Cement: A Culinary Disaster

I love baseball. The sport is slow but success is not measured in brief flashes so much as in consistently good play. Participants are always trying to get in the zone or on a hot streak. Whether the goal is to steal bases without being thrown out; maintain a batting streak; or simply show up, suit up, and do your job without complaint; some of the greatest individual achievements in baseball are characterized by repeating the same simple task again and again without fail. I was on a hot streak once. Sure I was never much of a factor in athletics, but in the kitchen I was in the zone. In fact, it took a year and a half of cooking before I faced the wing-clipping force of reality: I flopped my first meal.

I don’t mean to suggest that I was firing out platter after platter of Michelin star food night after night without fail. My sensibilities were rustic and inspired by my dad’s kitchen. The techniques had been drilled in me since a very young age and while I wanted to fashion myself a pioneer, I stuck largely to my roots. The result was not always perfectly executed, but it was at the very least palatable. I kept this streak alive despite changing countries and kitchens and having to mix and match ingredients. I started to feel like I could take on any task in the kitchen and produce with ease.

But when I flopped, it was a strike out on the scale of “Casey at the Bat.” My culinary hubris had led me to believe that I could tackle a dish I had rarely even tasted and certainly never seen prepared in person, a risotto. Risotto is a beautiful dish because it requires patience, skill, and persistence and rewards hard work with a transfiguratively creamy and flavorful dish that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.

But this dish is no simple rustic fare. Making risotto is about coaxing dry roasted rice kernels from their lifeless and exhausted state. With each ladle of stock, you provide a little more sustenance to the grains but you cannot indulge the thirsty outcries of the simmering pot. Like when making fine wine, you must force the kernels to struggle getting just enough water to keep from drying out altogether but not enough to let them drink freely. A good maker of risotto is a cruel chef indeed.

I started off by following the recipe of a chef I was familiar with and who would have met my Dad’s approval. Being a novice at recipe reading, I scanned the ingredient list to make sure that I was stocked and then proceeded to tell myself that I basically knew what to do. I scattered my rice in the bottom of a pan to toast some and went about organizing my other items. Moments later, as the rice began to issue forth a hitherto unknown burnt odor; I felt an overwhelming wave of fear that this dish was not going to taste good. I could imagine the velvety texture of risotto rolling around my tongue and with that in mind I determined that I would make this work. So I began to ladle in a bit of stock for my rice to dine on. I stirred vigorously hoping to integrate the stock and rice as quickly as possible. What remained at the bottom of the pan was a slurry of rice kernels, and a glutinous off-white roux like substance that was the stock mixed with the starches from the grain. Already unappetizing and somewhat thick, I determined to add more liquid to the risotto and to keep on stirring. I repeated this process almost a dozen more times. At each stage, the risotto grew to look less and less like something a person would eat and more like cement from a construction sight. Furthermore, the risotto preparation became an athletic event in and of itself. I stirred violently early on but as the slurry thickened stirring became a more and more difficult prospect until my arm simply gave out on the strain of trying to stir super glue around a pot. My girlfriend, apprehensive spectator but fervent cheerleader from the stands made a disgusted face when she saw my handiwork. She had been so committed to this project, offering support, and like any good fan, sometimes questioning my decision making from afar, that she had become invested in this project. Her look of dejection met mine, and the whole kitchen arena was quiet.

I believe my greatest problem was that I was afraid of under-nourishing the little rice kernel. While it had no mouth, it spoke in the dry crackling at the bottom of the pot when there was no water and in the satisfying gurgles it made when I plied it with stock. The sound of the kernels quietly sipping up the stock in the bottom of the pot became a sound of relief for me. I told myself that I was treating my ingredients well and that they would reward me in turn. Unfortunately, risotto, like a child, sometimes needs to experience tough love. I was not ready at that time in my development as a cook to strike the balance between love and restraint that makes risotto succeed. And so I met my first failure in the kitchen. A gloopy, stiff, concrete that had more business holding together stones on the Great Wall of China than being served as food in my kitchen. It took almost as long to scrape it out of the pot as I had spent making it.

You can’t always hit a home run. Sometimes you swing and you miss and just like for Casey, it is when you are trying your hardest to impress. But good athletes not only know how to preserve hot streaks, they know how to shake off a bad stretch. And so I have since started the streak over. 100 days on the job since the last food related accident. And after a few more years of seasoning in the minor leagues of cooking, maybe I will be ready again to step up to the plate and knock risotto out of the park, or at least get a hit.