How does he keep his slender figure?

   Chef Dan Fluharty scores final platings from five students in Culinary Foundations III. This plating was worth 50 points. Chef tasted each component to score doneness, seasoning, temperature, appearance and portion size. He also scored each plate overall on food color -- minimum of three colors required for full credit -- cleanliness, design and height. The rectangular plate in the center and the round plate on the far right are grilled pork chops; the plate nearest Chef's left hand is sauté of duck breast; the plate near his right hand is fillet of sole and salmon mousseline; the plate in the lower left is mine, grilled New York steak.

On the last lap of 'cooking marathon'

Early on in Culinary Foundations III class, Chef Instructor Dan Fluharty (right) promised students a "cooking marathon that gives you a real world feel."

He has fulfilled that promise.

Today, we finish the marathon with two meals of five parts each. The first, with a chicken breast at its center, must be completed and presented in 45 minutes. The second, for which I drew New York steak, must be completed and presented in one hour.

All 10 of us should be ready. The chefs have been working us out for 18 weeks. In the last six weeks, we have had intensive, timed cooking exercises almost daily. In that six weeks, we have prepped, cooked and plated two dozen full meals, including three-course offerings and all rooted in the classic French techniques and flavors we have been learning.

We can see the finish line ahead, and we must run hard through it.

The real world lies just beyond.

Learning from cooking mistakes

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work," inventor Thomas Alva Edison (right) once said.

His viewpoint could well be the watchword of the culinary school kitchen, where mistakes are plentiful, but failures few.

Take for example a butchery lesson in which too much useful meat is left on the bone.

Or the making of a complex pate a choux in which the mixture turns bread-like.

How about a deep fryer that got so hot it burned anything dropped into it within seconds.

And those were just some of Chef/Instructor Dan Fluharty's mistakes. Chef Dan (left) is fond of saying, during a demo, some version of: "See how I did that? Don't do it that way."

Don't misread this: What Chef shows us and cooks as part of his teaching and demonstration process turns out most flavorful and favorable. That's because his skills are superb, his experience deep and broad. Probably his greatest skill is making adjustments to get the process back on track.

Food is the big variable, because all chickens are not the same, nor all veal cutlets, nor all green beans. The adjustments as we proceed are what we must learn and what Chef is best at teaching us.

It's good to see his human side and to learn from it.

The heat is on: cooking at a torrid pace

Anyone who has seen the frenzy of a restaurant kitchen in the middle of service can appreciate the steadily accelerating pace we face in Culinary Foundations III.

Chef Dan Fluharty reminds us repeatedly that he is pushing us so we are prepared for the hectic routine of most restaurants.

The past week is a prime example. We have gone from making two plated meals in 90 minutes to making a three-course meal in two hours. The difference might seem minimal. But the three-course meal always involves four or more of the seven basic cooking techniques and three-dozen or more ingredients for eight or nine plated items.

Take Tuesday's entrée: We made osso buco for the first time, braising it as we have done with other meats. On the same plate, we prepared a side dish of risotto Milanese, which we have made a couple of times before, along with braised leeks and carrots. First course was a Salade Nicoise with hand-made vinaigrette, and second course was a soup, borscht.

Chef's requirements for the repeat dishes are getting tighter, as are his overall standards. He wants proteins cooked to his specifications, sauces that are seasoned, flavorful and consistent in texture and starches and vegetables that are neither crunchy nor mushy.

Tall orders, yes. We are running fast but managing to keep up.

(Photo: My cooking station mates Richard Johnson (left) and Rob Park (center) and Chef/Instructor Dan Fluharty.)

Culinary school quotes of the week, Week 14

Kitchen crime scene
"I looked at their plates. It looked like a drive-by shooting on every other table."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty (right) on viewing the rock cod and salmon mousseline work of another class.

Some like it hot
"I know what a hot plate feels like."
-- Culinary student Aline Brown's retort to Chef Dan when he told her to feel another student's hot plate after admonishing her for bringing him her cooking effort on a plate that had not been heated.

Meat: the new money
"Cut toward the bone. If you cut toward the meat, what's that called? Money. You don't want to ruin the meat."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty demonstrating how to bone a pork loin so that the meat, which makes the money in a restaurant, is left intact. 

