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.
