It's my second night at the restaurant and I'm still greener than the parsley they're chopping up for garnish. Hell, I'm still trying to duck the embarrassment of my first night where I popped out of the changing room all eager and ready to go, chefs jacket crisply pressed and gleaming white, clogs are polished to a marine sergeant's shine and I'm the only idiot with his apron looped around his neck like I'm Regis about to taste Emeril's shrimp gumbo in the studio kitchen. I walked up to my chef and the entire line across from the pass dropped dead silent as all the cooks looked at me like my head was sprouting a talking daffodil. If you want to know how to properly tie and apron what you do is fold the apron with the lower half in the front and the top in the back at the tie strings. You then make 2 folds the width of your 4 closed fingers fingers forward towards the bottom of the apron. Put against your waist, loop the strings around behind you and then tie in front then tuck it under the fold you made, TA-DA!!
So anyways, I get put with this kid who looks like he just graduated preschool or something. Total stoner, thin and jumpy from out on the east coast in Nova Scotia somewhere. Yes, Anne Murray snowbird country. What he's doing in Montreal I have no clue. Doesn't speak French, and he's got the mental agility of a slug trying to calculate a safe reentry vector for a space shuttle. Seriously, I think there were about half a dozen shared brain cells to keep his body moving, his lungs breathing and his brain functioning but only enough to do two of those at a time. Talking doesn't appear to be connected to, or reliant on, brain function because he will not shut the hell up and just jabbers on about completely inane crap. I don't know if he's just nervous but he does seem to know what he's doing as far as prep work is concerned as we get some stuff done so the crew will have more time to do important stuff. Stuffing blue cheese into dates and wrapping them with bacon, portioning the pulled pork and vac-packing them, making fries and soaking them in big buckets of water, etc. I keep going back to chef to get more stuff to do. It's getting on towards the end of the night and he hands us a sheet of paper for one of their desserts. Pouding chomeur.
Pouding chomeur is basically a bread pudding in a maple syrup sauce. While the sauce is reducing on the stove we get the illustrious job of making the batter-dough. It's not really batter and it's not as thick as dough, sort of like cookie dough I suppose. We cream the butter with sugar, add the eggs and milk and get that incorporated and then I pick up the 52 lbs bag of flour and start pouring. The recipe calls for 3/4ths a cup of flour per serving. There's 10 crocks per sheetpan and 3 pans to go in the ovens. Now, this mix has to be just right on the money. Too much flour and you got a dumpling in your bowl, too little and you'll end up with some kind of ghostbusters ecto-plasmic slime instead of a moist and delicious dessert cake floating in syrup. I figure he knows how much I need to add. The problem is that he's thinking the same thing, though I don't know that. Flour is slowly sheeting down into the mixing bowl that's whirling away and I lift my head and say "Hey, tell me when to stop."
You know that old saying you're as white as a sheet or you look like you've seen a ghost? I literally saw the blood drain out of his face and he's giving me this deer caught in the headlights look. In the professional kitchen, and life in general come to think of it, we call this an "oh crap" moment. I'd marked off where the stuff was in the bowl before we started adding flour so knew where our zero was, but right now we're both trying to math out how much flour is needed and when to stop before we end up with way too much flour in the mixture. I realise that the brainiac with the processing power of a squished grape across from me isn't going to finish the race in time so I start thinking and thinking fast. If 1 portion is 3/4th of a cup then 2 portions is 1.5 cups, so 4 portions is 3 cups and 6 cups is 8 portions plus 2 portions at 1.5 cups means 7.5 cups per 10 crocks per pan multiplied by three pans is 22.5 cup and I gave out a yell of triumph barely making it in time with less than 2 cups of flour to spare before I end up turning the whole mess into a really rich brioche. Now if that had been metric and said like 3/4 of a liter per serving. That would be 0.75 liters per serving, for 10 we move the decimal and 7.5 liters per pan and 22.5 liters for all three. It's a lot simpler.
After all the dough was mixed, portioned out into the crocks with the sauce and put in the oven chef asked what all the yelling was about and we explained. He laughed, complimented us on a good job and said, "Next time, just put the flour down."
I've never felt so stupid in my entire life.
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