When I decided to forsake running a restaurant kitchen for the freelance life of a personal chef, culinary instructor, consultant, and TV chef, I gave up the steady paycheck in exchange for the freedom to explore food and cooking under my own terms.
But everybody has to make a living somehow, and when the catering and personal chef business slow down, you sometimes opt for other forms of cooking for pay – like being a supermarket demonstrator for new product introductions.
Such was my experience last weekend as I traveled more than 120 miles to perform the first demonstration and an additional 80 for the second one.
A company that specializes in merchandising new food products hired me through a division of their firm that also hires freelance chefs. I was particularly happy to accept this assignment because it was all about cooking steaks. And I like to work
To give you an idea of the way these things operate, the hiring company sends you an e-mail with the particulars and their rules, which can be stringent. I had to supply my own table, burners, implements, pans, etc. They sent me a box full of signs, brochures, coupons, recipe cards, cocktail-size napkins, toothpicks and plastic gloves, along with their recipe and a debit card. I was given a budget of $50 for each demonstration and there were to be no deviations from that amount. Anything over 50 bucks came out of my pocket. So since there was a butter sauce (in reality it was a compound butter), I would have to purchase the ingredients to make this “sauce” as well as the meat. So my shopping list for Demo No. 1 was fresh chives, dried oregano, store brand unsalted butter, store brand proprietary label roasted garlic mixture, salt, pepper, and paper towels. That added up to nearly $13 and I still had to buy meat – expensive rib eye steaks, no less – and the demo was scheduled to last for four hours.
So as you probably know, rib eye steaks have a lot of fat. It’s one reason why they are so flavorful. Combine that with a bone and there is an unavoidable amount of waste. My limited budget allowed me to purchase only four steaks, but the meat department manager custom cut them for me, thick and trimmed off as much fat from the edges of the steak as possible.
Something else you need to know about being a supermarket demo chef: You must be prepared for all contingencies regarding cooking methods. The store wants you to be highly visible, yet you can’t become an obstruction so that shoppers and their carts can’t navigate the aisles. I’ve done these demos before and I have portable burners, a couple fueled by butane and an induction burner that requires electrical power. Not all supermarkets have accessible electrical outlets, and that was the case in each of the stores I worked in. So butane burners it was – preferable for me because it’s easier to control heat with gas and I had the perfect cast iron grill pan, which would work on either kind of burner.
Friday afternoons from 4 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. are busy times in most supermarkets and those were my demo hours. Start pan grilling a steak and soon the aroma wafts through the store and my station was abuzz with hungry shoppers ready to sample my wares. But properly cooked steak on a butane burner can take some time. Samples, if you’re lucky are half-inch cubes.
Instructions from the company were to add a dab of the butter “sauce” to each sample. After the 27th “what’s that?” I opted for a different method. As side two was just about done, I slathered the compound butter on side one and let it melt while side two finished cooking and the additional time I let it rest before slicing.
At 5:30, a measure of panic set in, because I had just one steak and an hour and a half to go. So I called the company’s toll-free number and my instructions were that if there was no more meat, just stand by the meat counter and talk about how good the steak was, hand out coupons and “be charming.”
No.
When you’re doing steak demos in a hard-scrabble town, the people want meat! So I bought another steak on my own and that seemed to do the trick – at least it bought me close to another hour.
Demo No. 2 the next day went a lot easier, because I didn’t have to buy my sauce ingredients or seasonings since I had more than enough left over from the day before. So I used my entire $50 allotment (including a coupon) to buy only meat.
I did not find out until later that while I was setting up my cooking site, two not-for-profit groups were setting up their own food sites in the parking lot – one for ribs and the others for burgers and franks.
Call it serendipitous. Call it a piece of unfortunate luck for the steak company. But people who are fed meat outside a supermarket are less likely to want more meat inside the supermarket. Needless to say, I had plenty of steak to last for four hours. And there were no leftovers.
Sales of this new brand of beef in both locations were better than good, and the meat department managers were happy with the way each event turned out.
And right in the middle of Demo No. 2, I learned that the county fair I cooked at last summer wants me back. Only this time, I won’t have to compete with racing pigs and diving dogs.
It’s all about the food for me – Demonstration Man.