breakfast chef s01e01
Fuck those fuckers. It’s fucking propaganda. They can fuck off.
You’ve never been a breakfast chef? I’m surprised. I thought you had.
It’s much like you’d imagine.
First of all locate your cleanest dirty jacket. No, obviously not the red wine stained one - it’s saturated with dry sweat. The turmeric and chocolate one. Put it on and stumble through the weather from the stables to the kitchen. Turn the lights on, turn your music on, turn the oven and the grill on, eventually find a lighter, light the gas rings, and then… well then slowly dine on various breakfast dishes for the next four hours. Done.
Kind of. I mean you do have to cook for the hotel guests too, so once you’ve settled on an album or a playlist or an internet radio station without adverts, begin by opening the walk-in fridge. Taste check a few raspberries and then wheel out the high trolley you’ve stacked with cling-filmed gastronome trays of bacon, black pudding, haggis, vertically halved plum tomatoes, and sausage of the link or square variety. Lift the trays from the trolley, remove their cling film, season and olive oil the tomatoes, and slide all but the third and fourth bacon trays onto the six shelves of the oven.
Next, return to the walk-in and estimate that with there being thirty-six eggs per cardboard carton and a hotel full of breakfast guests, you’ll need two trays for boiled eggs and fried eggs combined. Don't drop them.
As per the advice you received on your first day, you’ve already whisked another two trays into two blue plastic jugs for scrambled eggs and omelettes. Take them from the fridge to the workbench as you smile wince at previous job flashbacks of peering through pot mist to egg white foam, flailing trails of yolk in bubbling water and egg shells everywhere. Because you’re a poached eggs black belt now. Second dan. You know to heat the water till bubbles appear and then turn it down. You know to always use fresh eggs. You know how to create a water vortex to shape them. And you know to pre-poach just do fucking loads into a cold water bucket. It's next to the jar of capers. On the left. Middle shelf.
Now you need two large pots of water. One, three quarters full, for the poached eggs and the other, half full, for the porridge. It takes pure yonks to fill them from the slow as fuck taps – almost enough time to coffee cup the fried egg eggs. You've been doing this since you acquired a surplus of coffee cups from a function room cupboard. A single egg into each cup, enabling a subsequent fluid movement into buttery frying pan. In your morning music daze you consider the square of egged coffee cups, vaguely associating them with a poster sale poster purchased by a former flatmate of ganja predeliction.
Okay, next. Open the fridge at your knees, and take out a few blocks of butter. Unwrap them into a half gallon container, save for half a block to be added to a dash of oil in a medium pot. Zone out and listen to lyrics as you tear and drop in a mixture of button mushrooms and wild mushrooms, and, as the beat changes, remember your idea for a breakfast menu solely consisting of mushroom dishes - chanterelles on toast, mushroom pancakes, and sorrel souffles the ones circled so far.
Laugh out loud and mentally qualify your radical menu minimalism by resolving to add a fish dish. But not an add butter put in oven kipper, or a poach in watery milk smoked haddock. No. A fish of the day fish. Whatever’s needing used up after the night before. Sea bass with a crispy skin, or salmon with a crispy skin. A crispy skin fish of the day breakfast fish. Plus the mushroom dishes. And perhaps regular pancakes too. Yeah, pancakes.
You add salt and pepper and thyme sprigs to the mushroom pot, and move onto the pancake batter. The large mayo tub of mix on the pot shelf. Tip some of that into a metal bowl, and add the required amount of butter, eggs and milk. Whisk it up, then leave it to the side with a ladle and the griddle.
Bacon. You’re alert to the smell of bacon. It’s ready enough. It's all ready enough, so you take the trays out with a towel, and use a pair of tongs to lift their contents to designated containers. You park the gastronome trays at the unoccupied kitchen porter area after pouring tray liquids into the sink.
You slide the remaining two trays of raw bacon into the oven.
Porridge. Okay, fine, porridge. But that's it. And only salted. Those sugar and fruit deviants can do one. They're undoubtedly the same wideos responsible for the sugary popcorn stuck to the cinema carpet you had to clean up all those times. There’ll be no catering for them cunts in the new menu era.
Collect two small to medium pots for the do they want it cooked in water or cooked in milk secondary porridge cooking stage, and congratulations, you’re now in equipment getting ready mode. A small pot for boiled eggs. A stack of trays. A few larger trays. Pans. More tongs. A lifter and a fish slice. Wooden spoons, and so on and so on, but I know you know I know you already appreciate this, so what’s with all the detail?
It’s because I will, after sending you this, edit it a bit and paste it into my online application to work for a hotel who give their staff access to their swimming pool. I’ve decided to be conscientiously extremely specific with the relevant experience box. Oh, and I'm putting you down as a reference so they might be in touch.
Hello from the sixth floor of the Newcastle City Library. I spent my last rent and deposit on a writing trip to Malaga, missed my flight back, and found one to here the next day. The hostel I’m staying in has an air fryer and a pool table.
In related news, I’ve finished my boring philosophical writing no one’s interested in. And I’ve started a new project. I’ll tell you about it when I see you.
Anyway, back to it. You’ve still got a few things to do before service begins. You say good morning to the waiting staff. They’ve arrived to pop between the kitchen and the landscape view dining room as they set up their world of serviettes, cutlery, bowls, cereals, juices, yoghurts, jams and marmalades, and bread to be diagonally halved once toasted.