Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (30 page)

He was better than television.

Gaby gave us an assignment to create a menu for an imaginary restaurant. I came up with an idea. I owned a book called
British Grub
, a garishly illustrated collection of recipes—full of Day-Glo, psychedelic colors and grotesque drawings of English people eating—for traditional British blue-collar food. I had looked through it a lot as a little kid, enraptured by the colors and the food itself. And what little kid wouldn’t want something called Toad-in-the-Hole for dinner? I’d been given a copy of Heston Blumenthal’s
The Fat Duck Cookbook
and had acquired Grant Achatz’s
Alinea
a few months prior. I decided that my menu would take all those traditional British foods and give them the Blumenthal/Achatz treatment—sci-fi, high-tech interpretations of salt-of-the-earth classics. Ridiculous foams, gels, and powders; bizarre deconstructions and groan-inducing puns. I spent an entire weekend pouring myself into the menu—sublimating the prior five weeks of L-Block tedium. I was surprised: I really got into it. It was the most fun I’d had in ages.

I had dishes on the menu like Scotch Woodcock, described as: egg yolk drops and crème fraîche spheres on anchovy-Parmesan toast; “Potted Shrimp” Pousse Café, which was butter and prawn parfait, English pea mousseline, honeydew-cucumber sorbet, and sauternes gelée; and Deviled Varieties, grilled variety meats with braised mustard
seeds, mustard-honeycomb-apple compote, and Pommery mustard gelato. I’d look at the components of the traditional dish, break them down, see if Alinea or Blumenthal had handled similar ingredients in interesting ways, concoct flavor and texture ideas, and there I’d have the finished dish. I wound up ripping off my two source materials a lot less than I’d anticipated.

When I showed it to Gaby, he loved it. It was sophisticated, he said. Vibrant. Fun. Exciting. I explained how I’d “invented” the dishes and his response thrilled me. I hadn’t been thrilled in many months.

“I know those books. I see the influence, but you’ve also got your own thing happening. I want to eat this food. Really—I want to eat this food.”

“Oh, Jonathan Dixon,” Nelly exclaimed, when I showed her the menu. “Will you make some of these?”

I never did.

At Christmas I had to borrow $200 from my aunt to buy presents for my parents. I considered that this might be a new low.

The holidays ended, and L-Block limped almost imperceptibly to a close. I waited for it all to end.

O
N DAY ONE OF
the Baking and Pastry class, signs started going up around campus announcing that the Bocuse d’Or finals would be held at the CIA in just a couple of weeks.

I’ve heard cooking and baking compared to the difference between jazz and classical music; cooking requires an intuition and ability to improvise, but baking is all about exactitude, a science. I did poorly in science classes when I was younger and felt a little intimidated by the idea that it was preternaturally easy to screw up baked goods.

Baking and Pastry classes run in the Baking Center, a separate building connected to Roth Hall by a walkway. It was the same building where incoming students eat those first few formal meals, and where the Banquet and Catering course occurs; it was an area most of us enrolled in the culinary arts program steered clear of. There wasn’t
much of a rivalry between the culinary students and the baking students—although it went unspoken that each thought their program superior and more rigorous and difficult—but the bakeshops, as they were called, felt like uncharted territory. When I looked at a campus map, and saw the representation of the baking center, I always had it in my head that it should read like an ancient map, where unexplored areas bore the words “Here there be dragons” except ours could read, “Here there be Germans.” That was the association I had of the place: that it was staffed by stern Teutons with an appropriate love of order. On the few occasions I was in that area (usually to use their bathroom, because it was really nice), that’s pretty much what it seemed like.

The weekend before class started, I pored over the textbook. I was hungover from L-Block and the crawling damage of the winter. My snuffed-out enthusiasm hadn’t rekindled.

I was really beginning to worry. I had a while yet to go to get my degree, and I believed that the only way to really get the most one could out of it was to go through it headlong. Why the hell stay—why bother? Why waste the time and resources?—if I didn’t burn to do it? Wouldn’t it make sense to maybe cut my losses?

