RARIFY QUEST HOW TO

The chef could see Jarobi’s thoughts play out on his face: Oh, shit, I need a bucket! Jarobi crossed the kitchen to grab one. The chef watched Jarobi at his station, potato skins spilling over the table and onto his feet, potatoes rolling off his cutting board. Jarobi’s problem was that he hustled too hard and moved too much. Stuck stuffing hot dogs into buns at an O’Charley’s on Long Island, Jarobi muscled his way onto the hot line by convincing his boss to fire one of his coworkers because, Jarobi claimed, he could do both jobs at once. He’d been working in restaurants since he was 14 years old. One student, Jarobi White, was neither novice nor slouch.

RARIFY QUEST HOW TO

In a kitchen at the New York Institute of Technology’s Long Island campus, a chef taught his new students how to turn potatoes-“turning” being one of the basic techniques of knife work: peeling and cutting vegetables so that they have a smooth and uniform shape. The following is an excerpt from the book, which chronicles White's journey from emcee to Roy Choi cooking partner. One of the chefs Charnas profiles is Jarobi White, an original member of A Tribe Called Quest, whose decision to depart from the crew to pursue a career in cooking led him to work in some of the finest kitchens in NYC. The book that resulted is called Work Clean: The Life Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind.

The goal? To deconstruct the chef’s particular system of personal organization, called “mise-en-place,” and show how it can be applied outside kitchens-in offices, homes, and other settings. Over the past two years, author Dan Charnas has spent dozens of hours in professional kitchens interviewing over 100 people from the culinary world -including lauded chefs like Thomas Keller and André Soltner.

Rarify quest