I should have written about this sooner, when it was still painfully fresh in my memory, but to be honest, I've needed time to recover from the shock of it.
"It" being our first practicals.
Mon dieu.
I now have a healthy respect for Cat Cora, and understand completely why she and her team promptly follow up every Iron Chef battle with a shot of ouzo.
We knew they were coming. We knew what we'd be tested on (well, at least the spectrum of possibilities, which was wide, to say the least). We knew there'd be a time limit.
We did not, however, know there'd be a minuscule time limit. "Minuscule" being relative, apparently. Chef C. thought our Knife Skills instructor was overgenerous in giving us 20 minutes to complete our five cuts.
Granted, that sounds like a lot of time, and it would have been if we'd been able to devote that 20 minutes solely to performing the cuts. However, said 20 minutes started ticking away the second we crossed the threshold of the kitchen, which meant our window of time included setting up our stations, collecting and washing our fruits and vegetables, and actually cutting them up (it also should have included filling the wash/rinse/sanitize sinks in the back, which nobody did, so we all lost 2 out of the possible 10 points right off the bat- "Live together, die together," a slight variation on the LOST philosophy).
For the record, 20 minutes goes by faster in the kitchen than it does in real life. The time-space continuum is weird in there. Especially when you're trying to break down a tomato concassé, a potato into large dice, a giant carrot into julienne and brunoise, and an orange into suprêmes, all when you're still a little gun-shy from cutting off the end of your thumb not so long ago.
Our Mise practical was even worse, considering Chef C. gave us 15 minutes to make a sauce, top to bottom. Again, that's 15 minutes to set up your station, mise your ingredients, elbow your classmates out of the way for a burner at the too-small stove when the portable burner you were so proud of yourself for running straight for refuses to fire (it was probably out of butane; I didn't stop to figure it out), and complete the sauce (the recipe for which calls for you to allow it just to simmer for 15-20 minutes at one point- so the odds weren't great from the beginning). Needless to say, we had a lot of unfinished velouté, most of which was too thin and either over- or underseasoned.
The whole thing was chaos. It was high-pressure. It was stressful. It was exactly like Top Chef, except none of us has any skills.
We were all pretty useless in class after that. "Lethargic" and "catatonic" were probably appropriate adjectives. Also "defeated." There was a lot of staring at nothing, and a little sotto voce voicing of the fears we were all suddenly party to. And in the glassy-eyed, bewildered faces of my classmates I saw my own. Funny how 15 minutes can make you doubt yourself, make you doubt whether you've made the right decision, make you doubt what you're capable of. I guess we'll find out. "Live together, die together" indeed.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Slice, camera, action!
There hasn't been much blogging happening in September. In fact, there's hasn't been any blogging happening in September because the first weeks of culinary school have been, well, uneventful.
Until yesterday.
On the very first day of my Knife Skills and Fabrication class (the one in which I will, in short order, be learning how to properly break down chicken carcasses), my instructor informed us that a sharp knife was a chef's best friend, not necessarily because it makes cutting up fruits and vegetables so much easier, but because when you cut yourself ("not if, when you cut yourself") it makes a clean cut. He promptly demonstrated by cutting himself approximately five minutes later while showing us how to dice an onion.
Chef: 0. Knife: 1.
I remember thinking, "Oh, but I shall be careful! I shall pay close attention to where my fingers are at all times! I shall not bleed on my nice sharp knives!"
Fast forward to yesterday.
I made it through Knife Skills and Fabrication unscathed. We learned how to properly prep bell peppers and broccoli florets. We learned how to chiffonade basil. We learned how to break down a red cabbage. We learned how to flute mushrooms, and we learned how to tournet potatoes (which is apparently a skill that I will never be called upon to repeat in the real world unless I find myself working for Paul Bocuse in Lyon).
My Mise class began innocently enough, with our instructor demonstrating how to clarify butter and how to make roux. We then set to work making espagnole (one of the five Mother Sauces). I volunteered to prep the mirepoix my group needed, dutifully got out a cutting board and my chef's knife, and started dicing carrots. I might have made three cuts before, on the next pass, the blade of my knife went not through the carrots on my cutting board, but through the end of my left thumb.
Chef: 0. Knife: 2.
The sight of blood, even my own, has never bothered me, and this time was no different. I calmly put down my knife, went and sat down like we were told to do when ("not if, when") we cut ourselves, and called over my Mise instructor. I knew the cut was, relatively, not that serious-- there was a lot of blood, but I couldn't see bone or anything. My instructors, however, reacted as though I had cut off my hand. This in turn made me start to feel woozy. As I sat in my hard orange plastic chair, I could feel all the blood draining out of my face and, presumably, out of my thumb onto the side towel on the table in front of me; I was having trouble breathing and getting really hot; and the voices of the approximately 17 people crowded around me began to go fuzzy and sound really far away. Thankfully, my Knife Skills instructor, at the direction of the program director (what can I say, I do love an audience), brought me a glass of sugar water (which is disgusting) and a bowl of chocolate chips (which he later replaced with higher-quality, better-tasting chocolate chips; once a pastry chef, always a pastry chef), the combination of which effectively rescued me from the brink of passing out.
