Tasks you hate doing - Page 3

Tomatoes concasse. Just the feel of the grainy pulp underneath as the waxy skin slides off, the mucus encased seeds and their insipid juice everywhere....for about 6 weeks every year they are a divine pleasure. Now with 100 moules provencal a week hitting the board they seem like a never ending pain in the ***.

And I can identify with about 90% of the other posts too...Although I've never met a dishwasher that refused a six pack of heineken or corona to clean the grease trap. Total cost to me $6.48 Actual value: Priceless!

Shrimp, HATE IT. And, for some reason I cannot stand to grease and flour ANY type of pan, I spray the heck out of 'em and PRAY. I'll also line the bottoms which is also a PITA but I would rather do that than flour them. Guess I just wanna get to the good stuff! When I teach I make others do the grunt work for me!

Picking herbs, especially thyme.

Frenching racks of lamb.

Frenching racks is easy too. Cummon people! :) Chop faster!

Its very easy (actually most cooking is pretty easy imo), its just not fun after the 150th rack and your fingers are numb, thank god nerves regenerate.

I wish a private **** on whoever decided to start using these things.

On that note...the purveyor we use for beef started individually wrapping the fillets a couple months ago which wasn't great but we got used to it...but I just noticed today that they started putting inspection stickers in what seems like 1 out of every 8 packages. Not only is it more time consuming...but what if someone misses that when they're unwrapping 250 steaks and somehow it ends up on the plate?

The task I hate doing most - making any sort of a garnish for a dish that people never really eat anyway. It's against my culinary philosophy, and is a colossal waste of time. I've worked in restaurants where 80 percent of the time was spent preparing 10 percent of the food. **** pretentious fine dining nonsense...

How about deliming the combi oven? One place where I worked the water was so bad we had to delime every week.

I love cooking professionally. And mulling over this topic a little more I think that all the manual labor, cleaning, paperwork, dealing with purveyors, suits, etc.....all seems easy compared to getting cooks to do their work properly and consistently every single day without compromising the food in any way. Esp. in a union kitchen. "That's not my job," has got to be my most favorite hated phrase of all time.

I never really gave this one much thought, but you do bring up a good point. I can pretty much agree with you 100% on this.

What do you call those little bundles of herbs? Pluches or something? What's the proper name?

I also thought about this, though it is a minor gripe since the customer is entitled to have their food the way they want.

I really dislike having to cook anything past medium (unless its chicken)

I really dislike breading anything. That or waitstaff that doesn't tell you about big tops in the restaurant. Griping servers....Slow workers...blah.

I don't mind shrimp, fryers and supremes!

In fact, I'd say of the closing tasks I least mind, cleaning the fryer is one of them. I'd volunteer to do it if it means someone else will deal with all the fiddly organizing elsewhere. A big task which requires total attention is perfect for me after a day of multitasking, it's a chance to mentally calm down and not have to worry about anything else, and there is no running around on tired feet involved.

I do mind cleaning the hoods and filters, but only because of the climbing and squirreling aspect. If someone will fetch filters down for me and put them back later on, I'll be happy to scrub them to a mirror shine.

Citrus supremes are fun, very satisfying task. Same for tournes.

When I worked catering gigs, the task I liked least was the constant setting up and tearing down and setting up and tearing down, repeat ad nauseum. No amount of superior pay compared to restaurant kitchens could get me to choose that profession for full time.

But any task can be made unpleasant if you're teamed with a co-worker who's sloppy or otherwise uncaring and/or not mentally present. That kind of thing affects my own morale. Of course I do my best not to let it affect me but it sucks and is distracting to have to fight it anyway.

I agree with you 150%...but let's not forget lazy...chatty...dissappears all the time.

ok as a commie... ill tell you what i hate..

now depending on who im working with depends on if i get yelled at and no respect (i dont care if im bottom rung... i work hard too)

heres a 40lb bag of mussels... clean em, check em, once youve done that, theres 50kg of spuds... peel em, chop em, steam em... and by then there should be sufficient mess and low stock to hand for me to keep you busy all day while i chat and drink coffee around working...

or theres the guy who helps me peel, helps me wash the mussels, gives me real food to cook... sometimes i get left on the grill taking main courses all the way through from fresh to plate while its quiet and its a great confidence booster


fryers = easy... get yourself some industrial strength de-greaser, whack more than it says your supposed to in water, fill the fryer (over the max level and over the mess) turn your fryer on and up...

just dont let it boil over !!!! boss tried my way once, left it boil over, fire alarm, an hour of cleaning... what a twat.

cleaning enourmous pots that have had gravy simmering without stirring for 9 hours.

day dotting and cling filming i hate that... cleaning things you KNOW are gonna get dirty within 5 seconds of...

breadcrumbs... i hate them.. not as a task so much as they get everywhere you move some bread 4 inches and the whole table has crumbs on for an hour.

cleaning the char grill, the hood, i dont think we have grease traps... or if we do they are cleaned proffesionally. how do i know if we have grease traps?

I HATE unedible garnishes. I also hate mint and parsley sprigs. Unappetizing, unappealing, waste of money! And YET every day I must finely finely chop parsley, to the point my wrist becomes sore and I have to hit my knife to the stone again after I'm finished, and all that just to sprinkle on a salad plate. I HATE IT. I HATE...IT...

We do oysters at my restaurant, too, and those bastards take so much time. Especially the kumo motos! When you already have to roll seven rolls of sushi, make fifteen different items on the menu, and then receive an order for twenty oysters... well, let's just say I've gotten really really fast at shucking oysters!

