Larry's Take on Celebrity Cooking

People ask me about celebrity cooking more than they ask me about sausage, which tells you something about where dinner ranks against entertainment. Who won the celebrity edition. What pan does he use. Is that chef really that mean off camera. I watch the shows too. But the useful part is never the part they edit for.

What celebrity chefs get genuinely right

• Mise en place. Every one of them lays out the whole dish before the burner goes on. It looks like showmanship; it is the reason they never burn the garlic.
• Salting in layers. They season the onion, then the sauce, then the plate, instead of dumping salt at the end and hoping.
• Heat management. Watch their hands, not their mouths. The pan moves on and off the flame constantly.
• Tasting out loud. They taste four or five times per dish. Most home cooks taste once, when it is too late to fix anything.

What is pure television

The twelve-ingredient spice blend. The blowtorch. The plating tweezers. The idea that a recipe has to be difficult to be worth cooking. Sausage and peppers has five ingredients and it has never once lost to a foam.

A chef with a camera has to surprise you every eight minutes. A cook at home only has to feed people. Different jobs.

The gear question everybody asks

What pan does the famous guy use? Usually carbon steel or copper, because a network bought it. What I use is a twelve-inch cast iron skillet that costs less than a nice dinner and holds heat when a cold pile of peppers hits it. That is the whole trick: the pan should not care that you just made it cold.

The one habit worth copying this week

Before you turn on a burner, put every ingredient in a bowl on the counter, already cut. That is it. It is the single most professional thing you can do at home, it costs nothing, and it is why their pans look like that and yours does not.