RSSMy Horror Story: Rivers of Fat
March 22nd, 2007 by Joe, Co-founder of Rouxbe
Someone wrote today and wanted to know about my biggest kitchen disaster. So here it is.
From 1997 to 2004, Dawn and I worked as film caterers. In 2000, we built our own catering trucks from the ground up – a 44-foot long, five-star rolling catering kitchen. At the time we used to call these our kids, as they took nine months to build, then they drained the life out of us:).
One day, we were working in one of Vancouver’s motion production studios serving 170 people lunch. Most days were pretty crazy, lasting 14 to 16 hours a day. And the clean-up took hours after lunch. On this particular day, I decided I would try and tackle one of our messiest and most dreaded kitchen tasks before lunch service – cleaning the deep fryer – just to shorten the end of our day. We had used the frying oil a couple of hours earlier so I was sure that the fat was cool enough and that there was enough time to get it done before lunch. (Yes, you can probably already see where this is going, but wait…)
With 15 minutes to spare before the crew broke, I drained the fat into two large four gallon pails and started to scrub the inside of the fryer. At one point, Dawn turned to me and said, “hurry up, we only have another few minutes before the crew breaks.” Then all of a sudden she screamed, “Joe, the buckets”, I looked down and noticed that the PLASTIC pails were starting to bulge at the base.
All of a sudden one of the buckets burst, releasing four gallons of dirty, hot frying oil down the inside of the catering truck flowing from one end of the truck to the other. Dawn and I had to jump up onto the counter tops to avoid the lava. While we sat there, bucket two burst at the seams; another four gallons of hot oil on the run. Then… to our horror… the crew broke. There was nothing we could do but watch as the oil cascaded out of our truck, down and across fifty feet of parking lot.
In shock, Dawn and I noticed that people were starting to gather along side the river of fat that was draining from our trucks which just so happened to be flowing directly into a storm drain, clearly marked with stenciled “fish” icons indicating that the drain led to a nearby fish hatchery. Everyone was pointing to the source of the eco-nightmare (with Joe and Dawn looking out the back of the trucks as if we hadn’t a care in the world regarding the hundreds, maybe millions of minnows that were about to meet the next Valdez catastrophe headed their way). At one point, we saw producers and actors actually jumping the river of fat.
Clean-up took hours but not before Dawn and I skated (literally) our way through lunch service. My boots, well they never came clean from that ordeal. And the poor fish? :(
Ironically, guess what we served for lunch. Fish!
Got a personal story to share just to let everyone know that we’re not all perfect in the kitchen. Do you have a story? Share away!
Sort of. It’s a cooking story that yields the single best piece of kitchen advice I’ve ever received, though.
In the early days of my cooking, the first time I had lived in an apartment on my own away from home, I did even more improvisational cooking than I did now. Tiring of baked/roast chicken breasts, I went for a more liquid cooking method. I think I had in mind something akin to a braise or fricasee – what I was actually doing was closer to overpoaching (even boiling, perhaps) chicken breasts and bell peppers.
Both looked rather hideous after 30 mins in the pot. The chicken was white as a sheet, the bell pepper squares were closer to gray and insipid than the bright green crunch when they started, there was about 3 times too much liquid in the pot, and it was clouded with all these little white globs. [I now know that those were, I think, blobs of protein given off by the boiling meat - harmless but not exactly appealing.] If I had been cooking for other people, I’d have been panicked. As it was, I was mainly just furious that it *hadn’t worked*.
So, I called Mom.
We talked about the food for a bit as it sat there on the stove, taunting me. I calmed down somewhat. Then she gave me words that I live by to this day:
“Look. There’s the pot. There’s the trash can. There’s the car keys, and there’s the [choose your favorite fast food chain] down the road. Now let’s see what we can do to fix this.”
To this day, whenever I get panicked about dinner disasters, I glance at the garbage can, take a deep breath, and soldier on. And for the record, I think I tried my best to eat the chicken and ended up at McDonald’s that night.
Random thoughts from the captains chair;
I don’t remember the “A River of Fat Ran Through it” ordeal so it must have happened on a show I wasn’t on but I do recall a few moments of interest when Joe and Dawn catered “Dark Angel”. As a transport captain I worked closely with the caterers to make sure they were parked in the right place and not in my way when the rest of the unit showed up. As a cardinal rule I tried never to move them and did so begrugingly only on the last episode of the season.
For those who do not work in film I’ll tell you the two most important departments on any show are catering and accounting. We all want to eat and we all want to get paid after that nothing else really matters it’s just a job. Like an army a film unit marches on it’s stomach and if the food is good people run for a front spot in the service line if the food is bad people run for their cars to go to a drive thru. I never saw anyone leave set for food when Joe and Dawn were cooking.
It became a game from the moment you were eating breakfast to try an figure out the lunch menue by what raw ingrediants my drivers were loading into the kitchen. The first part of the shooting day crew members would walk by their truck and call over their radio to the rest of the crew if they had a clue “I smell pork or they have the bbq set up”. I had a special relationship with the two of them so I was usually let in on the secret but I’d never tell.
Some of my favorite moments on set were with Joe and Dawn sitting in the lunch tent after service when the crew had gone back to work we’d all sit for twenty minutes and have coffee and desert and just relax. It was the only time you’d ever see the two of them not moving. All morning they executed their orchestrated ballet of the kitchen in such tight quarters it was fun to watch but since they started at two in the morning and served over 300 meals to the crew over a six hour period I think they deserved the break.
Too this day I’m not sure how they pulled off their greatest serving triumph ever. I corodinated an assault of 160 crew members and 350 extra’s on them one sunny day at the Vancouver water front. They set up two service areas, one for crew and one for extra’s. Too my astonishment they served all those extras’s and had them ready to go back to set before the crew. Over five hundred fantastic five star custom plated hot meals in under twenty minutes. This was no fast food drive thru and I’d love to see McDonald’s even try to do what they did even with their pre packaged crap. Fast food does not need to taste bad and be wrapped in paper and styrofoam.
Do I miss these guys on set? You bet I do as does anyone who ever had the honor to eat from their kitchen on wheels. I am glad however that the world can now enjoy their experteise and genius in the kitchen, myself included. I never thought I could reproduce at home what they did so well on set but Rouxbe is the proof we can all eat better now.
Oh Steve You are a Dream!
You made life on the trucks so much easier for us! You were always there, always gave us the best drivers and always made sure we had whatever we needed.
Thanks for the kind words! We may not see you often, but now we can dine together “virtually” every night!!
Thanks for sharing your story, Joe. I’ve had many, many minor mishaps (so many that I put a category “kitchen disasters” on my blog), but even if you added them all together AND included the time my husband nearly burned the house down, they wouldn’t equal this.
My theory is a cook’s culinary disasters will be in direct proportion to his or her skills. Steve’s glowing testimony proves this.
Hmmm. Wonder what my penchant for small spills says about me?