Practically a year ago to the day, I unwittingly stepped into a kitchen that brought me precisely to the spectacular undertaking to which I am fully relinquishing the next six months - life as a culinary student at the International Culinary Center’s Farm-to-Table program.
That kitchen belonged to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant located on the campus of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY. Blue Hill is widely lauded as one of the most innovative and aspirational farm-to-table establishments pretty much anywhere. The day I found myself there I was attending a rescheduled Whole Animal Butchery workshop, one among a plethora of educational offerings at the National Young Farmers Conference, an opportunity for 200 new and hopeful farmers and agricultural advocates to come together for resource exchange, inspiration and education at Stone Barns each year. The “rescheduled” detail is a significant one; the workshop was one of the conference’s most popular and required pre-registration, but because of the changed time there were conflicts that encouraged some people to opt out last minute. En route to the workshop I took a pit stop to commune with some pigs rooting around for acorns in the soil of a nearby field. On arriving, even though I was late, the smaller crowd allowed me to snag a seat right at the front of the room.
It's difficult to explain the effect that watching Jose Morquecha, Blue Hill’s master butcher, carve up a half pig into perfect, precise cuts of raw muscle and fat had on me. I’ve tried to put words to it again and again, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is to say that I had this unprecedented, visceral desire to get my hands in that pig. Adam Kaye, Blue Hill’s Vice President of Culinary Affairs who started out as the restaurant’s meat cook, narrated the process Jose played out, describing how each part that was pulled away from the carcass might be cooked in their kitchen and the kinds of dishes it might be incorporated into. I listened and took painfully meticulous notes, but the proof was in the visual: the realization that I was going to learn to do what I was seeing was basically instantaneous.
My NYFC attendance was subsidized by a scholarship that I qualified for in part because of my status as a FoodCorps Service Member living on a modest Americorps stipend (more about FoodCorps later), and because I had pretty significant travel costs to cover as a result of coming all the way from Maine. The three other scholarship recipients I shared a hotel room with - two other FoodCorps members coming from Mississippi and a FarmCorps member from Colorado - and I had become fast friends over the weekend, and when we all convened for dinner that night in nearby Tarrytown I couldn’t shut up about the porcine miracle I’d witnessed earlier that day. I also distinctly remember ordering pork belly in celebration.
Informational overload was part and parcel of the conference experience, and among the pamphlets and info sheets I accrued over the course of the weekend was one with details about the ICC’s new Farm-to-Table program. Blue Hill’s Executive Chef, Dan Barber, was a graduate of the Classic French Culinary program when the school existed under a different name, the French Culinary Institute. He designed the farm-to-table component of the program, which included a week in the Blue Hill kitchen and on the farm at Stone Barns. Culinary school wasn’t even on my radar as a conceivable next step at that point. But over the course of the year, in the midst of food-based education projects and a cascade of professional development activities focused around meat, all informed by that singular workshop experience, it became the inevitable next step.
Now a week and a half into my culinary school adventure (I’m in the midst of preparing for our first test tomorrow), it’s pretty wild to look back to last December and revisit that first glimmer of my present trajectory - advocating healthy community development through cooking great food. I’m hoping to get a decent camera soon (ATTN Santa!) to better record my progress over the next six months as I’m immersed in the “to” of farm-to-table/nose-to-tail/bean-to-brew/cacao-to-chocolate/etc. In the meantime, check out my classmates Amanda and Lauren’s blogs for pictures and more details about the beginning of our collective foray into the educational kitchen.
As Chef Alain says when he strolls into our class every so often: joyeux cuisine (happy cooking)!