Gaby’s project had felt good. It reminded me of the way I was before I’d started school the year before: excited, brimming with wonder, open to every scrap of data. That menu had been like a shot of L-dopa, with a burst of life but then crucial diminishing returns. I remembered all those forays through the really high-end cookbooks in my collection, almost giddy when I’d look at French Laundry recipes that I knew were out of my reach and think,
I’ll be taught every technique I need to know to do that
.

I sat on my bed with the textbook open. Beer bread dough … chocolate cherry sourdough … meringues … croissants …

It would be pretty cool to understand how these get made
, I thought. I flipped back and forth, looking at the pictures and stopped on page 231, the recipe for puff pastry dough.

Just a short time ago, I’d been having a Proust moment, thinking about these Pepperidge Farm goods I used to eat, a broccoli-cheese mix encased in pastry. Pepperidge Farm had long since stopped producing
them. I associated the taste with my first months in New York City because I’d come home late from work and buy some from the supermarket, heat them up, eat them, and drink beer while watching the news.
I wish I could have one of those right now
, I’d thought that short time ago, and then a second thought came:
Hold up there—you’re in cooking school. Why don’t you make some?

I drove to the local Price Chopper and bought ingredients—broccoli, cheddar, and frozen puff pastry. I balked at the price of the puff pastry because it was ridiculous: $4.99 for two small sheets of it. Still, I took two boxes home. Back in the kitchen, I made a Mornay sauce by cooking up a light béchamel and shredding the cheddar into it. I blanched the broccoli and sweated some onions and garlic in a sauté pan. I chopped all the vegetables fine, mixed in some of the Mornay, and gave the whole thing a generous hit of salt and pepper. I spooned the broccoli mixture onto one of the sheets, folded the pastry over, and cut them into rounds. I got about three per sheet. The bundles baked until they were golden. I let them cool, and then sampled my efforts. Not exactly what I remembered—and it occurred to me even if I had an actual Pepperidge Farm pastry in my kitchen, it wouldn’t taste like I remembered—but pretty good. Then I broke it down: probably about $2 worth of broccoli and cheddar, and $10 worth of puff pastry. $12 for the whole recipe, meaning each pastry cost $2. That was pretty steep for a trifling snack.

But staring at page 231, I noticed that the recipe yielded almost nine pounds of puff pastry. It called for almost three pounds of butter and three of flour, but I’d get ten times the amount of puff pastry for the same cost.

I closed the book. I willed myself to think,
That will be really cool to know how to do
.

O
N
T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
, J
ANUARY
25, I arrived at Bakeshop 8 a few minutes early for class because I wasn’t sure where the bakeshop was, and I’d be starting with an entirely new group of people again. I’d
finish the program out with this group, and I wanted to get a read on them. They had all arrived before me, and when I walked in, they turned to look at the new guy.

I nodded and forced a faint smile, moving past the four large wooden-topped square workstations toward an open seat right at the front of the room. I put my things down and the other students started coming up to me, introducing themselves. Leo, Micah, Sammy, Rocco. Jessica. Gabrielle, Margot. Stephen. Bruce. Sabrina. I shook hands with everyone. It was nice to meet them, too. Just a minute before 2:00, our instructor arrived.

Rudy Speiss killed off every preassociation I had with not only the building, but the whole art of baking within about five minutes of entering. He was Swiss, not German; he wore kindness and patience like a nicely tailored shirt; and as soon as he began talking, baking suddenly became accessible, leagues from the esoteric science I’d always thought it. He was about fifty-eight or so, on the short side, with a full head of brown hair and a carriage that indicated that he wasn’t completely averse to sampling his own wares. His voice was soft and even and impossible to imagine rising. He smiled constantly.

He spent a few minutes laying out the rules—three absences equal a failing grade, two tardies equal one absence, and all the rest of the disciplinary calculus—that we knew by rote.

As he spoke, I swiveled in my seat to get glimpses of my new classmates. Man, they looked young—really young. Baby skin. Inner glow. Full of energy. They looked incredibly earnest, too. Everyone leaned forward into Speiss’s words, taking careful notes. These kids had no dust of cynicism on them. One student, Carol, caught my eye and smiled and bent her head back over her notes.

