If you're a culinary student and you're going on your internship or extra. Find the highest quality most difficult kitchen you could find and go and see if you can really do it. Day in and day out and day in and day out and day in and day out and you'll be fine. You know you just put your head down and you work. You don't know anything when you go into a kitchen. Take a step back and lose the ego and listen and just put your head down and work. The cream will rise to the top. One thing that people need to understand and I tell my staff all the time is you might be learning some things that you don't like just as much as you do like and then you need to be conscious of that. Just keep your eyes open and your ears open. Cook with your ears!
What we covered in this episode
- Boeufhaus is a small neighborhood French-German brasserie in Chicago.
- Old-world culinary techniques and contemporary style, from demi-glace, to patés and terrines.
- Boeufhaus is a new style of a steakhouse. Serving classic meat sandwiches at lunch (pastrami, corn-beef, Philly cheesesteak, etc…).
- The restaurant is ingredient quality based.
- Originally, Chef Brian Ahern was a Fine Arts major and was working at restaurants at the same time.
- His father had a great influence on him always taking him to off-the-beaten-path places.
- He did not go to culinary school but started working.
- Executive David Burke was one of his mentors. He was very demanding and Chef Brian Ahern learned how to become a professional. You can listen to Chef David Burke interview on “flavors unknown” at https://flavorsunknown.com/david-burke/
- Chef Michael Pirolo was his other mentor. He taught him the importance of consistency.
- Today the struggle is real to find reliable staff. Probably because of the inequities in pay between the front and the back of the house.
- To culinary students, his advice is to find an internship in the most difficult place they can find and see if you can really do it day-in and day-out. Loose the ego, put your head down and work!
- Cook with your ears. There are opportunities to learn in restaurant.
- His inspiration comes from everything: staff, reading, traveling, eating at other restaurants, even from Instagram.
- New York City is inspiring to him. From the colors to the sounds.
- Chef Brian Ahern describe the short rib beignets. One of my favorite dish on Boeufhaus menu.
- We talked about the different sauces made at Boeufhaus. Chef Brian Ahern describe their in-house chicken stock process.
- The ingredients that are indispensable to him are chicken, thyme, garlic, high quality oils and vinegars.
- 5 rapid-fire questions!
Links to other episodes inn Chicago
Chef Brain Ahern advice for a good burger.
It sounds cliche but let the ingredients for themselves and maybe if you have a good relationship with your local butcher they may serve you some aged meat. Maybe you could ask him or her to save you some of the ground fat from their butchering and you can get a leaner meat and then fold that fat inside your burger or if they weren't willing to give you some ground aged fat you could you could render that. Just ask him to save the scraps for you and you could render that. Then season with whatever you want. At Boeufhaus, they come out of our cast iron pans and they're resting, we seasoned rendered beef fat with some garlic and paprika, a little bit of mustard powder, herbs and we and we sort of paint onto the meat as it's resting. So you could render that fat and you could cook your burger in that if you wanted to use a cast iron pan. But I would mix the burger yourself and opposed to buying a preform Patty you know and just just enough to just sort of let it keep its form after you mix them you shape them into whatever size you want and then just put them in the fridge just to sort of set up and then, seems counter intuitive, then let them set out to get to a little bit more room temperature right before you grill them. But just let the product speak for itself. Really high heat and not much more over medium. For sure not over medium.
And any excited sauce that you can put the burger and the bun. You could take some of that beef fat and making an aoili out of it, or you could caramelize some onions and puree them and then fill that in, or you could make your own steak sauce. You know I like to bite into a cheeseburger and have a little bit of mayonnaise or aioli on the side of my mouth. And then you know you could make an herb butter or something intensely herby butter that you used to you know to pain on the roll as you toast it because I don't know if I consider a burger, a burger unless the bun is toasted.
