The Supermarket Gourmet

by Buck Reed

The Heart of a Cook

I originally wanted to write about the life of a chef, but I got too depressed and had to scrap it. Instead, we can hopefully find inspiration in what drives a cook. It doesn’t really matter if you are a professional cook in a kitchen brigade, a famous chef, or you are just creating a snack for your 10-year-old, there is a difference only in your motivation. Are you there to just get through it, or are you there to be better than you were yesterday? This is a question far too many professional cooks will not answer or even ask themselves.

The heart of a cook is knowledgeable. It wants to know why things worked or didn’t work on the plate. It wants its knowledge to expand and grow, and even share that knowledge with others. It wants to take a task that has been done a thousand times and do it better than ever before.

The heart of a cook is inquisitive. It wants to look over recipes and ideas and try to incorporate those into its repertoire. Imagine I have been making Apple Strudel for 40 years, and the discovery of one recipe after all these years changed that dish for me forever. Something as simple as reducing the sugar in the apples and adding a smattering of breadcrumbs turned my strudel from a sloppy, wet mess that I actually thought was pretty good into a pastry that was light, flaky, and actually crisp three days later. Most people enjoyed what I made before, but I feel like I wasted four decades of my life.

The heart of a cook is courageous. It is not afraid to try new things. Sometimes it finds something that it has never tried before and throws itself into it with zero fear. I had a friend that I worked with many years ago who had that heart. He wasn’t a pastry chef, but he tackled a Tarte Tatin just for the fun of it. We learned a lot about caramelizing apples and puff pastry, and although we couldn’t sell it, it was pretty tasty. We were young and foolish, but we had the heart.

The heart of a cook is giving. Creating a dish that someone enjoys brings happiness to a cook’s heart. Creating a dish to feed a loved one or a customer that might remember it for the rest of their lives brings a lot of joy to a cook’s heart.

I always say you start with your mind and you create with your hands. But if you don’t cook with your heart, you are not really cooking; you are only going through the motions.