What I got out of Basic Cuisine:

• Organization and cleanliness at every moment of cooking. Workflow from dirty to clean, raw to cooked, separation of raw and cooked food. The chefs that walk around in class will tell you off for cleanliness even as the sauce is in the process of overflowing. Vegetable peels never touch the cutting board.
• Timing: Multitasking and always planning ahead. Heat up water or pans first before cutting something so you don’t have to wait. You can only peel or chop sometime so fast, so to save time (and not taking short cuts) you need to think ahead. There is much to improve here in a real-world restaurant where multiple dishes are cooking at the same time
• Consistency: cutting vegetables to identical size and shapes is fundamental. Never mind the half of carrot that needs to be trimmed off to obtain brunoise. The trimmings do go to the school kitchen to prepare stocks.
• Learning how to cut and clean vegetables, whole fish and birds
• Making stocks and jus – I still remember the first chicken jus I made was a pale yellow colour. Never made that mistake again.
• Seasoning: salt and often pepper to everything at every stage except sauces and stocks. The level of saltiness asked for is always more than I would do at home. So taste – it is nice – and double the salt and you have achieved restaurant seasoning. For some students it is the opposite.

Practical class

What I thought was good:

• Every minute of school. Heat, sweat and whatever the kitchen can throw at me.
• The sound of sizzling pan with a layer of sucre (caramalized sugars and protein) – deglaze!
• The look and feel of a sauce that is ‘nappe’ as I push the liquid in the small saucepan with a spoon. Usually I am ready to plate at that time and the look of a sauce as it is disturbed with a spoon just does it for me. ‘Nappe’ is the French word to describe a the consistency of a sauce that can coat a spoon and then leave a trail when brushed with a finger.
• Ok, seriously. The chefs have high standards and are attentive to every detail. In demonstration I always see the chefs check their plates to make sure there are no finger prints. They will plate, re-plate and re-shuffle the prawns if they do not sit the way they want. They probably made that dish for the millionth time but will still make it perfect. I reflected on this point and find this an incredible lesson.
• The chefs are all very good and have their own style. All can easily hold, or once held Michelin-starred restaurant or won more prestigious chef awards. To be critiqued by them is the best lessons every learnt in cooking. Even if you don’t agree, remember taste is subjective but a messy station is fact.
• Political correctness is not paramount to chefs. A girl was told by a chef she was not Vietnamese because of the way she cut up a whole chicken. English and Americans have jokes thrown at them.
• Male chefs (most are male) have some preferences for girls – a good thing because I don’t want them to hold my hand as I am whipping a mayonnaise.
• Even if my dish was good, I really appreciate comments on how to improve taste, method or change plating.

Duck à l'orange

What I thought was bad:

• Nothing.  The areas that are negative just don’t even hold weight to the good things about school. Yes, the chicken supreme dish (white sauce on white meat on white rice) doesn’t taste good but you learn how to poach a chicken, make a stock, make bechamel and cook rice on pan (I admit, never better than a rice cooker). If you wanted to play with liquid nitrogen go to another school. Also, this is not a holiday cooking school.

Who goes to Basic Cuisine:

• About half school leavers and half who have previous jobs
• 2/3 who think they want to be a chef, 1/3 who are doing it as a hobby or want something to do with food
• 1/3 Europeans, 1/3 from North and South America, 1/3 Asians. There are very few French nationals

Was it difficult:

• Not for me. And not for most students. Language is probably the biggest problem. If you can’t speak English or French then you are in for a long ride.
• This was a 6 month break from my usual work and the very fact that I was able to learn something I love made everything fun.
• I also took a shorter term for wine basics. If I am sitting an exam and sipping on a glass of white wine (a sancerre that tasted like carbernet sauving0non) at the same time then I wont complain.

Exams:

• Written and recipe memorization is not hard.
• Practical exam can be stressful but you are cooking one of the dishes you have already made in a previous practical class. Stressful because cooking is a performance and there is always a slight chance that if my glasses fell and broke… In all seriousness, you do need to score enough on the practical (45% of the the term total) to pass. It is not hard to pass but just don’t drop the pan with your food inside (even if the handle is out of the oven and searing your skin to a nice caramel colour). There is no re-sitting (which I think is rather unfair in the bigger picture considering that you could be injured by someone else).

Does the school prepare you to be a chef?

• Firstly I don’t think anyone should call themselves a chef unless they are working in the professional kitchen as their main job. I am not.
• Finishing the Cuisine Diploma (3 terms) only gives you the basic skills to work in a kitchen station. In the restaurant setting, the ability to communicate and and work as a team is far more important and the school does not provide this knowledge or experience until the stage/internship. Not to mention there are politics, business and money to handle in a restaurant. Owning a restaurant is a completely different game.
• The school places suitable students to restaurant to do a 2 month stage (internship) after successfully completing the Diploma. This will probably be the first time students get a reality check on the passion to be a chef. I believe many high-end restaurants depend on unpaid or minimal wage pay chefs to be financially sustainable (or in certain cases, greedy). But one has to start somewhere.
• Being passionate about food is something that can’t be taught at school. There are plenty of students who could not care less about the knowledge outside the action of cooking. For example, how things are grown, where do products come from, what varieties of food are available and the economics of food.

