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I am not yet a chef, but I am now officially a cook. As a graduate of culinary school, I consider myself ready to be a professional cook. And I am indeed “working” at a restaurant as such, though for no money. Until the cash arrives, the cook title is unofficial, but I can still throw my new titular heft around.
My graduation—a grand buffet in which every student in our class of 15 had to prepare one or two appetizers or desserts—was a blast. Most of the dishes were very good, and I think I held up nicely with my peers. I put together an “Italian-style” ceviche of grilled octopus. It included the regular additives of lemon and lime juice, but also included grape tomatoes, finely diced fennel (and fennel fronds for garnish), garlic zest, red onion, Italian sweet pepper, blood orange puree and oregano. I’m a huge fan of ceviches, both because they’re easy and usually delicious, and I think this one went over well. I was denied my original intention to use baby octopus and garnish with lemon balm. Oh well.
The second dish was a beef cheek ravioli with a spicy marinara dipping sauce. While the ceviche took very little time to produce, this was a long-term dish. I had to start the beef cheek braise the day before (braising in demi-glace, orange zest, mirepoix, nutmeg, tomato paste and garlic). On the second day I strained the liquid (saving a bit for my dipping sauce), pureed the meet with some ricotta, parsley, more orange zest, balsamic vinegar and basil oil. The mixture resembled cooked brains, all gray and gushy, but they were all goodness and flavor.
I then rolled my own pasta for the ravioli. And therein lay my main problem, one that always seems to plague me: I underestimated how much dough I needed. So I had to rush to pump out some additional dough as the clock ticked away, chewing my fingernails as I waited for the dough to rest in the fridge. Theoretically I could have gone ahead with my original plan, to bread and fry the ravioli, but I deep-sixed that and simply froze and boiled the pasta. The result worked fairly well, though my pasta was a tad too thick for some refined tastes, and the presentation was a little awkward. Basically I jammed one ravioli each in a small dipping cup, and then drizzled a little dipping sauce on top. Again, it was tasty but strange to eat at a standing cocktail party.
At the end of the night, which is another way to say the end of eating and beginning of drinking, we got our chefs hats (mine broke when they tried to put it on my giant melon head), a copy of Larousse Gastromique, and a pat on the back.
And so I go into the world of cooking for real. School’s out, time to get working. Time to get cooking. Time to make money doing so. 
Sorry for not posting in a few days, but last week was kind of hectic. We had our written and practical exams for the first module, which meant a lot of studying and practicing at home, in addition to freelancing and whatnot. We haven’t gotten our written exam grades yet, but I’m confident I did well. I ended up doing fairly well on the practical, losing points mainly on my mayonnaise, which had too much mustard in it. And my knife skills were deemed “perfect” by Chef M, netting me all 10 points on that section.
Perhaps it was some resulting hubris, then, that led me to partially amputate my finger on Friday while prepping steak and pommes persillade. As I was slicing up the parsley, I turned away to say something to a teammate about another recipe we were working on, and … off came a huge slice from the side of my left index finger. The result was a severe avulsion of my index finger, which I was told will grow back but will be unsymmetrical. So much for a backup career as a hand model.
Long story short, the Aspiring Chef had to go to the nearby Beth Israel medical center to get his mutilated finger sanitized (very painful), numbed with Novocaine (strange feeling of “heavy weightlessness,” as if my finger suddenly did not conform to Newton’s law), and cauterized (my favorite part was when the Eastern European doctor warned me that it might smell like BBQ in the room).
But this might be a good time to reference the three rules of knife safety: 
-- Always curl your left hand fingers when cutting (and use the knuckles as a guide)
-- Never look away when cutting
-- Keep your knives very sharp, because a somewhat dull knife can skate off the surface of some food and bury itself in your flesh.
