Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

between two fingers and held my wallet up in the other hand. In slow motion I lowered the pit into the wallet like a mom pretending a spoonful of food is an airplane while feeding her baby.

We both laughed. I knew I had been beat.

DJ has never asked to see the pit. It sits, waiting for him, in my wallet.

I worked as a prep cook for months. I was patient. But I was anxious to move up, or to at least know that I would move up eventually.

I approached chef Keller and expressed my concerns of being passed over or left behind as an eternal prep cook. A soft smile spread over his face and I imagined that he must have been thinking how I was very young, presumptuous, and naive. I was only twenty-two years old, and he basically told me as much. “Be patient,” he said. “You don’t realize it yet, but you are learning so much right now.”

I nodded my head in agreement, but I didn’t agree.

I wanted a life on the line.

I wanted to burn my forearms on the oven door and dig myself out of a giant black hole of tickets every night at seven. I wanted to feel the adrenaline. I wanted to be great.

“Eventually, Grant, we’ll move you into a chef de partie position.”

I was a commis at The French Laundry for eleven months. It was the most important period of my culinary development. I was surrounded by products that I had never seen before, let alone worked with on a daily basis. I learned how to cook pig ears and trotters, duck tongues, cockscombs, sea urchin, and veal brains. I was exposed to traditional techniques as basic as making veal stock and kneading the perfect pasta dough to more advanced preparations like cleaning foie gras for torchons or properly macerating short ribs in red wine, clarifying the marinade, and flaming it before the cooking process. I spent months making the innovative, savory oyster-flavored tapioca sabayon for the “Oysters and Pearls” caviar dish.

Chef Keller would take time out of his day to personally demonstrate techniques required to complete preparations. Many of these would be the more traditional or obscure techniques for preparing offal. Ingredients such as hearts, brains, sweetbreads, liver, trotters, cheeks, gizzards, tripe, and tongue typically require numerous preparatory steps and long cooking times over several days. These are projects, not simply cooking, and it was necessary to start early in the morning before the chefs de partie would fill the stoves with other elements of the daily mise en place.

Chef Keller was passionate about these preparations and loved teaching us how to cook them.

One December morning Chef came into the French Laundry kitchen carrying a beautiful antique copper brassier. He hefted it onto the counter, glanced at me with squinted eyes that had seen only three hours of sleep, and said, “Morning, Chef. Do you have the mise for the tripe ready?”

Three days earlier we had received a delivery of tripe. Chef Keller told me he would show me how to process it in the coming days, and he started me that day by giving me specific instructions, which I wrote in a notebook, on soaking and rinsing the tripe. This series of purging required pounds of salt, gallons of fresh water, several large containers, and about three days. When he brought in the brassier I thought we were ready to go with the final step. Little did I know that we were only halfway to the finish.

The task is not enchanting—the goal is to clean the lining of a bovine stomach. Despite the unglamorous work, or perhaps because of it, I could see the care and determination of his effort. Chef Keller understood something about the end result that I could not at this point in my career. Maybe he really liked tripe. But I think the point of all of this tedious work was to transform something that by definition is poor, worthless, or offensive.

And so we kept at it: repeatedly soaking the tripe and changing the water, scrubbing it with salt, scraping the lining, blanching repeatedly, and trimming after each step. Finally, after days of work, we had something that looked appealing. The pure-white honeycombed texture that was revealed was a satisfying conclusion to the effort. It was like waxing a car by hand. And we hadn’t even cooked it yet.

The cleaned and polished tripe was packed carefully into the brassier between layers of carrot, onion, and celery—or mirepoix—that were added in an alternating, specific order. White wine, vermouth, and aromatics were added and the pot was placed in the oven for hours, only to be removed, repacked with fresh mirepoix and wine, and cooked again. We repeated this process three times.

Five days after the tripe arrived it was finished.

Every step along the way chef Keller was there demonstrating, watching, correcting, and guiding. He literally stood over my shoulder. It felt like I had been taken under his wing, like I was building the GTO all over again.

But this was different. Chef Keller was not just teaching me, he was protecting the tripe. He wanted that worthless piece of a cow to complete its transformation perfectly. And he was willing to get up early every morning to see that it did.

Chef Keller always talked about thinking “big picture.” He drilled that into all of the cooks at The French Laundry. With the tripe, he knew that if he showed us the right way to prepare it, he would be passing down not just a recipe but also a philosophy of cooking.

And chef Keller knew that someday, later in my career, I would pass along that same ethos.

I became good friends with Eric and would tell him regularly that if I didn’t get moved to the line soon I would have to leave. Eric was on the meat station at the time and had worked nearly every station in the restaurant. He had a