Pro Chefs Share Their Hardest Cooking Tasks

Oh. Uh-oh.

No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no.

Oh God.

Already off to a bad start, he got water in the bowl,

which is also the enemy of chocolate tempering.

[conga music]

Once again, we are back in the test kitchen.

And today we're talking about...

Oh, you want me to, the hardest kitchen...

Skills to master.

The hardest thing to do.

Yes.

Very unpredictable with this improvisation, Sohla.

So for me, the hardest things

are the things I haven't spent any time doing.

It's an ongoing process, refining, refining,

it's not so much like this end goal.

There's a sliding scale, right?

There's like cracking an egg one-handed,

which I'm on record as saying I would master in 2019,

still have not done it.

Okay.

I think we can do that.

I had a hard time coming up with something,

I mean there are a lot of things

that I considered that were hard throughout my career,

but I couldn't pinpoint one that was the hardest.

Yeah, I think the hardest skill to master

is like being consistent.

When was the last time you deboned a whole chicken?

You're right. I don't know.

I don't remember.

Jacque Pepin's whole deboned chicken

is the thing that I still can't do

without watching the YouTube.

I don't think people at home filet a fish

because they don't wanna make the mess,

and have like all that skin and scales

all over your counter and your sink.

Learning how to filet a round fish.

The smaller fishes, larger fishes, flat fishes.

Around fish in the salmon family,

as opposed to all the other ones.

But then also, like the goal

for whenever you're breaking down an animal

is to like have little to no waste.

When it's your first time, there's a big chance,

you don't wanna screw it up,

because one you do you can't fix it.

Because you're paying money for your fish, yeah.

[drum music]

I chose something that I can't do,

which is pleating a dumpling

the way that you do for a soup dumpling,

which when we were developing this recipe,

and Claire was working on this,

you're supposed to get 18 folds.

It took her like weeks to get even into the teens,

and I think I tried one day with her,

and I got like 10, and they looked terrible.

[Claire] It doesn't matter which direction you go,

I'm just gonna rotate the dumpling,

creating a series of pleats, and pinching,

and the object just to get 18,

which is a lucky number in Chinese culture.

If we have air in the dumpling

it's gonna expand as it steams,

and it can burst the dumpling.

I'm just gonna take all those edges

and pinch them together to seal,

give it a little bit of a rotation.

And there's your soup dumpling.

I'm trying to do exactly the way Claire described,

where I'm pulling it up and folding it back on itself

to make a pleat, [laughs]

but I'm like not moving.

And the more pleats you make,

the less amount of wrapper there is.

What are you doing?

I don't know.

I'm gonna rush and do it even worse for the second half

because I'm frustrated.

Do you do that?

No, I just slowly like to fail and suffer.

[Carla laughs]

This is not a good one at all.

[Claire] That's a lot better than mine.

Tremendous amount of disappointment.

I think the key with this is repetition,

learning from someone who's gonna correct, you first of all,

and then throwing away your bad ones.

It was like when Molly and I were making mozzarella

and the guys were doing,

every time we thought we made a good one,

they would laugh at us and throw it back into the hot water.

[conga music]

I still find it very challenging

to make the perfect potato chip.

I would say impossible.

It's really hard.

You know what's really funny,

in college for some reason I had this thing

where I was like,

I'm gonna be the guy that makes my own potato chips.

Like you would. [laughs]

And it was never a [beep] good idea.

I think it's always an A for effort sort of project.

It is.

It's actually extremely hard

to get perfectly even slices of potato all the way through.

And so you get a potato chip

that's overcooked on one side,

or undercooked on the other.

And you can like see those in the bag sometimes,

where there's like

one sad, curled-up, brown part of the chip,

and then there's this other part

that's kind of like flacid and...

These big companies

have like these wild industrial machines

that do things that could never be replicated.

That's true. In a kitchen.

Potatoes, like once you slice them,

immediately start to release all their starch,

you need to soak the potato slices in water,

wash away, like physically wash away some of the starch.

Yeah, get the starch off of there.

And then let them dry

before they can even go into the fryer.

Basically, if you don't get rid of some of that starch

in some way or another,

the chip will end up just like cooking through too fast

and it'll burn, it'll just overly brown.

I feel like deep frying, for a lot of people,

can be kind of intimidating, it's a lot of oil,

and then in the case of potato chips, it also matters

like what temperature you're cooking them at.

So like for most foods that are fried,

chicken, french fries, whatever,

like you wanna do that at a standard 350,

but potato chips because, they're so much more delicate,

I would go a little lower.

A little gentler on the heat.

Yeah. [conga music]

I think one of the most difficult skills

is tempering chocolate,

because chocolate plays by its own rules.

And it is temperamental, if you will.

Yeah, for sure.

Even Claire, you know,

has had issues with tempering chocolate.

