This week someone asked an interesting question on Chowhound, and the responses are a fascinating look into how restaurant kitchens actually work. The question was deceptively simple: do restaurants use recipes? (We're talking about real restaurants here, not chain restaurants where everything is dictated to the gram, and most of the meals are premade in a central warehouse and shipped out frozen to the sites.)
The first question is, how do you decide what constitutes a recipe? If you think of a recipe as "a somewhat specific procedure for making a food," that's one thing. But if you only define a recipe as "specific measurements and instructions written down on a sheet of paper," that's quite another.
Obviously, restaurants strive for a certain amount of consistency. You can't have a dish that varies completely from one night to the next. But the head chef isn't always in the kitchen, and they can't cook everything.
The answer is that the head chef will come up with their recipe, such as it is. Some chefs are more precise than others. The head chef will then teach all the line cooks how to cook the dish, basically passing along the recipe, but as a demonstration, probably not on a written recipe card.
Cooks have to improvise on the fly, so measurements are not usually precise. A particular cut of meat might be unusually dry, or today's batch of tomatoes might be particularly sweet, and the cook will need to adjust the other ingredients to account for this. Put another way, it's more like playing music in a band on stage than it is performing a solo piano recital straight from sheet music.
This all flies out the window when it comes to baking, of course. Baked goods require a level of precision which requires specific measurements, and most bakeries follow very strict recipes in order to ensure that their products turn out deliciously consistent.
Image courtesy Flickr/Inspirational Food
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