backed her up on this, and claimed that he plowed it up every spring.)
My Mom’s moral to the story: Even if you’re one hell of a good cook, baking is no place for improvisation.
I am an excellent cook… if I have a recipe in front of me. Now, if I could be an excellent cook without following a recipe, I’d consider myself a chef. In my mind, that’s the difference between cooks and chefs. Chefs create excellent food without needing a recipe. It’s like paint-by-number vs. a real oil painting, y’know?
But I’m really good at paint-by-number. 
And I bake the world’s best chocolate chip cookies, if I do say so myself. Come visit me sometime, I’ll whip up a batch, you can have a couple warm from the oven with a glass of milk.
I’m a chef?? I appreciate the compliment but Oh no. I wish I was, and sometimes allow myself the delusion that I am, but no.
It’s somewhat a question of semantics really. But to me, there is a difference. A good cook can follow a recipe to the letter and make it work. An excellent cook can improve on that recipe, or improvise if certain ingredients in the recipe are not available and still make something wonderful. A chef doesen’t need a recipe at all. A chef makes something that has never been done before and makes it perfectly.
As an analogy. A good cook can make really yummy cinnamon rolls following the Betty Crocker cookbook. An excellent cook can duplicate Cinnabon rolls without a recipe, or make a delicious roll even when noticing that they are out of the ingredients in the recipe, etc… using BC as a base, improvising as required to taste (adding spices, changing dough technique, etc…) A chef takes it to the next level and makes an entirely new dough based dessert.
You called? 
I do believe that being a good baker does require a certain attention to detail, as there are some ratios that must be kept for your product to turn out. That’s extremely important. But, as a pastry cook (not chef yet, as I’ll discuss in a moment), I also know when it’s ok to experiment and play with ingredients–it’s a part of the training I’ve gone through. For example, when baking a cake, I’m very exact in what I do, because if I’m off on a ratio, that cake is either going to explode in the oven or become a hockey puck. But, for a dessert like a fruit crisp–heck, I need no stinkin’ recipe for that. It just takes practice and knowing what’s going to work and what just doesn’t.
Being in the business, no truer words have been said. When just regular people ask what I do, I do say that I’m a pastry chef, but there’s no way in hell I’d go around saying that at work. A chef is management in the business, and I’m too fresh out of school to be at that point. I have trained to become a pastry chef, and I’m working my way up the ladder to do so.
The rest of y’all are just plain good ole home cooks. 