Diary: July 10, 2002

[Malawry]

Monday, July 8, 2002

I think I must have left a part of my brain on vacation when I got to school Monday morning, because I had a totally dull-witted day. Well, maybe not totally dull-witted, but I could see things that needed to be done a certain way, see why they were or weren’t working…yet when I tried to execute these things I failed almost every time. I didn’t fail miserably, but it’s extra-annoying to fail when you know better than the work you’re producing.

I left home at 7am and arrived at school at 7:40, giving me just enough time to get my neckerchief tied, fix a cup of coffee, and copy down the information on the white board concerning today’s lesson. Chef Peter entered and rang the bell to start class at 8am on the dot.

First up was further detail on the concept of mise en place. Chef Peter reminded us that it’s important to be organized about setting up your mise en place, and that forgetting something leads to getting woefully behind later. He suggested that we spend a few minutes developing a game plan when we broke up into teams for fixing today’s lunch, and told us that doing so would save us a lot of grief later.

Then he started discussing omelets, which were on the menu for today’s lunch. First he mentioned the differences between cooking omelets in cast iron and in nonstick pans. He explained the importance of seasoning cast iron properly. He had a cast iron pan on the stove when class started, filled with two tablespoons or so of salt. He said that to properly season a cast iron pan, you heat it with salt for 20 minutes or so, shaking it occasionally. The salt turns gray and picks up black specks of crap from the pan. After you dump it out, you rub the pan with a little olive oil using a cloth or a folded-up paper towel, and then it’s seasoned and ready for omelet cooking. A student asked about seasoning a pan by rubbing it with oil and then baking it. He said that would work too, but using the salt allows you to get up any stray blackened bits and that’s why he prefers this method. Nonstick pans don’t require seasoning and take less oil, but they work just as well.

He explained some omelet fillings that we will be preparing today:

Cheese, usually gruyere or another nonoily melting cheese, or parmesan

Ham; remove the skin and cut into small dice

Caramelized onions (he mentioned that anything with Lyonnaise in the name contains onions, and said you could call an onion omelet an Omelette Lyonnaise)

Mushrooms sauteed in butter

Fresh herb: 90% parsley, 5% tarragon, 5% chives, all minced

He taught us the difference between scrambled eggs and omelets: scrambled eggs in the French tradition are broken and combined in advance with cream, cooked very slowly in butter using a hot water bath (bain-marie) to form tender curds. Omelets take about 30 seconds, are made from eggs broken and beaten to order without cream, and allow for a light, fluffy, soft texture. To get the right consistency, you whip the eggs well so there are no big ribbons of egg white, and you do it at the last minute.

Chef Peter then turned his attention to our other dishes for the day: a basic vinaigrette, used to dress a tomato salad, and some turned potatoes. (Horror swept through the class as we learned that we were expected to turn potatoes for today’s lunch. I felt a little better prepared since I’d actually practiced over the weekend, plus I had my new tourne knife to assist in the process.) The vinaigrette is composed of three parts olive oil to one part red wine vinegar, seasoned with salt and pepper, beaten right before adding to whatever salad it’s dressing. There are also emulsified vinaigrettes, but we didn’t learn any today. The tomato salad we were expected to serve with lunch is simply peeled sliced tomatoes, topped with brunoised shallot, salt, pepper, and the basic vinaigrette.

The potatoes are turned in the rissolee size (three to a standard-sized potato), blanched in water, dried, browned in peanut oil, and then cooked in the oven for about 20 minutes until soft in the center. They’re then tossed with butter and chopped parsley. The recipe is simple in every regard except for the fact that the potatoes are supposed to be a certain size and shape which new students notoriously find difficult to achieve.

Finally, Chef Peter showed us how to make an omelet properly. He put the seasoned cast-iron pan over fairly high heat and added some peanut oil. Once it was at the smoke point he cracked some eggs into a bowl, added some cheese, and rapidly whipped them with a fork. He added a knob of butter to the pan at the same time as the eggs and used the fork to violently bash about and scrape up the eggs. Once they were about half-set he stopped the harsh, back-and-forth motion and started using the back of the fork to push undercooked egg towards the edges where it could cook more quickly. He then used the fork to fold over one edge about a third of the way, tapped the pan on the stove lip to move the unfolded edge towards the tip of the pan, and folded that edge back onto the omelet. Boom, he tipped it onto a plate, a perfect rolled omelet. He added three of the rissolee potatoes and passed the plate around so we could all taste. The omelet was cooked “Baveuse”, slightly runny and soft in the middle, with no browning to the egg whatsoever.

