Scratch Versus Homemade, plus Bread

I just read that chefs in Chicago are serving various dishes in wide mouth mason jars to, according to the article, make the dish appear more "homemade." I have no problem with the concept of presenting food in any creative way you want. Though I personally don't like food as sculpture where one needs to deconstruct it before you can begin eating. This can also have comic consequences as happened to me in a restaurant in Las Cruses, NM- the food had this massive fried tower on top that proceeded to fall off the plate and onto the table even with the waitress attempting to gently and carefully lay the plate in front of me. She was embarrassed, but it had obviously happened before.

A restaurant can make a dish from scratch, using nothing but raw ingredients to get there. An example would be my Chicken Marsala. We start with raw chicken, vegetables, herbs and spices to make the chicken stock that will be in the broth. We chop all the mushrooms and mix the various kinds I like to use. We slice and flour the chicken breast, etc, until the dish is cooked and plated. No premade sauce or bullion is used. The chicken isn't already sliced, floured and frozen by a factory. This is scratch cooking, and all fine dining restaurants do this.

Homemade cooking can only occur in a home. And though I spend more hours in a day at the restaurant then in my home, though I sometimes jokingly call it my home and even have mistakenly said, "I'm heading home," when I meant the restaurant, it is not my home. Only if the chef actually lives in the restaurant can you call it homemade. It might be a technicality but it is a difference that counts. Besides, at my mom's home, like many American households these days, homemade means jarred pasta sauce with a few things added to change the flavor. That is homemade, but not scratch cooking. Chefs should be proud of scratch cooking and use the word when they are doing it. Implying homemade can imply shortcuts they aren't even taking.

With that in mind.... I have never told my guest at the restaurant that our bread was homemade or scratch. Up until last night we used a frozen dough that needed to be defrosted, shaped, allowed to rise and then baked off for that day. Yesterday I made a scratch baguette using half organic stone ground whole wheat flour. The texture was great and I'm proud of it, though I am not the most accomplished bread baker. I also created a roasted garlic- rosemary roll using the same flour and my favorite challah bread recipe as a base. This was less successful- the rosemary flavor was almost perfect, but I need to triple the garlic next time. Live and learn. But once I finish off the case of pita bread I already have, ALL the breads we serve will be from scratch. (Pita bread is actually quite simple and I used to bake batches in a restored 1800's wood fired oven when I live in Tennessee.) Its time I used those skills once more.