Culinary school diary: week ten

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By OWEN MORRIS

Going into this week, the class had been cooking seafood and poultry and learning the ins and outs of the real meat and potatoes of cooking. Also, we’d been gaining confidence. We have spent enough time in this particular kitchen to know its idiosyncrasies and where everything should be. Actually, the idiosyncrasy in this kitchen is pretty disruptive. It has to do with the stove-tops.

I’ve complained about the stove-tops in a past diary. There are only two for the entire class, but that’s not my biggest complaint. For reasons I’ve been told have to do with cost, our class uses electric stove tops. To someone who has always cooked on an electric stove top that may not seem like a big deal, but electric stove tops are unheard of in professional kitchens — except when someone’s telling a joke.

Gas stove tops are so so much better. With gas, the top heats quickly and you can easily increase or decrease temperature on the fly. Neither is easy with the best electrical stove tops, much less the ones in our classroom. We’ve learned to adjust, though. Instead of turning the heat up or down, you move pans to different places that are hotter or cooler — sometimes halfway off the stove top. When you’re boiling water it’s not a big deal, but when you’re making something as sensitive to heat as rice, like the class did last night, it becomes a nightmare.