He banged out a couple more omelets (a good thing, since I’d missed most of the first one when I looked at my notebook as I scribbled furiously), and then he dealt our class cards in groups of three for us to go into the kitchen and replicate these dishes. I was placed with the same guy I’d been paired with for soup-making Wednesday plus a friendly sort of woman I’d talked to over lunch last week who waits tables in a well-known Northern Virginia restaurant. We went into the kitchen and, as I said, I mostly zoned out.

I volunteered to do the potatoes since I wanted to play with my new knife. I did a passable job with the potatoes, and the practice was much-needed, but I would have been ultimately better served by only doing some of the potatoes and then helping with some of the other tasks. I ended up doing almost nothing besides tourneeing potatoes for lunch service.

My team took a break during setup to join one other team of three to learn how to take orders from the faculty and staff for lunch. (Students prepare faculty and staff meals every day; the last few days were an aberration.) Each of the six of us took turns asking a staff member what they wanted for lunch, a moderate challenge since we were trying to use the French pronunciation for the menu items. Once everybody’s order was in, we assigned two faculty members to each student team and told the team what had been ordered. (Most people designated omelet fillings when placing their orders, and some people asked for no potatoes or requested extra salad.)

Once lunch service rolled around, everybody on my team tried to avoid making the first omelet. My female classmate went first because I was unable to decide whether or not I wanted to go first and because the man on my team seemed a little too scared to make the first attempt. She was too ginger with the eggs in the pan, so they browned a little bit around the bottom and were a little too dry when she finished. I felt confident I’d do better, because I had seen where she had gone wrong and believed I could fix those problems. I think I did do better than her when I took the next turn, except I had a hard time getting the far end of the omelet shaken to the back of the pan so I could make the second fold. Because it took me so long, the bottom of the omelet browned, and so the finished omelet had a golden color to it. I need to stop being so careful and just make it happen. Much to his surprise, my male classmate turned out a perfect onion and gruyere omelet on his first try. Golden, fluffy, tender, a little soft on the inside. No browning, folded evenly. He is my new hero. We each attempted a second omelet (my second came out much like the first, much to my chagrin), and in between we snacked on bites of omelet and rissoleed potatoes. (The potatoes came out beautifully browned, by the way, and they weren’t at all overcooked…an accomplishment when you consider that they weren’t exactly evenly turned.)

After lunch, we were shown a piece of paper with our names broken down into teams for post-lunch cleanup duties. I was placed on dish detail with about four other students. I’ll be doing dishes with these people for two weeks. I’d worked dish detail on Wednesday, so I knew how to operate the dishwasher and took charge of loading up dishwasher trays and so on. I spent a lot of time standing about drying dishes. There aren’t enough dish towels in the school to go around, so my towel got really wet after a while. Seemed like about 10 minutes after we started, people started drifting off, and next thing I knew it was just me and Juan, L’academie’s hired pot-washer, working on the last of the dishes. My back was a little sore and I really wanted to sit down, but it didn’t seem fair to stick Juan with the last of our mess, so I stayed with him. He was kind and after a while patted me on the back fondly and told me he’d finish up alone. I gratefully went and sat in the student lounge for most of the rest of our post-lunch break.

After break, school director Francois Dionot came to teach us, which he will do most Monday afternoons. He lectured on dairy products, mostly the differences between milk, half and half, heavy cream, whipping cream, table cream, and crème fraiche. He followed this up by talking some about our recipe notebooks, and explained the minimal level of detail we are expected to produce for our recipes. I rewrote my onion soup recipe, which I have pasted below:

La Soupe a L’oignon/Onion Soup

Onions

Whole butter

Garlic

BG

White wine

Chicken stock

Sea salt

White pepper

Caramelize onions in butter. Season with salt and pepper. Add BG and garlic. Deglaze with wine. Add stock and simmer. Remove BG and garlic. Season with more salt and pepper.

Tuesday, July 9

This morning’s demonstration and lecture seemed pretty short. We talked about soups and a little bit about eggs, all of which was fairly straightforward. School is beginning to become a routine at this point; everybody is starting to get comfortable and understand what they need to do on a daily basis.

We may have already lost a student. One guy was absent both yesterday and today, and unless he has extenuating circumstances I suspect we may have seen the last of him. Ironically, he had attempted to start the program six months ago, but he’d dropped out because he got sick early on and decided to try again in July. I hope he is okay and that he returns to class tomorrow, ready to learn. I already feel protective of my fellow students, and I want us all to succeed.