Basic Cuisine, Group D, September 2011

Quotes of the term (added)

• As we did puff pastry dough the second time, one of the Chinese students was excited that the butter stayed inside the dough and did not get smeared on the marble. In a thick accent “Look! Today no butter! It’s a party!” he also did a little jiggle
• “Excellent c’est quoi chef?” “Excellent c’est bon!”
• Chef looks at a under-cooked fish and exclaims “no worries, you serve sashimi, excellent!”
• “Chef? what could you use instead of rabbit if you can’t get it?” Chef looks up surprised and shocked “Huh? Pas de lapain!? Il n’y a pas de lapin? Je crois qu’on peut utiliser un chat, c’est pareil. Mais vraiment – s’il n’y a pas de lapin, ne faites pas ce repas!” (Huh? No rabbit!? There is no rabbit? I think one can use a cat, it’s similar. But really, if there is no rabbit then don’t make the recipe!”). Smiles!
• Chef looks into the sink that always gets clogged up and then fills with a grey fluid. “Ah, you guyz like to make zoup huh? zo kind of you.” He the grabs the plunger and smiles.
• There is nothing quite like it when the translator Ben gets off on fats. Licks his lips as he says “Mmm…. that is basically bacon, cooked in fat plus more fat, wrapped in fat” “It is just meant to be!” “It’s all part of the creator’s plan!”
• A chef always self-congratulates as he tastes his own food during demonstration “excellent!” “incroyable!” “impeccable!” “parfait!” Actually, his food tastes the best out of all the demonstrations.
• One of the chefs always like to show how the fish or bird might have swam or walked when it was alive by moving it’s tail or legs (or head). He then proceeds to play with the head after chopping it off.

I am high on life. Living in Paris, about 100 metres from the Eiffel Tower, going to cooking school and meeting people with the same passion. Currently I am attending the Intermediate Cuisine (intensive) course. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do the Superior course. I have no idea how disappointing it will be to leave in January and not be able to start Superior with my friends. I am giving it at least 5-6 years before I could take another break like this. I want to prove myself wrong.

I am planning to take my 3rd year off (2011) from the conveyor belt of medical training. Don’t worry, it will keep running until someone decides to fall or accidentally hit the red button. So what will I do in this year? The main aim is actually to join a cookery school in France. I have been looking at Le Cordon Bleu, Paris, a school of classical French cooking for designed for training people to become chefs.  It has branches around the world, including Sydney, but that just misses the point of French cooking. Many types of courses are available, including regular terms on cuisine, patisserie wine, and many short/one day courses on specific topics. The problem is it’s almost 8000 euros per term! I think I will need to locum a bit if I want to make this work. Anyway, when I say year off, it just means off the conveyor belt. I also wanted to try working in a less developed country for a different experience.

For those who want an idea of what it’s like in the school. There is a good and humorous read by Michael Booth – Sacre Cordon Bleu: What the French Know About Cooking. It’s about a journalist who pauses his regular job an joins the cookery school. Let me know if you want to borrow it.

(Picture from Le Cordon Bleu website)

What the French know about stocks. Michael Booth, a travel writer and journalist decided that he had enough of writing about chefs, restaurants and food. He takes his wife and young kids to Paris and joins the famous cook school Le Cordon Bleu. There he learns the exciting, tedious and at times bizzare ways of French cooking. Surrounded by food loving students from all over the world (many from Japan) and the local culture, isn’t that the ultimate foodie’s dream? Read the book!

OK, I admit I am a bit biased towards that area of the world. I have my own dreams. But at least when I take a year off, I can combine a bit of hospital work in a less developed country for a few months and then join the cook school in Paris. How long for? Last time I checked the tuition fees, I almost clogged off my well-buttered arteries.

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“It is to the production of perfect stocks that the sauce cook should devote himself” – Auguste Escoffier

Tedious as they are, stocks are the fundementals of French cooking. But once you have tasted a velvety sauce burting with flavour and joyfully married to the main ingredient on the plate you know all that sweat was not wasted. You just wish someone could some to taste it rather than trying to explain it all over again with words.

Serves 2. Prep time 45 minutes. Clean up, none if you are cooking for a friend.

- 350g raw prawns, peeled, heads reserved
- 100g scallops
- 1 shallot, finely diced
- 1 carrot, half finely diced, the othe other half sliced into ribbons with a fuit peeler
- Half a baby fennel, thinly sliced, a few green fronds reserved
- A few parsley stalks, finely diced (Michael observes that chefs prize this often binned ingredient)
- 100 m of cream
- a table spoon of butter
- half a lime + a wedge

Heat a heavy based pan with some grape seed oil until hot. Add the prawn heads in and fry until the heads turn to bright orange and continue on low heat for 5 minutes. Don’t let it burn. Add the finely diced shallot, carrot and parsley stalks and fry for another few minutes. Add water (around 300 ml) until heads are just covered and simmer for 20 minutes, occasionally letting out some steam by bashing the heads with a wooden spoon. Strain the resulting liquid and discard the solids. Replace the liquid and gently reduce in a pan by a third.

While reducing, heat up a wide, non-stick pan with a little oil and cook the prawns and scallops quickly under high heat. They should sizzle and not boil. Once ready and coloured, add some finely ground pepper and take them off the pan and into a warm bowl. Re-heat the pan and cook the carrot and fennel ribbons until soft.

Add butter and cream into the stock and dissolve. Add the juice of half a lime and then suck the lime after you squeeze it. It taste good. You should not need any salt.

To serve: place most of the carrot and fennel on the bottom of the plate, add the seafood and top with remaining carrots and fennel. Pour the sauce around the side of the plate. Finish with a spinkle of fennel fronds and a wedge of lime.