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Speaker 1: At the Culinary Institute of America, there is an instructor named Michael Pardis who is a total BMF when he gets behind the stove. How old are you you've been cooking for money? I've been cooking so though I was fourteen. Wow, so looking at fifty years closing in. Michael Partis came of age in the seventies, looked like Ted Nugent when he began his lifetime of cooking. He's cooked all over the world, from California to New Orleans, to Singapore, to Brazil to Vietnam, and always with the brilliant mind and a vast curiosity about cultures and food, a curiosity and ingenuity reflected by the coolest cooking tools in his kitchen. What we're looking at, I know this audio, but what we're looking at is is a walk line with six watchs. We have then three larger walks which can be used for doing larger batches of surd fried things or soups or braises. They range in wi about it from about twenty four inches about thirty inches wide. Melt coming down here, we have a Chinese roasting oven rods across the top that you can hang things like ducks or chickens, or racks or ribs that you want to roast. There are shelves that you can put wire mesh racks on and they're likewise at things roasting slowly hammose racks. That large wooden tub that we have here, it's called to hung here. It looks like a barrel. It's about thirty six inches wide and about ten inches deep. It's made of um wood that would no he sues, no fasteners, no blues, no nails. Each piece of wood is it cut and hand fit and there and there are a couple of copper bands around the exterior that them in place. Uh. That's specifically for cooling and seasoning of sushi rights. Also partis was one of the most important instructors I had during my time at the Culinary Institute, teaching that began on day one in skills. Cut myself in the first day, as as many cooks will do when they're nervous or in an unfamiliar place. You got me a band aid, shaking your head, who is this knucklehead journalists? Um? But three days later I cut myself again. You said you need and I said, no, I gotta. I bought a band aid, and he said, you bought you brought a band aid because you expected to cut yourself, and you kind of shook your set your head and amusement walking away and said, now that's mesing. Plus that was funny. I'm sure I managed it somehow turn it into a compliment. Welcome to From Scratch. My name's Michael Rohlman, and I've spent the last twenty years in professional kitchens, writing about and with the world's best chefs. From Scratch is a podcast about cooking. In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one non chef about the same theme. The great thing about the cooking life is that you never stop learning. In this show, I want to go to the edges of what I know and then go beyond together with you, with all chefs, home cooks, and everyone who cares about food and cooking. Today's theme is misan blass, literally put in place, without a doubt, the most fundamental philosophy in the kitchen. One reason I'm so glad to talk with Partists is because he's great at breaking complex systems down to their simplest components. For his students at the Culinary Institute of America usually referred to the CIA. If you're going to be a good, solid cook anywhere in the world, you need to understand that there are seven basic cooking techniques. There's fry, there's roast, there's grill, there's saute or stir fry. There's braise or stew. It was the same. There's poach, and there's steam. Those are the only ways to cook. That's it. That's all you got. Anything else is an offshoot of one of those, like suvit is poach. Suvit is is poach. Yeah, you know, so all this molecular astronomy stuff, which I'm I think it's part of the evolution and some of the things like evolution. You know, we have a tail when we need a tail, and eventually tail drops off or the tail becomes really useful when we keep the tail. I think there's a lot of things in modernist cooking that will prove to be useless, tales that will fall off if they haven't already, Like remember the anti griddle that but they have a life of a about three years. Nobody knows that anymore. But then you know that, you know, hydroco vidal suspensions that are proving to be really useful. Uh, you know so. But everything is an offshoot of these seven basic cooking techniques. So if you know those, then you also have to be aware that you only have five basic tastes, and that's sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and new mommy. Most people don't make their food taste bitter on purpose unless they're going to balance out the bitterness with some of those other based tastes. So right, I was gonna ask you to find you said, first thing, be aware of those foretaste you dropped off bitter? Um, because we don't. We don't like better as a rules. Sometimes if we haven't, we well we like coffee and some gravies or something like that. Um. When you say be aware of them, just what do you mean to be aware of them? Okay? Well no, First of all, a lot of people confused bitter and acidic. Give someone will tell someone to suck on a lemon, their face will get all puckered up and they'll go, that's really bitter. And my response is no, no, no, you know here's you know, there's a caffere lime we've stuck on that, that's bitter. Uh. People have trouble differentiate they they're not clear on what that is, So that that's the first step. You have to be aware of what they really are, and then you have to be aware of how you can manipulate them to make a balance. To quate. I look at it almost as a mathematical thing. It's an equation. One of those tastes by itself is rarely appealing. Keep your finger in salt and okay, we like salty, but you don't want to put a whole tablespoon of salt in your mouth, or even a half a teaspoon of salt in your mouth. But if you add a couple of drops of lime juice to a little bit of salt, and you add a little bit of sugar to the salt and lime juice mix, then you've balanced that out. So if you know the seven cooking techniques, if you're familiar with if you know the four tastes, then you can cook anything anywhere. No, that's great. You know. I love breaking things, breaking complex process, processes that seemed complex, breaking down to their fundamental components. And you've just done it with seven and four and I love that. Put that together with measing plus and there's nothing you can't do in the kitchen. Absolutely. I I do an experiment with my students on the second day of class. The second day, we're tasting twenty components different ingredients from around China, and I am one part of the tray of cups of ingredients. There's there's soy sauce, and then another section there's a price vinegar and black rice vinegar, and then in another section there's some ginger. As we're working through, I will stop, I'll put down empty cups in front of everyone, and I'll say, okay, take a take a teaspoon out of the soy sauce and cup number one and put it in the empty cup. Take a teaspoon of black vinegar, which is sweet and sour. Put that in with the soy sauce. So the soy sauces salty and new mommy, and the black vinegar is sweet and sour. And then I said, now take a piece of ginger and drop it in there and just just mash it around with this spoon, taste it, and everybody uniformly goes, wow, this is really good. And if they've got any experience eating Asian food, most of them identify it as a dumpling, you know, dipping sauce for dim song. But that's how easy it is if you understand this concept. We've got sweet and sour in the vinegar, we've got salty new Mommy in the soy sauce. We've got a regionally appropriate aromatic. We put them together. You just made a totally authentic Northeastern Chinese condiment without a recipe. It's that easy. You just have to think about it. You just have to think about it. One of the first things Partist does is ask his students to set a timeline for their day every day, not just what they will do, but the order in which they'll do those tasks, what tools they'll need at their station, and even a diagram of their station for each day. But essentially the timeline is it's a sequence of events that makes sense that you should be able to condense into bullet points. And let's say I'm going to enter the kitchen at seven am. The first thing I'm gonna do is put a pot of water on the boil, because i know I'm going to have to blanch some cream beans. While the water is coming to boil, I'm going to clean the green beans and get some ice water and get a calendar, and so when the water boils, I won't have to stand there and wait for water to boil. I can blanch the green beans. I won't have to run for ice water when they're finished. The ice water is already there. And then I can move on to the next thing in my sequence, because I've laid it all out. Artis encounters a whole range of students who come with a range of intellects and skills, from teenagers just out of high school to older students wanting to enter the culinary field. Interestingly, some of his biggest challenges are younger students who arrive already with natural intelligence and skills. And I'll tell them, you know, I think the problem is that you suffer from what I call too smart for your own good. And they usually cock and eyebrow, and I said, spare with me. See if this sounds familiar. How old are you? Okay, you went all the way through high school with a solid B average. You never had to crack a book. Maybe before midterms or finals, you might have crammed for an hour or two before does, but generally speaking, you didn't have to do anything intellectually rigorous. And you scooched by with a B. And I almost always if I'm having this conversation, I get an affirmative nod. And I said, you could have gotten a's, but that would have required some work, and what the hell? These are pretty good and if you can get to be without having to do any work, why bother stretching for the A? And again I get an affirmative nod, and I say, the problem with that is it ends somewhere between high school and college or your first year two and work. Because while you were coasting to get a bee, there were other people who were working their tails off to get that B, and they developed a work ethic to be at the same level that you were when you weren't trying at all, so you didn't have to train yourself to have a work ethic. And now they're as educated as you are because they got the same grade that you did, but they also have a ethic to take them to another level. And you're kind of stuck wondering why this coasting stuff doesn't work so well for you. Now