Professional Chef Answers Home Cooking Questions

Chef with Three Restaurants Debunks Your Home Cooking Myths

Why does everything stick to your pan? Why won't pil pil sauce emulsify? Potatoes with or without onion in the tortilla? The questions that arise when cooking often have a technical explanation. A chef—partner in three establishments, one closed, and head of a hotel's kitchens—answers questions for free on a forum. No beating around the bush, and with a few sharp remarks.

Why Won't Pil Pil Emulsify and How to Rescue a Broken Sauce?

The short answer: temperature and patience. A roux (flour and fat) requires cooking the flour properly and continuous stirring when adding broth, or lumps will appear. Paprika is another minefield: if it burns, it ruins the entire dish. Among the circulating tricks, one suggests pounding chicken breasts "to break down the fibers."

For pil pil, the chef offers an unorthodox shortcut: xanthan gum doesn't need heat or dilution in water; it thickens cold and creates a smoother emulsion. It's not grandma's recipe, but it can save dinner. Every craftsman has his own method.

The Great Sauce Brava Debate: Tomato or No Tomato?

This is where tempers flare. One camp insists that authentic salsa brava contains no tomato, describing a roux made from a sofrito with meat and ham bone broth, to which paprika is added. Another argues that brava varies by region and there's no single fixed recipe. The Catalan version uses aioli and paprika oil; the Canary Islands version uses mojo mayonnaise; and even a famous Madrid chef—Alberto Chicote—prepares it with a tomato base.

The professional's conclusion is uncomfortable for purists: for bravas to be bravas, you need two things: potatoes and a spicy sauce. And anyone claiming the Madrid version is the official one is mistaken: it's not the primary one. Sour potatoes, they say, are best for frying.

Long Menu, Frozen Product: The Rule That Signals Suspicion

Few sentences better summarize the business. A large menu necessitates impossible stock levels to move fresh, so the deduction is simple. Those who cook to sell focus on short menus, orders adjusted to the season, and rotating products. Traceability—from origin to table—and temperature control are not luxuries: they are legal obligations in any professional kitchen. The real difference between cooking at home and in a restaurant, he insists, isn't technique: it's the quantities and the stress.

The True Cost of Cooking: Salaries, Tips, and Rancid Oil

The numbers the chef shares ground the industry. Before the pandemic, he earned about €40,000 gross per year in consulting; the crisis reduced his turnover by 40%, and with the company now running, he estimates he'd now be around €100,000 gross. He works about 40 hours a week, though with days of 10 or 12 hours and others of 3 or 4. Flexibility, he says, that he didn't always have.

Regarding tips, distribution is chaotic: sometimes split between front-of-house and kitchen, sometimes only for front-of-house, sometimes each waiter keeps their own. What's clear is that they are decreasing. And about the oil, an uncomfortable warning: with constant use, it should be changed daily; some establishments stretch it for two weeks. The greasy smell in some bars doesn't come from frying a lot, it comes from rancid oil.

The Real Christmas Dinner: Moussaka, Tagine, and Oxtail Cannelloni

When asked about the Christmas menu, the chef comes down to earth. On his last home Christmas Eve, he served muhammara, baba ganoush, and mutabbel with wheat bread, plus a moussaka and a lamb tagine. For New Year's Eve, cannelloni stuffed with oxtail. Nothing from a magazine recipe. And a warning for the naive: easy panettone doesn't exist. Anything that turns out well takes time and effort, and even then, he only made it once, in culinary school.

Home cooking isn't fixed with shortcuts or fancy names—"earth apple in hot oil" is still a fried potato—but it can be improved with method. It's strange that no one charges for it.