The hands and arms of a chef
There is great lore and mythology surrounding the hands and arms of a chef.
As an example, there seems to be great marvel whenever I cook for friends, family or in a demo class about how much heat I can apparently absorb or sustain with my hands.
Often I fan the flames of this misinterpretation by confidently shrugging my shoulders and allowing that, “Yes, we do handle a lot of hot stuff, so I suppose I have become immune.” I am queasy and a little embarrassed to write that, at those times, I tend to puff out my chest a tad; my shallow ego licked once more.
The tell-tales scars on the arms and hands of line cooks the world over illustrate a rite of passage of some sort and are inflated with requisite bragging rights. In some instances, the scars shine like red badges of courage. But not always.
The reality is that cooks don’t have much different heat tolerance than most other people, at least where getting burned is concerned. Flesh burns at the same temperature for all of us.
What we do glean, however, is a healthy understanding of what is truly hot and where. We learn exactly how to move the hot thing, minimizing our surface area with that of the heat and drastically reducing the contact time our hands have with the source. Let’s just say we don’t linger or offer up the full fleshy mitt of a hand. Using quick jerking and bouncing movements we create the illusion of super human hands.
All cooks brag about the trauma that brought such and such a scar. I have been there myself. I recall one night years ago as sous chef when I was calling the pass and cooking at the same time. I turned to face the chit machine while simultaneously flipping a duck breast that had been rendering in a hot pan. Not looking at what I was doing, I forced a big splash of molten duck fat up over the soft flesh between thumb and fingers and over the top of my hand. It was a doozy and the subsequent peeling of a good deal of skin and scarring was something that I was proud of. But it really hurt.
As I have grown older I have adopted a different approach to the bravado of kitchen scars.
To wit, a cook on my brigade with burned or scarred hands and arms displays to me that they have endured the cruel, physical sting of a job submerged in fire, heft and sharp knives. That same cook, over time, showing less scar tissue, resounds deeply with me as a cook who has downplayed recklessness and bravado for thoughtfulness and accuracy. In short, I look for experienced hands that don’t look like horror movie extras.
And no matter how much grace and thoughtfulness learned through experience, there is still rampant stupidity.
The worst cut I sustained from my chef’s knife happened in my home kitchen when I used my chef ’s knife to cut off the grounding guard on a plastic extension cord when I wanted to plug in a three prong cord (my wife cautioned against this bonehead move (see: ‘bravado’ above). I even went to lengths to set up my guard fingers correctly, until the thick rectangle of plastic rolled forward and I cut off the nail and tip of my right hand ring finger.
Stay safe.