you're clearly bright enough to have skated through on a bee. Imagine what you would what would happen if you could intersect that intellect with a work ethic, you would rise very fast, very far. But if you're content to stay the way you are, I predict that three to five years from now, you're gonna be subordinate to a su chef or a chef who's not as smart as you, and you're gonna be grinding your teeth every day wondering why this moron is your boss and you're not. And the reason is because you never trained yourself to put your intellect to its best advantage. Measing plus, as I said, literally means put in place. In the kitchen. It often refers to your station set up, that you have everything in place, all the ingredients and tools you need to get the job done, everything in its place at your station and in your mind. What really does means implust mean well, I literally, I think that translates the things in place. Everything is in place, and it should apply to everything physically being in place. So your ingredients are lined up in the order that you're going to use them, and the equipment that you're going to use is all wind up and in proper order to be used as required. And it should extend from the very beginning of the cooking process to the sending out of the plate to the dining room. When you get up in the morning, do you get dressed before you take a shower or do you take a shower before you get dressed. It really breaks down to something that fundamental. So apply that logic to everything else you do and you'll find that you're not wet all the time. Um. One of the things that Thomas Keller said to me as we're talking about mesing classic says, also get anything out of your field that you don't need. I mean, if you're at home, take the take the car keys off the counter, and the glass of milk that was left unfinished. Get because that will trip you up. And if you don't have everything in place, you're necessarily going to have a break in your pace or your flow where you're going to have to go and get whatever it is that you're missing, and that's going to interrupt that one sequence. But you repeat those interruptions over the course of an evening service several times or more, and you don't have a cohesive flow. You don't have calm, you don't have uh focused attention, you have so thing that made border on chaos. So take another piece of paper, and I'll do it because I've got I just washed my hands and make another layer. Who's why have you passed me another sheet tracks yet? Top? Who's making a jep tay today? The stur fried noodles? Make sure that you divide your music plasts into four batches. Right. Um, Hey, guys, if you've got some time and you want to start helping to do some handful of noodles, I'm gonna start doing that now. The benefit it's economic, but it's also psychic. I'm sure I didn't make it up. I probably read it or heard it someplace. But I think structure sets you free, is the way I like to say it. If you build yourself a framework within which to operate, and you have a routine system of habits that need to be done just to get through the day, after they become ingrained habits, they start running in the background like an operating system on a computer, and you don't need to pay attention to them. And when those things become automatic, then you're free to be creative, and free to be intuitive, and free to explore an experiment because you're not living under the stress of imminent chaos. To have everything in place physically is big part of it. But in order to have everything in place physically, you also have to have everything in place mentally. So that means being aware of what your physical means and plus should be, but also aware of how you're feeling, how the people around you are feeling, how you're going to respond, what could possibly go wrong that might throw you off your track for a couple of seconds, said, how you're going to recover from that. You should go into service with all your physical needs and plus but also sort of a centered nous on a focused attention that's not easily disturbed or put out of place. Because if you've got the physical and the internal pieces all wind up the way they should be, it becomes a pleasurable creative experience. How does it apply to our lives generally? And I know you've experienced this because we've talked about your development as a as a writer, uh and your ability to discipline yourself and sit down at a certain time of day and crank out so many words. And if you don't have the mental needs and plus and you don't have that operating system running in the background, you couldn't be as prolific as you are. If you take the time to have focused attension and way everything. Oh, it doesn't matter if you are cooking or doing some other manual task or if you're doing an intellectual task. If you don't have everything laid out and you don't have a sequence in which you plan to work, everything becomes really random. And when things are random, they become chaotic. As an example of how to break down something from chaotic to achievable, Chef Partis used a Chinese noodle dish to explain I'll have a version of it on my site Roman dot com. It's got a fascinating noodle technique from Western China I've never seen before, and a daunting array of ingredients, which is why it gives us a look into Partis's mind. How he thinks He had a dishtion a Manhattan restaurant this noodle dish and wanted to recreate it for his class. He explored the internet found various versions that intrigued him, but they seemed unnecessarily confusing. It seemed really daunting because there were so many words and so many ingredients and seasoning mix A seasoning mix, B seasoning. There are five seasoning mixes listed, so I was like, okay, I can. I can clear away all the clutter and break it down into its component parts, and then look at the components and see which sequence of preparation seems the most logical and stress free, and then arrange things accordingly. When you're reading a recipe, it's dense with text. The information that you need is often surrounded by a lot of other superfluous verbage that is part of the narrative story but not essential to the preparation of the dish. So you have to read through the method and take out the important parts and then put those on your timeline in bullet points. Then write a bullet list of tasks. Task. What am I what's the specific task pre heat of in three seventy assemble mariner trimbone lamb equipment? What do I need to trim the lamb? I need a boning knife. I need a cutting board. I need a matt under my cutting word to give it from sliding. I need a container to put the finished trimmed lamb in and a container to put the unusable trim. You know so, but you're I'm getting rid of all that excess burbage and I'm just cutting it down to I've got a streamline. What am I doing? What equipment do I need to do it? What ingredients do I need to do it? And bullet point checklist. First, do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, then do this. Stop. That component is done. You don't really have As long as you know how to use a knife, you you don't really need a dense set of instructions. You just go, Okay, do I have these things? Do I have these things? Do I have these ingredients? Okay? Just check check check check. Okay, that's fun. Put it on tray, put it in the cooler. Next check check, check, check check. Okay. Now that's done. Now I've got this long list of things, but they're all complete, they're all clearly labeled. Now I've only got lamb marinade, five different identified and labeled spice layers, and the appropriate equipment to finish the dish. And in terms of timing, this dish is instructional as well. You'll see how he breaks down a recipe into tasks, which begins several days in advance, all in preparation for the moment. The stir fry dish begins from start to finish five minutes and it's time to eat. Part of the beauty of planning, preparation, and organization a k A really good meansing plus partis gives us a beautiful circumstance. From his own experience the situation, and that has happened to other chefs, he knows that is a perfect description of the effectiveness of the philosophy of me. But most commercial kitchens run on gas, so if the power goes out, it's dark, but you can still cook because you just turn on the gas. So most chefs that I know keep a handful of half a dozen or so headlamps in their file cabinet in their office. On that weird night when the power goes out, all you do is going to your office, grab a bunch of headlamps, past them out to all your line cooks, tell the Matred to pour everybody a comp class of champagne, take a couple of deep breaths, and just keep on cooking. Because everything is in place. You don't need it to be fully illuminated, but you do need to see what's immediately in front of you. So you've got a headlamp, you've got heat, and if you stick out your right hand at a right angle. That's where the salt and pepper always is is, so you can assume that it's going to be there tonight too. And so what to everybody else, a chaotic mess is for you, it's just like, yep, planned this, and you get a standing ovation from the nining room. Everybody goes home talking about what a great experience they had at your restaurant, because even though the power went out, all they did was poor free glass of champagne for everybody, and things just went on like they were supposed to. Arguably, had it not been from Michael Pardis what he taught me in the kitchen, I might never have been able to go on to write the books that I did. When we come back, we talked to a man who had spent his life in the music industry who became so interested in the culinary world and the concept of mesing plus that he wrote a book about it. Dan Charnis was one of the first writers for The Source magazine, which is the world's longest running hip hop periodical. He worked at Profile Records, home of Run DMC, and for Rick Rubin at Deaf American, where he worked on Sir Mix, A Lot's Baby got back. He even briefly ran for his Whittaker's music label. He then got his masters in journalism before deciding to write The Big Payback, fascinating history of hip hop that became the basis for the movie The Break for VH one. The Big Payback is a forty year history of the business of hip hop. It's how this obscure New York street culture that nobody knew about and nobody cared about went in forty years from being nothing to being the world's predominant global pop culture. So it's not so much the story of the artists, it's the story of the people behind the scenes who made this scene happen. How