Diary: July 21, 2002

[Malawry]

Thursday, July 18

Today’s menu was my favorite one so far: gougeres (pate a chou puffs with cheese), grilled salmon with bearnaise sauce, potatoes au gratin, buttered asparagus, and madeleines. I feel like this makes up for yesterday’s veal liver in a big way.

Today was somewhat insane in the kitchen, but I found it to be quite satisfying. I was not placed with George or Chin (too bad, I’d liked working with both of them); instead, I worked with two classmates I’d worked with separately last week. Melanie left immediately for the pastry kitchen, since today’s menu included an appetizer using pate a chou and both my other teammate and I had made it yesterday. This left two of us to assemble potatoes au gratin, buttered asparagus, and grilled salmon with a bearnaise sauce. Melanie asked if she could come back and make the bearnaise, since she had not yet assembled a hollandaise (of which bearnaise sauce is a derivative).

It didn’t seem like an overwhelming amount of work initially. I offered to grill the salmon since I haven’t yet worked grill or saute station, and I told my classmate I’d do Melanie’s mise en place for the bearnaise. He got cracking on the potatoes while I started some shallots, tarragon, cracked pepper, white wine, and white wine vinegar on reducing. Chef Peter came by just as my reduction was reaching the a sec stage and told me I had too much pepper in my reduction, so I had to go make it over. As I was doing this, my teammate realized there wasn’t any shredded parmesan left for the potatoes. Since he’d already sliced his potatoes, they started oxidizing while he was getting more cheese hunks off the wheel and through the Robot Coupe for shredding. So he had to start all over, and I’m afraid he had to spend his whole lunch service time trying to recover.

As a result, I ended up doing almost everything: Peeling, trimming, and blanching the asparagus. Melting butter and separating eggs and chopping herbs for the bearnaise. Seasoning and grilling the salmon. Wiping things up along the table. Retrieving stools for us to sit on. Rolling up flatware in napkins. And so on. I enjoyed managing so many different tasks at once, and I bolted across the kitchen confidently. I had just enough time to get it all done. Everything came out beautifully except for the potatoes, which simply hadn’t had enough time to bake through. (My classmate was pretty upset about this.) Chef Peter declared Melanie’s gougeres to be the best in the class, and he said my salmon was grilled perfectly. I even got the quadrillage (grill hash mark pattern) completely right. Plus everything tasted great.

During the post-lunch analysis, Chef Peter got a bee in his bonnet about dishes. He told us we weren’t helping enough with them, that we weren’t rinsing out or stacking our pre-service dishes like we should. He said we were overwhelming the potwasher Juan, and he said he was docking everybody in the class a point off the participation grade. I remembered ditching Juan with my bearnaise reduction pan, the bearnaise dishes, and other nasty hard-to-clean items. I try to be good about helping Juan, particularly since I work dish duty for now, and I felt pretty bad about how I’d treated him today. Still, we’d been snowed, and I don’t usually abandon my dishes like that. Too bad everybody else got snowed on the same day.

Chef Peter also handed out the scores from those “life skills” tests we took in the first week. I scored 100 on the reading comprehension and a 96 on the math skills. Most of my classmates were forthcoming with their scores, so when they asked what I got I showed my numbers. Lots of people scored in the 80s on the math skills.

After break, Chef Francois combined our class with the pastry class for a discussion about the foundations of taste and some taste comparisons. He’d prepared little condiment cups full of various substances on some trays for us. The cups were labeled “sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” “salty,” and then four cups numbered one through four. There were also two empty condiment cups and two spoons on each tray. The trays were distributed for us to share with one other student. (I shared with the same pastry student I’d discussed ice cream makers with.) Chef Francois mentioned the umami (meaty) taste, but said that evidence on it is inconclusive and that he doesn’t formally teach it for this reason. We began by tasting the sweet, sour, bitter and salty formulas. (They were all watered down, and were composed of sugar solution, vinegar solution, water with Angostura bitters, and salt solution.) Then he had us switch between sour and sweet, to show how much sweeter sweet is after tasting sour. Then we used the empty cups to mix sweet and sour, and then to add bitter and salt. The resulting liquid had a far more interesting flavor than two or three tastes mixed had carried.