Blood flow at last, for the moment, somewhat stanched, I now faced the decision of whether or not to take myself and what was left of my fingertip to the ER to see if they could stitch or glue it back on. After weighing my options ("do I really have three or four hours to waste today? are the antiseptic and the gauze pads at the hospital really worth the $400 they will charge me?"), I did what any self-respecting, ex-Yeager (read: admitted long-time overachiever), first-year culinary student would have done: I cut my losses (um, literally), gritted my teeth through the hydrogen peroxide bath and first-aid kit bandaging, and got back in the kitchen to learn how to make tomato concasse.
Chef: 1. Knife: 2.
Many thanks to Cindy and Anna, who have since properly cleaned and dressed my wound! Thanks especially to Cindy for the digital block and the non-stick pads. Many thanks also to Casey, who cleaned the blood off my knife.
Until yesterday.
On the very first day of my Knife Skills and Fabrication class (the one in which I will, in short order, be learning how to properly break down chicken carcasses), my instructor informed us that a sharp knife was a chef's best friend, not necessarily because it makes cutting up fruits and vegetables so much easier, but because when you cut yourself ("not if, when you cut yourself") it makes a clean cut. He promptly demonstrated by cutting himself approximately five minutes later while showing us how to dice an onion.
Chef: 0. Knife: 1.
I remember thinking, "Oh, but I shall be careful! I shall pay close attention to where my fingers are at all times! I shall not bleed on my nice sharp knives!"
Fast forward to yesterday.
I made it through Knife Skills and Fabrication unscathed. We learned how to properly prep bell peppers and broccoli florets. We learned how to chiffonade basil. We learned how to break down a red cabbage. We learned how to flute mushrooms, and we learned how to tournet potatoes (which is apparently a skill that I will never be called upon to repeat in the real world unless I find myself working for Paul Bocuse in Lyon).
My Mise class began innocently enough, with our instructor demonstrating how to clarify butter and how to make roux. We then set to work making espagnole (one of the five Mother Sauces). I volunteered to prep the mirepoix my group needed, dutifully got out a cutting board and my chef's knife, and started dicing carrots. I might have made three cuts before, on the next pass, the blade of my knife went not through the carrots on my cutting board, but through the end of my left thumb.
Chef: 0. Knife: 2.
The sight of blood, even my own, has never bothered me, and this time was no different. I calmly put down my knife, went and sat down like we were told to do when ("not if, when") we cut ourselves, and called over my Mise instructor. I knew the cut was, relatively, not that serious-- there was a lot of blood, but I couldn't see bone or anything. My instructors, however, reacted as though I had cut off my hand. This in turn made me start to feel woozy. As I sat in my hard orange plastic chair, I could feel all the blood draining out of my face and, presumably, out of my thumb onto the side towel on the table in front of me; I was having trouble breathing and getting really hot; and the voices of the approximately 17 people crowded around me began to go fuzzy and sound really far away. Thankfully, my Knife Skills instructor, at the direction of the program director (what can I say, I do love an audience), brought me a glass of sugar water (which is disgusting) and a bowl of chocolate chips (which he later replaced with higher-quality, better-tasting chocolate chips; once a pastry chef, always a pastry chef), the combination of which effectively rescued me from the brink of passing out.
Blood flow at last, for the moment, somewhat stanched, I now faced the decision of whether or not to take myself and what was left of my fingertip to the ER to see if they could stitch or glue it back on. After weighing my options ("do I really have three or four hours to waste today? are the antiseptic and the gauze pads at the hospital really worth the $400 they will charge me?"), I did what any self-respecting, ex-Yeager (read: admitted long-time overachiever), first-year culinary student would have done: I cut my losses (um, literally), gritted my teeth through the hydrogen peroxide bath and first-aid kit bandaging, and got back in the kitchen to learn how to make tomato concasse.
Chef: 1. Knife: 2.
Many thanks to Cindy and Anna, who have since properly cleaned and dressed my wound! Thanks especially to Cindy for the digital block and the non-stick pads. Many thanks also to Casey, who cleaned the blood off my knife.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, or, as David Bowie might say, "Ch-ch-changes"
If you had asked me a year ago what I'd be doing today, I would have said breathlessly with bright eyes that I'd be living and working in the behind-the-scenes world of film and television production in Los Angeles, a recent transplant from Huntington, WV.
Instead, I'm still in Huntington, and I went to my first Knife Skills & Fabrication and Mise en Place classes today. In other words, I started culinary school. Breathlessly with bright eyes.
A big change of plans, of course. And while some people these days might term this my quarter-life crisis, I think it's really just the product of being a.) a recent college graduate w/ two, um, nontraditional bachelor's degrees, and b.) a twenty-something. To be sure, it's also the product of spending August through December of last year working on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution for ABC (which, by the way, won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program last week). So I owe many thanks to everyone I worked with on the show, but extra thanks to Jamie Oliver, Anna Jones, Abi Fawcett, and especially Anna Helm-Baxter-- one of the food stylists from the show who recognized something in me and graciously handed me my first freelance gigs in NYC as her assistant, and whose website sweetbyhalf.com you really should check out-- for turning me on to food in the first place.
