NY TIMES.COM -- By MARK BITTMAN -- It looks pretty straightforward, and for Harold Moore, the 29-year-old chef at Montrachet in TriBeCa, it is. Take a dry-aged sirloin and sauté it. Serve the meat on a bed of shallots in a red wine reduction sauce, with sautéed chanterelle mushrooms, a few haricots verts and some carrots.
Finally, sprinkle some tiny flowers on top of the meat, accompany it with a round of potato gratin and send the resulting plate out to the customer (or, for that matter, a photographer). There it is: honest, relatively simple restaurant cooking. A perfect French dish. The sort it would be lovely to make at home.
But without a lot of help, you can't. It is, in fact, virtually impossible for any home cook to cook like a chef. In order to make his dry-aged sirloin with potato gratin, Mr. Moore employed nine people over two days. For the final preparation, he used 10 pans and a stove area about the size of an average Manhattan kitchen.
Not even a chef can cook like a chef outside his restaurant, no matter how accomplished a slicer and dicer or how visionary an artist. "I just smoke up the house, and it annoys my wife," Mr. Moore said. Still, with some planning and a few simple techniques borrowed from the professionals, the home cook can approach the grace of Mr. Moore's $28 creation, without smoking up the house. It won't be exactly the same, but it will be close.
The great advantage that chefs have is a labor force. There were, for example, the two men who arrived at Montrachet in the morning to peel the Yukon Gold potatoes used in the gratin and to slice them to Mr. Moore's specifications. They left the results soaking in cream in the restaurant's walk-in cooler for another prep cook, who assembled the gratin, cooked it in a convection oven, covered it with parchment paper and returned it to the walk-in to cool. Then there was the butcher who accepted delivery of the sirloin ($120 a side, aged three months) and who cut it into steaks for the evening service, trimming fat and sinew. There was the unpaid chef's apprentice who cleaned the mushrooms, and a line cook, Ryan Stewart, who turned and glazed the carrots and trimmed and blanched the haricots verts and who, at the end, sprinkled the flowering micro beet sprouts over the meat.
There was another line cook, Pedro Espinal, who sautéed the steak and warmed the shallot sauce. There was Kevin Lasko, who cut the potatoes out of the gratin pan with an aluminum die, and gave the round to Mr. Espinal, who warmed it in the oven and browned it in the salamander, a kind of superbroiler used in professional kitchens that sits above his stove.
And throughout the process there was Mr. Moore, who poked and prodded and nudged and tasted and, eventually, smiled. "This is my job," he said, by way of slightly amazed self-explanation. "This is what I do."
And you, cooking at home? Before you finish peeling an onion, a chef is sautéeing it. While you are mincing an herb to get the teaspoon needed in a recipe, a chef is grabbing a pinch out of a little tray.
When, before tackling a new recipe, you wonder whether you should make a batch of stock, which itself might require a trip to the market, in order to reduce it so you can produce a few tablespoons of demi-glace, the chef is spooning that thick, delicious, sauce-enhancing substance out of his seemingly endless supply, produced earlier by a prep cook who arrived at 7 a.m.
A well-stocked restaurant has common herbs like parsley, dill, thyme and basil on hand every day of the year; it may also stock chervil, shiso, marjoram, lovage, baby arugula, basil sprouts or, as at Montrachet, micro beet sprouts. Veal chops are ordered cut to specifications; beef cuts are consistent and dry-aged; fresh pasta might be made on premises or delivered. And so on. Will your local fish supplier or supermarket have halibut tomorrow? The chef has someone call Maine to make sure it is delivered first thing in the morning.
And though it does not matter as much as people believe, restaurant equipment is often on a different level from what is available to all but the wealthiest home cooks. There are indoor grills and wood-burning ovens; efficient salamanders (so named for the mythical reptile who lived at the fiery center of the earth) that, unlike most broilers, actually brown food; convection ovens to speed the roasting process; Fryolators that make frying, a tremendous challenge to home cooks, ridiculously simple; dishwashers, both human and mechanical, that take care of pots and pans almost as quickly as they are soiled; and exhaust vents that can handle real smoke.
At Montrachet, for example, Mr. Moore needs to keep the door to his kitchen open at all times. If he does not, the suction created by the exhaust hood above his stoves will pull the door open by itself, creating a breeze that blows decorative elements like flowers off his plates.
