The Culinary Tales Week 1: Adventures in Culinary School
I survived the first week. But barely.
Culinary school is cool and exciting and I say this with the complete understanding that I’m demented enough to get my thrills from being challenged masochistically.
By itself, culinary school is supposed to be hard.
Now, I had been through the circus called “college” once: all-night study sessions, powering – hungover – through Fridays after Thursday-night binge-drinking sessions, therapy when the professor that matters makes you question your talent and self-worth…
I’d even put in a dozen years in the working world: battling office politics, managing impossible deadlines and big budgets, powering – hungover – through Fridays after Thursday-night binge-drinking sessions…
But the one experience that I realized would help me the most through this ordeal? Catholic school. It’s the same authoritarian model that I grew up with, except this time, I was praying in earnest.
Culinary school is less about learning as it is having discipline and the fear of you-name-it drilled into you. It’s akin to joining the military, only we were issued knives instead of guns.
For starters, we were expected to arrive in class a few minutes early. (If I was on time, I was late.) Secondly, we needed to be in complete uniform: pressed chef’s jacket and pants hemmed to the proper length (no rollups), name tag on, long hair tucked under our standard-issue skullcap, fingernails trimmed and neckerchief properly tied (we spent a whole 15 minutes on a how-to-tie primer during orientation.)
If nothing else came of this, at least I finally learned how to tie a Windsor knot. My future husband will never have to feel the shame of clip-ons.
And as if the restaurant industry isn’t harsh on women to begin with (this will be discussed more in depth later), we had to say goodbye to nail polish. Never thought about that before but when you work with food with your bare hands and your polish chips, where do you think it goes? To this day, I do not trust a female chef with perfectly manicured nails.
Attendance was not the only thing the teachers were looking for when they took roll… we were inspected from head to toe to make sure we were not violating the uniform code.
And we were to always, ALWAYS answer our instructors with a respectful “Yes, Chef!” or “No, Chef!”
Speaking of the teachers, we had two (whom I will call Good Cop and Bad Cop) assigned to our class. They weren’t the clichéd fat, jellybellied chefs you see in cartoons; in fact, both were skinny. Good Cop was simply a petite woman obviously blessed with the skinny gene. You could tell she could eat like a horse and never gain an ounce; me, on the other hand, I look at food and I gain ten pounds. Bad Cop was tall and lanky, toughened from years of working in professional kitchens, and may or may not have kept his slender physique from accompanying years of cocaine abuse.
Standing side by side at the front of the class, I thought they were a caricature come to life.
Class itself was intense. For our first week, it was all about learning the sauté and blanch techniques, making a proper stock (there’s actually a formula), risotto and rice pilaf (you’d think that being of Asian descent would give me a leg up here, but you’d be wrong), as well as practicing knife cuts. I’m told they actually take out a ruler to measure, making sure our juliennes are 1/8” x 1/8” x 2”, our battonets ¼” x ¼” x 2”.
What proved to be most challenging is the tourné cut, which is best described as a seven-sided cross between a football and a gherkin pickle. It used to be a standard in fine dining (high-end hotels/restaurants used to hire someone solely to cut tournés) but, like culottes, is past its prime.
It was imperative to concentrate on technique, rather than speed, as speed will come later with time and experience; more important to make sure we correctly held the knife (lightly pinching on the base of the blade) and product (using our knuckles and with fingertips tucked in).
The first day of knife cut practice was also our bloodiest; one of my classmates sliced a quarter of her fingertip with a PARER, while another made a nice, “healthy” cut. I personally grazed my own finger but didn’t break skin; nevertheless, in the following days, I picked a station as close as possible to the first aid kit. It was also the farthest away from our chefs’ line of sight.
I spent three hours after sanitation class to practice knife skills on potatoes; I would have done more, except we ran out of potatoes.
There were 24 students when we started and by the end of the week, we were down to 18. One of the casualties, I’m sure, was the result of the no-polish rule (the lady in particular had three-inch acrylics that probably cost as much as the tuition.)
I questioned whether I’d be among the body count before long… after all, my day started at 6 a.m., working from 8 to 4, slogging through L.A. rush-hour traffic from 4 to 6, class from 6 to 11, and then homework and catching up on work e-mail before I fell asleep sometime around 2 a.m. A couple of times had to run home to iron my uniform during my lunch break. This routine I did Monday through Friday, and then had to be back in school from 8 to 5 on Saturday for sanitation class and lab time.
The rest of the free time I had (what free time?) was spent moving. I chose the absolute worst time of my life to find a new place to live. I did say I liked self-inflicted torture, didn’t I?
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