Tasting Fame

For the last ten years here in Syracuse our largest local news station, WCNY, has put on a charity dinner once a year called Taste of Fame that is hosted by Drumlins Country Club. Each year features a celebrity chef who comes to Syracuse for the dinner while the banquet and events staff at Drumlins recreate the chef’s recipes for a cocktail hour and three course meal. This year featured celebrity Chef and Restaurateur Tiffany Derry. Chef Derry is well known for her appearances on Top Chef and her Texas-based restaurants Roots Chicken Shak and Roots Southern Table. While I have not had the pleasure of eating at any of Chef Derry’s restaurants yet, I did some research ahead of the event to see what I was going to be getting myself into when it came time to work.

This was my second Taste of Fame event that I have worked at Drumlins, but my first time being in charge of it entirely. I had a team of six including myself and it was up to me to execute recipes that I had not only never tasted before, but things I have never been able to successfully make in all my years in the kitchen. This was a high-stakes, higher profile event and every bit of its success was riding on my shoulders. No pressure, right? I spent an entire day just trying to source some of the ingredients since it’s Autumn here in CNY and our providers can’t get certain items. Like blood oranges, only in season from December to April. And I needed at least 30 of them just to execute the recipe at a 250 plate volume, let alone extras to try the recipe ahead of time and make sure it came out properly. Another entire day was spent converting the recipes provided to us by Chef Derry into the right amounts for the volume we were doing. Most of the recipes sent were for either a single batch serving 20 or a single plate serving one. The amount of math involved to convert a full recipe for burnt sugar short ribs, including spice garnis and sauce ingredients, from 8 plates to 200 plates and not have things overpower other ingredients at that volume was a high point of frustration for me. Math isn’t my strong suit. That’s why I cook and not bake.

Speaking of baking, one of the recipes was for a pistachio olive oil cake. Did I mention I don’t bake? I have made some variation of just about every recipe Chef Derry sent us EXCEPT an olive oil cake. Baking and I don’t get along. I can COOK anything. I cannot bake. Cooking is art. Baking is science. Baking requires precise measurements down to the GRAM and even something as simple as baking soda not being a compressed teaspoon and instead a loose teaspoon can drastically altar or ruin a recipe. I do not bake. I had to bake. Not only did I have to bake, I had to bake a very delicate, complex recipe using ingredients that I could not source without spending astronomical amounts of money on. So I had to MAKE pistachio paste instead of buy it. Does the idea of having to flash boil, shock and peel the skins off of six POUNDS of shelled pistachios sound appealing to you? And then puree those peeled pistachios into a fine grain paste and HOPE you don’t over blend them or add too much water or else you ruined the entire batch? Not my idea of a good time. At $129.80 per 6lb case of pistachios versus $56.99 per 2.2lb tub of pistachio paste via Amazon (and I would have needed four of them), I didn’t have much choice otherwise I was going to go way over my food costs just on dessert.

For the cocktail hour, we build an elaborate charcuterie display featuring cheddar, pepperjack, brie and pimento cheeses, pepper jelly, whole grain bourbon honey mustard, pepperoni, andouille sausage, bread and butter pickles, pickled green beans, dried apricots, roasted and candied pecans, cheese straws, assorted berries, deviled eggs with bacon jam, and whipped ricotta crostini with grilled peaches and hot honey drizzle as well as passed hors d’oeuvres of Chef Derry’s Mac & Cheese and miniature chicken and waffle sliders. Just for the charcuterie display we had to cut the cheeses, make pimento cheese, make the bourbon honey mustard, cut and cook the andouille, pickle green beans, roast and candy the pecans, prep and assemble 250 deviled eggs, make the bacon jam for the eggs, cut 250 crostini, whip the ricotta cheese, cut and grill the peaches and assemble the crostini, make the mac & cheese and then portion it into cups, prep the waffles and fry the chicken and then assemble the sliders. I had two people dedicated to JUST assembling the display on the day of the event.

For the three-course dinner, every recipe was to be a recreation of some of Chef Derry’s dishes. Starting with a Southern Caesar Salad with thinly sliced kale, romaine and mustard greens tossed with Chef Derry’s Caesar dressing, duck fat breadcrumbs and pecorino romano cheese. Entrees included a choice of Chargrilled Red Cabbage for the vegan option, which was supposed to be sous vide cabbage served over spicy garbanzo beans with charred lemon chimichurri. I don’t have the means to do sous vide, so we had to pivot and braise the cabbage instead and hope for the best. The poultry entrée was Fennel Roasted Chicken Breast with Calabrian honey glaze served over crispy roasted fingerling potatoes and asparagus and topped with wild mushroom bacon demiglace. Lastly, the red meat entrée was Burnt Sugar Short Ribs with roasted pearl onions and baby carrots served over sweet potato puree. For dessert, we had the aforementioned Pistachio Olive Oil Cake with blood orange marmalade and mascarpone crème or Coconut Panna Cotta for the vegan offering, served with seasonal berries and blood orange marmalade. Our final head count for the event was 250 plates with 16 vegan, 103 chicken and 131 short rib.