Chef Somchet, the pastry instructor, came to show us how to make an orange salad this morning. There’s a strange and humorous dynamic between Chef Somchet and Chef Peter. Chef Somchet is direct and intelligent, but she’s also very sweet and generous. Chef Peter is also direct and intelligent, but he’s a bit of a jokester at times and Chef Somchet seems to bring it out in him. One of my fellow students mentioned that the two of them seem like they should have their own cooking comedy show, since they clearly enjoy teaching together so much.

After the demo, we started our kitchen work by preparing some chicken backs for stock. There were three cases of chicken backs and we had to cut off all the fat and scrape the innards out of them before starting on today’s menu. I knew that there would be a point when I’d become intimately acquainted with raw animal flesh, but I hoped to put it off for as long as possible. Still, it turned out to not be all that bad once I got past the first two or three. Removing the fat was all right, but scraping was pretty bad. Most of the backs still had kidneys attached. I was okay with this until I had one kidney refuse to budge. When I tried to scrape it off it ripped in half. At that same point, one of my team members was talking about how nasty some of her restaurant work cleaning soft shell crabs was, and between her story and my bloody chicken kidney I nearly yarked all over my cutting board. I simply put down my knife and looked away for a moment, and then I washed my hands and touched my face briefly to steady myself. I rewashed my hands and went back to work on the chicken backs with no further issues.

Once we finished with the chicken backs we got to work on today’s menu: carrot soup, omelets, chateau (tourneed) potatoes, and the orange salad. I was paired with two female students. One immediately said she wanted to prepare the potatoes since she had not adequately practiced tourneeing. The other student and I were delighted to hear this, since we had both spent the previous day’s food preparation time tourneeing. I handed over my tournee knife for my classmate to try out, and then I got to work on the soup. The soup was easy and fun to put together. Since the whole mess is pureed, I didn’t have to be careful about my knife cuts, which felt liberating after my lack of success with julienne, brunoise, and tournee cuts to date. Nothing burned, or overcooked, or overreduced, or otherwise got messed up. I found preparing our soup to be relaxing, almost meditative.

In between working on the soup, I did most of the work for the orange salad. My new peeler did a great job of taking the peel off the oranges; hardly any pith clung to the zest, and what little was there was easily scraped off with my paring knife. I cut off the pith from the oranges while losing almost none of the flesh, and then I sliced the oranges and arranged them on dessert plates. I julienned the zest; Somchet came around while I was attempting the julinenne the zest and pulled out some cut pieces that were too large. “This, I don’t like.” She showed me a thinner piece I’d cut. “This makes me happy.” By this point, I was almost done with julienning the zest, so there wasn’t much I could do about my fat strips. I tried to pull out the largest ones and cut them down. Then, I blanched the zest three times to remove any bitterness, and then one of my teammates made a simple syrup and candied the zest in it.

Chef Peter was one of the two guests assigned to our team for lunch. I poured out the finished soup, and we garnished it with cooked julienned carrot and a parsley leaf. Chef Peter declared it excellent, except for a minor lack of salt. I loved it…much better than the version I’d made over the weekend to use up my carrot trimmings. Thick and creamy without being overwhelmingly rich. While we were dishing out soup, Somchet appeared in the kitchen with a sheet pan of focaccia she’d just pulled out of the oven. It was topped with fried basil, parmegiano-reggiano, and dollops of ricotta cheese. Chef Peter brought a heaping plate of it to our table for enjoyment with the soup.

After the soup, we got started on the omelets. Somehow I ended up with the task of preparing Chef Peter’s omelet (he requested mushrooms and gruyere). I didn’t successfully turn out a proper omelet yesterday, so I was nervous about my ability to execute a perfect one today. Indeed, the first one I made was undercooked, and wouldn’t fold properly. I ended up eating it myself and preparing a second one for Chef Peter. The second one folded up okay, but he said I hadn’t properly beaten the eggs…there were small ribbons of white showing on the top of the omelet which he pointed out to me. “Nice seasoning, though. Tastes great. Nice and soft on the inside.” Nobody seems to add enough salt for Chef Peter, so that at least brought me some satisfaction.

I was sorry that my orange sensitivity meant I couldn’t eat the orange salad, because it looked and smelled lovely. Chef Peter complimented my orange slicing, but then he too commented disparagingly on my julienne skills. “Who julienned this zest? Or, I should say, who attempted to julienne this zest?” I owned up to it, and he sympathized that the zest is oily and hard to cut properly before reiterating that I need to do better at it. I acknowledged I need to spend more time practicing and working on it.