interesting, um, and quite a world that you explored and quite different from the world that I want to talk to you about today, which we share fascination with absolutely. How did you move from hip hop to misemplas and the world of the professional kitchen? You know, as part of my work in the music business, I became an executive. I became a vice president at the age of I don't know, twenty something like that. How old. How old am I now? I'm fifty one? Okay, So this is a while back. This is in the middle of the nineties, and uh, you know, suddenly I was responsible for budgets, I was responsible for people. I was responsible for attending meetings. I was responsible for strategy, but not trained, and so being the person I am, and being a virgo if you believe in in uh, horoscopes, my wife is into that, and yes, she will tell me what exactly what that means. Pre I'm predisposed to all things having to do with the organizations. So I became, you know, a fan of books by Stephen Covey on how to organize your life according to basic principles. I think, you know, Dave Allen had you know, getting things done system, but none of them really stuck, and none of them seemed to really help me with the larger corporate culture. And it just so happened that at the tail end of my run as an executive in the music business, I read your book The Making of a Chef, and I read Anthony Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential. Those two books, for me, you know, really kind of birth the modern chef narrative as sort of a distinct genre from cookbooks. It was the first time I'd ever heard of me on plots. Why would I have ever heard of it, you know, being in my circle. And I was, you know, fascinated by this in the same way that I was fascinated by you know, watching like a movie like The Godfather, you know. And let me see if I can explain why, like chefs and mafios have something very very interesting and common is that they lead these sort of wild, edgy lives, and yet they're bound by a code. They're bound by the idea that you're responsible for everything, that you're responsible to the people around you, that you're responsible all of you to keep that goddamn floor clean, that you're all going to pick up a broom when necessary, that you're all going to keep your station clean. These are all things that you know, I learned just from reading. But it was fascinating to me because all of those ethics seemed to be absent from the corporate world in which I worked. I believe when you and I first met, I told you I was looked just looking for a book that elaborated on Nissan Plus, and there wasn't one. Uh. And at the same time, I'm actually you know, interested in you know, moving on to my second book and thinking about what I'm going to write. At some point I just had the audacity to think that I could, perhaps as a journalist, research this really well and write it. And so that was the genesis of the book, Work Clean. And how did you begin? Where did you start? How did you do your research? How did you become an expert? It started as an NPR piece, like a radio piece, um that I had pitched, and you know, NPR seemed to be pretty excited about, so I you know, one of the first places I went was the you know, culinary in To of America, which is a hundred miles north of New York and obviously the place where you learned. And the most amazing thing about that is I got to meet all of those people, a lot of those people that I met in your book, which was incredible, you know. But Charnis didn't stop at the CIA. He spent years talking to every cook and chef he could, collecting hundreds of interviews taking means on plus. After talking to students, talking to UH chef instructors, talking to working line cloaks, talking to working chefs, that means on plus seemed to neatly sort itself out into about ten different ingredients or principles. What would you say, Um, we're the top three of those ten that were most meaningful to you, either as a life lesson or as a great story from a talented chef for a charismatic chef. I mean, I can't now. I think. First one that comes to mind, well, planning is prime. That's the first one. Uh, you know, planning is private. Planning is the basis of everything that a good cook and a good chef does. First of all needs on plus. That word means right, which means the place it's also comes. It's the same Latin root as the word commitment. Right. I had no idea. I don't remember reading that in your book, Wow, commiering right. So, uh, the commitment really is at the core of means on plus. It's a commitment to h to planning and to working your plan. Our well being, our financial, our physical well being depends on being able to do our job properly, and we don't. Some of us don't even make lists at the beginning of the day. So we all know how to do that. Um. And yet it's that commitment that really makes the difference between success and failure and and the difference for cooks and chefs is that they have no choice. Right, you must man because dinner is at six, and if it's not ready by six, you can't say, uh sorry, uh yeah, we're not open, you know, come back at seven, come back at eight you're done. Yeah, you are worse than host and you may be without a job. That's right. So planning is that the core? What would you say would be another of the key principles? Well, I think we mentioned this before cleaning as you go, making cleaning an organization, a part of your movement, not just something you do before or after. You know. The way that means this, these principles flow. It starts with planning is prime, and then the second one is arranging spaces and perfecting movements, you know, making sure that you have everything arrayed around you in order to do your work, so that your feet can be planted and you're just moving fluidly, but and there's nothing to prevent there's nothing to trip you up, there's nothing to slow you down. And so then the third ingredient flows from that. Cleaning if you go, is a kind of commitment to moving in a way that leaves you with nothing to clean afterwards, that you just you start it and you finish it. Right, these small little actions you wipe the board down and you're ready for the next thing. Tell me about the next one. Making first moves. So, making first moves essentially a commitment to starting right away, to not waiting until things are perfect, to taking that first step, because the first step is always the hardest um and that once you commit your body in some small way to what your mind has planned, that brings you much closer to actualizing it. Sometimes making first moves can be put the thing that you want to do on your calendar. Don't just say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay and leave it on your lips. No, actually, all right, if you have this writing project to do, put an hour on your coundar just to look at the blank page even and jot a few ideas down. That in itself is a first move. And then, of course the opposite of that is finishing actions, which is at some point you do have to finish and it can't be perfect, and that there is a continuum. Right. Think of it as like a line with two arrows on it, and on one side is perfect execution and the other side is perfect delivery. And if you focus on perfect execution, you'll never deliver it because it's never going to be perfect. And then there are people who go to the other side, which is just deliver it. Where we want is in the middle. Right. Lauren Michaels, who's the executive producer of Saturday Night Live, says, you know, we don't go on at eleven thirty because we're finished. We go on eleven because it's eleven thirty. Every chef, no matter how good they are and how committed they are to making things perfect, must deliver the dish. And in delivering that you get feedback, which is also important part of that perfection of perfecting things. And if you don't deliver, if you're a perfectionist, then don't deliver, you cut yourself off from that feedback system that is so important important for being you know, striving for perfection in the first place. Does that make sense? Yes, Time and tides and restaurants service wait for no chef, right, That's exactly right, you know. But I think the most interesting thing about this book that I learned that I feel, other than the sort of committing to planning, right, uh, is this idea that chefs have a sort of a dual relationship with time, or they see time in two different ways. And I found this so useful for my work in the office. You know, as a writer, perfectly well, tell me about tell me about those two ways. So, um, the easiest way to talk about it is that chefs have sort of hands on time and hands off time. Right, hands on time would be chopping vegetables like I can only the only way I'm going to chop vegetables is to chop them right. But hands off time would be like cooking rice. All I need is to start it and the rice cooker will do the rest. But the interesting thing is when you put those two together, you realize that hands off time doesn't happen unless you start it at some point. So the the the example that I give is a lot of organization experts like Stephen Covey tell office workers tell executives do the worst first, right, do the ing that is the hardest to do first, And chefs know that that's not always the case and not always the right thing to do. If a young student chef has having real problems with their vegetable cuts, right, they come in thinking, Okay, I'm just gonna focus on these cuts right, because it takes me the longest to do and they're cutting, cutting, cut, cutting, cutting, cutting, and they've spent I don't know, thirty minutes, forty five minutes and they're ready to cook and they realize that they haven't turned the oven on. Always turn your ovens on when you get there, right. So that's a hands off thing, right that you could have done right. And the way that I talked about it is not hands on hands off. It's more like I call it intensive work and process work. So intensive work requires your hands, it requires you to be there, like writing. But then there's process work, which requires you to kind of up periscope from time to time from your intensive work to start something or continue something, to answer that email so that somebody else can do the work that they need to do for you too, um to to think about three things that you need to tell your assistant or your coworker to do so that they can do it while you're going back into the intensive work. But if you wait, and you keep people waiting, everybody's efficiency is gone, not just yours. The miracle of hands off of process work