A quick overview of the ups and downs thus far.
Most enjoyable days:
- stocks - seriously, making stocks is pretty much nirvana-status contentment.
- food preservation - duck confit, gravlax, preserved lemons, and brandade, the light fluffy salted cod spread descended directly from the heavens.
- fried potatoes - enough said.
Days that required extreme decompression (read - naps) immediately after class: salads (seriously though), soups, sauces. All dishes bearing the reminder that improvement will come, with time.
It’s pretty much unfathomable to be reminded that I’m halfway through my first level of culinary school. First of all, it feels like I’ve been here 6 months. Which happens to be the actual length of my program. It's partly because of the breadth of material we’ve covered so far: soups and fish and salads and sauces and stocks and potatoes and preserved foods, as well as knife skills, equipment usage, presentation, kitchen hierarchies and organization, product identification, chemistry. That’s right, chemistry. And a whooooole lot of french vocabulary.
The time warp I’m finding myself in is also a result of the class bonding that’s occurred in the couple of short weeks. Turns out, when you spend 30 hours a week with the same 13 people you get friendly pretty fast. Though most (but not all) of us were drawn by the Farm-to-Table angle in one way or another, it seems to me that our class as a unit is extremely diverse, in a totalizing sense. Finding out what brought my fellow classmates to working with food is utterly fascinating. While our backgrounds and lenses can vary pretty wildly, the one thing that comes to the fore in every conversation I’ve had that's landed in the “why food?” arena is the same visceral undercurrent: “I love to cook.”
Guiding us along are two highly experienced chef-educators: Chef April, a former “Chopped” contestant, and Chef Veronica, who trained and worked in high-end professional French restaurants for 30 years. The word “passion” gets thrown around a lot in reference to chefs and cooking - there’s an appreciation for process, the history, the tradition, and, with all these as a foundation, the opportunity for innovation that all come to a head in what Chef V refers to as “alchemy” in both the professional and educational kitchen. Both of our chef instructors also have backgrounds in the arts; both fields, arguably, have an alchemic element to them.
It’s extremely clear even this early on that its equally important for us to learn our ingredients backwards and forwards, as well as the reasons for using the techniques we learn, in order to master them. Those techniques, by the way, are highly “classical” in the sense that they are capital-F French and often originated a few hundred years or so ago, thus also involving doing a lot of dirty work by hand. Machinated shortcuts are not much of a “thing” in culinary school, and our chefs, trained in the classical style, are teaching us extremely old-school kitchen skills.
It’s extremely clear even this early on that its equally important for us to learn our ingredients backwards and forwards, as well as the reasons for using the techniques we learn, in order to master them. Those techniques, by the way, are highly “classical” in the sense that they are capital-F French and often originated a few hundred years or so ago, thus also involving doing a lot of dirty work by hand. Machinated shortcuts are not much of a “thing” in culinary school, and our chefs, trained in the classical style, are teaching us extremely old-school kitchen skills.
Between the pared down, history-steeped nature of classic French culinary education and the farm-to-table addenda, it's easy to locate a kinship with a back-to-the-land ethic that translates really nicely through our in-kitchen and out-of-kitchen experiences. This week, we visited the NYC Greenmarket and chatted with both a local farmer and a chef about the evolution of their relationship to each other via the market. In January we’re visiting Blue Hill Farm to get some exposure to their particular F2T approach as a preamble to our week out there at the end of the program, as well as Mast Brothers to learn about chocolate, which I’m so obscenely excited about I can’t think straight.
All this is to say that both the community building and information inundation in levels 1 and 2 (of 6) at the ICC is definitely at a maximum. We have written tests - frequently - and biweekly evaluations from our lead instructor, as well as a comprehensive practical at the end of each level. Studying and testing may not be totally unfamiliar territory, but practicing peeling potatoes into tiny footballs (tournage) and cutting carrots into 1 cm cubes (brunoise) for several hours a week outside of class is definitely venturing into unexplored territory.
To be honest, I haven’t adapted as quickly as I hoped I would. Kitchen etiquette, multitasking, active use of my peripheral vision to monitor the kitchen activity around me, speed and confidence with my equipment, and even just maintaining my knives properly are all practices I’m adjusting to pretty clumsily. But I’m still gripped by the whole thing, and I’ve been assured by my instructors that though not progressing at the inhuman pace of my dreams I’m right where I ought to be. And if there's one thing I've learned so far, its that what chef says, goes.
"Christmas Around the World" family meal last week (ICC Facebook)
