The Making of a Chef (3 page)
Read The Making of a Chef Online
Authors: Michael Ruhlman
Adam Shepard, a tall thin student with a narrow face, sharp nose, and dark hair, asked, “Is this a flavor issue?”
“Yeah, we're talking flavor here. We're going to be cooking it so we don't need to be worried about any residual toxins, like, I don't know, staph toxins. It would just have an off odor.”
He removed one hot pan from the oven and poured Wesson cottonseed oil from a large white jug into the pan. “It's the cheapest oil you can buy. We use it only for this.” He dumped half the tub of bones in. They hissed as they hit the oil. “You want an even layer, not stacked. Why is that?”
“So they caramelize evenly?” one student asked.
“Well, yes,” the chef said. “But you could get that by turning them frequently.” He waited. “The reason is that the bottom and top layer would caramelize but the middle would sweat and release liquid, and the liquid would form at the bottom of the pan. So instead of a good fond, you'd end up with a crust of blood and coagulated protein. Don't try to squeeze eighty pounds of bones into three pans.”
The final stop on the tour was the pot room, filled with sauteuses, sautoirs, marmites, sauce pots, rondeaux, and plastic two-gallon stock containers. He held up a sauté pan with sloping sides and asked for its name. “Sauteuse.” He held up a pan the same size but whose sides were at right angles to the bottom. “Sautoir.”
Chef Pardus returned to his desk and said loudly and with finality,
“This is your kitchen for six weeks. Keep it clean.”
“This is your kitchen for six weeks. Keep it clean.”
It did seem to me a fine kitchen, spacious and bright. It measured thirty-seven-and-a-half feet by twenty-six feet. The two Hobart reach-in coolersâone for the A.M. class, one for the P.M.âat the head of the kitchen included an exterior digital read of the internal temperature. The reach-ins faced one end of a long bank of Garland ranges comprising three sets of four burners alternating with three large flats above six separate ovens. Across the kitchen were the Wolf ranges, seven burners lined side by side, behind which were seven flattops. This side also contained the deep fryer, which remained empty and covered for all but one day of this class. Two industrial extension cords hung from the ceiling. There were three separate sinks, one just for cooling stocks, as well as a giant ice machine. Even the cutting boards were substantial, three inches thick and weighing, I'd guess, twenty-five pounds. You had to use both hands to carry them to your station.
A kitchen like this costs about $330,000 to equip. There were thirty-six others scattered throughout the Culinary.
Chef Pardus instructed us to distribute chairs around the tables and we sat at our stations. “I'm Chef Pardus, but if you see me at Gaffney's or
wandering around Woodstock, call me Michael. I graduated from here in 1981. I got my bachelor's in, I don't know what it's called, management and hospitality, something like that, from Johnson Walesâboo hiss, boo hiss.” He smiled. Johnson & Wales University, while not devoted solely to the culinary arts, is among the Culinary Institute's biggest competitors. “I began teaching here last July.”
wandering around Woodstock, call me Michael. I graduated from here in 1981. I got my bachelor's in, I don't know what it's called, management and hospitality, something like that, from Johnson Walesâboo hiss, boo hiss.” He smiled. Johnson & Wales University, while not devoted solely to the culinary arts, is among the Culinary Institute's biggest competitors. “I began teaching here last July.”
Michael Pardus, thirty-seven years old, had spent much of his cooking career in high-end French restaurants and had watched most of them go under as the appeal of French restaurants faded. His last position had been executive chef of the Swiss Hotel in Sonoma. He loved northern California, decided that was where he wanted to end up, but he didn't want to be cooking fourteen hours a day. Not far from him in St. Helena, the Culinary Institute of America's new facility called Greystone would soon be opening. There, he decided, was his future, and he began a long-range plan to earn a teaching position at the Culinary's West Coast campus, built within a nineteenth-century winery and serving only professionals in the food industry. The first step was to apply to his alma mater in Hyde Park seventy-five miles north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. The school gave him a shot at the chef's practical, then offered him a job; he packed his car and headed east. He intended to show the administrators at the Culinary that he was willing to do anything to earn a position at Greystone.
He sat on the desk and tried to get to know his new students. He pointed to a big guy with thick dark hair, Lou Fusaro, the oldest student in the class at thirty-seven. “Why are you here?”
Lou said, “I don't know, really.” There seemed a genuine plaintiveness in his voice, a concern: it wasn't that he hadn't thought about it. Lou was a longtime resident of Poughkeepsie, immediately south of Hyde Park; he was married, had three children, and had for years been a manufacturing operator in the shipping department at IBM, a company that once girded the local economy here. Lou could watch the dynamics of his future changing by the year. Computers kept getting smaller and smaller, requiring fewer people like him to ship them; Lou said while he was there computers that once filled a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot room had become desktop computers. Clearly, IBM would not provide the stability he needed. His father had owned a bar with a kitchen and in the early eighties he'd owned a sandwich shop; this satisfied the Culinary's entrance requirements, but practically speaking, he had zero kitchen experience. He scarcely knew how to hold a knife. At last Lou said, “I guess to see where I fit in.”