After that, he had everybody in the class hold our noses, and then he passed around a brown powder and told us to take a little on our finger and taste it without releasing our noses. I suspected it was cinnamon since it had a slightly barky/bitter/muddy flavor, and because it looked like cinnamon. When he had us release our noses, I inhaled and immediately got a strong aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg. It was a really cool sensation, how sharp and spicy the smell was versus how mild and bitter the taste had been. I highly recommend trying this one at home if you’re interested in understanding the differences between flavor and taste.

The numbered cups contained water and then three strengths of salt solution, which we tasted back and forth to see how salt plays on the tongue as it gets stronger and weaker. Plain water tastes almost sweet after tasting a strong salt solution, and salt makes other flavors taste stronger. It will be interesting to take this lesson to the next level, and I intend to analyze tastes in light of today’s lesson over the coming weeks.

Friday, July 19

Earlier in the week, Chef Peter warned us that on Friday he’d be running our asses off. “You’re gonna leave here wondering what the hell happened, and I intend that you will feel that way.” As promised, we entered the demo classroom this morning to see a complicated menu waiting on the white board:

Potato-leek soup (Le Potage Parisien)

Eggs Florentine (Les Oeufs Poches Florentine)

Sauteed Flounder Meuniere (La Sole Sautee Meuniere)

Potatoes Parmentier

Apple Cake (Le Gateau aux Pommes)

The soup might have seemed simple on the surface, but it required an annoying number of even knife cuts of potato and leek, essentially a slimmer version of the paysanne dice. The eggs themselves seemed simple on the surface, but a bechamel requires different skills and attention demands than the hollandaise-type sauces we’ve made to date. The flounder seemed easy enough, but we had to fabricate (butcher) the whole fish into fillets ourselves. The potatoes had to be perfectly cubed to cook properly. At least the apple cake seemed fairly straightforward.

I was on a team with Melanie again, along with Drew and Kristin. We were Team 1, so we had to break down Chef Peter’s demo…and it wasn’t a simple matter of a few pots and pans. The demo kitchen was smeared with fish scales, dabs of cake batter, Wondra flour, and so on. Most of my team vanished to the kitchen to get started, but I stuck around and made sure the demo kitchen was really clean before starting on lunch service. I even helped Juan process some of the demo dishes. I didn’t like how Chef Peter yelled at me last week about cleanliness, and furthermore I hadn’t enjoyed his dressing-down after lunch yesterday, so I made a point out of getting everything spic-and-span before getting to work. Chef Peter came by as I was spritzing the demo stove with cleaning solution and told me I was a doll, so hopefully I’ll make that lost point back up.

When I joined my team, Drew was already in the pastry kitchen working on our cake, and Melanie and Kristin were hurriedly assembling mise for lunch service. Melanie explained that they’d agreed to just assemble all the mise possible before deciding who would cook what for lunch, since there were so many knife cuts and mixtures and things to be set up in advance. I immediately offered to make all the cuts for the potato and leek soup, because I thought it was the most hateful task remaining, and because I need the knife practice. I ended up spending most of my prep time on making perfectly identical square pieces of leek and potato; by the time I finished most of the soup was done, the bechamel was already together, and Kristin was almost finished butchering our flounder. I went over to check on her with the flounder and she asked if I could help her by deskinning the fillets she’d already cut. Taking the skin of a fillet is much easier than it seems like it would be. Chef Peter had weighed one of our whole fish and wanted to weigh the cut, skinned, trimmed fillets we ended up with as a comparison, so I tried to do an extra-good job on those pieces.

Once the fish were ready and chilling in the fish refrigerator, it was time to start lunch service. After the soup, all four of us coordinated on assembling the eggs Florentine. And then it was time for the fish course. We all took turns coating the flounder fillets with seasoned flour and frying them. They’re very easy to fry; by the time they’re browned on both sides they’re cooked through. Drew took care of the lemon-nut brown butter sauce; he accidentally burned it and had to make it a second time. The sauce is done in about 45 seconds, so if you aren’t vigilant it burns and you have to start over. The second sauce was perfect, and we all sat down to eat with a sense of tiredness and satisfaction.

