I had fallen in love with ideas before, though none quite this hard. My mind raced to grasp the new concepts sparking light into my pot-addled laziness. Hiroshi, his name translates to "the great one" in English, had been giving his five students daily lectures on the science and spirituality of Natural Food cooking.
Baking, boiling, steaming, frying, and sautéing are the only five possible ways to cook food. These methods can be combined in any myriad of ways to produce various end results in the kitchen. What is most important is to understand how water contained in foods is heated to produce the effect of cooking. To do this, one must learn how to dance with heat as well as gain knowledge and control of fire, the most uncontrollable element and most necessary for cooking.
Hiroshi was an older man already, with over 40 years of kitchen work under his belt by the time I met him. His ability to dance with fire proved unmatched by any line cook I had ever seen before. His knowing of the proper size flame for each specific purpose puzzled us newer students. How could this old man so precisely predict the unpredictable? He had us mesmerized.
As I gained my own confidence around fire over the next year and a half of my life, I began to understand. The more you play with fire, the less you get burnt. Totally the opposite of what my parents taught me. Dancing in a commercial or professional kitchen, dancing with flames and steam and heat, knowing the flame and what it wants to do, all come with constant practice. This is the only way to overcome fear of getting burned. Hours stacked upon hours as he taught us.
High heat and giant flames are only necessary in Chinese cooking. Incredibly fast motions and forethought of my mise en place being the only way to keep up with the flames that produce such exquisite flavors only high heat can yield. Otherwise we generally practiced over medium to low flames, learning the dance slowly as we prepared ourselves to become proper cooks capable of handling the craziest of dinner service rushes. Time and practice are the only ways to gain this understanding. Knowledge and experience are the keys to wisdom.
The idea of controlling fire in the kitchen has helped me deal with heated situations in the outside world as well. Flammable situations are understood when one knows whether to apply or reduce the heat at a given time. This lesson is a constant even today, eleven years after I first met Hiroshi, and a year and a half since my mentor's passing.
No matter how hot it got, Hiroshi taught us to deal with fire by showing that it can be done with speed, accuracy, and beauty even in times of crisis.
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