:cool: HOW ABOUT THE GUY OR GIRL THAT NEVER DOES THEIR OWN PREP BECAUSE THEY ARE TO SLOW AND (OR) CANT EVEN DO IT HIM SELF. BECAUSE THEY HAVE'NT LEARNED HOW, AND YOU'VE ALREADY TRIED TO TEACH THEM BUT THEY CAN'T, THEY DO'NT KNOW, THEIR TO SLOW AND BESIDES YOU DO IT BETTER AND FASTER. SO GET IT DONE AND KEEP HAVING THEM WATCH OVER YOUR SHOLDER AND ONE DAY MABE YOU'LL GET A SUPRISE.

• Peeling shallots and cleaning crab and baby artichokes(down to the hearts)

• Piping pate a choux

• Organizing the walk in freezer and cleaning the relief mats (old school style with the holes in them).

Oh yeah and mopping/cleaning etc.. up after the wait staff just because they don't want to get dirty.

I hate:

Coming in two hours before the start of my shift on Sunday (for which I am not paid) so that I can get those 6 trays of chicken breaded, those 3 roasts cut into single servings (fat removed), 2 pans of gravy and 3 pans of mashed made, 1 pan of southern-style taters cooked, eggs, sausage, french toast sticks, white gravy, cleaning all the pans/trays/wire racks that these items get cooked or prepared in/on, oh yes, and preparing 4 lbs of pasta, dicing 16 tomatoes, setting up for waffles (waffle irons weigh 50 lbs- think cast iron), getting all the veggies set out, buffet completely set up, kitchen mats/utensils all put out, everything turned on, line restocked, items for the catered jail meal set up, more dishes, prepping salads, restocking the bags of chicken in the cooler, making 2 lbs of our wild rice/white rice/veggie mixture, more and more (that's about half of my assigned tasks on Sunday)...

And getting yelled at when I get behind.

Or getting yelled at because I forgot to put a ladle in the salsa- go get it yourself, you friggin' lazy kitchen manager! It's a ladle! You've done nothing but drink coffee for 15 minutes since you got here!

I love the tasks, I just wish people would stop saying "well, it didn't take ME more than 3 hours to get everything done..."

And I wish I could get paid for those extra hours.

Other than that I hate washing all the buffet pans.

Cookie Mama-at home baker

Cleaning graters after grating citrus peel and rind.
Burnt suger in the oven when forgetting to protect it from a spitting pie.
Cleaning bowls too big for the sink.

Hey there,

I have to say its cleaning mussels because they just take so long and some of them are just so dirty grrr :mad: lol

But I know its worth it but oh my god

I didn't read the whole thread, but I despise potato baskets(if you have ever made them you know what they are). I was 16 working the broiler at a CC and we were doing a wedding tasting. The Sous got these pot basket makers(basically juffrett pots arranged in a basket shape and fried, piped full of mashed) and we were using it with the Fillet and Lamb. To make a long story short we sent one out to the bride, and she had to have them for the wedding (250 people:mad: ). I got stuck making them one at a time over a hot fryer, and my hand is still numb to this day from 2 boxes of pots on a mandoline(cris cross cris cross, etc.....)

lobster, lobster, lobster

hahahaha, i have no problem doing the killing, cooking and removing of shell, but since im the new guy learning, i have everone else asking me to do even the smallest things while im in the process of doing the lobster, wherein i have to take my gloves off, wash up (dont want cross contamination) just to fetch some eggs, or a litre of water, or something like that.

no wonder all the lobster piles up, im never given the opportunity to just get at it and finish it all in one go

Teaching and supervising people who don't want to learn or too stupid. I'm sorry, but for two consecutive nights I just wanted to scream at this one person who just didn't seem to get it... I felt I was being very patient and understanding and trying to guide her through everything and she disappears every hour to God knows where... but when you feel like you need to hold their hand while telling them how to check food temps and they can't spell lettuce correctly... well, it really got to me. Fortunately, she admitted that she couldn't handle it and will be quitting, and since I'm neither the chef nor the sous, I felt powerless.

I hate doing other people's jobs as if I didn't have tasks of my own to do.
Much of my staff are aging and can't reach certain things, or do things outside what they've done for the past 10+ years. I mean, cookies are easy to do especially when we order them already in 2oz portions, all you gotta do is tray them, bake them, and time it, then take them out to cool. Or how about cutting your own **** vegetables. I don't know how many times I have left my station partially unattended because I gotta look up onions and peppers for the pizza station, gee how about not chit chatting so much and DO YOUR FREAKING JOB!

I pulled a double today training in the new chef and as usual, I have to cover everyone's break without having my own. Well, the 2 manning the pizza station always go on break together...don't ask me why. Because they couldn't go on break earlier together, they went late, at the same time other people go on break, when I look after their job...so now I'm doing 3 people's jobs instead of 2. Well instead of hiring more people, heres a cheaper and much simpler solution...GO ON BREAK SEPERATLY!

Cleaning.....:eek:

People who don't respect food, they just cook as a job and there's somehow at least one everywhere I go. The rest I love, even if I hate it at that particular time, at the end of the day, when I'm reflecting, I know that I got better, and someday someone will come around that thinks they can pop oysters faster, clean garlic better, or even down to scrubbing the floors better....well I beg to differ :smiles: If my chef can't do MOST things better or faster or whatever, I want to go somewhere else.

cleaning the deep fryer :(((

I hate to clean that thing it's really sick and nasty!!

Stella,
http://radical.glogster.com/