Chef at Sea
In the spring of 2008 I started down a career path that just a few months earlier would have seemed impossible. The previous fall, I had taken the steps to become a Merchant Mariner. I was a chef, and had worked at every kitchen job there was, from washing dishes to grinding celery for egg rolls to making five gallons of Bearnaise sauce at a time, and, despite what the Food Network would have you believe, that career is not all unicorns and lollipops. A stint a couple of years earlier as a steward for the University of Rhode Island’s research vessel had given me a glimpse of what working at sea could be like. When the opportunity arose to take the classes and move down that path I took it. Early in 2008 I was hired to be the Chief Steward on the R/V Oceanus, one of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s research vessels. I haven’t looked back.
Don’t get me wrong; I love being a chef. I love exploring new foods and making people happy. Food is the great peacemaker. It’s hard to stay mad over fresh strawberries with homemade vanilla ice cream drizzled with dark cherry balsamic vinegar. I love introducing people to the best oysters and explaining how terroir is just as important to food as it is to wine. I love the magic of turning four ingredients into creme brulee. Working in a restaurant, I hated never seeing my family, never having a holiday off, working dreadfully long hours in the stifling heat. Working at sea has given me the best of what I love and virtually eliminated the things I don’t.
My first real sea voyage lasted six months. I left Woods Hole on the ninth of July 2008 and returned on the twenty-second of December. In that time, I traveled to Barbados, Cape Verde, Canary Islands, Saudi Arabia, Gibraltar, St. Thomas and Bermuda. It was incredible. Many onboard bet I wouldn’t make it past Barbados, this being my first lengthy time away from the family, but I made it.
I ate flying fish sandwiches, the best polpo you can imagine, real paella, camel and seafood galore. I caught mahi-mahi, tuna, triggerfish and cooked them all. Delicious! I met talented scientists, interacted with locals, visited fish markets and produce markets and did some absolutely amazing hikes. I’m going to share with you some highlights from my first sea journey: the challenges that come with ordering for a trip at sea; receiving orders in foreign ports; what to do when you really, really need a gimballed oven; and the awesome experience of a simple can of soda in a village with no roads on an island off the coast of Africa.
Ordering for a restaurant is fairly straightforward. You know what your most popular items are and have a list of dairy, produce, meat and fish that you use to order, generally for the next day or week. When things get low or run out you can have it delivered that day or the next, depending on the purveyor. On a ship, you can throw that out the window. There is no Stop & Shop buoy and the produce guy does not deliver 1000 miles out at sea. The planning is paramount, the math exact. Take into account that in some countries, like Saudi Arabia, things you count on are not available, like pork. So, you have to order extra pork to get through that leg of the trip, but you may not be able to cook it if local emissaries are on board. So the math of feeding 30 people for 30 days becomes important. It breaks down like this: on average you have to budget for six ounces of meat per person per meal or 18 ounces a day or 1012 pounds of meat for the month, divided among chicken, pork, seafood, beef and lamb. Usually you add 10% to ensure you don’t run out.
With produce, it’s even more difficult. You might need 80 pounds of lettuce to keep the salad bar fresh for a month, but conditions on a ship mean the lettuce will only keep for two weeks, same with cucumbers and tomatoes. So you work out a progression of vegetables: the first two weeks you are serving fresh vegetables, then frozen, then canned. If you run out of those it means you are drifting somewhere in the Atlantic and nobody knows where you are so you won’t have to suffer the canned items for too long. Storing takes place every month or so and good luck getting what you thought you ordered in places like Cape Verde.
A scratch cooking background is of vital importance in places like this because what you won’t be getting is premade marinara sauce or even cut up chickens. Oh no, the chickens were delivered whole, still warm, with heads and feet attached, in garbage bags! They were, in fact, perhaps the most delicious chickens I’ve ever cooked, but a couple of the scientists almost became vegetarians.
For the most part ordering is done through a type of vendor called a chandler. There is generally at least one and sometimes as many as a dozen depending on the port. This is the guy “who can get you what you need”. This company will supply everything the ship needs for that stop. Oil? He’s got it. Some small, obscure valve with gasket you need to make the crane run? He’s got it. Groceries? He’s your man.