is it's stuff that happens that makes you efficient that you don't have to have your hands on to do right, but you do have to start it. And that's part of making first moves right. You have to start things so that they can continue while you have your hands and other things. And that has been so useful for me as a professor, as a TV producer, as an thro. I I love my intensive time, I love my writing time, but I am also committed to stopping once in a while on a regular basis two um, to check in to make sure that things move forward. And of course that's the that is the central drama of modern life. If you up periscope too much, then you lose any time to do your intensive work, your creative work. Yeah, you know, And I love when you talk about how means on plas began to affect your life once you left the kitchen. You know, means on plas affected the way you wrote your your book. Um, and I'm sure you still use means on plas and almost everything that you do. Oh, absolutely see means in plas everywhere. You know, Yes, you start seeing measing plus in your bathroom and where your toothbrushes and putting everything in the same place so you know exactly where it is all the time, because that's always where it is you're never looking for because you're you need to conserve that time and when you when you apply that to every facet of your life, whether it's your desk or your you know, where you relax, or your your wherever you work. Uh, it is as you said about conservation primarily of time and energy. And the better measing plus, the more time and the more energy we have. And we both know that this philosophy and practice of measing plus can apply to every and any profession. Here's the thing about professions, right, Um, I trained to be a journalist. There are people who go to school for years to be lawyers and learn about the law. People who go to medical school for you know, over half a decade and learn medicine. And yet none of these professions really have as a sort of feature of what you learn how to actually work. Right, there are only two professions really that spend a lot of time on. Okay, how do you organize your work? How do you get through a day? How do you handle a workload? And that's the military and the culinary And of course military and the culinary world, Uh, you know have certain urgencies in common and we don't have those urgencies were not you know, if we work for a software company, we're not you know, checking the minute hand of the clock. We're looking at the calendar. You know, we can easily push back the delivery of software a day or two. Um, so we don't we had we didn't need to evolve mis on plus in journalism or in software because we didn't have those senses of urgency. But because we didn't have the need to do it, we didn't evolve the very nuanced system for dealing with conserving time, space, resources, energy. So Dan has developed a modern day office version. He calls it a Daily Means, a Daily Needs, Right. It's a thirty minute session that you just commit to every day, and that involves cleaning your station, essentially emptying your email, emptying your physical inbox, basically cleaning your tools, and then the next fifteen minutes would be planning your day, your week ahead. And a big part of that planning is taking things that you want to do, things that are on your list, onto your calendar to schedule them, because your list is ruled by the mind. Right, But in order to execute some think the mind wants to do, the body actually has to be in a time and place to do it. So everything that you really want to do in your mind, everything you have a mind to do, has to be put on your calendar. Because the schedule is what governs, governs where your body is in any given time and place. And then you have to audi your connected to your schedule, and that's how you get stuff done. That's how you get stuff done. When we come back, I'm going to be completely missed out for a version of Michael Partis's Western Chinese pulled noodles with lamb. Last night, I made my dough noodles, shocked them, oiled them so they wouldn't stick. I caught my lamb, put it in a zip top bag with the maynad, and made the two sauces, and put my cut onion and bean sprouts in a pan. I put it all in the fridge. Now I'm ready to cook. I'm at a stove. I've got two burners. One has a pot of boiling water for the noodles. One is a black cast iron skillet, my favorite cooking pan. Now I'm just gonna heat everything over high heat. But all I am doing is adding heat to it. So here I'm gonna go. I've got my water boiling to reheat the noodles and then turn that's so low. I've got the skillet going heavy bottom and solid. Okay, that oil went in and starting to ripple already. And you take my meat and as part As showed me, kind of gonna lay them out so they caramelized on the outside, and so they there we go. I'm just gonna put them down in eventually pretty much as much as possible, because that's how he did it in his vast walk. But I'm preparing. I'm getting a lot done in a short amount of time because of moving flots, and I didn't need to worry about looking for stuff. The more I've got a little bit more lamb than I need to starting to kid Land is in cooking. You got some tones here and cooking tools at already I'm laying in the meat to sit there, and he sat there. I thought it was gonna burn, but it didn't burn. And that's aboutamiliar heat source. You have to be very familiar about your heat soorce how it works, the temperature of your oven ovens, not all these calibrators. Right, So this meat has been merited in a range of sauces. I've got my water boiling here, so uncover that. And this is Lamb's shoulder, so it's tough, but I've sliced it thin and scored it so that it's tender, and I'm turning the Lamb's got a nice brown surface to it, because browning is flavor. You've got my yard reaction. It's it's cooking of proteins, it's cooking of seasonings. I also have my no, we call it a cheat sheet, but it's not a cheat sheet. It's kind of important. There you go. So I've got he'd skill up cook lamb. I've got nicely caramelized letters. Lots of sticking to the pan now, and that's good too, because that's also caramelizing and adding flavor. This is really an amazing disse. These noodles were so much fun to prepare, great to do with the kids. You feel like a kid doing it. It's like a a kindergarten project for adults. Okay, And I'm gonna add my onion. So I've got a big pile of bean sprats in here, So I've got meat, bean sprats and white onion here, cooking and sort of salted and soaked the onions. I always like to assault my onions early because that starts throwing out their abundant water, and its seasons them and makes them it uh, it lessens their acidic properties. Smelling al ray, it smells gorgeous, smells like human. It's a very human the dish. So we've got mainly vegeta. So right now it's like a quarter meat and three quarters bean sprats and onions finishes off the I'm gonna dump those because I'm looking at my my little mesing plus charts. So cook lamb ad onion, cook some more. Okay, I'm gonna get rid of this. They're not cooked, and putting them, dumping them into holding pan. There was the cover of the pop. I'm going to boil the noodles in and then I'm going to add says add sesame oil. I've never cooked with sesame. Who it was kind of unusual that we cook with sesameha, But there we go. Add seasoning b which is the stuff that needs to be cooked. It's got peppers in it, it's got garlic and ginger and all kinds of seasons. When cook these rich, very rich seasonings, and the seasons are liquids. They're sort of helping to de glaze the pan. They're helping to declaze the pants, so we get all that flavor. So it's all about you know, cooking is always about building flavors and developing flavors. I'm scraping the bottom of the pan, cooking these and then we wow, this is cooking. I'm just gonna drop the noodles. You know, my flatage wouldn't spoon, which I love. I'm scraping up all the bottom stuff. Check the noodles. That's ouch hot water and the taste the neodle, make sure it's hot. I'm the dump the googles. I may finish them home his pan. Now we drain the noodles and they're going right in this pan. I didn't turn the heat off as was recommended. But this because I'm cooking at home and I'm using my common sense, not following the venerable of my cartis Is recipe. But I'm tossing the noodles and the sauce. It almost looks like a bow and s sauce, a light bones sauce. So I've got that that's all hot. I'm going to add my lamb onion mixed. Sure, and now all I need to do is sauce. And finally in goes the finishing sauce, which has some sugar. I believe it as some sugar in that, but I prepped it so I know it's right. Um, it's more liquid fat seasonings. Just give it some more juiciness and then I'm gonna add my herbs. Finally, you have to have the herbs. Those adds so much flavor. They're right here in the fridge and I'm just gonna tear off the cilantro and add the Julianne mints or chopped mint. But these fresh herbs are are key. Well, everything's key. Some things are optional, some things are not. Um, I'm just ripping the ment of if I didn't even have time to juliette, but I don't need to. I'm just pulling it. And they were done. This is a beautiful dish in a clear example an objective correlative, if you will, of the power of measing plas. After writing about and watching chefs for twenty years, I've come to believe that the world would work more efficiently, happily, be more relaxed. We would all have more time if everyone was required to be a cook first, or at least spend a week in part of his kitchen, or really just practice again that's the word practiced, measing plus whether in part of his kitchen or like Dan Charnis, at your desk Meason Plas special thanks to Dan Charnis and Chef Michael Pardis, I highly recommend dance book, Work Clean, The Life Changing Power of Meason Plas to organize your life, work and mind. And if you want to know more about Michael Pardis, he lives in my book The Making of a Chef, Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America. Also, my new book is out. It's also called From Scratch, but it's all about cooking and ten meals that can teach us all we need to know in the kitchen. We'll have a link to it in the show notes and on my site Roman dot com. From Scratch. The podcast is produced by Jonathan Hawes Dressler. Our executive producer is Christopher Hasiotis. Our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. Music is by Ryan Scott off his album A Freak Grows in Brooklyn. From Scratches, a production of I heart Radio. From