The big sauté pans, maybe three feet by three feet if not slightly bigger, took up one whole stove each. If any one of the crew were working alone and were in a hurry they might have worked two pans simultaneously. That was a feat in and of itself.
Working one pan, in actuality, was hard enough. Working two pans meant working double-speed and then some. Two pans at once meant no leisure time at all. By the time you filled one pan and half of the second it was definitely time to start flipping the breasts in the first pan. With luck, if the oil were not too too hot at the start, you might get to fill the second pan before starting to flip. Two pans meant constant work and never letting your eye off the chicken breasts.
Working two pans meant constant flipping. It also meant no mistakes.
Sometimes cooks and chefs laughed to themselves. It seemed stupid, right? What kind of mistake could anyone make flipping a chicken breast? But there were many.
First and worst was splashing grease and burning yourself. That could happen lots of ways.
Dropping a breast as you went to flip one was one way. Putting a flipped breast down the wrong way was another. If the grease splashed and hit your arm, that meant an immediate blister.
Burns and blisters sucked which was why they wore long-sleeve chef’s jackets here.
The job wasn’t just flipping one breast. Each pan held about 30 breasts, sometimes more or less depending upon the size of the breasts and how tightly you put them in. So you were working at least two and a half dozen breasts at once, twice that if you were working two pans.
At Suburban they wore short-sleeve kitchen shirts. Bill could hold out his arms and show a host of burn scars, more like brown spots and stripes up his arms. At Suburban they never had to sauté on such a large scale. Most of the burns on his arms happened from fryer grease popping or from touching the top of the Garland when reaching inside the broiler. The stripes were on the top of his arm mostly, but he striped the underneath part of the arm too by touching the bottom of the broiler when reaching deep inside, and he did this often.
Other mistakes in the big sauté pans were not getting to a breast in time and having to hurry or dropping one flipped on top of another. And of course the worst was if you burned one or two breasts, or even more. This did happen and it was a great unhappiness. It meant losing some stock sometimes and it certainly meant having to change oil and/or pans in the midst of the work. Once something burned it was really hard to get that taste out.
They sautéed. As they worked they were in their own worlds yet together. They talked and they joked and they tended to what they were doing, one pan each, each one working carefully, painstakingly cautious so as not to get burned or burn the chicken.
It worked out to three pans apiece. They could do one and then a second with a quick skimming of the oil in the pan but for the third pan it was start all over again. Choices there were to empty the pan, scrape it then put fresh oil in it or to scrap the pan altogether and get a fresh one. They all decided on that latter choice, especially since they did not have to wash the pans.
While they were waiting for the oil to heat up again for that last round of frying, they stood smoking and chatting. Jimmy Banquet Chef offered what he called the last drink for the day since it was starting to get toward time to be setting up for The Falstaff Room.