I’ve got a spreadsheet broken down into five parts: dairy, produce, meats, frozen, dry goods. I’ve got to take inventory a week before port stop and estimate what I’ll have left and what I’ll need for the next leg of the trip. I put all that down on the spreadsheet and submit it to the chandler that has been picked by the office back in the United States. In roughly two days I’ll get an estimate back and then the real work begins. I have to go over the entire order line by line and make sure that what I ordered was they have written down because, while the language of good food may be universal, the description of those things isn’t. If I am not careful I’m going to get something drastically different from what I ordered, something I may not recognize and the label won’t help because it’s in the native language. At that point, I am really sorry I skipped Ms. Diaz’s Spanish class my entire junior year.
Whipping cream is presweetened, thus rendered useless for cooking. For that I had to order cooking cream. Sour cream? That’s a no go; it’s going to be creme fraiche, but not quite creme fraiche, rather some combination of the two. Pork shoulder? Sorry, a bag of pork chunks that is easily 75% fat is what arrived. I need to order fresh ham, not to be confused with an actual ham, because then I get a giant salted Serrano ham with the hoof attached. Which is absolutely delicious and, even though I leave it out and carve a little every day for breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, self serve it lasts forever. I can’t get rid of it and it takes up so much space.
The produce is another whole region of confusion. I did not know that eggplants are only called eggplants in America. They are aubergines on the other side of the pond. Cilantro is coriander, summer squash, you never know what you are going to get, it is yellow zucca over there. Needless to say you have to go over the order carefully, identify things you don’t recognize and clarify with the chandler. Since there is no phone all this is done over e-mail, which can be a long and difficult process, always with a language problem in the way. One strategy I adopted was adding an image to each product on the spreadsheet so they had a good idea of the American product I was looking for. This went a long way towards solving the problem.
The last part of the chandler struggle is the actual delivery itself. Again, I speak no other language than English (and rather poorly at that), and the driver’s primary language is the local one. They could all speak a little bit of English, something that embarrasses me a bit as an American, so that helped. We gave them coffee and American cookies and looked through the whole order. A smart phone was essential. If I had received the wrong product, I asked what it was, they pointed it out on the slip and I popped up a picture of what I was actually looking for. Sometimes there was a dawning ahhhh! and they knew right away what we needed, made a call and prepared to make a second run. Often, they had no idea what their equivalent was. I had a guy who loved Marshmallow Fluff. Horrendous stuff but he was an engineer and vital to the operation. We couldn’t get it. I can say with some certainty that the rest of the known world has no idea what that stuff is and it gives me hope for the future. We ended up having it shipped from the U.S.
Produce was difficult. In the U.S. we tend to buy things that last for a week or more. Tightly wrapped heads of iceberg lettuce, tomatoes that are not fully ripe, cucumbers that will last a couple of weeks. In most of Europe they do their shopping every day and as a result their produce isn’t geared for longevity. The romaine is a loose-leafed lettuce that we would consider bolted. It lasts about four days. The tomatoes are delicious. Five days. Fantastic strawberries full of flavor? Better use them right now. You end up planning how far you are from the next stop and hitting farmers’ markets as much as possible.
And that leads to the local markets. We had petty cash on the ship that I could use for local purchases, and I took full advantage whenever I could to visit local markets and grocers. We have this special feeling in America about farmers’ markets. We Americans go to our local farmers’ market on Tuesday from 10-2 and ooh and aah over the fresh tomatoes and beans. We gurgle with joy over the kale that was just picked and try to decide where our CSA dollars will go this year. I have bad news for you: we are rank amateurs at this market thing. Other countries do not consider them special, they don’t have to be heavily regulated, the buyers are aware of warning signs of what not to buy and who not to buy from. It is just the market. It is an amazing experience.
The fish market in Cape Verde had a variety of fish, shellfish and octopus all caught that morning from a skiff less than a few miles from the market location. The market in Barbados had fresh organic basil picked that day. The market in Grand Canary had over 200 varieties of olives. I am not a fan of olives, as the three or four standard types we have here do not impress me at all, but in Spain? Oh boy! Olives stuffed with pimientos, fresh tuna, white anchovies, parsley pesto. Olives the size of the tip of your pinky, olives as big as cherry tomatoes, smoked olives, pickled olives, dry-cured olives, olives marinated in the juice from Serrano hams. No two tasted the same and they all were incredible! Now I love olives, not ours necessarily, but let me get my hands on some from Italy, and now we’re talking.