Finally, there is a fact that few people talk about but everyone knows: most chefs do not cook with your health in mind. They might fuss about organic vegetables or their steaming technique or their vegan soup, but when it will benefit a dish they load in the fat. While you might think twice about finishing a reduction sauce for four with a tablespoon of butter, the chef will finish a sauce for one with two tablespoons. Your two tablespoons of olive oil used for sautéeing four portions could easily become half a cup for sautéeing one at the chef's stove.
Mr. Moore uses butter with calculated glee, which is to say with no calculation at all. "I don't even think about the amount of oil I use," Mr. Moore said, pointing to some glazed baby carrots in Mr. Stewart's sauté pan. "For me, it's a tool, not an ingredient."
Having said all that, though, experienced home cooks know that you can produce great food that approaches the four-star restaurant level in the home kitchen. It just means you must have reasonable expectations while exercising good judgment and mastering a few special techniques.
For "judgment," I might say "restraint." Home cooks get themselves in trouble when they become overly ambitious (there is a tradition of this in the United States: it's called Thanksgiving). Without help, and I don't just mean someone to wash the dishes, it is a challenge to prepare a meal that includes more than two complicated dishes. Indeed, on anything except a special occasion, when you might set aside four hours or more to be in the kitchen, it is nearly impossible.
Great as Mr. Moore's potato gratin is, you'd need the bulk of the day just to soak the slices in cream. But the alternatives are myriad, and some, still worthy of a great restaurant, are quick enough for weeknight meals. For example, parboil those same potatoes - a step you can do in advance - crisp them in a pan, and you've saved hours. Then substitute dried porcini mushrooms for Mr. Moore's chanterelles, replace the carrots with easy-to-prepare broccoli and eliminate the time-slaughtering shallot sauce, and a meal similar to Mr. Moore's can be executed in less than two hours.
None of this means that side dishes and desserts should be store-bought; it means, for example, that you might abandon the idea of Montrachet's crisp-topped crème brûlée for dessert, as I've done here, in favor of vanilla pots de crème, a stellar dessert that predates the crème brûlée and is far simpler to make (there's no messing with propane torches to brown the top, for instance). It also means that not every dish must be served piping hot (an obsession more noticeable in the United States than elsewhere); as chefs like Mr. Moore know well, many are equally good warm or at room temperature. Steaks, in fact, can improve in the time spent resting, as the juices recede from the surface of the meat.
As for the equipment deficiencies of the home kitchen, these are largely imagined and not unlike car envy; you may want a Mercedes, but your Taurus gets you to work just fine. Similarly, you don't need a Viking stove to be a good cook, and all but the most inadequate equipment can be worked around (I have done most of my cooking on electric stoves since 1994, and have come to like them). The key lesson to remember here is not that you need a stove that produces ultra-high heat but that you should use the high heat that your stove produces.
I have talked to scores of chefs over the years about this issue, and most agree that the most beneficial adjustment home cooks could make would be to preheat skillets before beginning to cook in them. Even if you have a propane stove, if you rest an empty skillet above a medium flame for a couple of minutes before adding oil, butter or the steak you're preparing, you will begin to sauté and pan-grill like a champ.
High oven heat is almost as important, as is using the oven more frequently, even in preparing dishes that are not roasted. An oven set at 450 or 500 degrees can help you get food off the stovetop while you continue to brown it.
This has a couple of advantages. First, it can compensate for the lack of an exhaust fan, which means you can brown fish or meat in the house without setting off the smoke detector. It also means you can gain room on top of the stove. And finally, if you equip your oven with a pizza stone or ceramic cooking tiles, you can produce the kind of strong, even bottom heat that chefs gain by putting their skillets directly on the floor of their ovens.
Of the remaining issues, some are insurmountable; you will never have a bevy of workers and unlimited access to prime ingredients.
You can, of course, produce large quantities of stock and freeze some, mince enough parsley in a food processor to last a few days (and preclude the need to track down fresh, flowering micro beet sprouts with which to garnish the steak) and so on, but this does not guarantee that you will have what you need when you need it. And you can treat yourself to some chanterelles or a dry-aged steak when you see them at the market or order them from afar. That's easy enough, as long as you have the money.
But in many ways, the easiest way to make your food taste chef-created is to bring butter back into your life: steam some broccoli and top it with lemon, then steam some more and top it with lemon and beurre noisette, and see which one reminds you of your favorite restaurant.
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