Culinary School Diary: Week One

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BY OWEN MORRIS

I’m taking advanced culinary classes at Johnson County Community College, and plan to journal about each week’s experience here.

The first thing you learn about serious cooking is that it uses a lot of pointless French words. For instance, what any normal American would call a melon-baller, I am now told by my textbook (Le Courdon Bleu Professional Cooking Sixth Edition) is actually to be referred to as a parisiennes. The proliferation of langue française is supposedly due to the overwhelming influence French cooking has on modern techniques. But listening to chefs you realize the real reason the language has survived is that it creates a subculture in which chefs can identify each other.

There’s another, bigger benefit as well. Previously, as a layperson I might have made chicken noodle soup but no more! My chicken noodle soup is now consommé printaniere. Better to raise eyebrows (and menu prices) that much more.

An actually useful French phrase is mise en place, which was the basis of my advanced culinary class last night. The literal translation “to put in place.” The real-world translation is, “getting your shit together ahead of time.”

To that end, the class spent 90 minutes listening to a lecture on making sure to prep in advance, proper holding after preparation and the utter importance of blanching to save vegetables’ color and extend their shelve life by days. Some other important lessons useful to at-home cooks: keeping parsley stems in water and under plastic wrap will extend their shelf life from a couple of days to a month; make sure the steel you use to sharpen the knife is as long or longer than the knife itself.

After a quick overview on stocks, it was off to the kitchen to make some that will last us for the rest of the semester and practice good mise en place.