Uh, hey See Dan Cook, didn’t you already write a post called Intro? Yes I did, but that was an intro to my Monday Baking Lab. You see, yesterday I had the first of my Wednesday Food Basics labs which are led by a different chef instructor. A new lab series with a new instructor is enough cause for another ‘Intro’ post, so there.
The difference between the Baking and the Food Basics labs is pretty easy to tell. Basically, Food Basics is almost entirely focused on savory food items where the Baking lab, although we will be making lots of savory products, will be focused mainly on pastries and sweets. As I would very quickly learn, although I didn’t expect this to be the case, having these two different labs would lead to having two very different chef instructors. My Food Basics instructor, let’s just call him Chef S for now, has a style that is quite different than Chef D, my Baking lab instructor. Chef S has already established himself to be quite the character and is pretty close to what I’d call a prototypical chef. It is very clear that he is quite knowledgeable when it comes to all things food and cooking related. He also has the certain dry wit and slightly ‘jaded’ attitude that, through my own kitchen experience many years ago, I’ve come to associate with most chefs that don’t appear regularly on the Food Network. He also has a penchant for being able to say something cringe-worthy and potentially inappropriate at a moment’s notice. Here are some slightly paraphrased one-liners that he shared with us:
- On the post-cooking group clean-up that happens after every class – “The sooner we clean up, the sooner we can go drink”
- This one is self-explanatory – “Chopped up parsley sprinkled over food is not garnish, it’s dirt”
- Also on the subject of garnishes – “You guys may want to throw chives on your food as garnish…that’s a lazy man’s garnish…leave that to the Portuguese guy” (still have no idea what that means)
- On the subject of deli slicers and said while holding up all of his fingers - “The motorized blade will not stop for anything, not even 10 of these…they’re nice like that”
Ok, so these bits were much funnier in the context of the classroom. Like a good comedian, Chef’s timing was impeccable. In addition to his wit, another difference between the two chefs is that Chef S is a lot more hands-on than Chef D. On Monday, Chef D took a few minutes to read through the recipes that we’d be preparing before sending us off on our own. Chef S took about 45 minutes to pick apart and piece back together our daily recipes, making all kinds of changes, additions, and subtractions based on fresh items that might be available in the kitchen on this particular day or as a way to challenge the actual food science theory used in a recipe. For example, he eliminated sugar from the cooking liquid that would be used to cook green beans for a salad…the theory being that sugar would reinforce the cell structure of the beans, an effect that we did not want to achieve in our dish. Once all of the students finished cooking and tasting each others dishes, the Chef also led us through a review of all the recipes and had the students talk about what worked, what didn’t work, and any on-the-fly changes that were made and why they were made. I felt that these ‘before and after’ sessions were very valuable exercises for the class to participate in as a whole. Chef D did say that she was eager for one of us to make a mistake so that she could show us how to fix a dish (provided that we didn’t burn it), but Chef S took a much more proactive point of view, offering us a much more thourogh introduction to the techniques behind being able to fix recipes and also began to enforce the idea of keeping an eye out for things that don’t make sense. To Chef D’s credit however, part of the difference in the two styles comes from the nature of the two beasts. By definition, cooking a savory dish generally requires nowhere near the level of precision and technique that is required for a ‘baked’ item. There is generally much less room for taking liberties when you bake something…if you skip an ingredient or fail to mix something properly, your final product may not turn out the way you intend it to.
One of the more interesting recurring themes of the day was the use of salt. I don’t want to say this in a way to stir up controversy, but I’ve never really seen anyone use salt like Chef S did. When Chef S talked about blanching vegetables in salty water, he made sure to emphasize the word salt and went so far as to say that the water used for blanching should be salty like the sea, to ensure that the vegetables are properly seasoned. One of the day’s recipes called for a pound of cooked pasta, also to be boiled in “a lot of water that is salty like the sea”. Once I saw the enormous stock pot go on the stove, I, along with my fellow classmates, waited patiently for it to boil just to see how much salt he was going to put in the water. We would not be disappointed. Once the water came to a boil, he found the nearest student and asked her to hold out her hand directly over the boiling water, with the palm facing up. Chef S then proceeded to fill her hand with a softball-sized pile of salt, which then was dumped into the pot. We all watched, with mouths agape, expressions of disbelief on our fresh faces, only to watch the chef repeat this procedure two more times until he felt the water was salted properly. Then as a way of demonstrating what ‘salty like the sea’ means, he tasted the water and told the student to do the same. In the end, the pasta didn’t taste salty, but it did taste like it had been well-seasoned, so there you go. Salt can be a very valuable tool for a cook as it is used to bring out the flavor in food. This subject would come up again and again in during our first Food Basics lab.
Our whole day was pretty much filled with enlightening moments like this. Chef S moved effortlessly from an hour long lecture on different vegetable types and some ‘best-practice’ cooking and storing methods, to an hour long lecture featuring a tasting of about 15 different fresh herbs, to an afternoon of assisting the class as we fumbled with executing our recipes. He then concluded the day with a 2 1/2 hour seminar on knife skills, reviewing 4 primary cuts with us…a batonnet, a julienne, a ‘mirepoix’ dice, and a brunoise. I hope all of our upcoming days with Chef S are as informative and interesting as day 1. I’ll take all of the cringe-worthy quotes too…that helps to keeps things interesting.
Part 2 of this post will come on Friday. I remembered to bring my camera to class with me so I’ve got some pictures of the recipes that we prepared in class. Oh yeah, and I found my supposedly ‘lost’ notebook. It was in my knife kit all along. Off to sleep now…the first week of culinary school has done a good job of rapidly accelerating my aging process. I spent the whole day today moving from place to place in super slow motion. Oy, so very tired.
