Burning Question: Are there any foods that chefs find difficult to make?

Say you crave a warming tom kha or decadent beef Wellington, perhaps a molten lava cake because you somehow miss the ’90s. Where do you start? Well…um…

Listen—this is why we go to restaurants.

Well, it may come as a surprise, but some dishes baffle even the most celebrated chefs. Most, for instance, gave up on beef Wellington some years ago. And there are painstaking preparations like consommé that have also fallen by the wayside.

“If there’s one thing we all struggle with, it’s soufflé,” says Christian Ojeda, chef at Lucia Restaurant in the many-starred Bernardus Lodge in Carmel Valley.

The presentation dish is indeed notoriously temperamental, demanding both care and patience. That’s why it tends to be found only at old school haunts such as Fandango in Pacific Grove or gluttons for culinary punishment like Carmel’s Le Soufflé, where they can focus their attention on the delicate beast.

Not that tedium steers chefs away from all such dishes. For example, Kim Solano presses on toward spectacular moles at Moss Landing's Haute Enchilada, despite the labor involved.

“Everything is roasted on the fire first,” she explains. “You have to seed and devein the chiles, spices are toasted—it takes hours.”

A note of warning: Tip Solano off about the ease of mole from a jar and you’re likely to get an icy glare in return, even though you were just trying to help out.

Chefs most often warn about the exacting recipes, even if they are common to menus. Television celebrity baker Duff Goldman singled out pie, something he should know very well. However, he told Insider that “it’s very easy to forget small steps that end up having a big impact on the final product.”

Yet it is not always the most ponderous courses that trip chefs up. It’s hard, for example, to find great fried chicken outside of a Southern church gathering or, so we’ve heard, the Monterey Peninsula Country Club in Pebble Beach—which we are happy to confirm, should a member invite us (an affront that would likely get that person barred…from a church or the country club, either way).

So which dishes frustrate chefs the most?

“That’s a tough question,” says Todd Fisher, chef, butcher and owner of The Meatery in Seaside. “I want to say I’ve gotten past that, but…”

He admits to trembling at the thought of preparing bread—“there’s such a science to it; it intimidates me”—and pan seared scallops. 

For Zach Ladwig, author of the exquisite menu at Sur House at Alila Ventana Big Sur, a simple treat can cause trepidation. 

“Caramel,” the standout chef says, shaking his head. “I will burn it three times before I get it right. The stars have to be aligned.”

Certain rice dishes also come back to haunt chefs. Risotto requires constant attendance to replenish liquid and stir. And the classic from Valencia is no slouch, either.

“I’m a sucker for paella,” Ojeda points out. “But the socarrat—getting that down doesn’t happen overnight.”

Socarrat is the prized layer of crispy rice almost welded to the pan, and it’s not a matter of merely scorching the dish. Seasoned paella chefs know by sound when the socarrat is right.

This is what chefs mean when they deploy the phrase “prepared with love.” It’s like a concert violinist trying to scratch out a fiddle tune. They may hit all the right notes, but the emphasis isn’t quite right. 

In other words, a technique passed down through generations for making tamales is more satisfying than the same order at most restaurants. Likewise, a Southern grandmother just knows when the fried chicken is right, while a harried line cook during lunch rush is checking a timer.

That’s why Ladwig breaks it down to degrees of difficulty. Background and training can only go so far toward fully understanding a dish. Others agree.

“If you were to ask me to cook an authentic Indian dish, I’d give you a westernized version of that,” Ojeda says.

In answer to this week’s Burning Question, the list of dishes is many and—more importantly—varied. When publications take notice of the culinary traps that lurk in recipe books, the lists include time honored classics like consommé, oddities such as turducken and regional traditions, from khanom chan to huntsman pie. But everyday pot roast appeared in Saveur’s account of difficult dishes, well ahead of boiled cow’s head.

We’re going to need a minute…

OK. Simply put, chefs are human. And that’s a good thing.