The Pros and Cons of Premade Versus Scratch Products in the Kitchen

In the middle of a very busy Saturday night service, my sauté cook realized he was running short on béarnaise sauce -- not the kind of sauce that one can really jump off the line and whip up in a jiffy. He jokingly called out to the prep cook on duty for just such emergencies, "Warren, I need you to run to the 7-11 and pick me up some more béarnaise sauce!"

Any steakhouse worth its Hawaiian volcanic sea salt wouldn't dream of using a béarnaise that was made from anything but the chef's own whisk but the truth is, Knorr Swiss, and I'm sure many other companies, make a just-add-water béarnaise sauce mix (though I doubt they carry it at our 7-11).

Where do you draw the line? It's easy to say, "We only serve what we make ourselves" but there reaches a point when that's impractical and in fact counterproductive. When is it worth the extra expense in effort, labor and sometimes food cost to do it yourself? Bake your own bread? Roll your own pasta? Make your own desserts?

What about making your own salad dressings and coleslaw? If it's sold in a restaurant, it's a sure bet that it's available in ready-made form somewhere.

The most important factor that makes one restaurant unique and separates it from the pack, most chefs will say, is food quality. If there's a chef alive who doesn't believe that his food isn't better than the next guy's, he's not living up to the chef's credo ("my ego is exceeded only by my cooking ability"). Let's be realistic; unless your restaurant's check average is $190 or you have an endless supply of talented interns working strictly for the glory, everybody has to make sacrifices. Not everything can be from scratch.

Here are some common battlegrounds for the debate between from-scratch vs. ready-made.

Bread

Baking bread is such a specialized art that most restaurant chefs are only too happy to delegate those duties to someone who is in business for only that purpose. The proposition of baking bread is so precarious that even professional bakeries often need to supplement sales by offering retail sales as well as desserts and pastries.

Baking bread, while it is perhaps the most therapeutic way of making a living in the food industry -- there's just something wholesome about waking up early and working with doughs and creating a masterpiece from a blob of flour water and leavener -- presents a tremendous burden for a restaurant kitchen. It requires an area almost exclusively to itself with mixing machines, scaling tables, proofers and specialized ovens.

The signature of one of my restaurants is our house-made breadsticks, which I came upon quite by accident. While I was trying to produce a crispy little "grissini" to serve upon guests' arrival, I made what more resembled minibaguettes. They're baked by the sheet tray all service long and it's a monumental task to produce them from the single convection oven on the sauté station. But if I ever tried to remove them from the repertoire, I'm certain that the National Guard would be called in to restore calm.

Chef's Recommendation: Even though bread baking is a hallmark of one of my restaurants, I'd recommend leaving the baking to the pros and sleep an extra hour or two in the morning.

Pasta