Culinary School Diary: Week 13
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By OWEN MORRIS
Tonight I finally realized why Johnson County Community College has our upper-level class cook in the smallest and most crowded kitchen in the entire school.
The answer dawned on me as I was literally stuck in an impasse between two students cooking on a stove-top with two more students beyond them in each direction. In the best of times the fit between stove-top and warming station is only two-feet wide but a mass of bodies filled that two feet.
I had a flashback to a similar moment years ago in a kitchen where I was a lowly busboy. I was holding some metal pan just out of the washer with my fingers when I got caught in a trap of chefs going both directions at once. The pan was burning my fingers and there was no place to set it down where it wouldn’t hurt some food — except the floor.
That flashback made me realize that this teaching kitchen is designed to be the most like a real kitchen, and because our class is an advanced one that’s supposed to simulate real-world conditions, the college had either purposely or through necessity made it a tough kitchen to work in.