Chef Pardus nodded, said that was a good reason to be here. “How about you?” he said, pointing to one of the youngest in the class, Matt, not yet out of his teens. Matt simply said, “I don't know,” and that was that. Chef Pardus said there were many reasons to be here; one of them might be to increase your skill level. Happy to have been supplied an answer, Matt nodded and said, “To increase my skill level.”
Each of these students had been here for nine weeks already, since shortly before Christmas, in an incoming class of seventy-two. Everyone had begun with fourteen days of Introduction to Gastronomy and Culinary Math. Then they had had seven days of Sanitation and Nutrition, seven days of Product Identification (learning about produce, evaluating quality, buying it, and studying food purchasing)âsix-and-a-half hours of class, then two hours of Culinary French in the evening. They moved into Meat Identification next, learning the muscular and skeletal construction of animals, and after seven days they had moved to the basement for Meat Fabrication, where they would practice their subprimal cuts, their boning, their Frenching.
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ob del Grosso, a slender forty-one-year-old with a narrow face and dark features harkening back to his family's roots in Italy, taught Introduction to Gastronomy to everyone who entered the Culinary Institute of America. His résumé was filled with Connecticut restaurants: line cook at the Black Goose Grill in Darien; chef at the Lakeville Cafe; at Le Coq Hardi Restaurant in Stamford, he was, variously, charcutier, first cook, sous chef, and finally executive chef. Del Grosso was also a trained micropaleontologist, with a master's from CUNY at Queens College. A booming oil industry had ensured plenty of jobs in his field, but as he was considering a Ph.D. in micropaleontology in the early 1980s, the oil bubble burst and his future grew cloudy. He gradually became so anxious about what he would do, he couldn't sleep and took to pacing. One morning he fell asleep on the living room floor. When dawn came, he was awakened by a beam of light in his eyes. “I had an epiphany,” he told me. “I thought, âI can
cook
!'”
ob del Grosso, a slender forty-one-year-old with a narrow face and dark features harkening back to his family's roots in Italy, taught Introduction to Gastronomy to everyone who entered the Culinary Institute of America. His résumé was filled with Connecticut restaurants: line cook at the Black Goose Grill in Darien; chef at the Lakeville Cafe; at Le Coq Hardi Restaurant in Stamford, he was, variously, charcutier, first cook, sous chef, and finally executive chef. Del Grosso was also a trained micropaleontologist, with a master's from CUNY at Queens College. A booming oil industry had ensured plenty of jobs in his field, but as he was considering a Ph.D. in micropaleontology in the early 1980s, the oil bubble burst and his future grew cloudy. He gradually became so anxious about what he would do, he couldn't sleep and took to pacing. One morning he fell asleep on the living room floor. When dawn came, he was awakened by a beam of light in his eyes. “I had an epiphany,” he told me. “I thought, âI can
cook
!'”
Del Grosso taught in what appeared to be an old-fashioned lecture classroomâwith posters of fish, vegetables, and pasta shapes taped to the wall, an extended blackboard, long curved multileveled rows of permanent seating. When he began teaching the course he was amazed to find out how few people even knew what gastronomy was. “Astronomers know what
astronomy is,” he said. “Physicists know what physics is. But people who claim to be gastronomers, or gastronomes, don't know what gastronomy is.” Del Grosso stood before the rows of seats and talked, questioned the students, paused, squeezing his chin thoughtfully, a near caricature of Ed Sullivan, in what seemed an endless digression on food. The course did have an agenda and schedule, beginning with the notion of etiquette, and moved from there to the history of the chef in French cuisine, into nouvelle cuisine, followed by the contemporary scene, Alice Waters, and the chef-farmer connection. One class was devoted to the question “What is food?” and the final class addressed the ethics of food production.
astronomy is,” he said. “Physicists know what physics is. But people who claim to be gastronomers, or gastronomes, don't know what gastronomy is.” Del Grosso stood before the rows of seats and talked, questioned the students, paused, squeezing his chin thoughtfully, a near caricature of Ed Sullivan, in what seemed an endless digression on food. The course did have an agenda and schedule, beginning with the notion of etiquette, and moved from there to the history of the chef in French cuisine, into nouvelle cuisine, followed by the contemporary scene, Alice Waters, and the chef-farmer connection. One class was devoted to the question “What is food?” and the final class addressed the ethics of food production.
“Let's identify the process of nouvelle cuisine,” he would say to his class. “Not an easy thing to do. My belief is that you must cook to the essence. Think of nouvelle cuisine as Socratic cooking. How many of you have read Plato?” About a half dozen hands rose in a class of thirty-six. Del Grosso briefly mentioned
The Republic
, the allegory of the cave, and the notion of Platonic forms. “There is a perfect form of the salad,” he said. “Say you're a Socratic cook and you want to make a hamburger. You would begin the process by posing a question: âWhat is a hamburger?'” He posed this to the class. One intrepid student offered, “A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns.” Del Grosso clarified: “Round? Let's call it disc-shaped.” A lively discussion of the hamburger followed. The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking critically about food. Many of the students had little education beyond high school, and many, whether from the armed services of the United States or having worked only in kitchens, were not used to this sort of thinking. “A chef should be Socratic,” del Grosso continued, “questioning everything, including the placement of the silverware. Cooking to the essence,” he said with a flourish. “âWhat are you,
beef
?!' Cook to your answer. It's a very different way to cook. It requires a lot of thinking. I'm not going to encourage you to cook this way all the time because I don't. Imagine if every time you cooked an egg, you had to ask, âWhat is an egg?' But it's useful to do so every now and then.”
