The Tale of the Rubber Band Sauce

This is about a particularly memorable experience I had while working in one of our local country clubs.  It still haunts me.

This wasn't your usual country club.  It was a country club for people who couldn't really afford to become a member of a real country club but still wanted to be able to say they belonged to a country club.  More specifically, they wanted to behave like they belonged to an actual country club and tell their friends about how they lived a life of privilege.  These people had heard the horror stories about how badly the members of some real country clubs treated the club staff and they were determined to treat the staff of their dollar store country club even worse just to make a point that they could "out 1%" the real 1%.  

In this particular club, the Executive Chef was a young guy who had landed his position right out of culinary school.  He didn't go to a prestigious culinary school.  He went to our local community college culinary school.  At first it might sound like I'm disparaging the school, but in reality the graduates of the culinary arts program had a pretty good knowledge of how to cook,  The program had made huge advances in their offerings and it was starting to show in the quality of their graduates.  This guy wasn't one of those.  His crowning achievement was to help a crappy local food critic put together a cookbook full of food photos that looked pretty good but tasted like something you'd find rooting around in a dumpster on a hot July afternoon.

Ok, so the stage is set.  We'll call this guy Ben, which is obviously not his real name.  There's also a guy we'll call Seth who will come later in the story.  I was working as a cook and my main responsibility was mostly doing banquets.  Now I'll tell you up front that I am pretty good at cooking for large parties.  I don't particularly like doing banquets, but I worked for a real French chef at one point and he made it very clear that those banquets were what paid the bills, so I was happy to do it and very appreciative of the wages I was paid for it.

So now we're actually going to get to the story I wanted to tell you.  On this particular night we had a party for about 200 people.  It was a buffet dinner of Italian food, which was totally in my wheelhouse since I had owned a couple of Italian restaurants and had cooked in them every day.  I spent most of the day getting food prepped and ready for the event and we were on schedule to have everything out on the buffet right on time.  Everything was going smoothly until we got to the fettucine alfredo.

If you've ever had real fettucine alfredo you know that it really should be made right at the moment of service.  It starts as a reduction of white wine, shallots, and a little fresh garlic. From there you add some heavy cream and reduce it a little, take it off the heat, add some good quality parmesan cheese, and then finish it with some soft whole butter.

Making alfredo sauce is not rocket science but it's more difficult than microwaving a cup of yesterday's coffee.  When you have to make it for 200 people buffet-style your only real option is to make an "alfredo" sauce beforehand.  This is generally a bechamel sauce with all the required seasonings and parmesan cheese that is ladled over a pan of noodles in a chafing dish and set out for the masses to ravage.  Not the real thing, but it's as close as you can possibly get if you have to serve 200 people in 15 minutes.  As a chef specializing in Italian food, I lose a little bit of my soul every time I have to make it that way.

I would have normally made the imitation alfredo sauce myself and given up a little more of my soul for the cause, but for some reason Ben wanted to make it himself on this day.  I don't know if Ben wanted to spare me the humiliation of making something as hideous as this was destined to be or whether he just wanted to try and make something that would actually pass as real alfredo.  To this day his real motive will remain a mystery unless he steps forward and confesses his true intent.

Anyway, I offered to make it several times throughout the afternoon but my offers were rebuffed each time.  When we got down to about an hour before the guests were to arrive there was still no alfredo sauce, either finished or in progress.  Everything else was ready to go.  After I offered again to make it, Ben decided that the tomato roses he was making for no particular purpose could wait and he gathered the ingredients and started the sauce.  On one hand this was good news to me, but on the other hand I was starting to worry about what culinary monstrosity would eventually be born of his efforts.

Normally we would thicken an imitation alfredo with a little roux to get it to the right consistency.  If you're not familiar with roux it's basically a starch cooked with a fat which results in a compound with thickening properties.  We usually use some clarified butter and flour to make roux.  It's a basic process that every cook learns early in their culinary journey.  For some reason Ben decided to use something other than roux to thicken his imitation alfredo.  