more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: At the Culinary Institute of America, there is an instructor named Michael Pardis who is a total BMF when he gets behind the stove. How old are you you've been cooking for money? I've been cooking so though I was fourteen. Wow, so looking at fifty years closing in. Michael Partis came of age in the seventies, looked like Ted Nugent when he began his lifetime of cooking. He's cooked all over the world, from California to New Orleans, to Singapore, to Brazil to Vietnam, and always with the brilliant mind and a vast curiosity about cultures and food, a curiosity and ingenuity reflected by the coolest cooking tools in his kitchen. What we're looking at, I know this audio, but what we're looking at is is a walk line with six watchs. We have then three larger walks which can be used for doing larger batches of surd fried things or soups or braises. They range in wi about it from about twenty four inches about thirty inches wide. Melt coming down here, we have a Chinese roasting oven rods across the top that you can hang things like ducks or chickens, or racks or ribs that you want to roast. There are shelves that you can put wire mesh racks on and they're likewise at things roasting slowly hammose racks. That large wooden tub that we have here, it's called to hung here. It looks like a barrel. It's about thirty six inches wide and about ten inches deep. It's made of um wood that would no he sues, no fasteners, no blues, no nails. Each piece of wood is it cut and hand fit and there and there are a couple of copper bands around the exterior that them in place. Uh. That's specifically for cooling and seasoning of sushi rights. Also partis was one of the most important instructors I had during my time at the Culinary Institute, teaching that began on day one in skills. Cut myself in the first day, as as many cooks will do when they're nervous or in an unfamiliar place. You got me a band aid, shaking your head, who is this knucklehead journalists? Um? But three days later I cut myself again. You said you need and I said, no, I gotta. I bought a band aid, and he said, you bought you brought a band aid because you expected to cut yourself, and you kind of shook your set your head and amusement walking away and said, now that's mesing. Plus that was funny. I'm sure I managed it somehow turn it into a compliment. Welcome to From Scratch. My name's Michael Rohlman, and I've spent the last twenty years in professional kitchens, writing about and with the world's best chefs. From Scratch is a podcast about cooking. In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one non chef about the same theme. The great thing about the cooking life is that you never stop learning. In this show, I want to go to the edges of what I know and then go beyond together with you, with all chefs, home cooks, and everyone who cares about food and cooking. Today's theme is misan blass, literally put in place, without a doubt, the most fundamental philosophy in the kitchen. One reason I'm so glad to talk with Partists is because he's great at breaking complex systems down to their simplest components. For his students at the Culinary Institute of America usually referred to the CIA. If you're going to be a good, solid cook anywhere in the world, you need to understand that there are seven basic cooking techniques. There's fry, there's roast, there's grill, there's saute or stir fry. There's braise or stew. It was the same. There's poach, and there's steam. Those are the only ways to cook. That's it. That's all you got. Anything else is an offshoot of one of those, like suvit is poach. Suvit is is poach. Yeah, you know, so all this molecular astronomy stuff, which I'm I think it's part of the evolution and some of the things like evolution. You know, we have a tail when we need a tail, and eventually tail drops off or the tail becomes really useful when we keep the tail. I think there's a lot of things in modernist cooking that will prove to be useless, tales that will fall off if they haven't already, Like remember the anti griddle that but they have a life of a about three years. Nobody knows that anymore. But then you know that, you know, hydroco vidal suspensions that are proving to be really useful. Uh, you know so. But everything is an offshoot of these seven basic cooking techniques. So if you know those, then you also have to be aware that you only have five basic tastes, and that's sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and new mommy. Most people don't make their food taste bitter on purpose unless they're going to balance out the bitterness with some of those other based tastes. So right, I was gonna ask you to find you said, first thing, be aware of those foretaste you dropped off bitter? Um, because we don't. We don't like better as a rules. Sometimes if we haven't, we well we like coffee and some gravies or something like that. Um. When you say be aware of them, just what do you mean to be aware of them? Okay? Well no, First of all, a lot of people confused bitter and acidic. Give someone will tell someone to suck on a lemon, their face will get all puckered up and they'll go, that's really bitter. And my response is no, no, no, you know here's you know, there's a caffere lime we've stuck on that, that's bitter. Uh. People have trouble differentiate they they're not clear on what that is, So that that's the first step. You have to be aware of what they really are, and then you have to be aware of how you can manipulate them to make a balance. To quate. I look at it almost as a mathematical thing. It's an equation. One of those tastes by itself is rarely appealing. Keep your finger in salt and okay, we like salty, but you don't want to put a whole tablespoon of salt in your mouth, or even a half a teaspoon of salt in your mouth. But if you add a couple of drops of lime juice to a little bit of salt, and you add a little bit of sugar to the salt and lime juice mix, then you've balanced that out. So if you know the seven cooking techniques, if you're familiar with if you know the four tastes, then you can cook anything anywhere. No, that's great. You know. I love breaking things, breaking complex process, processes that seemed complex, breaking down to their fundamental components. And you've just done it with seven and four and I love that. Put that together with measing plus and there's nothing you can't do in the kitchen. Absolutely. I I do an experiment with my students on the second day of class. The second day, we're tasting twenty components different ingredients from around China, and I am one part of the tray of cups of ingredients. There's there's soy sauce, and then another section there's a price vinegar and black rice vinegar, and then in another section there's some ginger. As we're working through, I will stop, I'll put down empty cups in front of everyone, and I'll say, okay, take a take a teaspoon out of the soy sauce and cup number one and put it in the empty cup. Take a teaspoon of black vinegar, which is sweet and sour. Put that in with the soy sauce. So the soy sauces salty and new mommy, and the black vinegar is sweet and sour. And then I said, now take a piece of ginger and drop it in there and just just mash it around with this spoon, taste it, and everybody uniformly goes, wow, this is really good. And if they've got any experience eating Asian food, most of them identify it as a dumpling, you know, dipping sauce for dim song. But that's how easy it is if you understand this concept. We've got sweet and sour in the vinegar, we've got salty new Mommy in the soy sauce. We've got a regionally appropriate aromatic. We put them together. You just made a totally authentic Northeastern Chinese condiment without a recipe. It's that easy. You just have to think about it. You just have to think about it. One of the first things Partist does is ask his students to set a timeline for their day every day, not just what they will do, but the order in which they'll do those tasks, what tools they'll need at their station, and even a diagram of their station for each day. But essentially the timeline is it's a sequence of events that makes sense that you should be able to condense into bullet points. And let's say I'm going to enter the kitchen at seven am. The first thing I'm gonna do is put a pot of water on the boil, because i know I'm going to have to blanch some cream beans. While the water is coming to boil, I'm going to clean the green beans and get some ice water and get a calendar, and so when the water boils, I won't have to stand there and wait for water to boil. I can blanch the green beans. I won't have to run for ice water when they're finished. The ice water is already there. And then I can move on to the next thing in my sequence, because I've laid it all out. Artis encounters a whole range of students who come with a range of intellects and skills, from teenagers just out of high school to older students wanting to enter the culinary field. Interestingly, some of his biggest challenges are younger students who arrive already with natural intelligence and skills. And I'll tell them, you know, I think the problem is that you suffer from what I call too smart for your own good. And they usually cock and eyebrow, and I said, spare with me. See if this sounds familiar. How old are you? Okay, you went all the way through high school with a solid B average. You never had to crack a book. Maybe before midterms or finals, you might have crammed for an hour or two before does, but generally speaking, you didn't have to do anything intellectually rigorous. And you scooched by with a B. And I almost always if I'm having this conversation, I get an affirmative nod. And I said, you could have gotten a's, but that would have required some work, and what the hell? These are pretty good and if you can get to be without having to do any work, why bother stretching for the A? And again I get an affirmative nod, and I say, the problem with that is it ends somewhere between high school and college or your first year two and work. Because while you were coasting to get a bee, there were other people who were working their tails off to get that B, and they developed a work ethic to be at the same level that you were when you weren't trying at all, so you didn't have to train yourself to have a work ethic. And now they're as educated as you are because they got the same grade that you did, but they also have a ethic to take them to another level. And you're kind of stuck wondering why this coasting stuff doesn't work so well for you. Now you're clearly bright enough to