The Republic
, the allegory of the cave, and the notion of Platonic forms. “There is a perfect form of the salad,” he said. “Say you're a Socratic cook and you want to make a hamburger. You would begin the process by posing a question: âWhat is a hamburger?'” He posed this to the class. One intrepid student offered, “A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns.” Del Grosso clarified: “Round? Let's call it disc-shaped.” A lively discussion of the hamburger followed. The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking critically about food. Many of the students had little education beyond high school, and many, whether from the armed services of the United States or having worked only in kitchens, were not used to this sort of thinking. “A chef should be Socratic,” del Grosso continued, “questioning everything, including the placement of the silverware. Cooking to the essence,” he said with a flourish. “âWhat are you,
beef
?!' Cook to your answer. It's a very different way to cook. It requires a lot of thinking. I'm not going to encourage you to cook this way all the time because I don't. Imagine if every time you cooked an egg, you had to ask, âWhat is an egg?' But it's useful to do so every now and then.”
This course aimed to introduce the students to the culture upon which the school was basedâand that culture had its roots in classical French cuisine. But his was a class, by design, of rambling. Del Grosso would expound for fifteen minutes on Celebration, the Walt Disney Company's planned town. And when a student mentioned the word “confit,” he stopped the discussion of Gault and Millau, the journalists who coined the term “nouvelle cuisine,” to ask if everyone knew the word “confit.” Sensing that
not everyone did, he began with the meaning of confit, and confitures, the history of confit, its purpose of preservation, and concluded with a small discourse on how he personally prepares
confit de canard
.
not everyone did, he began with the meaning of confit, and confitures, the history of confit, its purpose of preservation, and concluded with a small discourse on how he personally prepares
confit de canard
.
After describing his dry marinade and the cooking of the confit, del Grosso explained that he stores the duck legs, submerged in their congealed fat, for at least two weeks, preferably in glass jars, but plastic will do if you're in a restaurant kitchen and don't want glass jars all over the place. After two weeks, he would simply remove the legs from the fat, wipe them off, pass them under a broiler or salamander to crisp up the skin and heat the meat some. He would then serve them with potatoes that had been fried in clarified butter, along with deep-fried parsley. “Have you had deep-fried parsley?” he asked. He closed his eyes and said, “It's a miracle.”
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uch a class seemed spiritually at odds with Culinary Math, which took up the other half of an incoming student's day.
uch a class seemed spiritually at odds with Culinary Math, which took up the other half of an incoming student's day.
Homework questions: Convert twelve quarts and twelve tablespoons into a single unit of quarts. How many cups are there in four pounds of honey? You are catering a function of 350 people; you estimate that each person will eat three quarters of a cup of potato chips; how many pounds of chips should you order?
Such things were important to know. A pint is not a pound the world round. A pint of ground cinnamon, for instance, is only half a pound; a pint of honey is a pound and a half.
“You will be doing a lot of conversions when you get to Skill Development One,” Julia Hill told her class. “If you're not comfortable with conversions, get comfortable.” Hill used to be an accountant. She left that profession to become a restaurant manager. Eleven years ago, she arrived at this school to take a continuing education course and never left. “The moment I set foot on this campus,” she said, “I knew this was where I belonged.”
Her class, a review of math applications relevant to the food-service industry, was an interesting series of puzzles. When possible, she would have students bring their knife kits, hard black briefcases filled with tools. They would take apart pounds of carrots in problems addressing “as purchased quantity” and “edible portion quantity.” The class began with three days of basic math, fractions, decimals and how they behaved, then moved into conversions, cost, costing recipes, ratios, and lastly alcohol measurements.
“The definition of âcost' in this industry,” she told the class, “is: cost is what you use, not how much you bought it for.” Cost, therefore, was an idea, not necessarily an absolute. But this was about as close to the world of ideas as the class got, and many were glad for this. Some loathed del Grosso's class, but loved the concreteness of Culinary Math. Others hated both classes and spent nine weeks longing for the kitchen.
This was A Block. The people in it were called A Blockers. Their average age was twenty-six, and 10 percent of them would drop out. Twenty-five percent of them were women, 12 percent were minorities. A Blockers wore street clothes, but were requested to dress in light shirts, dark slacks or skirts, and dark shoes. B Block, which included sanitation and nutrition, followed A Block, and C BlockâMeat Identification and Fabricationâcame after that. This never varied; every graduate had gone through the school this regimental way since 1976, when the Culinary shifted to what it called a progressive learning year, though the curriculum itself expanded considerably during the following two decades. Each block, fourteen class days spread over three weeks, built upon the previous block.
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