We're talking about actually getting it to temper

so that at room temperature, you know,

you bring it into a working temperature of like,

for dark chocolate, this will be like 88, or 89 degrees,

and then, you know,

it'll basically like set at room temp.

So melting it

and then adding unmelted chocolate to the melted chocolate

to slowly bring it down.

That is one method

and that's what I think what we'll do here today.

We wanna melt it, but like maybe 90% of the way,

I still want a few bits of chocolate in there

so that we don't bring

the temperature of the chocolate too high.

[Molly] It's sort of like carry-over cooking.

[Chris] Carry-over cooking.

[Molly] It's like 90% melted, you pull it off

and let that extra 10% sort of happen organically.

Exactly.

That's the other thing about tempering chocolate,

it's kind of boring.

It's not like razzle dazzle like, you know, boom.

Unless you're doing. [makes whooshing sound]

Yeah, unless you're doing that, but we're not doing that.

I'm kind of disappointed you're not doing that,

to be honest.

Like, I don't know anything about chocolate.

I don't even eat the damn stuff.

Oh, that's right.

It's like Molly and I do this hilarious thing

where I pretend to forget that she eats chocolate.

People give me crap about not liking bananas,

about not liking peanut butter,

Seafood.

Like to me that's like, no, I seafood's fine,

calm down with that, that's how rumors get started.

Okay, so, so. [Molly laughs]

He hates seafood.

Don't you feel like you're almost there?

Yeah, we're close.

The tempered chocolate that we're adding from the package

is going to start the chain reaction

of like all those constituent fat molecules

in the cocoa butter.

[Molly] Oh boy, big man on campus behind you.

Adam can crack an egg one handed.

He can?

Yeah, you haven't seen him do it?

Ad.

Like really well.

[Molly] Prove it, bro.

Are you tempering the chocolates.

We're tempering.

But in the meantime, it's really boring.

We've got time to kill.

We'd love to see you crack an egg.

It's a lot of pressure.

[egg cracks]

This is the coolest thing about you.

And then you get like that for the drama.

[Chris laughs]

[egg cracks]

That was pretty good Confidence.

Don't let us down. [egg cracks]

Ooh, you did it, you did it.

It's not bad,

but I definitely did not have the flare on that.

We can work on the flare.

Stirring obviously helps cool it,

but you don't want it to cool too quickly

or overshoot your window.

When I feel like I'm in my working temp,

rather than just like laying all the chocolate out,

or starting to dip things,

I'll take like a little parchment like tester strip,

just get a super thin layer.

and let that set up, you know, in like a minute or two.

Should we transfer it into a different bowl

that doesn't have all this heat retained?

Ooh, we're coming, we're flying out.

Okay, that was a great idea.

[gasps] Never get a- Rocks.

What? No, no, no, no, no, no.

We're good, we're good, we're good, we're good.

88, 88.

Oh no, its at 89. Stop.

No, we're good, we're good. It's fine, it's fine.

Jesus, forgot like how jumpy you make me

when you're like shouting and like hollering.

[Molly laughs]

This is how you temper, right?

Yeah, for sure.

All right, so I'm just trying to preserve

the heat we've got in the chocolate right now.

[Chris chuckles]

[Molly blows]

Now I'm like really invested in this.

See, you can't walk away now.

No. Even if it is chocolate.

Yeah, I love chocolate.

Your dedication to the craft won't let you walk away.

What if all the sudden I just love chocolate?

I'm like, I've tempered,

I see to its soul, and now I love it.

That would be great,

because then I wouldn't have to change.

I know.

I'm thinking about going to see a hypnotist about it.

Are you serious? Yeah.

Do you think I should?

[beep] Yeah,

Maybe I'll do a GoFundMe.

Like, can they throw a few other things in there?

Excuse me, I don't have anything else.

What other behaviors are we trying to get out of Molly?

Just the chocolate?

I don't think there's anything else I need to work on.

Just the chocolate, okay Thank you very much.

You've heard it here first.

All right, if it were just like a tiny bit firmer

we'd be able to pop it up.

There it is, there it is.

So we're good.

Tempered chocolate, everybody wins.

It's tempered chocolate.

And Molly's gonna go see that hypnotist,

and it's gonna be fun. I ate it.

Oh my god, it's so-

Toasty, nutty, earthy.

No, nope, no. Chocolatey.

Nope. Okay.

[conga music]

So the dish that took me a really long time to master

was aloo paratha.

So basically you're looking

for like 80% potato to 20% bread,

bad aloo parathas are like too much bread,

too little potato.

The first trick is making sure

your potatoes are like really nice and smooth.

What we found is,

the best way to get really really smooth potatoes

is to grate them.

So once we boil the potatoes, we peel them,

and then you grate them on like basically large holes.