have skated through on a bee. Imagine what you would what would happen if you could intersect that intellect with a work ethic, you would rise very fast, very far. But if you're content to stay the way you are, I predict that three to five years from now, you're gonna be subordinate to a su chef or a chef who's not as smart as you, and you're gonna be grinding your teeth every day wondering why this moron is your boss and you're not. And the reason is because you never trained yourself to put your intellect to its best advantage. Measing plus, as I said, literally means put in place. In the kitchen. It often refers to your station set up, that you have everything in place, all the ingredients and tools you need to get the job done, everything in its place at your station and in your mind. What really does means implust mean well, I literally, I think that translates the things in place. Everything is in place, and it should apply to everything physically being in place. So your ingredients are lined up in the order that you're going to use them, and the equipment that you're going to use is all wind up and in proper order to be used as required. And it should extend from the very beginning of the cooking process to the sending out of the plate to the dining room. When you get up in the morning, do you get dressed before you take a shower or do you take a shower before you get dressed. It really breaks down to something that fundamental. So apply that logic to everything else you do and you'll find that you're not wet all the time. Um. One of the things that Thomas Keller said to me as we're talking about mesing classic says, also get anything out of your field that you don't need. I mean, if you're at home, take the take the car keys off the counter, and the glass of milk that was left unfinished. Get because that will trip you up. And if you don't have everything in place, you're necessarily going to have a break in your pace or your flow where you're going to have to go and get whatever it is that you're missing, and that's going to interrupt that one sequence. But you repeat those interruptions over the course of an evening service several times or more, and you don't have a cohesive flow. You don't have calm, you don't have uh focused attention, you have so thing that made border on chaos. So take another piece of paper, and I'll do it because I've got I just washed my hands and make another layer. Who's why have you passed me another sheet tracks yet? Top? Who's making a jep tay today? The stur fried noodles? Make sure that you divide your music plasts into four batches. Right. Um, Hey, guys, if you've got some time and you want to start helping to do some handful of noodles, I'm gonna start doing that now. The benefit it's economic, but it's also psychic. I'm sure I didn't make it up. I probably read it or heard it someplace. But I think structure sets you free, is the way I like to say it. If you build yourself a framework within which to operate, and you have a routine system of habits that need to be done just to get through the day, after they become ingrained habits, they start running in the background like an operating system on a computer, and you don't need to pay attention to them. And when those things become automatic, then you're free to be creative, and free to be intuitive, and free to explore an experiment because you're not living under the stress of imminent chaos. To have everything in place physically is big part of it. But in order to have everything in place physically, you also have to have everything in place mentally. So that means being aware of what your physical means and plus should be, but also aware of how you're feeling, how the people around you are feeling, how you're going to respond, what could possibly go wrong that might throw you off your track for a couple of seconds, said, how you're going to recover from that. You should go into service with all your physical needs and plus but also sort of a centered nous on a focused attention that's not easily disturbed or put out of place. Because if you've got the physical and the internal pieces all wind up the way they should be, it becomes a pleasurable creative experience. How does it apply to our lives generally? And I know you've experienced this because we've talked about your development as a as a writer, uh and your ability to discipline yourself and sit down at a certain time of day and crank out so many words. And if you don't have the mental needs and plus and you don't have that operating system running in the background, you couldn't be as prolific as you are. If you take the time to have focused attension and way everything. Oh, it doesn't matter if you are cooking or doing some other manual task or if you're doing an intellectual task. If you don't have everything laid out and you don't have a sequence in which you plan to work, everything becomes really random. And when things are random, they become chaotic. As an example of how to break down something from chaotic to achievable, Chef Partis used a Chinese noodle dish to explain I'll have a version of it on my site Roman dot com. It's got a fascinating noodle technique from Western China I've never seen before, and a daunting array of ingredients, which is why it gives us a look into Partis's mind. How he thinks He had a dishtion a Manhattan restaurant this noodle dish and wanted to recreate it for his class. He explored the internet found various versions that intrigued him, but they seemed unnecessarily confusing. It seemed really daunting because there were so many words and so many ingredients and seasoning mix A seasoning mix, B seasoning. There are five seasoning mixes listed, so I was like, okay, I can. I can clear away all the clutter and break it down into its component parts, and then look at the components and see which sequence of preparation seems the most logical and stress free, and then arrange things accordingly. When you're reading a recipe, it's dense with text. The information that you need is often surrounded by a lot of other superfluous verbage that is part of the narrative story but not essential to the preparation of the dish. So you have to read through the method and take out the important parts and then put those on your timeline in bullet points. Then write a bullet list of tasks. Task. What am I what's the specific task pre heat of in three seventy assemble mariner trimbone lamb equipment? What do I need to trim the lamb? I need a boning knife. I need a cutting board. I need a matt under my cutting word to give it from sliding. I need a container to put the finished trimmed lamb in and a container to put the unusable trim. You know so, but you're I'm getting rid of all that excess burbage and I'm just cutting it down to I've got a streamline. What am I doing? What equipment do I need to do it? What ingredients do I need to do it? And bullet point checklist. First, do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, then do this. Stop. That component is done. You don't really have As long as you know how to use a knife, you you don't really need a dense set of instructions. You just go, Okay, do I have these things? Do I have these things? Do I have these ingredients? Okay? Just check check check check. Okay, that's fun. Put it on tray, put it in the cooler. Next check check, check, check check. Okay. Now that's done. Now I've got this long list of things, but they're all complete, they're all clearly labeled. Now I've only got lamb marinade, five different identified and labeled spice layers, and the appropriate equipment to finish the dish. And in terms of timing, this dish is instructional as well. You'll see how he breaks down a recipe into tasks, which begins several days in advance, all in preparation for the moment. The stir fry dish begins from start to finish five minutes and it's time to eat. Part of the beauty of planning, preparation, and organization a k A really good meansing plus partis gives us a beautiful circumstance. From his own experience the situation, and that has happened to other chefs, he knows that is a perfect description of the effectiveness of the philosophy of me. But most commercial kitchens run on gas, so if the power goes out, it's dark, but you can still cook because you just turn on the gas. So most chefs that I know keep a handful of half a dozen or so headlamps in their file cabinet in their office. On that weird night when the power goes out, all you do is going to your office, grab a bunch of headlamps, past them out to all your line cooks, tell the Matred to pour everybody a comp class of champagne, take a couple of deep breaths, and just keep on cooking. Because everything is in place. You don't need it to be fully illuminated, but you do need to see what's immediately in front of you. So you've got a headlamp, you've got heat, and if you stick out your right hand at a right angle. That's where the salt and pepper always is is, so you can assume that it's going to be there tonight too. And so what to everybody else, a chaotic mess is for you, it's just like, yep, planned this, and you get a standing ovation from the nining room. Everybody goes home talking about what a great experience they had at your restaurant, because even though the power went out, all they did was poor free glass of champagne for everybody, and things just went on like they were supposed to. Arguably, had it not been from Michael Pardis what he taught me in the kitchen, I might never have been able to go on to write the books that I did. When we come back, we talked to a man who had spent his life in the music industry who became so interested in the culinary world and the concept of mesing plus that he wrote a book about it. Dan Charnis was one of the first writers for The Source magazine, which is the world's longest running hip hop periodical. He worked at Profile Records, home of Run DMC, and for Rick Rubin at Deaf American, where he worked on Sir Mix, A Lot's Baby got back. He even briefly ran for his Whittaker's music label. He then got his masters in journalism before deciding to write The Big Payback, fascinating history of hip hop that became the basis for the movie The Break for VH one. The Big Payback is a forty year history of the business of hip hop. It's how this obscure New York street culture that nobody knew about and nobody cared about went in forty years from being nothing to being the world's predominant global pop culture. So it's not so much the story of the artists, it's the story of the people behind the scenes who made this scene happen. How interesting, um, and quite