"Why food?," you might ask if you know me, "Aren't your degrees in Theatre and French?" Yes, they are (at least I know what "mise en place" means), and I still ask myself that first question every day, but I think I'm coming 'round to a preliminary answer, at least (I'm going to wax poetic here for a minute, so please bear with me. Or skip ahead.). My background is in the arts, all of them. I'm an actor, a musician, a writer, and an artist (of the painter/ sculptor/ potter variety), and I think I've finally figured out that I love all of those things so much because they create community. They force all kinds of relationships to be made, be they actor-audience or musician-listener, artist-artist, writer-reader, or any of a million other iterations, and I thrive on community. I love it. I need it. Can't get enough of it. And food creates immediate, visceral community, whether that's in the prep kitchen or at the table.
I have a few confessions to make before we start all of this. First, I don't want to be a restaurant chef, I don't want to open my own bakery, I want to make food pretty so it can get its picture taken. I want to make people think, "Wow, I want a bite of that." I want to sort through dozens of bags of tortilla chips and cartons of raspberries to find the perfect ones (ahh, the glamorous life of a food stylist), make six or ten of the exact same plate, and let someone else take the credit (sorry, everyone, [insert favorite celebrity chef] didn't really make that [insert dish], and s/he definitely didn't prep his or her ingredients).
Second, while I'm not as limited in my food choices as, say, my sister, who lives on hotdogs, grilled cheese (which she can't even make herself), and fruit, I'm not necessarily adventurous when it comes to food either. So hearing my mise instructor say today that, unless we have food allergies, we're required to taste everything was, while not unexpected, still a little scary. I knew what I was getting myself into when I signed up for this, and I want to challenge myself and learn to eat new things, but that doesn't mean I'm counting down the days until I get to eat liver and oysters, or kill lobsters, or bone (read: gut) fish...
So this will be an adventure, to say the least. And I'm betting that culinary school will make for plenty of good stories, which I'm going to try my best to document regularly. I hope you keep reading. I'll probably be feeding some of you soon.
Instead, I'm still in Huntington, and I went to my first Knife Skills & Fabrication and Mise en Place classes today. In other words, I started culinary school. Breathlessly with bright eyes.
A big change of plans, of course. And while some people these days might term this my quarter-life crisis, I think it's really just the product of being a.) a recent college graduate w/ two, um, nontraditional bachelor's degrees, and b.) a twenty-something. To be sure, it's also the product of spending August through December of last year working on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution for ABC (which, by the way, won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program last week). So I owe many thanks to everyone I worked with on the show, but extra thanks to Jamie Oliver, Anna Jones, Abi Fawcett, and especially Anna Helm-Baxter-- one of the food stylists from the show who recognized something in me and graciously handed me my first freelance gigs in NYC as her assistant, and whose website sweetbyhalf.com you really should check out-- for turning me on to food in the first place.
"Why food?," you might ask if you know me, "Aren't your degrees in Theatre and French?" Yes, they are (at least I know what "mise en place" means), and I still ask myself that first question every day, but I think I'm coming 'round to a preliminary answer, at least (I'm going to wax poetic here for a minute, so please bear with me. Or skip ahead.). My background is in the arts, all of them. I'm an actor, a musician, a writer, and an artist (of the painter/ sculptor/ potter variety), and I think I've finally figured out that I love all of those things so much because they create community. They force all kinds of relationships to be made, be they actor-audience or musician-listener, artist-artist, writer-reader, or any of a million other iterations, and I thrive on community. I love it. I need it. Can't get enough of it. And food creates immediate, visceral community, whether that's in the prep kitchen or at the table.
I have a few confessions to make before we start all of this. First, I don't want to be a restaurant chef, I don't want to open my own bakery, I want to make food pretty so it can get its picture taken. I want to make people think, "Wow, I want a bite of that." I want to sort through dozens of bags of tortilla chips and cartons of raspberries to find the perfect ones (ahh, the glamorous life of a food stylist), make six or ten of the exact same plate, and let someone else take the credit (sorry, everyone, [insert favorite celebrity chef] didn't really make that [insert dish], and s/he definitely didn't prep his or her ingredients).
Second, while I'm not as limited in my food choices as, say, my sister, who lives on hotdogs, grilled cheese (which she can't even make herself), and fruit, I'm not necessarily adventurous when it comes to food either. So hearing my mise instructor say today that, unless we have food allergies, we're required to taste everything was, while not unexpected, still a little scary. I knew what I was getting myself into when I signed up for this, and I want to challenge myself and learn to eat new things, but that doesn't mean I'm counting down the days until I get to eat liver and oysters, or kill lobsters, or bone (read: gut) fish...
So this will be an adventure, to say the least. And I'm betting that culinary school will make for plenty of good stories, which I'm going to try my best to document regularly. I hope you keep reading. I'll probably be feeding some of you soon.
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