A few years back I worked as a prep cook in a bakery café. It was one of those busy, bustling places that channels cool Brooklyn vibe with the soul of a French boulangerie. Great food from scratch, amazing bread, incredibly good pastries. A fun mix of traditional with trendy.
The food focused on basic breakfast and lunch staples: sandwiches, salad, soups, and the breads and viennoiseries shone in every application, whether on the egg and cheese breakfast croissants, the croutons on the soup, and the myriad sandwiches that had loyal followings among the regulars. If we dropped a sandwich from the menu were inundated with pleas to bring it back.
But why? What made the sandwiches so special? How does a restaurant pull off a tuna melt that can ruin you for every other tuna melt ever? It’s a sandwich for cryin’ out loud… can’t you just make it at home?
And that’s the thing… you can’t. Well, you can, but you won’t, even if you have all the ingredients in your fridge. It’s just not worth it because restaurants have something you don’t: economies of scale.
Put it this way, how many ingredients are you willing to measure, chop, or otherwise handle to make one recipe? Even I, a trained chef, have my eyes glaze over reading recipes with more than a dozen ingredients. How many steps are you willing to grind out? The recipes that go onto a second page? Yikes! Are you willing to make three or four (or five!) different recipes (the components) before you can make the main dish?
To show you what I mean, I’ll dissect the tuna melt from my old restaurant. The years have faded the memories of the exact measurements (which wouldn’t work for you anyway) and probably an ingredient or two, but this sandwich is a perfect illustration of restaurant cooking vs. home cooking.
The Bread
As I mentioned above, the bakery produced its own bread. More than that, it sold bread wholesale to other restaurants and through a number of local/regional grocery stores. All the breads produced were incredibly good, but the breads used for the panini sandwiches were special. They were similar to a ciabatta, and there were several varieties, including cheddar jalapeno (so good!) and black olive. The tuna melt was made on a bread filled with baked potato chunks, caramelized onions, fresh chopped dill, and garnished with sesame seeds. For a while the restaurant kitchen assisted the bakery with prepping these mix-ins and it’s how I got my PhD in caramelized onions. But that’s not a bread you are likely to get at a regular grocery store – you’d have to make it yourself or source it from a good bakery, if you could find something similar at all. Score one for the restaurant sandwich.
The Tuna Salad
Everyone has their own way of making tuna salad, but what if you put all the best secret tips and tricks together in one recipe? We hand-squeezed the water out of huge commercial-sized cans of fish (gloves or not you still end up smelling like tuna) and mixed in hand chopped pickles, onions, and celery. We slopped in shocking quantities of mayonnaise and mustard and weighed out spices, seasonings, and fresh dill. We divided the mixture into four-sandwich portions for easy prep. It would be a lot of work for one little can of tuna, so unless you and your family are prepared to eat tuna sandwiches for a week (three or four cans?) you probably won’t make quite such an elaborate recipe. Score another point for the restaurant sandwich.
The Fix-Ins
What goes on your tuna sandwich? A slice of tomato? How about custom sliced cheddar cheese (in-house!), tomato, baby arugula, grated carrot, and a custom spread made with mayonnaise, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, salt, freshly ground pepper and hand-cut fresh chives. The lemon juice, you oughta know, wasn’t from a bottle either. A cook would stand over a juicer several times a week to squeeze a few quarts of lemon juice to last the kitchen a day or two. The kitchen took great pains to work with suppliers to keep the restaurant stocked with high-quality tomatoes and arugula even in the coldest weeks of winter. That’s a lot of meticulous attention to even the most mundane aspects of a sandwich. Another point for the restaurant.
So before you’ve even sliced your loaf or salted your tomatoes you’re looking at bespoke bread and spread, a many-step tuna salad, and fresh everything. Add to that meticulous attention to portioning, assembly, and an industrial-strength panini press. Your homemade sandwich doesn’t really have a chance.
But what to do? Forget groceries and just live on Skip The Dishes? Hardly. You may not be able to re-create all your favourites at home, but there are a few lessons you can learn.
Use the best ingredients. The best doesn’t necessarily mean the most expensive, but it means taking care to make sure you use quality ingredients, particularly where they are a signature part of the dish. Good bread is a non-negotiable for great sandwiches, fresh crisp vegetables key to a great salad, and good quality stock makes any soup better. If you focus on seasonal and local (I get it, that’s not always possible depending where you live) you can keep costs reasonable.
Learn to balance flavours and textures. The tuna melt worked because it played on all the senses - crisp toasty bread, soft creamy tuna, sweet tomato slices and carrot shreds. Acidic tang from lemon juice and pickles, pungent mustard, the bite of onion and the peppery bitterness of arugula. You many not be able to cram that many elements into your dish, but you can balance what you have. My sandwich pictured above? Crisp fresh sourdough ciabatta, Dijon mayo, shredded carrots, and a bit of leftover lemon garlic kale salad - a balance of flavours and textures. Not the same, but also a fraction of the work.
Eat first with your eyes. A little cliché, but very true. The visual appeal of food is why we love all those foodie Instagram accounts. Think about the colours on your plate, the shapes of each component, and the textures. Square food on a round plate, or round food on a square plate? There’s a real art to composition and plating, but think of the meals that have appealed to you and try to articulate what precisely caught your eye.
Know your limits. Even chefs don’t try to cook everything at home. There are some things that no home cook can ever reasonably achieve. A gorgeous steaming bowl of Vietnamese pho can be had for less than $10 and the effort to create it at home would be ridiculous. Deep frying at home is rarely worth the effort - it’s messy, possibly dangerous, and your home will smell like a chip truck. There are countless delicious pastries that I would never attempt in my own kitchen because they are too labour-intensive for a one-man band. But you can make excellent pasta, a great steak, and beautiful salads at home. So learn the basics that YOU love and spend the money you save on quality ingredients. Seek out restaurants not for their convenience but because they can do things you can’t manage at home.
Restaurant cooking isn’t just about the food either. It’s also the occasion, the atmosphere, and that you have someone else to clean up the mess. It’s the separation of the work from the reward. And the rewards can be substantial when you seek out high-quality, creative, soulful cooking from talented chefs and hard-working kitchens. The better cook you become the quicker you’ll recognize great food and appreciate the effort that goes into it.