After cleanup and break, we heard a lecture from Chef Peter on the different types of pepper, and then he conducted a fat tasting. He’d dished out individual tastes of the following oils: peanut, soybean, canola, corn, grapeseed, safflower, extra virgin olive, pure olive, walnut, hazelnut, almond, sesame seed, and an infused white truffle. He also passed around melted clarified butter and browned butter. We were given pieces of baguette to use for the tastings. I hadn’t realized that there is a difference between the flavor of soybean oil and safflower oil, or that you can really taste the corniness of corn oil and the peanut in peanut oil. They’re not strong, but they’re definitely there. The hazelnut oil was definitely my favorite. One of my classmates said, “Ooh, it’s like Nutella!” when she tasted it. I started imagining salad dressings and ingredients as soon as I put it in my mouth. Dried cherries, frisee, and hazelnut-white wine vinaigrette sounds pretty good.

Wednesday, July 10

We started talking about mother sauces today. Lunch includes eggs benedict, so we started off our discussion with the hollandaise mother sauce. Anthony Bourdain would be pleased to hear that we were taught to never hang on to a hollandaise for more than two hours due to food safety concerns. “If you have a four-hour service window, make it again halfway through or take it off the menu.” Hollandaise sauce at L’academie is safe to eat since it’s pitched before it gets truly nasty with bacteria.

Hollandaise is a testy sauce to make since it has to be warm, but not too warm, and it requires a lot of whisk work to keep it emulsified and happy. Chef Peter made it look fairly simple during the demo, but of course we knew it wouldn’t be that way in the kitchen.

I was placed with the same female classmate when we broke out into teams, plus a guy who I hadn’t really talked to yet. Le menu: potage Dubarry (cauliflower soup), eggs benedict, and cocotte potatoes (the smallest tourne size we’ve learned). My female teammate wanted to make the soup since she hadn’t touched the carrot soup we’d made yesterday (I’d made the whole thing, and she was on my team.) My other teammate wanted more practice with tourneeing potatoes, so we happily let him do most of the cutting. We started a pot on low heat melting some butter so we could clarify it, and I helped cut mirepoix of garlic, leek and onion for her soup.

Butter takes a long time to clarify properly. Once it’s separated, there’s an annoying number of small bits of milk solid floating on the top, and you have to remove as many as humanly possible with the use of a ladle. You then have to pour off the clarified butter from the precipitate on the bottom of the pot, being careful not to get any of the goop into your clear yellow liquid. We kept taking turns fishing out milk solids and it seemed like an eternal task. Fortunately we clarified extra butter, and hopefully we won’t have to do this next time.

I took care of poaching some eggs for us and putting them in an ice bath to hold until service. My eggs came out beautifully. Chef Peter tasted my poaching water and declared it the only water in the class which had enough acid (white wine vinegar) and seasoning (salt) to poach eggs properly. Everybody else came around and tasted my water so they could see how it should be prepared. I felt proud of my water, plus a little pathetic that I like to be complimented on plain water with vinegar and salt in it.

Our hollandaise was coming along when Chef Peter stopped by and started barking at us about the state of our table. “Nine knives and two peelers and three cutting boards and five empty deli cups at a single table, and nobody cutting anything! What is this?” We frantically put things away and wiped down surfaces. I saw a man I’d never seen in the background carrying a clipboard a minute later and realized he was probably the health inspector. L’academie’s health inspection normally takes place around May, but it hasn’t been inspected yet this year, so we knew an inspector might show up any day. I think that’s why Chef Peter freaked out about the state of our table. It was cluttered but not that terribly messy.

Soon it was time for service, and we sat down with our soup. Chef Peter declared it too thick, and made us go to a couple of the other tables to check their consistency. (The other students were flattered we were checking their soups, of course, but we were a little embarrassed. My classmate overreduced the soup because it was initially too thin. At least it packed a lot of flavor for a white creamy soup.) After our soup course we reheated the eggs and assembled the eggs benedict. I forgot that you’re not supposed to take an egg off your slotted spoon between when you remove it from the water and when it goes on the English muffin. As a result, we had to peel them off the paper towels I’d set them on, and Chef Peter came by and tut-tutted at us again. At least our hollandaise was smooth and rich and correctly seasoned.

After break, we had our first real pastry lesson. Tomorrow’s menu includes quiche lorraine, so today we made our first pate brisee, or broken pastry. Somchet demonstrated how to use the scales to weigh out flour and butter, and then showed us how to cut the flour and butter together with some salt to make a sand-like texture. She spooned in seven tablespoons of ice water and showed us how to scrape the dough together. There was lots of grumbling and furtive looking-about as she finished the demo; clearly, my classmates were largely not happy about pastry work. On the other hand, I was glad we were learning some pastry skills and didn’t mind the work at all. We each made one batch of pate brisee and wrapped it in plastic. I look forward to rolling it out tomorrow.

