My Ramsay Moment

It was going to happen sooner or later. This morning I had a Gordon Ramsay moment, on par (nearly) with his infamous brow-beating of a line cook by getting in his face and endlessly repeating "do you know how to cook an artichoke?!"

Background: despite my best efforts, I've been frustrated with the quality of the baked products served in our coffee shop. I (and sometimes my temporary minions) make the scones and cinnamon rolls and then freeze them and send them to the other kitchen, which does breakfast service and therefore has staff on hand to bake the items off at six in the morning. Day after day, the croissants are overproofed and underbaked, or the cinnamon rolls sloppily glazed, or the scones overbaked. The sous chef who runs that kitchen, known as LouReed on this blog, has Issues With The World and cannot be reasoned with. He has a whole passive aggressive thing about baking and pastry in particular, and dumps the coffee shop products off on the nearest hapless (and often clueless) intern with no instruction. I've tried arguing, pleading, ratting on him to Chef and nothing works. Sigh.

Today, when I dropped off the second delivery of baked goods (the ones I not only make but also finish, the brownies, cream puffs, cookies and eclairs), the woman who runs the coffee shop showed me the morning's cinnamon rolls and asked if I thought they should be sold.

Ho. Ly. Crap.

They were burned. I don't mean overbaked. I mean actually charred.

Anyone standing near me that moment might have heard the actual snap of my last straw regarding the AM bake-off. I took the rolls from her, marched over to the other kitchen and demanded to know who'd baked them. LouReed wasn't in, as luck would have it, but an intern (from my own alma mater Cookin' School, no less!) copped to the deed. I haven't worked closely with her yet, but my general observation is that she is cute and pretty and uses that to her advantage, and also that she thinks she knows everything, and anyone who disagrees with her simply hasn't noticed how cute and pretty she is.

This did not help matters.

I won't go into the specifics, but let's just say that the 15 minutes that followed included me pelting her with one cinnamon roll after another while roaring "do you think we can actually sell this?! Did you notice it was charred when you took it out of the oven?! How about this one? Were you making Cajun blackened cinnamon rolls?" I repeated this with each individual roll, noting that they were rock-hard enough that, if I threw with serious force and directed it at her head instead of her shoulder, I would actually give her a concussion.

She got defensive. Not hands-up-shielding-her-cute-and-pretty-face defensive, but "I'm not a baker!" defensive, which only made me lose it more. I don't expect the cooks, especially the students, to know about gluten development or starch gelatinization, but Christ on a crutch a learning-challenged lower primate would have noticed the product was suffering from third-degree burns. The rolls were black! I also snapped that when Chef has told me to plate a salad course or make bernaise sauce, I don't whine "I'm not a cook!" I do it and, if I don't know how, I ask so that I can do it.

Ugh.

Ugh!

When the carny-dishwasher with multiple piercings in his face stops what he's doing to come over and watch the drama, you know you've stepped over the line.

Anyway, I had Delilah with me because, in addition to my smackdown of the unrepentant non-baker, we were there to steal stuff. So after I dealt with Britni (not her real name, but it fits), we took all their ramekins (I had a creme brulee order for a party) and platters (we had to plate-up for a conference luncheon). Out of pure spite I also stole a dozen of their half sheet trays.

And I'm not sorry. I'm also not sorry for throwing blackened cinnamon rolls at Britni in front of all the other line cooks and aforementioned dishwasher, either. It felt good to wipe that cute and pretty arrogance off her face and replace it with alarm.

The only fallout was from Fredo, the sous chef I like, who came up from that kitchen in the afternoon to tell me "you've got a psycho-bone in you."

He said it approvingly.