Drew’s apple cake came out beautifully. He put leftover coconut ice cream from last week’s ice cream bonanza on my plate, and decorated the plate with a raspberry coulis. Drew is one of my favorite classmates. I think he’s the youngest at 22, and he’s one of the least experienced among us. He told me early on that he’s going to culinary school because his friends are graduating from college and starting their adult lives, leaving him wondering what his place in the world should be. He hasn’t done anything he really cared about since high school, so he decided that since he liked to cook maybe he should get it together and pursue a culinary career. He knows very little about the field and very little about serious food, and he hasn’t worked much in restaurants, but he is so enthusiastic and he works so hard that I can’t help but love him. I loaned him my copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential when he said he hadn’t cracked a book since high school. I hope he likes it.

Lunch service left everybody feeling fairly wrung-out. We had a shorter break than usual, and then we sat through a demo on gravlax and fish stock. We finished the afternoon with another round of chicken back cleaning. I think chicken backs are the culinary school equivalent of a sewing circle: an unpleasant task made less annoying through the enjoyment of fellow students and amusing chatter. I chatted with Melanie and Chin and some other students while we worked over the backs, which made the job easier. Chef Peter came by to chat while we worked, and he made a comment about our lunch menu today: “Three weeks ago, when you guys started, you never would have believed that you’d be putting out a four-course meal like you did today.”

Edit disclosure: corrected spelling via Jinmyo

[=Mark]

Malawry, forgive me if this has been covered, for I've not seen it. Are the instructors and fellow students aware of your continuing diary on eGullet? If so what are their feelings about it?

[KateW]

Chef Francois mentioned the unami (meaty) taste, but said that evidence on it is inconclusive and that he doesn’t formally teach it for this reason.

I read somewhere that "fatty" should be considered a flavor too! LOL

[Jinmyo]

Rochelle, a minor point: spelling is "umami". Inconclusive? Hardly. I think it was classified in 1903 but when Westerners have a set of categories, they're loathe to adjust them. And rather than "meaty", it's usually referred to as "savoury". It is strongly associated with the naturally occuring msg in parmesan. mushrooms, kombu and so on.

I'm not sure I have a sense of the number of covers the class works on.

[Fat Guy]

Malawry, if you don't mind being forever labeled the class geek, you might consider initiating a pro-umami campaign.

I continue to enjoy your reports very, very much.

[Dana]

When you doing a lunch service, how many people is your group cooking for? I'm assuming there are several groups serving a set number of students/teachers/other staff. Is that correct? I am living vicariously through your diary entries. They are terrific.

[mynamejoe]

Just so I understand correctly, each day some group is required to clean up after the chef-instructor? If so, that's ridiculous. You are paying the school to teach you culinary skills, not to be a lackey for their chefs. I would never dream of asking a cook in my employ clean up after me, and I pay them! It is important that a cook realize the responsibility of cleaning up after themselves, but there are other ways to do that. Other than this one irritating thing (to me, anyways), it seems like you picked a good school.

[Malawry]

Thanks for the spelling correction. I don't agree with the dismissal Chef Francois expressed with regards to the fifth taste, which was specifically why I documented it. (Despite my diligence as a student, I really don't take everything I'm taught as gospel.)

Lunch service covers: depends on how large the teams are. When we're divided into teams of three, we typically feed five people each: the three on the team plus two faculty/staff/guests. If we're teams of four we usually feed six or seven. We had four guests one day last week (two prospective students and two parents) so everybody had to feed a lot of people. There was the one day in Week 2 when seven people fed everybody (17 students + 10 or so faculty/staff) which was a disaster. We might be better equipped to handle that by now, though. We do not feed the pastry students, nor do we feed second session students when they are in the classroom on Tuesdays.

Yes, each day Team 1 cleans up the chef-instructor's demo. That team also gets any leftover mise, which in some cases is quite the benefit. Unfortunately, the one thing that really would have helped me Friday (leftover leek and potato cuts) were totally used up in the demo. I see little point in bemoaning the unfairness of this, since it's a reality and it has to be done. But you can bemoan all you like.

Oh, and markstevens: it hasn't come up yet.

[Steve Klc]

Mynamejoe--classroom dynamic is a complicated thing to judge. I've taught avocational and professional students at cooking schools. A lot. Thinking as the lead instructor, your time and experience is valuable--and if having one small group of students break down your station after your demo--so you can pay greater attention to what other students are doing--or where you're going next--where's the problem? As long as this small group of students rotates, it's a relatively fair process as well.

Thinking as a student--who is paying good money for that instructor's time, expertise and greater awareness of the whole--I don't want my instructor wasting my time by washing his own dishes and breaking down from his demo. He has more important things to do--and has to move the class forward as a whole.