[Fat Guy]

We've been eagerly anticipating this installment and it does not disappoint. Thanks!

[cabrales]

Ahh, I knew eggs would feature prominently in cooking school. But so early on ....

[Malawry]

Unfortunately, the egg dishes we have learned to date have not been particularly humorous. If things change, Cabrales, you'll be the first to hear of it.

[Rachel Perlow]

I find it interesting that this week seemed to have such an egg theme. Everyday, eggs for lunch. That isn't humorous?

Did your missing classmate show up on Wednesday?

Did the chef comment on your tourneed potoatoes? Did all your practice make them perfect?

I think this could be a soap opera.

[col klink]

I just have to say I read your diary and I'm utterly fascinated by which items are prepared and the delicate nuances which make them professional. Great work!

Hopefully my local library will have the same books you're using and I can work along!

[Patrice]

Thank you Malawry, reading your diary reminds me a lot of great and,not so great, memories of my own years at the cooking school.

[KateW]

I just wanted to say I've been reading your "diary" and I really enjoy it. I got the link from a post on chef talk cafe. I'm starting cooking school in September and it's nice to see a sneak preview :)

Since you learned all about creams and such, maybe you can put in your two cents on this question from chef talk cafe's forums!

http://cheftalkcafe.com/forums/showthread....=&threadid=7737

[Steve Klc]

As if you don't already have enough to do, right Rochelle! Do you have any idea how your notebook is shaping up compared to your classmates--and have you started to see any kind of competitiveness or secrecy developing?

[Miss J]

Rochelle, you're not pathetic for feeling proud of your poaching water. I mean c'mon - I felt a vicarious thrill when I read that about it. Now THAT'S pathetic.

Miss J

[jerobi]

Always enjoyable...thanks.

[Damian]

Again, thanks. It is so much fun to read these.

[Malawry]

The AWOL classmate still has not appeared. I assume we are down to 17.

Steve, good question. Nobody has been competitive yet. It helps that we haven't had to deal with scarcity so far. Dish towels are the only really scarce resource. Chef Peter has mentioned that we will experience more scarcity of foods later on a number of times, and he's said we'll quit being so buddy-buddy when we're fighting another team for a scrap of red pepper.

I have not shared my notebook contents with my fellow students. Frankly, I don't see much utility in doing so. Only Chef Francois grades the notebooks, and only his opinion ultimately matters to me. I don't feel insecure about my recipe-writing skills and wouldn't feel compelled to share my recipes with my classmates to see what they think.

Rachel, my tournee is improving. I was working on some yesterday to help catch up my teammate who was doing the potatoes, and Chef Peter came by and complimented me on my even cuts. I didn't look up when he did so because I thought he was talking to my teammate, but then he said, "I mean you, Rochelle. Trying to make you feel better." And indeed, I did.

[Kim WB]

I'm becoming co-dependent...I'm on bed rest recovering from a nasty infection, and have spent some time with my friends on the Food Network...and as they cut and chopped, I would think.."I wonder how Malawry is doing?" I imagine the chicken guts were difficult...I commend your Nike Just do It attitude. Thanks for a good read.

[polly]

Thanks for the posts Rochelle, It's amazing how well you bring back the feeling of being at school. I feel almost aprehensive and nervous when i'm reading about the classes, as if the chef is about to walk up to me...

You seem to have a good head on your shoulders so i have no doubt that you will get through all this just fine.

Can't wait to read all about offal day. When do you get to that?

[Suzanne F]

It's great to hear about how the lessons at your school are organized. Seems to me every school is so different; so when people ask "Which is the best school?" you just can't answer. But it certainly sounds like this is a good one for you. Are we having fun yet?

This could be difficult, because of the extra time it takes, but do you think you could put names and a bit of personality to your classmates? I'd like to hear who else is there, why they're there, and how you guys interact. It might be a little early for that last bit, but I'll bet you've already started to notice personal quirks and characteristics. Working together in a kitchen is so intimate, after all.

And no, it is definitely NOT pathetic to be glad that your cooking water was perfect! It means you learned the right way, and can produce a properly-flavored poached egg. That's HARD, and you should be proud of yourself.

[awynhaus]

I was so excited to learn that you were writing about your culinary school experience. Your descriptions are wonderful as usual and I am so glad that you are learning so much and being challenged.

I look forward to reading all of your posts and hearing all about it. You are making me consider culinary school now. wow!