The chicken was the only dish out of everything that did not have me worried in the slightest. It wasn’t a complicated recipe, just a slightly more intensive cooking process than just “bake chicken, serve it.” Braising the cabbage instead of sous vide was a gamble, but I didn’t have much of an option. The braising juice and sauce for the short ribs was intense to make because anything with burnt sugar in the name has a roughly 3 second window between executed properly and unusable while you are caramelizing the sugar before adding the broth. Tossing panko in lemon zest and duck fat is easy in theory, but when you have to zest 75 lemons and render 4.5 pounds of duck fat to do it, it gets a little more daunting. Demiglace isn’t DIFFICULT to make, it just takes a lot of time. Time was unfortunately something I did not have a lot of that week.

Not only did we have this high profile, 250 head plated dinner to execute, the week leading up to it wasn’t exactly a breeze. Tuesday featured wedding tasting for four and a dinner buffet for fifty. Wednesday held a lunch buffet for 35 and a dinner buffet with passed hors d’oeuvres for 125. Thursday we had a lunch buffet for 30 that then had to flip into a plated dinner with displayed hors d’oeuvres for 75 while we also sent out a plated dinner for 80 at the exact same time. Friday was Taste of Fame, leading straight into Saturday with another massively important event for Syracuse University in the morning of a brunch for 150, brunch for 60, dinner buffet for 130 and ANOTHER dinner buffet for 60 just to turn around and have a brunch for 40 on Sunday and another high-profile event with a charity golf tournament for 105 on Monday. In between executing all of these back-to-back events, we had to find time to test and prep all of the recipes for Taste of Fame. I put in 71 hours in five days that week before Taste of Fame even happened.

I’m pretty sure the only reason we succeeded for that event was the fact that Chef Derry and her Sous Chef Naomig Perine were there to taste the food ahead of time and offer advice for adjustments. Chef Perine was in the kitchen with us the entire day Friday helping to put finishing touches on items as well as plate all 250 salads, dinners and desserts. Her contributions that day saved us, because without her it would have been a lot harder of a day. She knew exactly what every element of the plated food should look, taste and feel like. Having her in the kitchen helped in ways that I couldn’t even begin to describe and I regret the fact that I left before getting a chance to say thank you and good night because I was so exhausted after it all that I couldn’t even think straight.

But somehow we pulled through. Somehow I was able to keep all of the gears turning and the metaphorical plates spinning all at once to keep my team running and everything went swimmingly. Not one single complaint nor criticism from anyone. Chef Derry was thrilled with the level of detail we put into each item, doing our absolute best to recreate dishes we had never tasted using techniques we had either never tried or hadn’t used in years. Somehow I managed to bake five sheet trays of perfect pistachio olive oil cake. I still don’t know how, because I do not bake. But we did it. This was easily the most intense, most nerve-wracking event I have ever ran in my culinary career. Taste of Fame last year was a challenge, but I wasn’t in charge then. I was still learning how things worked at Drumlins and it wasn’t up to me to convert recipes or source ingredients or delegate tasks. This time, everything was riding on me. My team’s success was solely on my shoulders. The proper execution of a celebrity chef’s recipes was my responsibility to ensure. I hated every second of it. I loved every second of it. This is what I was meant to do. The stress, the pressure, the 90-ish hours worked in one week. All of it was worth it to have a Chef infinitely better at cooking than me look me in the eyes, shake my hand and say “Good job, Chef. You guys nailed every single thing. Every plate looked like it could have walked out of my restaurant’s kitchens.” I had a hand in every single item that walked out of my kitchen that day just so I knew it was done properly, but not one bit of that event would have been possible without my team. Sue, my morning prep cook, was the clincher in her ability to just hammer out mundane, tedious and repetitive tasks like cutting and coring 125 hard boiled eggs to make deviled eggs. Kaitlin and her absolutely beautiful charcuterie displays and eye for detail in the flow of each display. Shawn with his knack for bulk prep and can-do positive attitude keeping me from pulling my hair out. Matt and his ability to make the perfect sauces and purees in taste and consistency while also doing bulk cooking to make sure all of our sides were ready at once. Without them, this would have been an entirely different story.

All said and done, I simultaneously cannot wait to see what Taste of Fame looks like for next year and also dread Taste of Fame next year. This event is insanity, but I live for the insanity. This was the first time since I started at Drumlins that I felt real pressure like I did working on the line at the Sherwood or Cavalry Club. That entire week was the hardest week I have ever worked. And I loved every second of it. So thank you to WCNY for organizing this event, Chef Tiffany Derry for her incredible recipes and taking the time to come see us in the kitchen and offer her advice for adjustments to what we had already started and to Chef Naomig Perine for all of her help day-of. This is what good food looks like.

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