a world that you explored and quite different from the world that I want to talk to you about today, which we share fascination with absolutely. How did you move from hip hop to misemplas and the world of the professional kitchen? You know, as part of my work in the music business, I became an executive. I became a vice president at the age of I don't know, twenty something like that. How old. How old am I now? I'm fifty one? Okay, So this is a while back. This is in the middle of the nineties, and uh, you know, suddenly I was responsible for budgets, I was responsible for people. I was responsible for attending meetings. I was responsible for strategy, but not trained, and so being the person I am, and being a virgo if you believe in in uh, horoscopes, my wife is into that, and yes, she will tell me what exactly what that means. Pre I'm predisposed to all things having to do with the organizations. So I became, you know, a fan of books by Stephen Covey on how to organize your life according to basic principles. I think, you know, Dave Allen had you know, getting things done system, but none of them really stuck, and none of them seemed to really help me with the larger corporate culture. And it just so happened that at the tail end of my run as an executive in the music business, I read your book The Making of a Chef, and I read Anthony Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential. Those two books, for me, you know, really kind of birth the modern chef narrative as sort of a distinct genre from cookbooks. It was the first time I'd ever heard of me on plots. Why would I have ever heard of it, you know, being in my circle. And I was, you know, fascinated by this in the same way that I was fascinated by you know, watching like a movie like The Godfather, you know. And let me see if I can explain why, like chefs and mafios have something very very interesting and common is that they lead these sort of wild, edgy lives, and yet they're bound by a code. They're bound by the idea that you're responsible for everything, that you're responsible to the people around you, that you're responsible all of you to keep that goddamn floor clean, that you're all going to pick up a broom when necessary, that you're all going to keep your station clean. These are all things that you know, I learned just from reading. But it was fascinating to me because all of those ethics seemed to be absent from the corporate world in which I worked. I believe when you and I first met, I told you I was looked just looking for a book that elaborated on Nissan Plus, and there wasn't one. Uh. And at the same time, I'm actually you know, interested in you know, moving on to my second book and thinking about what I'm going to write. At some point I just had the audacity to think that I could, perhaps as a journalist, research this really well and write it. And so that was the genesis of the book, Work Clean. And how did you begin? Where did you start? How did you do your research? How did you become an expert? It started as an NPR piece, like a radio piece, um that I had pitched, and you know, NPR seemed to be pretty excited about, so I you know, one of the first places I went was the you know, culinary in To of America, which is a hundred miles north of New York and obviously the place where you learned. And the most amazing thing about that is I got to meet all of those people, a lot of those people that I met in your book, which was incredible, you know. But Charnis didn't stop at the CIA. He spent years talking to every cook and chef he could, collecting hundreds of interviews taking means on plus. After talking to students, talking to UH chef instructors, talking to working line cloaks, talking to working chefs, that means on plus seemed to neatly sort itself out into about ten different ingredients or principles. What would you say, Um, we're the top three of those ten that were most meaningful to you, either as a life lesson or as a great story from a talented chef for a charismatic chef. I mean, I can't now. I think. First one that comes to mind, well, planning is prime. That's the first one. Uh, you know, planning is private. Planning is the basis of everything that a good cook and a good chef does. First of all needs on plus. That word means right, which means the place it's also comes. It's the same Latin root as the word commitment. Right. I had no idea. I don't remember reading that in your book, Wow, commiering right. So, uh, the commitment really is at the core of means on plus. It's a commitment to h to planning and to working your plan. Our well being, our financial, our physical well being depends on being able to do our job properly, and we don't. Some of us don't even make lists at the beginning of the day. So we all know how to do that. Um. And yet it's that commitment that really makes the difference between success and failure and and the difference for cooks and chefs is that they have no choice. Right, you must man because dinner is at six, and if it's not ready by six, you can't say, uh sorry, uh yeah, we're not open, you know, come back at seven, come back at eight you're done. Yeah, you are worse than host and you may be without a job. That's right. So planning is that the core? What would you say would be another of the key principles? Well, I think we mentioned this before cleaning as you go, making cleaning an organization, a part of your movement, not just something you do before or after. You know. The way that means this, these principles flow. It starts with planning is prime, and then the second one is arranging spaces and perfecting movements, you know, making sure that you have everything arrayed around you in order to do your work, so that your feet can be planted and you're just moving fluidly, but and there's nothing to prevent there's nothing to trip you up, there's nothing to slow you down. And so then the third ingredient flows from that. Cleaning if you go, is a kind of commitment to moving in a way that leaves you with nothing to clean afterwards, that you just you start it and you finish it. Right, these small little actions you wipe the board down and you're ready for the next thing. Tell me about the next one. Making first moves. So, making first moves essentially a commitment to starting right away, to not waiting until things are perfect, to taking that first step, because the first step is always the hardest um and that once you commit your body in some small way to what your mind has planned, that brings you much closer to actualizing it. Sometimes making first moves can be put the thing that you want to do on your calendar. Don't just say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay and leave it on your lips. No, actually, all right, if you have this writing project to do, put an hour on your coundar just to look at the blank page even and jot a few ideas down. That in itself is a first move. And then, of course the opposite of that is finishing actions, which is at some point you do have to finish and it can't be perfect, and that there is a continuum. Right. Think of it as like a line with two arrows on it, and on one side is perfect execution and the other side is perfect delivery. And if you focus on perfect execution, you'll never deliver it because it's never going to be perfect. And then there are people who go to the other side, which is just deliver it. Where we want is in the middle. Right. Lauren Michaels, who's the executive producer of Saturday Night Live, says, you know, we don't go on at eleven thirty because we're finished. We go on eleven because it's eleven thirty. Every chef, no matter how good they are and how committed they are to making things perfect, must deliver the dish. And in delivering that you get feedback, which is also important part of that perfection of perfecting things. And if you don't deliver, if you're a perfectionist, then don't deliver, you cut yourself off from that feedback system that is so important important for being you know, striving for perfection in the first place. Does that make sense? Yes, Time and tides and restaurants service wait for no chef, right, That's exactly right, you know. But I think the most interesting thing about this book that I learned that I feel, other than the sort of committing to planning, right, uh, is this idea that chefs have a sort of a dual relationship with time, or they see time in two different ways. And I found this so useful for my work in the office. You know, as a writer, perfectly well, tell me about tell me about those two ways. So, um, the easiest way to talk about it is that chefs have sort of hands on time and hands off time. Right, hands on time would be chopping vegetables like I can only the only way I'm going to chop vegetables is to chop them right. But hands off time would be like cooking rice. All I need is to start it and the rice cooker will do the rest. But the interesting thing is when you put those two together, you realize that hands off time doesn't happen unless you start it at some point. So the the the example that I give is a lot of organization experts like Stephen Covey tell office workers tell executives do the worst first, right, do the ing that is the hardest to do first, And chefs know that that's not always the case and not always the right thing to do. If a young student chef has having real problems with their vegetable cuts, right, they come in thinking, Okay, I'm just gonna focus on these cuts right, because it takes me the longest to do and they're cutting, cutting, cut, cutting, cutting, cutting, and they've spent I don't know, thirty minutes, forty five minutes and they're ready to cook and they realize that they haven't turned the oven on. Always turn your ovens on when you get there, right. So that's a hands off thing, right that you could have done right. And the way that I talked about it is not hands on hands off. It's more like I call it intensive work and process work. So intensive work requires your hands, it requires you to be there, like writing. But then there's process work, which requires you to kind of up periscope from time to time from your intensive work to start something or continue something, to answer that email so that somebody else can do the work that they need to do for you too, um to to think about three things that you need to tell your assistant or your coworker to do so that they can do it while you're going back into the intensive work. But if you wait, and you keep people waiting, everybody's efficiency is gone, not just yours. The miracle of hands off of process work is it's stuff that happens that