And so it all began, finally. Yesterday was my first day of culinary school. Although the day began just like most normal weekdays do, with me guzzling a thermos filled with scalding hot coffee on an insanely packed train listening to Killswitch Engage and Helmet, trying not to make any eye or body contact with anyone else, the similarities ended there. I began to wonder if any of my other fellow commuters would take notice of my large knife kit or ”Cambridge School of Culinary Arts” logo stitched to the front of my shoulder bag for everyone to see, and if they noticed, would they wish that they could follow me instead of going to sit in an office all day? I only ask that because if the roles had been reversed, I would’ve been green with envy.
Upon arriving at school at 8:15am, I changed into my chef’s uniform (still sans chef coat) and took a seat in the ingloriously named Lab B, my home for the next 4 months or so (at least on Mondays and Wednesdays during the day). At around 8:30am, Chef D (she has a real name but let’s just call her D for internet purposes) began to address the class for the next hour, focusing a bit on her background, what we could expect in a typical day at school, and a detailed review of the syllabus. Chef D graduated from the CSCA 20 years ago and has been teaching for 16 years. She has a calm and icy cool demeanor, something I imagine comes in very handy when every 3 months you have to ensure that a brand new crop of culinary school students don’t impale themselves on the various devices in their knife kits or cause great bodily harm when trying to figure out how to use a robot-coupe for the very first time. During her intro lecture, Chef D also mentioned a few books worth reading, including recommending anything written by Alton Brown. She also encouraged us to watch his “Good Eats” program on the Food Network, saying that it was a great learning tool for a budding chef. Funny that she mentioned that…the wife and I have recently begun to watch his shows religiously. On many nights, the 11pm airing of “Good Eats” will be the last thing we watch before heading off to sleep and the 2nd episode that we’ve watched that evening.
Chef D explained that a typical class will begin with a 1 – 2 hour long lecture on the topic of the day. Once lecture is over, we will spend some time talking about and assigning out the recipes that will be prepared that day. Once the recipes have been assigned, the students will then be responsible for assembling their mise en place (all of the items that will be needed for a given recipe), which Chef D will inspect and critique. Then the students have a few hours to cook and prepare their recipes for plating, which would take place usually in the afternoon. The students will then taste and evaluate each other’s creations. Chef D stressed that now is no time to be going on a diet, instilling in us all from day 1, hour 1, that it is imperative that we taste everything and learn about what works and what doesn’t work in a recipe, and also how to fix something that may go wrong. Another very important aspect of the kitchen…clean up. “Clean as you go”, an idea that I try to follow to new obsessive-compulsive heights when I cook at home, is the motto and all students are expected to help pitch in whenever they can. Once all items have been plated and tasted, we all are expected to help clean the kitchen and get it ready for the next class so that when they use it, it won’t look a bomb went off next to the garbage can or in the walk-in cooler. We can usually expect the day to end by 4 or 4:30pm.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really able to get a good sense of what my fellow students are like as there wasn’t too much of a chance for us to meet each other or interact before Chef D started her lecture. I suppose that some of the meeting-and-greeting happened during orientation last week…good thing I missed that. I can say that there are 9 other students in my class, 4 men and 6 women in total, and that if I had to guess, I’d say that most people are close to my age.
Once the initial housekeeping address was out of the way, Chef D began to lecture about our primary topic of the day: Fruits and Spices
