09 Basic Skills Pt. 3:
weeks 4-6

Tuesday December 14, 2004

Once we finish our soups and sauces competency and enter the second half of our Basic Skills course, we have the pleasure of finally cooking solid foods. Every day gives us something new to look forward to – one night we create French fries, beer-battered onion rings and shrimp and vegetable tempura, while the next night we produce hand-made linguini with alfredo sauce and ricotta-stuffed raviolis. Still another night sees us wrestling with braised flat iron steak and mashed potatoes, grilled sirloin steak with compound butter, and blanquette de veau, a white veal stew. No longer are we forced to find our evening’s sustenance in the mediocre cafeteria downstairs – we’re cooking dinner for ourselves in class.

Every plate that we present to Chef Steve must include a starch and seasonal vegetable, and we are encouraged to express our creativity with presentation and garnishes. It’s no longer enough to sprinkle a little parsley on top of the plate and call it a day – Chef Steve demands balanced colors and flavors, and some of the more experienced members of the class quickly raise the bar for the rest of us, using squirt bottles of brilliantly colored oils and creams to create designs on the food, or building elegant towers of food that utilize every component on the plate.

My randomly-selected partner for these exciting weeks of class is Richard Blue, the Las Vegas transplant who had previously saved Chris and I from failing to produce a beurre blanc. Because of my organizational skills “Blue” jokingly calls me “Boss,” and follows my lead when we plan out how to prepare the menu for the night. However, Blue can just as easily be the “boss” in our partnership -- his previous year and a half of restaurant experience has given him plenty of fresh ideas, and he often surprises me with ways to handle or present our dishes. On salad night, for example, he melts a handful of parmesan cheese in an omelet pan, flicks it out of the pan with his bare fingers while it’s still hot, and drapes it over a plastic bowl. In a few seconds the cheese has hardened into a crusty edible container that we use to hold our Caesar salad in a dramatic presentation.

Blue and I, however, do not always succeed brilliantly – one night’s Coq au Vin turns into a blackened disaster after we neglect to provide enough liquid in the pan for the bird to properly braise, and another evening’s apple chutney (meant to accompany a sautéed pork medallion) looks more like cooked diced vegetables than a moist condiment. More often than not, Mia and Chris, the other pair who work at our table, create plates that look more elegant than ours do, and Nathan and Tanya and Lennie and Michelle at the next table over make use of exotic ingredients for their own stunning dishes. It’s easy to tell that there are a lot of amazing cooks in our class, and I sneak peaks at what others are doing to get ideas for my own plates.

As the final days of class approach, however, the fun of preparing different foods every night suddenly dims in the face of two impending competency tests: one night we have an hour to prepare tabouli salad, a grilled pork chop with a demi-glaze sauce, duchess potatoes (mashed potatoes that have been piped into spirals on a sheetpan and then baked), and broccoli. The next night we have another hour to prepare cous cous salad, poached salmon with beurre blanc, rice pilaf and turned zucchini. Our grades for both of these tests make up almost half of our total grade for the class, and as the competencies grow closer, partners are seen huddling outside of class, planning their strategy to get the food finished and plated before time is up.

Grilled Pork Chop Competency

Always one who feels better with a list, I prepare for our first competency by writing out all of the tasks that Blue and I need to accomplish, in the order that they should be done. I don't want to forget something important when time is going to be such a critical factor. For Thursday’s pork chop competency, our prep list looks like the following:

1. Preheat oven
2. Gather mise en place
3. Marinate pork (milk and ?)
4. Reconstitute bulgur
5. Boil potatoes
6. Prep tabouli
7. Prep/cook/ice broccoli florets
8. Prep sauce
9. Mash potatoes -> spirals in oven
10. Plate tabouli
11. Sauce to hold point
12. Mark/cook pork
13. Warm plate in oven
14. Reheat broccoli
15. Finish sauce
16. Plate

I feel good about our chances, since Blue is a rock star griller, and I’ve already made perfect duchess potatoes and broccoli several other times in class. I hope we’ll methodically go about our work, and not let the pressure of the exam cause us to lose our cool.

All goes well during the first part of the test -- even though we seem to lag a little behind some of the other groups, I never feel like we're behind in our prep list. By the end of the hour, however, things suddenly fall apart. Although the duchess potatoes are perfect, I try to reheat the broccoli in a pan that is too hot and inadvertently singe them. In addition, the parts that aren’t singed are overcooked, and there's no time to do anything except trim off the discolored areas and hope Chef Steve won’t look too carefully. We have no clear plan about how to plate our food, and since I don’t want to hide the spiraled duchess potatoes under the chop, everything ends up in its own third of the plate – just like a meal you'd get from Mom, but not something you 'd want to present for a competency exam.

As expected, we're dinged a couple of points for presentation, and another two for the forlorn broccoli. Although we receive a score that I would normally be very happy about, I feel disappointed in our performance – I know we could have done better, and I feel angry that I choked on the broccoli, one of my favorite vegetables to cook, and something that I’ve made perfectly on many previous occasions. I resolve that things will be different for our poached salmon competency the next day – our last day in Basic Skills.