There is an hierarchy of effort in the real kitchen and the classroom--and it is hard to comment meaningfully on that when you aren't there. It's not as if all executive chefs and instructors agree how to run things smoothly, how to build their team, etc.

That said--schools do deal with this in different ways and I'm interested in following how Malawry thinks her school and instructor have chosen to handle this, and how her opinion may change over time. Some instructors have non-student assistant help, volunteering in return for a tuition break. Some instructors burden their best students with this extra work so they can spend a few extra minutes one-on-one with other students who need the attention. If an instructor personally had to do all his mise en place for every demo and then clean up after himself, then students would be affected as well: A) If instructors spend their time cleaning they will not be able to cover the same amount of material and B) If they have to pay people to do the cleaning students will ultimately pay the price through higher tuition.

Focusing in on specifics, like whether the instructor cleans up after his own demo, can distract from the larger, most important issue as far as I'm concerned--how good a communicator is the instructor, how passionate, how attentive and how effective is he as a teacher?

You do have to "learn" how to teach in a kitchen classroom--and it is very different from teaching on the job.

[Ron Johnson]

Malawry:

Scott Turow wrote a book called "One-L" detailing his experiences as a first year law student. He was a writer before he attended school and it is my understanding that he kept a diary, much as you are doing, through-out the first year. Later, he turned it into a best selling novel.

With the increase in attention given to culinary matters by the public, coupled with your gifted writing style and attention to detail, I think your diary has the makings of such a novel as well. I hope that is something you are considering.

[Rachel Perlow]

As I was doing this, my teammate realized there wasn’t any shredded parmesan left for the potatoes. Since he’d already sliced his potatoes, they started oxidizing while he was getting more cheese hunks off the wheel and through the Robot Coupe for shredding. So he had to start all over, and I’m afraid he had to spend his whole lunch service time trying to recover.... Everything came out beautifully except for the potatoes, which simply hadn’t had enough time to bake through. (My classmate was pretty upset about this.)

Did your classmate have to completely start over, recutting all the potatoes? Is there a reason why he couldn't have A) put the potato slices in water to prevent oxidation, or B) begin simmering the potatoes in milk while getting the cheese together? Or, did he just not realize that the potatoes would oxidize if he left them sitting on the counter?

If this is the case, did your instructor go over the options your classmate had other than allowing the potatoes to go to waste? I'm sure you are following recipes, but in a real restaurant you would have to adapt if problems come up and you wouldn't want to waste your resources either.

[bigbear]

Rochelle.... Thank you. I am really enjoying your diary.

[johnjohn]

The August/September 2002 edition of Fine Cooking has an interesting article entitled "Why we taste things the way we do." It is under the Food Science heading. It also lists Umami.

johnjohn

[cabrales]

Malawry -- Certain graded components to your courses have been mentioned. Are there instances of students from prior years who have done so poorly, after a certain point in time, that they have been let go by the school? Typically, how is written work weighed in the determination of an overall grade for a course, relative to kitchen performance? Do you get a sense that you and your fellow students are being "graded on a curve"? Also, is it possible to graduate with honors, and how heavily are grades scrutinized in the process of the receipt of job placements and other desirable goodies?

[mynamejoe]

Steve, I see the reasoning behind what you are saying (and definitely don't think a chef-instructor should be doing dishes at any time) but I'm definitely in favor of the teaching assistant solution. In absence of that type of program being in place, a quick post-demo wipe down and transport of used utensils to the dishroom is what I think would work best. The type of detail cleaning Malawry so diligently engaged in should not be done during valuable classroom time, IMO. That could be done after class when the students are cleaning the rest of the kitchen. Can you tell that I think that schools should mirror the actual real-world of cooking professionally (as I see it, anyways) more than they do?

Malawry, I'd be happy to bemoan this and any other realities you may come across for you, absolutely free of charge.

[KateW]

Is it true that in the "real world", cooks sometimes have to clean dishes and dishwashers are sometimes called upon to do some prep work or sauce making? I've heard stories like that from chefs and I don't know if they are tall tales, but if it's true, I can see how dishwashing in school can prepare you for what might happen on the job.

[mynamejoe]

Kate, my point of contention here is that the students have to clean up after the chef, instead of cooking. This does happen in some commercial kitchens, but at that point you are the payee, not the payor.

