Apricot Custard

The Cherry Tree

One of the many pleasures of my job as a wine sales rep is the one-on-one interaction with my customers, or customers-to-be.    I enjoy getting to know the buyers at wine stores, restaurants, and bars - sometimes they are tough nuts to crack, other times we'll get on great on our first meeting.    Some customers I'll just sit down with for long tastings and talk wine;  one customer recently, a chef and restaurateur in Brooklyn, sat me down at the bar and sent out food and wine, and came out and told me stories of his life as a chef, and how he'd gotten 4 stars in the New York Times as a young man;  I've sat in the kitchen of another restaurant, a small restaurant in Brooklyn, as the owner did the prep for the evening's service; I've even been asked to develop a full wine program for one bar, where I also bartend a couple of nights a week as the program is launched!  

I love the smell of Rioja in the morning ...

... and in the afternoon, and at night!

One of my rituals many mornings is opening four or five wines and having a quick sniff and a taste, before putting them in my bag and heading out for the day to sample with my customers.     I've been pretty lucky that I've rarely gotten a corked bottle, or one tainted in some other way, which can stink pretty badly, but that's what I'm checking for.    These smells are covered quite well in the Le Nez Du Vin "Faults" aroma kit, which my friend Michelle kindly lent me, along with the core kit of aromas you'll find in most wines (54 individual scents in little bottles!), and the "New Oak" kit ...  

The three best things I've learned at the FCI so far ...

I've been so busy with attending cooking school, getting ready for each lesson (reading ahead, preparing notes), and work (wines sales - more on that again some time), and trying to squeeze in a little downtime with the missus and the kid that I've neglected my blog!

I've learned a tonne of things since starting at the French Culinary Institute a little under two months ago.  I went in with the attitude "if I'm not shown it here, I don't know it ...", meaning I don't want to bring all my bad habits (or even my good ones) into the training kitchen, I want to take full advantage of the expertise of my intructor(s) and learn how to do the the right (French/ FCI) way, because that's what I've decided to invest my money and time on ... I did know a fair bit going in, but I also didn't.  My interpretation of things was never for a production environment, and I never achieved as many efficiencies in my techniques and yield as I am now learning.

The great thing about taking these professional lessons, as opposed to reading about stuff in a book, or even watching a good detailed demo on TV, is seeing the chef prepare things in all their various stages, from raw, uncut, product through to a final dish (which you can then taste), ask any questions you need to, and then go off and do it yourself - and get feedback all along the way and and the end when you present your final dish.

Making stock of things

So, I had a funny flashback in the locker room before tonight's class: as I was putting on my chef's whites, I had a vivid memory of 30+ years ago when I was an altar boy (!), when I'd be in the sacristy putting on my cassock and surplice to get ready for serving mass.   Just something about the ritual of dressing in a uniform for work ...

Ok, so tonight's class.  Stocks are the foundation of French cooking - so many French dishes require a sauce based on a stock, or there'll be a soup or stew with a stock base.   The base of almost all stocks are animal bones, which give the stock flavor and body.   Various aromatics, including herbs and vegetables, are added to provide even more layers of flavor. For our third class made stock - several as a four-person team in smallish quantities, and a couple which we done by one of our chef instructors,  with some input by the class.

I'd made stocks at home a few times, usually chicken stock (I usually start with a full chicken at home, instead of bones, and then use the meat for sandwiches).   I'd also helped by mum when I was a kid - she'd taken a series of Cordon Bleu classes and one of the first things she started doing at home was making stocks:  I remember trays of bones going into the oven to be browned, and then we'd spend a couple of hours skimming the stock as it simmered.   But it is one of those things that is best done in a large quantity, because of the time commitment, and a professional kitchen is well-equipped for that. 

We start cooking!

Day two.  Most of today's class was about food safety.   The main hazards that we need to keep out of our food are biological (bacteria, toxins), chemical (pesticides, cleaning agents), and physical (glass, hair, staples).  We learned about our sanitizing solution that we need to keep at our stations for clean-up, and we calibrated our meat thermometers.   The lesson stressed how important it is to ensure that food is kept safe at every step in the "flow of food": the purchasing, receiving, storing, preparing, cooking, holding, cooling, reheating, and serving.

Today we were also shown two techniques for cooking vegetables.  First, we julienned some carrots and did a macedoine of turnip.   These were the same cuts we did on the first night, and ones I want to keep practicing at home.  The equipment I used was a peeler for the carrots, and my 9" chef's knife.  Before we begin prep we set our stations up with a cutting board, set on a damp paper towel to prevent it slipping, and a bowl for peelings and a bowl for trimmings (carrot trimmings are kept as aromatics for stock).  

My station

First Day of School

It was just a small nick - a little bubble of blood, didn't really hurt at all, but I still felt pretty stupid! A quick trip to the first aid kit took care of it - a band aid and a rubber finger guard - and I was back to my station and resumed practicing my knife skills.   First day at cooking school and we're learning all the basic knife cuts for using on vegetables.

