The Making of a Chef Read Free Page B

stepped into a new world. I would learn what it took to be a professional chef. I would start at the beginning, and the beginning of Culinary Skill Development was stock.
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    â€œM aking stock is one of the primary purposes for being in this class,” Chef Pardus said as we began our tour of the kitchen. Our first stop: the steam kettles. The three enormous tanks, each a hot tub for one, were the steam kettles. The three enormous tanks, each a hot tub for one, were bolted to steam pipes and accommodated by two water faucets. Each day, the center kettle would be filled with 120 pounds of chicken bones, 22 1/2 gallons of water, and 15 pounds of mirepoix, along with bay leaves, peppercorns, parsley stems, and thyme wrapped in cheesecloth and called a sachet d’épices . This combination would yield 15 gallons of chicken stock by the end of class, to be cooled, labeled, and stored before lecture.
    â€œYou want to cook stock at what?” Chef Pardus asked.
    Several voices called out, “At a lazy bubble.” Everyone in the class should have learned this from the video assigned for homework. The library contained about twenty-three hundred videos, some of them made for television by the Culinary Institute— Cooking Secrets of the CIA, a cooking show featuring individual faculty, had recently begun to air on public stations throughout the country—but most were utilitarian, made solely for the students, such as “Making Brown Stock,” “Shucking Oysters,” and “Calf Slaughter.”
    â€œRight, a lazy bubble,” Chef Pardus repeated. “A few bubbles breaking the surface every few seconds. Why? Because we don’t want to emulsify the fat into the stock and stir up other impurities. We’re looking for clarity here.”
    Chef Pardus squatted at the end kettle’s spigot, opened and closed it, saying, “Make sure this is closed all the way or you’re going to have wet shoes.” He turned the knob on the steam pipe and the kettle began to clank like an old radiator as its jacket filled with steam. Chef Pardus hefted a
large white tub from table to kettle and dumped its contents, forty pounds of beef bones. He pushed the faucet over and turned the water on.
    â€œWe’re going to blanch the bones first,” he said, “to get rid of impurities, mainly blood. The water’s going to get a rich, funky, gray color. We’ll skim that off and then we’ll empty it. In Skills One, I want everybody to make stocks to measure. By Skills Two, you can do this by sight.” On an easel to the left of his desk was a large pad of paper with the stock ratios on it—water to bones to mirepoix to tomato. For the first three weeks, Pardus wanted us to measure in order to know how high seven-and-a-half gallons of water rises above forty pounds of beef bones. “After four hours, we’re going to add what? Mirepoix, right. An hour before finishing, the sachet d’épices.” The stocks would be about 145 degrees when we strained them, he said, and we would cool all stocks—typically thirty gallons a day—to 70 degrees in two hours and to 45 degrees in four hours, as sanitation guidelines require. “But don’t worry,” Pardus said. “We can go from kettle to cooler in eighteen minutes. The record I think is sixteen minutes.”
    â€œMake sure you skim the fat before you cool it,” he added. “If you forget, and you’re making consommé, your classmates are going to hate you because you dropped the consommé grade by two points.”
    He introduced us to the ovens. Two banks of ranges ran nearly the length of both sides of the room. “When you come in, make sure your oven works . Students don’t light pilot lights. We have someone come up from maintenance. If you do it wrong it will blow you across the room.” He crinkled his nose and grinned. “It’s kinda scary. You