There are many thickening agents that can be used in cooking and they all have their particular uses.  One of the more obscure ones is something called xanthan gum.  You typically find it in processed, shelf-stable non-perishable foods but almost never in hot sauces.  There is a reason for this.  The reason is that xanthan gum thickens things by incorporating it into the food and then physically agitating it.  It can be hot or cold -- it doesn't matter.  Roux thickens by cooking it into a hot sauce or soup.  xanthan gum is different because you can mix it into a cold liquid and beat it for awhile with a whisk and the liquid will get thicker.  The more you beat it the thicker it will get.  While this may sound like a miracle, it really isn't because it's a different kind of thickness.  It's a rubbery thickness.  You don't want your sauces to have a rubbery texture because it's just fucking unnatural.

As you may have guessed by now, Ben chose xanthan gum as his thickening agent.  When all the ingredients were added to the sauce, he followed by adding about half a cup of xanthan gum.  Now if you have any experience using xanthan gum you probably know that a cup of xanthan gum can add body to about 10 gallons of sauce.  You can imagine what it did to 3 gallons of imitation alfredo.  Xanthan gum doesn't immediately thicken whatever you put it in.  You can put a shitload of it into something and as long as you don't agitate it then it won't thicken at all.  But Ben kept stirring his sauce with a big wire whisk, which activated the xanthan gum more and more.  The more he stirred it with the whisk the thicker and more like raw rubber it got.  I don't know if he was genuinely pleased with his sauce or whether he just didn't want to admit that his choice of thickeners was wrong, but he seemed really happy about the outcome.  

I offered several times to finish the sauce for him, but each time he declined.  By "finish the sauce" I actually meant emptying it into the dumpster and making it again.  Unfortunately he was either genuinely pleased with his sauce or too proud to admit that it was a complete disaster and start over.  To this day I don't know for sure.

Seth was the Food and Beverage Manager at the club.  He had a solid kitchen background and routinely checked on the food we were serving, offering input on everything.  As usual, he cruised through the kitchen before the buffet to make sure we were ready and get a feeling for my comfort level.  This guy was not stupid.  He knew that if I was concerned about our ability to serve quality food on time for a banquet then he needed to do something right away.  If I was comfortable then he could go and hit golf balls on the driving range for an hour and then go home afterwards.  On this occasion he sensed that I was not comfortable so he kept probing until he got to the alfredo sauce.  He looked at it and, without tasting or stirring it, he asked if I had made it.  I told him that I hadn't and he asked why it looked shiny.  

That's the other thing about xanthan gum.  Too much of it makes things look shiny.  I'm not talking about the magical sheen that you see with pan sauces finished with a little quality butter.  I'm talking about shiny like a car fender after a good waxing.  You could almost see your face in it.

Seth grabbed a tasting spoon and dipped it into the sauce.  Well, I should say that he tried to dip it into the sauce, but the alfredo just slid off the spoon.  He looked at me and told me he knew it wasn't my fault and then reached for a ladle.  He dipped the ladle into the sauce and, once it was full of Ben's creation, he started to lift it.  His intent was to lift about 8 ounces of sauce out of the pot and let it pour back so he could examine the texture.  He managed to get the ladle about 10 inches above the surface of the sauce before the sauce in the ladle snapped back into the pot like a piece of stretched rubber.  He looked at me again and said he would go talk to Ben about it.

While I was uncomfortable about the quality of Ben's sauce, you have to understand the paradox of the professional kitchen to truly know the dilemma I faced.  I could tell you about it here and I may have already published a post about it, but the bottom line is that the Executive Chef of a professional kitchen is god like.  Whatever he or she says is simply the way it is.  If the Executive Chef tells you to serve a steak he bought out of the back of a pickup truck at the mall for fifty cents a pound and call it Wagyu beef then you do it.  Seth understood this and, as a result, didn't think any less of me as a person or chef as a result of this unfortunate incident.  He knew I didn't have a choice.

So, after reading this far you may wonder what actually happened with the sauce.  We served it and it was so bad the customers didn't eat it because they couldn't get it out of the pan without it sliding off the serving utensils.  That's what happened.  I'm not proud of it, but that's what happened.  Later that night I saw the dishwasher who was unlucky enough to get the pot of leftover alfredo sauce reach into the pot and pull it out with both hands like ten pounds of bread dough.  It was a huge mass of stretchy white material that you would never be able to identify as a sauce.  I felt bad for him but I also wondered if the people who went through the buffet really thought that this was how the 1% liked their pasta.  I hope not, but in these times things that really don't make any sense are the new normal.