What do chefs eat?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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LähiTapiolan henkivakuutuksen asiakasedulla saat nyt 25% alennuksen. Henkivakuutuksen myöntää LähiTapiola Keskinäinen Henkivakuutusyhtiö. Asiakaseduja sen määrä vahvistetaan vuosittain. LähiTapiola, samalla puolella.
Ever wondered what chefs eat? The finest ingredients night after night? Every staff meal had like so
much caviar that I'm so sick of caviar
now. Or whatever leftovers are lying around. Use
sausages from the breakfast the day before. Put in the oven with a five kilo block of cheese.
Sometimes you also just crave like vegetables. Suddenly you're like, it's been a week since I've seen something green.
This is The Food Chain from the BBC World Service with me, Ruth Alexander, and I'm talking to three chefs about what they eat while they're cooking for us.
Because at the end of the day, you have to feed yourself before you can feed somebody else.
Joining me from her native Switzerland is Juliette Feller.
I am a chef and writer currently based in London in the UK.
And pastry chef.
I'm Marisha Shukla. I'm from Bangalore, India, but I spent most of my time working all over Europe. So I was in France for a good while, then I was in Belgium and the Netherlands as well for a bit. And I recently moved back to India.
And in England, chef-owner...
I'm Sam Granger. I'm from Liverpool, but based in Manchester. I've worked in quite a lot of countries, chefing around the world, actually. So, yeah, Australia, India, Spain, UK, Thailand, so, yeah, a bit of everywhere.
Juliet, people might imagine that being a chef means eating extraordinarily well day in, day out. But what's the reality? What might you have eaten by the time the restaurant doors open?
So it probably will have been a spoonful of a sauce that I am not sure if it's still good. And then like a little bit of a paste to kind of check for seasoning. Then a fresh fruit that came in that looks really nice. Then a little bit of prep that a colleague is working on that's like, oh, what do you think of this? And then, oh, this piece of bread that's a little bit burnt. Let's go for that. It's really just a very eclectic, I think, selection of things. Maybe at the end of the day, it's maybe quite balanced. It's hard to say, but it is definitely... to stay on track of like, it's not a kind of very tidy what I eat in a day kind of video of like breakfast, lunch, dinner.
A bite here and there. Marisha, are you grazing on pastry and sweets through your shift?
So since I moved back to India, my job has completely changed because now I'm working for myself. So I'm basically consulting and just working on pop-ups, which definitely makes my eating habits much better. But when I was in Paris, it was probably just, I don't know, chug a glass of milk because I need to put something in my system before I run to work. Reach work again, try whatever there is. Basically bread and butter, I think, is what I've mostly lived on. because we would bake bread every day. So I had that always in front of me. So we had fresh butter, bread, salt. That's literally what I think I would fill myself up on. And lots of sugar, tasting everything and everything was always sweet. And the pastry kitchen was always in some corner or like underground.
So completely far away from the hot kitchen. So I was not getting any tiny leftovers of any meat or something. I would basically just keep tasting a caramel or a cream or a sweet pickle or something or the other. But yeah, I was on a sugar high 24-7.
Sam, does this sound familiar to you? Like surrounded by food,
tasting
constantly, but not really eating anything that would add up to a meal?
Honestly, most days in the kitchen, I won't eat till 11pm tonight in the night when I get home. I'll probably get in the kitchen for seven, eight in the morning and won't eat till night time when I get home. And then that will be something quick. Get food and meat, get some carbs and meat and go to sleep. And then we go again then.
How on earth do you keep going through the day when you haven't
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:29
2
What do chefs actually eat during a busy service?
5:29–10:28
3
How do chefs cope with eating (or not eating) while the kitchen is running?
10:28–16:40
4
Why are staff or family meals so important in restaurant culture?
16:40–23:01
5
What are the best and worst staff meals chefs have experienced?
23:01–27:44
6
How do restaurants balance the cost of feeding staff with profit margins?
27:44–29:05