This post is the first of a new category: stories about the kitchen. It is also the first guest post to appear on ThinkEatBeHealthy.com, written by fellow professional chef and Culinary Institute of America graduate Heidi A. Jurka. I hope you enjoy this chef’s view of the common table!
Tables
A kitchen work table
Tables are my pallet, my canvas, my muse. As a chef, they are essential to my profession and a lousy, broken one can ruin your day. I have worked on countless tables of various descriptions in all kinds of environments. There are tiny, dainty, spindly legged tables wedged into pastry kitchen corners, or just an old door plopped on creaky wooden sawhorses, outside, used for a massive open flame BBQ. Each one will affect your mood and outlook for the day and task.
Stainless steel tables are the good, sturdy, clean-slate workhorses in the busy, hot kitchen. They are tough, often loaded with cutting boards pounded and hacked upon to prepare large, heavy joints of meat. Steel tables are also used to a good scorching, relentlessly jammed up against roaring ovens. Burning hot, overloaded roasting pans and huge stock pots are routinely and brashly slammed down upon them. Stainless tables will stand up to a lot of weight and careless roughhousing. Yet they also show off a row of bright white plates cradling delicate salad greens to advantage, the perfect backdrop to accentuate crisp, colorful vegetables and fanciful garnishes. Stainless steel tables welcome all and beckon cheerfully with their bright, shiny, smooth surfaces, full of anticipation for unlimited culinary possibilities.
Butcher block wood tables are soft and hard at the same time. Tattooed by wear and often very heavy, they hide old secret family recipes and stories in their dark stains, deep grooves and scarring burns. Though firm and sturdy to the knife, wood gives when you chop on it and doesn’t dull the blade. With their brown skins, soft weathered shoulders and bulky figures, wood tables feel alive and maternal. They forgive the clumsy cook with poor knife skills who endlessly jabs them like an unruly child… Memories of culinary triumphs are savored, etched in the wood. Kitchen catastrophes receive safe harbor. Butcher block wood tables know how to keep a secret, they have seen it all.
Making sandwiches at an outdoor table
A cool, white marble table top excites the senses. It is for candy making, chocolate, bread dough and cookies. It’s ready for Fun! Sugar and spice and everything-irresistibly delicious..It makes you think about Christmas, Thanksgiving, and your mouth will salivate while working on it. The deep, tantalizing fragrances of cinnamon and exotic Madagascar vanilla beans stimulate childhood memories. Pans of luscious pecan sticky rolls and delicately scented chocolate-lavender truffles tease the imagination. The smell of caramelizing sugar speeds up your pulse, anticipating the movement as dangerous molten sugar spreads out across the cold marble top before you. You work it quickly but carefully before the marble cools the candy down. Cellular memories of nasty, deep, sugar burns from the past keep you well focused on your task. Yeast, sugar and flour can create magic, a living organism, which breathes as it lies on the marble, clothed and tamed before you beneath a dusting of flour.
When you encounter a new workspace, and a new table, it feels like a collaboration. You work together to produce the food sometimes in tight, hot, restrictive spaces, and always on a deadline. Your table is your steed and often you must ride it hard and long on a busy day. It is with real satisfaction that you soap it down and wipe it clean, sanitized at the end of your shift. You walk away, leaving the table behind. But it waits… For the next shift, the next chef, to bring food to life upon its surface.