So potatoes are lumpy,

they're gonna poke through the dough,

and it's gonna start to fall apart

when you're stuffing them.

You wanna make big balls of potatoes

and small balls out of your roti.

You almost treat filling parathas with potatoes

like they're dumplings, you have to really seal the top,

like you have to bring all the sides together,

you have to seal.

I usually like twist it a little bit

so that it won't spill out,

because the next part is really hard, which is,

you flip your ball and then you have to roll it out,

and you can't put too much pressure on it,

rolling it too thin that the potato gets exposed,

once a little potato gets exposed

a lot of potato gets exposed.

I usually use a cast iron to do my parathas,

it just seems to work better that way,

a little oil in the pan, you put your paratha in,

as soon as you start to see bubbles and spots, you flip it,

and then you take your ghee or your oil

and you put a spoon full,

and then you just spread it around.

So there's a double basting.

This may not be a laccha paratha,

where like the butter

is literally built into the layers of the dough,

but it's still gonna taste

like really, really luxurious.

It's very frustrating to describe food

and not have it in front of me. [laughs]

I know, I know, now I'm like really craving parathas.

We're just gonna leave this shoot really hungry.

So the hardest thing for me to learn how to make was tahdig,

so that's when you steam basmati rice

and you have like a really crispy bottom,

you can have crispy potatoes at the bottom, crispy pita,

but my favorite is rice.

I love, love, love that dish.

It's so amazing. So good.

And my mother-in-law makes the best tahdig in the world.

I've been trying for years to get it as good as hers,

and she finally told me the secret.

Which is? I'm on the edge of my seat here.

Hold tight, guys. Oh, wow.

A terrible pot.

Oh, huh.

Gotta get good rice, and you gotta get a [beep] pot.

Good rice, [beep] pot, got it.

Rinse the rice really well,

soak it if you have time, 15 minutes will help,

two hours is perfect, don't go more than that.

Just like an al dente pasta, you wanna see the core

in the middle of it.

So you wanna mix like a cup of rice

with a little bit of yogurt, the yogurt helps

to keep your like crispy, ricey cake together.

You lay your rice down,

the rice that you've mixed with yogurt,

and then you pile up the rest of the rice on top

into like a pyramid, you don't want it to touch the sides.

Poke some holes in there,

drizzle over a little like saffron-ey water,

I like to put some ghee. Yeah, okay, yes.

Always ghee.

Now we're gonna steam.

When you're ready to steam, it's also really important

to wrap your lid with a towel,

this is gonna catch the steam

so that the steam doesn't like sink back down

and make the bottom soggy.

Wow.

I'm just learning so many tips and tricks.

I don't know if I'm just going too fast

and there's too much information.

No, no, no, please keep going.

You do a flip. Just just do a flip.

Has it ever just like totally fallen apart?

Yeah, of course.

You can either do it like a cake,

but what I usually end up doing

is I scoop off the rice and then I flip out the tahdig part.

That's it, that's my story.

[conga music]

This is called a cornet, you spell it C-O-R-N-E-T,

but it's French so you don't say the T at the end,

it's cornet, or a paper cone,

and you have to do it a bunch of times or enough times-

Through muscle. To kind of get, yeah.

Through muscle memory. A little halfsie?

You doing halfsie, and then I'm gonna do a small one.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, step by step, Gabby.

So what you did, point up like this? Look.

Yes. Anyway, it's an isosceles triangle.

So then you cut it.

Nice.

You got A, B, C. B as in boy, oh boy.

[Brad] As in Brad.

Boy, boy, as in Brad.

A needs to meet C. Like that?

No, like this, like curl it.

Curl it, and go up.

Okay, so you wanna curl it. And go up.

And touch points? Mm, yes.

A little more.

Hold it like this,

and then get the other one and meet them in the top.

People like Brad cannot make a paper cone, you see?

I can't.

You got it. Brad, you got it.

Hold it here with this there, and in this,

and meet it over there.

And then pull both up until you get like.

Oh.

You got it? No hole in there.

And now you fold it in. In?

To close it, yes. Okay, I like that.

Look, I'm gonna give you a tape.

I think you have to make it once or twice with your hands

to figure that out,

I feel like putting the ABC makes it more visual.

Kind of helpful. Yeah.

Those were some difficult skills, but we mastered them.

Yeah. I mean I hope I did, at least.

With time and practice. And you can too.

Simple technique,

you know, whether it's simple or difficult,

it's just a matter of doing it is how you learn,

not just seeing it once, but doing it.

Trust your elders, basically.

I feel like we both learn these techniques

from our elders. Yeah.

There's a reason for all of their perfect-

Aunties have infinite wisdom.

Yeah.

If you wanna achieve mastery in the kitchen,

you read Bon Appetit, just subscribe to our magazine,

duh. [Christina laughs]

[Molly] Woo, yummy, yummy, yummy.