I used to have a Personal Chef service in Philadelphia called Roux: In-Home Fine Dining.
It’s a little known fact because it was a failure.
My failure as a personal chef was not due to my inability to cook; it was due to my lack of business education, which I have since corrected (thanks Drexel). Over my years I’ve learned a lot from each of my endeavors and something became crystal clear to me about 2 minutes before I started writing this post: Success in Social Media is a lot like Success in Cooking.
Recipes vs Technique
“Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again”
― Julia Child, Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking
Is it done yet?
There is a huge difference between putting a piece of chicken in the oven for 25 minutes at 375 because you read it in a cookbook and doing it because you’ve cooked chicken 10,000 times. There’s a difference between knowing a filet mignon is medium rare because the recipe said it should be by now at this temperature, and knowing it because you poked it with your finger and know what medium rare feels like.
A Perfect Roux
Roux is something near and ear to my heart. It’s the beautiful result of cooking some form of fat, usually oil or butter, and flour. A roux is used to thicken a sauce and is the basis of many cajun/creole dishes. To make a proper Roux, one needs practice. No matter how many recipes you read, making a perfect Roux is a skill that must be practiced over and over. Making a roux is not about a recipe, it’s about a technique, and once you have it, you can create magical dishes.
Season to Taste: Knowing how to cook
When you KNOW how to cook, you don’t look at a recipe and see ingredients, you see technique. Putting together the perfect dish isn’t always about what’s on paper, it’s about knowing the technique to use when it doesn’t taste “right.” Technique allows you to cook without recipes, it allows you to create.
Chefs vs Cooks
Though I’d never run my own commercial kitchen I always referred to myself as a chef, not a cook. While I understand that may be offensive to chefs that have earned their chops by enduring years in the grueling world that is the back-of-house, I assure you that the distinction is not meant to undermine their hard work.
The reason I always referred to myself as a chef is because chefs lead, and cooks follow and execute.
If you are a line cook, you have little final say in the creative direction of the restaurant. While cooks are vital to the end product and, in many ways, greater influence over the final product, it is the chef that sets the direction and puts his/her name on the line with each plate. The chef creates a theme, orders the ingredients, pays attention to the details and then entrusts his/her team to execute the plan.
Social Media: Create the Perfect Dish
Facebook is chicken, it ubiquitous, pretty much everyone likes it enough and there’s a million different ways to use it.
Building a relationship is cooking chicken perfectly.
If you talk about Social Media in terms of the ingredients, you are following a recipe. If you really want to create a dish that impresses you need to learn the technique. You need to understand that Social Media, Social Business, Social Networking and Social Strategy are about understanding HOW to use the tools, choosing the right ingredients, and picking the best combination of flavors to impress your guests (audience, customers, etc).
Once you learn the techniques, once you take the time to understand your guests, and once you have the foundation only then can you understand how to use that fancy new ingredient; whether it is a Pinterest, a Schemer, a Timeline or a Plug-in.
Digestif
“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
― Julia Child“You’ll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.”
― Julia Child“This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”
― Julia Child, My Life in France“Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.”
― Julia Child“Cooking is like love; it should be entered into with abandon or not at all.”
― Harriet Van Horne