So, a number of us in culinary school have talked about eating at some of the best restaurants in the city to expand our palettes and make inroads as we prepare this fall for our externships. What better place to start than Jean-Georges, one of the only restaurants in New York that has garnered a three-star Michelin rating and a four-star New York Times rating. It belongs to the chef of the same name (the guy with the throat-clearing last name of Vongerichten), who, according to some, helped bring nouvelle cuisine to the Big Apple.The lunch yesterday was great. We got to meet the man himself, though briefly, and took a tour of the huge kitchen both upstairs and down inside the Trump building overlooking Central Park. As a budding chef, I was tremendously impressed by the cleanliness, order and layout of his kitchen.Oh yeah, and the food was pretty good, also.The five of us at our table got to pass around several plates, including some amuse bouches and a complementary first course sent over from Jean-Georges. The sea trout sashimi, in trout eggs, lemon, dill and horseradish—the free first course—was easily the stand-out dish. It was amazing, with a great presentation and good tart taste.The only real downer was the amuse bouche, a trio of fresh mozzarella with pickled rhubarb, a crab fritter with mango sauce and some kind of herb shot. I liked the herb shot, but fellow classmate Bruno thought it was just blended herbs…which it was, and it looked like it. The mozzarella was kind of blah, and I didn’t care for the rhubarb. The crab fritter was ok, but too much going on, with the mustard and mango.Other standouts include the Parmesan-crusted confit of chicken leg (chicken, when cooked like this, is my favorite dead animal aside from fish) and the goat cheese gnocchi with caramelized baby asparagus.Here's some of our group in front of the sign (you can barely make it out, though). Food pics to come tomorrow.
As somebody who’s chosen to leave behind the world of financial journalism behind, I thought I’d never have to hear the word derivative again in the vocational setting.
Which was true until today, when we began working on derivative sauces, which are the progeny of the withered yet toothy matrons of the culinary world, the mother sauces (also known as grand sauces).
There doesn’t seem to be much consistency on what constitutes a mother sauce. Some say there are five: béchamel, veloute, espagnole, classic tomato and hollandaise. Others think hollandaise is a bogus addition, since it doesn’t include roux (flour and butter), doesn’t store well, and is not made in advance of service. The underappreciated master of French cuisine, Marie Antoine Careme, apparently considered Allemande a grand sauce, though most others (including my professor, Chef M) classify it as a derivative sauce. And so it goes.
But regardless of what is in the mother sauces, here’s what I’ve learned in class about classical sauce-making: it takes a friggin’ long time. The process can easily take days, using gallons of liquid and pounds of 
ingredients only to produce a quart or two of heavily reduced muck. Great-tasting muck, though the work involved has over the last couple days turned The Aspiring Chef into The Perspiring Chef.
Most sauces are begun with a stock (roasted bones with mirepoix and sometimes roux, then strained and reduced). The stock is then cooked with more roux, other ingredients, and reduced further to create a mother sauce. The mother sauce is then combined with other ingredients (and perhaps other sauces) to make one of its many twisted, inbred offspring, also known as a derivative sauce. Similar to the Book of Genesis, there are literally hundreds of derivatives that were borne from the five or so humble mother sauces.
Home cooks probably need to know little of this. More important is to chant two mantras. First, don’t skimp on the salt. Nearly every sauce my team made this week at culinary school was deemed either “somewhat” or “definitely” underseasoned, and I am not shy about using salt. If you think you don't need more salt, you probably do. And then some.
The second matra is don’t forget the butter. This is especially true when finishing off the sauce (known as monte au beurre to the cheese-eaters). Finishing a sauce with butter multiplies the sauce’s awesomeness exponentially, as I witnessed in the Forestiere sauce we made today. Good god, it was smoother than a Wall Street broker hawking collateralized debt obligations in 2005.
Of course, who has time to do all this? Well, Chef Mike said we should make the mother sauces ahead of time and freeze it in thin Ziplock bags, so they are easy to defrost and can be used to make the better derivative sauces. So that means making a great sauce only takes an hour or less when cooking dinner. Provided you are liberal with the salt and butter, of course.
Hey folks,
I'll get right down to it. This is a blog meant for gourmets, gourmands and people who enjoy relishing in the degradation and suffering of others. As in, my decision to cut free of a cushy white-collar job and enter the sweaty, stinking realm of Gehenna, also known as the culinary world.
OK, when I say cut free, I'm lying. The truth is that I was shitcanned in December 2008 from a great weekly newspaper, after it won a number of awards but kept losing advertising revenue; all the amazing employees at the publication were laid off. Upon my termination, I decided to forgo sending out any resumes to other pubs and instead attend culinary school. My resolve was so strong that I told my editor I'd rather wash dishes than write about complex corporate investments anymore. And so I shall.
So now I'm attending the Institute of Culinary Education in downtown Manhattan. My intention with this blog is to hopefully shed some light on the screwed up world of cooking, as well as talk food in a (hopefully) funny and (probably) snarky way.