makes you efficient that you don't have to have your hands on to do right, but you do have to start it. And that's part of making first moves right. You have to start things so that they can continue while you have your hands and other things. And that has been so useful for me as a professor, as a TV producer, as an thro. I I love my intensive time, I love my writing time, but I am also committed to stopping once in a while on a regular basis two um, to check in to make sure that things move forward. And of course that's the that is the central drama of modern life. If you up periscope too much, then you lose any time to do your intensive work, your creative work. Yeah, you know, And I love when you talk about how means on plas began to affect your life once you left the kitchen. You know, means on plas affected the way you wrote your your book. Um, and I'm sure you still use means on plas and almost everything that you do. Oh, absolutely see means in plas everywhere. You know, Yes, you start seeing measing plus in your bathroom and where your toothbrushes and putting everything in the same place so you know exactly where it is all the time, because that's always where it is you're never looking for because you're you need to conserve that time and when you when you apply that to every facet of your life, whether it's your desk or your you know, where you relax, or your your wherever you work. Uh, it is as you said about conservation primarily of time and energy. And the better measing plus, the more time and the more energy we have. And we both know that this philosophy and practice of measing plus can apply to every and any profession. Here's the thing about professions, right, Um, I trained to be a journalist. There are people who go to school for years to be lawyers and learn about the law. People who go to medical school for you know, over half a decade and learn medicine. And yet none of these professions really have as a sort of feature of what you learn how to actually work. Right, there are only two professions really that spend a lot of time on. Okay, how do you organize your work? How do you get through a day? How do you handle a workload? And that's the military and the culinary And of course military and the culinary world, Uh, you know have certain urgencies in common and we don't have those urgencies were not you know, if we work for a software company, we're not you know, checking the minute hand of the clock. We're looking at the calendar. You know, we can easily push back the delivery of software a day or two. Um, so we don't we had we didn't need to evolve mis on plus in journalism or in software because we didn't have those senses of urgency. But because we didn't have the need to do it, we didn't evolve the very nuanced system for dealing with conserving time, space, resources, energy. So Dan has developed a modern day office version. He calls it a Daily Means, a Daily Needs, Right. It's a thirty minute session that you just commit to every day, and that involves cleaning your station, essentially emptying your email, emptying your physical inbox, basically cleaning your tools, and then the next fifteen minutes would be planning your day, your week ahead. And a big part of that planning is taking things that you want to do, things that are on your list, onto your calendar to schedule them, because your list is ruled by the mind. Right, But in order to execute some think the mind wants to do, the body actually has to be in a time and place to do it. So everything that you really want to do in your mind, everything you have a mind to do, has to be put on your calendar. Because the schedule is what governs, governs where your body is in any given time and place. And then you have to audi your connected to your schedule, and that's how you get stuff done. That's how you get stuff done. When we come back, I'm going to be completely missed out for a version of Michael Partis's Western Chinese pulled noodles with lamb. Last night, I made my dough noodles, shocked them, oiled them so they wouldn't stick. I caught my lamb, put it in a zip top bag with the maynad, and made the two sauces, and put my cut onion and bean sprouts in a pan. I put it all in the fridge. Now I'm ready to cook. I'm at a stove. I've got two burners. One has a pot of boiling water for the noodles. One is a black cast iron skillet, my favorite cooking pan. Now I'm just gonna heat everything over high heat. But all I am doing is adding heat to it. So here I'm gonna go. I've got my water boiling to reheat the noodles and then turn that's so low. I've got the skillet going heavy bottom and solid. Okay, that oil went in and starting to ripple already. And you take my meat and as part As showed me, kind of gonna lay them out so they caramelized on the outside, and so they there we go. I'm just gonna put them down in eventually pretty much as much as possible, because that's how he did it in his vast walk. But I'm preparing. I'm getting a lot done in a short amount of time because of moving flots, and I didn't need to worry about looking for stuff. The more I've got a little bit more lamb than I need to starting to kid Land is in cooking. You got some tones here and cooking tools at already I'm laying in the meat to sit there, and he sat there. I thought it was gonna burn, but it didn't burn. And that's aboutamiliar heat source. You have to be very familiar about your heat soorce how it works, the temperature of your oven ovens, not all these calibrators. Right, So this meat has been merited in a range of sauces. I've got my water boiling here, so uncover that. And this is Lamb's shoulder, so it's tough, but I've sliced it thin and scored it so that it's tender, and I'm turning the Lamb's got a nice brown surface to it, because browning is flavor. You've got my yard reaction. It's it's cooking of proteins, it's cooking of seasonings. I also have my no, we call it a cheat sheet, but it's not a cheat sheet. It's kind of important. There you go. So I've got he'd skill up cook lamb. I've got nicely caramelized letters. Lots of sticking to the pan now, and that's good too, because that's also caramelizing and adding flavor. This is really an amazing disse. These noodles were so much fun to prepare, great to do with the kids. You feel like a kid doing it. It's like a a kindergarten project for adults. Okay, And I'm gonna add my onion. So I've got a big pile of bean sprats in here, So I've got meat, bean sprats and white onion here, cooking and sort of salted and soaked the onions. I always like to assault my onions early because that starts throwing out their abundant water, and its seasons them and makes them it uh, it lessens their acidic properties. Smelling al ray, it smells gorgeous, smells like human. It's a very human the dish. So we've got mainly vegeta. So right now it's like a quarter meat and three quarters bean sprats and onions finishes off the I'm gonna dump those because I'm looking at my my little mesing plus charts. So cook lamb ad onion, cook some more. Okay, I'm gonna get rid of this. They're not cooked, and putting them, dumping them into holding pan. There was the cover of the pop. I'm going to boil the noodles in and then I'm going to add says add sesame oil. I've never cooked with sesame. Who it was kind of unusual that we cook with sesameha, But there we go. Add seasoning b which is the stuff that needs to be cooked. It's got peppers in it, it's got garlic and ginger and all kinds of seasons. When cook these rich, very rich seasonings, and the seasons are liquids. They're sort of helping to de glaze the pan. They're helping to declaze the pants, so we get all that flavor. So it's all about you know, cooking is always about building flavors and developing flavors. I'm scraping the bottom of the pan, cooking these and then we wow, this is cooking. I'm just gonna drop the noodles. You know, my flatage wouldn't spoon, which I love. I'm scraping up all the bottom stuff. Check the noodles. That's ouch hot water and the taste the neodle, make sure it's hot. I'm the dump the googles. I may finish them home his pan. Now we drain the noodles and they're going right in this pan. I didn't turn the heat off as was recommended. But this because I'm cooking at home and I'm using my common sense, not following the venerable of my cartis Is recipe. But I'm tossing the noodles and the sauce. It almost looks like a bow and s sauce, a light bones sauce. So I've got that that's all hot. I'm going to add my lamb onion mixed. Sure, and now all I need to do is sauce. And finally in goes the finishing sauce, which has some sugar. I believe it as some sugar in that, but I prepped it so I know it's right. Um, it's more liquid fat seasonings. Just give it some more juiciness and then I'm gonna add my herbs. Finally, you have to have the herbs. Those adds so much flavor. They're right here in the fridge and I'm just gonna tear off the cilantro and add the Julianne mints or chopped mint. But these fresh herbs are are key. Well, everything's key. Some things are optional, some things are not. Um, I'm just ripping the ment of if I didn't even have time to juliette, but I don't need to. I'm just pulling it. And they were done. This is a beautiful dish in a clear example an objective correlative, if you will, of the power of measing plas. After writing about and watching chefs for twenty years, I've come to believe that the world would work more efficiently, happily, be more relaxed. We would all have more time if everyone was required to be a cook first, or at least spend a week in part of his kitchen, or really just practice again that's the word practiced, measing plus whether in part of his kitchen or like Dan Charnis, at your desk Meason Plas special thanks to Dan Charnis and Chef Michael Pardis, I highly recommend dance book, Work Clean, The Life Changing Power of Meason Plas to organize your life, work and mind. And if you want to know more about Michael Pardis, he lives in my book The Making of a Chef, Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America. Also, my new book is out. It's also called From Scratch, but it's all about cooking and ten meals that can teach us all we need to know in the kitchen. We'll have a link to it in the show notes and on my site Roman dot com. From Scratch. The podcast is produced by Jonathan Hawes Dressler. Our executive producer is Christopher Hasiotis. Our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. Music is by Ryan Scott off his album A Freak Grows in Brooklyn. From Scratches, a production of I heart Radio. From more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