Speiss was saying that from now on, we were to forget about cups and half cups and all the systems of measuring we used in our old kitchens. Here, we worked by weight. Our recipes would call for, maybe, thirty-two ounces of flour—regrettably, Speiss said, we were not on the metric system, which was even more exact—and sixteen ounces of water. We were to weigh this stuff out, even the liquids.
Next, he explained all the differences between the flours stored in bins under the worktables. Bread flour, all-purpose flour, cake flour, whole-wheat flour—they all had different levels of gluten in them, and they were employed in different recipes to exploit those differences, and in different ratios to refine the end results even more—heavier on the bread flour for a certain texture, more durum for another texture. Most people, he lamented, have a single type of flour in their pantries at home. You’ll never experience the wonders of baking and all its variety with a single type of flour. He gave a lesson on the nature of yeast. He talked about how salt toughens up gluten, how too much salt will make the dough irreparably sticky and impossible to work with. Then, as if cued by the word “sticky,” he said something really interesting.

“Students ask me, ‘How long do I mix a dough for? When is it ready?’ They think that baking is that precise, that you mix and knead for an absolute amount of time. No more, no less. This isn’t so. You know in the kitchen
approximately
how long it takes to sauté a chicken breast, but you can’t say it is for exactly four minutes and thirty-two seconds. At a certain moment, you sense it is done. Stoves vary with their heat, pans vary with their thicknesses. There are differences between each and every chicken breast. Baking is like that too. You need to be more careful with amounts, but you need instinct, also. A dough will tell you when it is just about ready. You can see the sheen on it, you can feel the stickiness. But you will also learn to feel with your gut when that dough is done. You will just know.”

Speiss divided us up into teams: laminating, desserts, custards, and bread. I was assigned to the laminating team. Just as I was about to raise my hand and ask exactly what laminating was, he explained that we would be making doughs of butter and flour for pie crusts, croissants, and puff pastry. I perked up. Then he handed out one recipe sheet each. I glanced at mine and saw “Puff Pastry” across the top. I perked up some more.

We broke apart and started gathering our ingredients. I weighed out five pounds of butter, eight ounces of flour, and then cut the butter into tiny pieces.

“Good, good,” Speiss said, standing at my elbow. “Now everything into the mixer. Use the paddle attachment. Mix it until there are no more lumps. No lumps, no lumps.”

I did as I was told. As my flour and butter mixed, I watched Speiss. He moved from team to team, person to person, with a genuine excitement. He loved this. He obviously loved his students—he made his explanations and corrections (“No, I think you might be just a
little
short with the flour weight” he said to Margot, whose dough was, the first time she tried it, a sopping mess. “There we go … good, good, great, beautiful.”) with concern and warmth. His whole manner seemed to communicate that we weren’t screwing anything up; we just hadn’t yet learned the right way to do things.

This was a different way of passing on knowledge than Viverito or Perillo or Coyac. A raised voice wouldn’t have suited Speiss any more than a paternal kindness would have fit Coyac. But the endgame turned out the same: You wanted to do things well.

All around the four tables, there was motion and noise. Giant Hobart mixers growled and thumped; clouds of flour rose up in drifts; people grunted behind the effort of kneading; whisks stirring custards rang against the sides of steel pots. When it ended a few weeks from now, I’d understand how to make bread, how to make flans, how to make croissants and puff pastry. Mysterious things were being made clear. I started to feel good about being in the class.

On the other hand, baking was slow business. The butter-flour compound I’d mixed was divided into four pieces and molded into squares, then set into the refrigerator to chill overnight. Speiss handed me a recipe for pie crust, and I started in on that.

“There are all sorts of factors that bear on bread and baked goods,” Speiss said to us as we worked. “Especially breads. Temperature is crucial. Yeast and gluten are both influenced by heat. What’s the room temperature? What’s the water temperature? What’s the temperature of your flour? When you mix dough, you will encounter mixing friction, and you can assume that the temperature of your dough will rise two degrees for every minute of mixing you do.”

“What should I do for a pie filling?” I asked him when I was done making the crust; it sat resting in the refrigerator.

“Whatever you want to do. Anything you want. Chocolate pudding, apple, we can order some blueberries … it’s up to you.” That wasn’t a sentiment expressed very often at the CIA. For a second, it threw me. I didn’t know what I wanted.