Most of all, I consider it very important that people clean up after themselves in the kitchen, as their mothers have an irritating habit of not stopping by and doing it for them. So, I have no problem with students having to do some dishes or cleaning whatsoever. As long as it isn't set up like Johnson & Wales/Charleston, where you could find yourself doing dishes from the end of lecture to the end of class. Hopefully for you, things have changed or are different in RI (I would be better known to you as Greg, former moderator of the culinary students forum at cheftalk, if you are wondering).

P.S. How long before you start?

[Malawry]

I see cleaning as a fact of life. It's got to be done, and it's important enough that the school grades us on it. I didn't mind breaking down Chef Peter's demo, although I minded a little that my classmates abandoned ship early on. I don't think Chef Peter should clean his own demo, because he does indeed spend the time he would invest in that helping students in the kitchen. He does not do most of his own mise, either. A few students report early voluntarily most mornings and do plenty of knife cuts and so on for him. I wonder if they will continue to report early once they feel caught up on their knife skills (it's the same two women each morning). I come in early once a week or so, and I normally assist Chef Peter with his mise if I do so. (I report between 7:30 and 7:40am most days, but that's not really early enough to do more than brew some coffee, tie my necktie, and take some notes.)

Rachel, the potatoes were cut extremely thinly on a mandoline. They had been peeled several days before and sitting in water in the walk-in the whole time, so they'd already leached a lot of starch. The paper-thin slices would have lost their remaining starch immediately had they been soaked in water, and the finished dish would not have held together. My classmate stuck them in water anyway, and Chef Peter came by and told him to pitch them and start over. Cooking them in milk may have worked in a real-life situation, but he'd already killed the starch by putting them in water, so it was a moot point.

Cabrales, excellent questions about grading. I think the total of written work amounts to 25% of the grade (12.5% recipes, 12.5% papers). Classroom participation is 25 percent, as are the practical exams and written exams. Some things seem to be weighted; for example, nobody earned over an 80 on the first grades we got, for classroom participation. There is no such thing as honors to my knowledge, and I don't know yet whether or not grading makes any difference to externship placement or other future career factors.

I can't respond to questions about what the "real world" of restaurants is like with reference to cleaning and dishwashing, since I'm only a student.

Thanks for the additional info on umami, Johnjohn.

As for what happens to my diary in the future, who knows? It's still a young project, but it's a lot of fun to write.

I'm really glad to see so much discussion on this thread, btw.

[Fat Guy]

I'm really glad to see so much discussion on this thread, btw.

Me too, but I'd like to make clear that I don't see follow-up discussion as a measure of how much people are enjoying your reports. You can be sure that many are reading, enjoying tremendously, and simply don't feel the need to post anything -- especially since your reports are so complete and self-sufficient and answer the basic questions in advance.

[Toby]

Rochelle, my apologies for not posting sooner to tell you how avidly I look forward to your reports. While I selfishly wish you could write new posts every day, I'm so grateful that you're finding the time to write such detailed and honest reports.

[marrowbone]

Ditto Fatguys previous post, I would like to add that although the subject is very interesting, I'm even more pleased by just the sheer beauty of Malawry's writing !

[KateW]

Move-in date for me is September 9th and I am really looking forward to it. Reading these posts just makes me more excited. I rarely post, but that doesn't mean anything.

I see what you mean now about cleaning up after the chef. I'll be interested to see how it's done at JWU RI.

[col klink]

I too would like back the sentiment of Senior Fat Guy. After a while, I start feeling a little goofy gushing about how great your posts always are.

[Rachel Perlow]

Exactly. If I don't have a question to ask, I feel silly being the third or tenth person to say what a wonderful diary entry, but Ive always thought that. Please assume I think it if you don't see a response from me, because I read all of you entries. Just look at the view count on the index as an indicator of how many people are reading every entry, just not everyone posts. Oh, and I realize you aren't fishing for complements, I just want you to be reassured and validated anyway.

But if you want to know how much these are anticipated, just look at this thread. The first two responses came in within an hour of your posting. I know I read your entries as soon as I notice a new one.

[CathyL]

I don't mind feeling silly for a good cause. Rochelle, I too look forward to your posts and share in the admiration of their style and substance. Many thanks for taking the time to let us learn from your experience!