Tronconner.

Emincer.

Ciseler.

Jardinere.

Macedoine.

Julienne.

After a tour of the kitchen and all the cooking equipment, we were presented with our knife kits (apart from cookware, most of our cooking equipment will be personally owned and maintained, such as our knives, our spoons, our spatulas, our whisks, and our pepper mill).  Our chef demonstrated various methods of cutting vegetables, or taillage, and we grab a bowl of carrots, turnips, and onions and start working on cutting our own vegetables.    We did emincer (thinly sliced) and ciseler (fine dice) on the onions, julienne (6-7cm x 1-2mm strips) and brunoise (1-2 mm x 1-2mm, cut from julienne) on the carrots, and jardinere (5cm x 5mm batons) and macedoine (5mm x 5mm cubes, cut from jardinere) on the turnips.   We also skinned tomatoes by scoring, blanching, shocking, then peeling them (process known as monter), and did a simple rough cut called concasser.

All set!

Three chef's hats.
Three chef's coats. 
Three pairs of black & white check pants. 
Three neckerchiefs.
Three aprons.
Three side towels.
One pair of Dansko clogs.
One water bottle.

Note to self:  pick up a small notebook, index cards, and some sharpies. And a lock for my locker.

Cooking school starts tonight.

Can't wait!!!

Taking the plunge

Tomorrow evening I'll walk into a kitchen with 23 other students, and begin the nine month Classic Culinary Arts program at the French Culinary Institute in SoHo. 

(via Flickr)

Learning to cook professionally has long been a dream of mine, one that even earlier this year I wasn't sure could become a reality.  Certainly the time commitment was quite substational, as were the fees.   It is also well-known that a newly-minted chef can expect to work very long hours for very little pay.   Yet, this was something I kept coming back to - from age about 10 and first considering it an career option, to seriously pondering it ever few years in the following decades.  So, not wanted to be mired in regret a few years down the road, I took what was really my only option to fund the course, and did an early withdrawal of my IBM savings account retirement plan, and enrolled in the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday evening classes.

Each of those nights I'll be in school for five hours, and there'll be a mixture of (mostly) practical hands-on kitchen work and some time in the classroom.    Every student has "Total Immersion" (that's the official FCI term, and it is service-marked!) during the training program, and has their own station in the teaching kitchens.   Later in the program, at Level 3 I believe, we'll work as a brigade in a more restaurant-like situation, so that we can take our individual basic skills and learn to apply them in a kitchen team.  

Overall the are six sections, or levels, and 600 hours later when I'm crowned with my toque I'll be ready to work in the kitchens of New York City and around the world. During my schooling I'll also have gained experience working at the school's restaurant L'Ecole, and hopefully have spend some time doing a stage at a restaurant or two around the city.

I hope to blog regularly about my time at the FCI, and I hope you'll join my on this adventure by reading my updates.   Let me know what you think, and if you've any questions.

More information about my course from the FCI Web site.

Marmite

I know what it is like to have no context for a certain flavour, to just not "get" it, and maybe even intensely dislike it.   I've wanted to like root beer and all the variants since I came to the USA fifteen years ago, but I simply don't like it.   We didn't have root beer in Ireland growing up (though I vaguely remember it being in McDonald's on Grafton Street in the mid-70s, soon to disappear from the menus.  However perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, because McDonald's doesn't carry root beer in the US, at least none of the ones I've been in, largely on the East Coast).   I've wanted to like it too, and I'll regularly try it if a friend has some, and I keep thinking perhaps one of the "fancier" brands - e.g. Boylan's - may do the trick.  But it never works - it always just tastes like sweet muscle rub to me.

I mention root beer, because most - though not all - of my American friends can't abide Marmite.   I always have a jar of this in the larder - not that I eat it every day, but when I have a craving I need to get my fix.   My favourite way to eat it is the simplest: just spread thinly on hot buttered toast.  It is so tasty, the warm butter and Marmite are a delightful combination.   I think it always needs a little butter - a very vivid food memory of mine is eating cheddar cheese sandwiches made with Irish brown bread and butter and Marmite whilst fishing at Howth pier in Dublin way back in the mid-to-late 70s.

Parisienne Cocktail

I'm a big fan of dry vermouth with my gin, and always make my martinis at home with a generous ratio of vermouth to gin - sometimes one part vermouth to two parts gin, though usually a 1:3 ratio (and I usually hit it with a dash of orange bitters too).  I also quite like the "Fifty Fifty" style which, of course, is half and half -  they do a good one at Pegu Club, called the "Fitty Fitty".   I just don't buy into the "whisper of vermouth" philosphy.  I know the argument is often that proponents of this approach want to taste the gin - and with so many interesting, and subtley-flavoured gins on the market these days, that's a legitimate argument, but one I always counter with "then try a glass of cold gin".   If we're to shy away from mixing a discernable amount of vermouth into a martini, then shouldn't we also abstain from adding liqours - and juices and syrup - to gin in other cocktails?