On to the physical difficulties of the job.
Imagine you are baking a cake. Nothing special, a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting. Most of you can envision the steps. You assemble the ingredients, weigh them out and prepare the oven and the pan. The organizing, the preparation, the actual baking is all pretty straightforward. Now imagine that a giant has stepped up to your house, gripped the building by the top of the foundation and lifted one side four feet into the air. Another giant does it again on the other side. Repeat. All your stuff goes flying. Your cake, when you get it in the oven, slides from one side to the other, spills out, never rises and you realize you were better off with a frozen cake.
It’s also difficult to make coffee because when the house moves, the stream of coffee ends up still pouring straight down except now the coffee pot isn’t directly beneath it. That’s what it was like cooking on the Oceanus. It was a difficult environment to get used to. We used clamps and rails on the stove, wedges in the oven and non-skid material everywhere. At one point, the meat slicer slid off the counter and across the floor. God bless Hobart, that beast still worked when we put it back. You couldn’t accurately weigh things because of the movement. You had to look at the lowest weight versus the highest weight and figure the average. As with any difficult situation, when you were successful it was doubly sweet. On one particularly bad run I made Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pies. I just couldn’t use the stove and my professional self had not yet acquiesced to peanut butter and jelly. When they came out the small pans had slid back and forth on the sheet pan repeatedly and became known among those who are still my friends as “The Night of the Chicken Pot Pie Tacos” because those suckers had folded right up. The next day was cereal and PB & Js, screw professional.
While these challenges could be difficult, over time I learned to adjust, communicate better and identify exactly what I wanted. When this allowed the operation to be more efficient and streamlined, it freed me up to actually explore the places I visited. I went on an incredible hike in Cape Verde: 14 kilometers down a mountain into a valley with banana farms and a village built on a ridge that was like stepping back into the 1800s. They were cooking over coals and had no roads or transportation. They shopped in Ribeira Grande and carried everything by hand over a dry riverbed to the village. After six hours of hiking, drinking my water and exploring, we found a mercado in the village and I had the single greatest drink I have ever had in my life: a pineapple Fanta.
Circumstances modify the experience a lot. In the Canary Islands we visited a village where a farmer was making small batch goat cheese that he sold to the local bars. He sold us a wheel. Now, I like cheese. I love walking into a cheese shop and absorbing the aroma of the fromage that just hangs in the air. This goat cheese from this small village on a mountainside on this island was a singular transforming experience. The single best cheese I have ever eaten, creamy yet piquant. We ate it with local honey and figs picked off the tree. I will never eat that cheese again. I would be unable to get to the place where we found it. I am always seeking that similar experience. In Saudi Arabia juice is elevated to a level I don’t think we can touch. Alcohol is not allowed, and juice is what they drink at parties, dinner, etc. Fresh squeezed sugar cane, fresh squeezed citrus, fresh squeezed fruits, everything fresh, fresh, fresh. A local berry and lime juice drink was sprinkled with a cinnamon spice mix and was superlative.
One of the things I have realized is that after ten years working as a steward on board ships at sea, I have missed the opportunity to be hired as an executive chef in a restaurant. That’s OK, because I hope never to do that again. I will say that the skills I had already acquired over years in the restaurant have only improved, and been enhanced by this job. I can make authentic Turkish khufti, Singaporean black pepper crab, Mediterranean plates with outstanding condiments, Caribbean jerk fish, Filipino pancit, all items I was never even aware of in my restaurant career. I’ve been exposed to cooking methods I never imagined and paid attention everywhere I went. My career at sea made me a better chef in almost every way.
In the end, choosing to work at sea was a decision that ranks among the best I ever made: travel, exposure to new foods and culture, and experiences around the world. I’ve traveled to 25 countries on five continents, eaten lunch under an erupting volcano, swum in all of the original seven seas, had my picture taken at 0° latitude by 0° longitude, and eaten oysters in Namibia (a close second to Wellfleet’s). I have enjoyed myself and grown both personally and professionally. Here’s to a few more years.