Poached Salmon Competency

For the salmon competency, Blue and I again write up a prep list to keep us on task. Hoping to avoid the problems of the day before, I go into even more detail with each of the steps:

1. Boil water for cous cous
2. Gather mise en place
3. Warm plate in oven
4. Prepare court boullion
5. Denature cous cous/dried fruit
6. Prep rice pilaf (onion, butter, lemon zest, tarragon, parsley)
7. Prep cous cous additions (parsley, lemon zest, etc)
8. Cut turned zucchinis – need extra for tasting
9. Prep beurre blanc
10. Finish/plate cous cous (use mold!)
11. Start salmon
12. Blanch zucchini
13. Prep plate garnish (diced tomato?)
14. Finish pilaf
15. Reheat zucchini (flavor with butter, garlic, vinegar?)
16. Finish beurre blanc
17. Plate (sun?)

Blue and I talk briefly about our plan during Nutrition (the lecture class that precedes Skills during the last two weeks) and we feel good – we’re ready to go.

Since Andrew, my fiancé, has come to the CCA with some clients for dinner that night, I stop in the Careme Room to see him before heading up to the Skills kitchen for the competency. When I finally get upstairs, I find that my usual spot at the table with Mia and Chris has been taken by Nathan and Tanya. I quickly see why – the middle table where they normally would have stood with Lennie and Michelle is less ideal, with more steps to the range, and a crowded center position. Although I understand why they would want to switch positions, I’m silently fuming as I gather my mise en place – I’m used to working near Mia and Chris, and I’m angry that Blue and I got bumped from our normal position. It's all I can do to calm myself down and concentrate on the food.

By the time I start the rice pilaf prep I've let go of my anger and I'm in a good groove. Blue and I move solidly through our list of tasks, finishing off the cous cous salad with extra lemon to give it more height, and a little parsley and scallion for extra color. We plate the salad with one of our circular molds, and scatter scallions and dried fruit around the edge for color, with a little parsley sprig on top. I think the plate looks good, and as we walk away from presenting it to Chef Steve, I see him give us full credit for it. One plate down, one more to go.

We start the salmon poaching in our court bouillion, a broth of water, wine, parsley, thyme, onion, leek, and celery that we started as soon as the test began. Meanwhile, I cook the zucchini until it’s just al dente before plunging it into an ice bath. We will quickly reheat it with butter and garlic just before plating. I season the rice pilaf with lemon zest, lemon juice, tarragon, and parsley to give it a little more flavor, and soon enough we’re onto our final tasks. As Blue finishes up his never-fail beurre blanc, I temp the salmon. At 115° F it’s nearly done, so I take the salmon off the range and leave it to finish cooking in the residual heat of the court bouillion.

I’m about to reheat the zucchini when disaster strikes: Blue spills his beurre blanc on the floor and the sauce that remains in the pan breaks when he leaves it for a moment on the hot stove. Because there's only five minutes left before the deadline, we stare at each other in a brief moment of panic. Quickly springing back into action, Blue gathers the ingredients for another sauce, while I use the broken remains of the first as the butter for rewarming my turned zucchinis. The reduced vinegar and shallots from the sauce provide the zucchini with good flavor, and Blue’s second sauce is ready in a few minutes.

With a minute to go before our hour is up, we’re finally ready to plate. We pull a hot dish from the oven and spoon a circle of rice pilaf in the middle, using our fingers to push the stray grains into place. We lift our salmon from the bouillion and place it directly on top of the rice, and then pour a line of pale beurre blanc down its middle and around the edge of the plate. I then take my eight most perfectly turned zucchinis and arrange them in a star around the rice, like eight points of a compass. For garnish we drop a few cubes of tomato concasse in between each zucchini, and top the salmon with a sprig of parsley for color. The plate looks beautiful, like a pink sun with green and pink rays.

As we hand our salmon in to Chef Steve, I feel great — there’s nothing I would change about our process or our end result. In many ways, the grade doesn’t matter -- I know that this is the best we could do, and I’m satisfied. I feel like I couldn’t have asked for a better end to Basic Skills, and as I break down my station and begin to wash dishes, I have a hard time wiping the grin from my face. We’re only six weeks into our culinary educations, but I’m already feeling the high that comes from a good night on the line.

It's nearly the end of class before Blue and I find out our final grade for the test: 100 points, a perfect score. Days later, Blue will find out from Chef Steve that it was the only 100 he gave for any competency exam, including the knife skills and soups and stocks competencies. I gloat to Andrew about the grade all weekend long, but in the end it's not the grade that makes me so happy about that plate of salmon -- it's the fact that Blue and I finally met the high standards that we knew we could achieve.

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To cook broccoli or cauliflower so that it retains its color and doesn't smell bad, cut it into small enough pieces so that it can cook through in under 7 minutes. Steaming is the best method for both vegetables.