He can dish
"Which plate do the lentils go on?"
-- Culinary student John Briggs' facetious question about Wednesday's menu after he served lentils on the wrong chicken dish on Monday. 

Just a pinch of Curcuma longa
"What did we learn about turmeric? It's really, really strong. It's mostly for color, not flavor."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty on overuse in our lentil dishes of the yellow-orange spice, which comes from the Curcuma longa plant grown in South Asia.

$45 salmon and the cost of doing business

A 2-foot-long eviscerated salmon of about 20 pounds appeared on the demo table in Culinary Foundations III last week. Chef Dan Fluharty used it to demonstrate knife work, cooking and restaurant economics.

The knife work took precision and accuracy. The cooking demanded a delicate balance of flavoring agents and good timing. But the economics involved the sharpest learning curve.

The California Culinary Academy curriculum is designed to teach the business of food service as well as restaurant-capable cooking skills. That means gaining knowledge from the point of the knife forward about how to prepare and serve good food and do it profitably.

There's the rub. Statistics on restaurant business success are daunting, so attention to costs and bottom line are critical. (One often hears that 90% of restaurants fail in the first year of operation, a figure that is without finding in fact. Studies done over the years at Cornell University and Michigan State University show the first-year failure rate to be around 27%, not nearly as bad but still noteworthy.)

The 20-pound salmon we used in class cost about $45 wholesale, Chef Dan said. After skin, bones and parts of the fish unusable for cooking and serving as fillet portions, about 14 to 16 portions of 6 ounces each remained. One must add in labor, overhead, myriad other costs and a profit to come up with a price per plate. Chef Dan put it at $18, meaning the cost of the fish itself would be covered in three servings.

How many more would have to be served to cover the remaining costs would be determined on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis. One can imagine a small profit from the 20-pound fish, but only after exacting P&L work and precise knife and cooking skills.

Those skills even drive the bottom line, Chef showed us during the demonstration. For example, one must pull the fish to the near edge of the cutting board so the hand holding the knife drops below the table. That allows a flattening of the knife blade and a precisely horizontal cut that removes the skin but little or none of the flesh that makes up the fillet.

Or, as Chef Dan put it: "If you don't keep your knife blade flat, you end up cutting money."

Culinary school quotes of the week, Week 13

Life imitating art?
"I like 'Worst Chefs in America,' because it reminds me of cooking school."
-- Culinary student Bary Gose's response when asked by the chef which TV cooking programs he liked.
  
Give warning
"Don't wait to pass out."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty to student Molly Lester when she said the heat and gas smell in the kitchen, with the hood fans off so we could hear the lecture, were making her feel woozy.

We want to earn our letter
"If you want us to move up to varsity, make us do seven sides."
-- Culinary student Fontaine McFadden reacting when Chef Dan said we could do a simple six-sided tourné of potato instead of the more difficult seven-sided cut required in classic French cuisine.

Silence is golden
"Say nothing when you're up there."
-- Culinary student Alfie Regadio's advice to fellow students when presenting their plated cooking efforts to the Chef. Alfie mentioned to the Chef a mistake on his plate that had gone unnoticed; he lost one-half point as a result. 

Mystery meat
"Schnitzel in America is called chicken fried steak. Chicken fried steak: It's not steak; it's not even chicken. What is it? I have no idea."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty previewing one recipe we will be undertaking in this term.

Chef as artist; plate as canvas

Well cooked is the key concept. Well presented follows closely behind.

"Pay attention to the plate. The plate is your gift to the customer," Chef Dan Fluharty said in introducing the topic of plating and presentation on Tuesday in Culinary Foundations III.

"That plate is your universe; nothing else matters," Chef Tony Marano told us in Culinary Foundations I in October.

How the food looks on the plate could be a career in and of itself. In fact, people known as "food stylists" have done just that.

We were already pulled in to plating and presentation last term, out of necessity as we presented our cooking to Chef Dan for his assessment and grading. Chef paid minimal attention to how our food looked on the plate, other than pointing out if it was sloppy, the plate was not clean in the sense of sauce spills and if it was jammed with too much food.

Now, as we get closer to that moment when we will work in restaurants and be responsible for appearance along with good cooking, we are looking at the principles and elements of art, composition and how food plating has evolved over the last half-century.

The basic principles of composition include keeping it simple; the rule of odds, in which an odd number of items (potatoes, for example) is better than an even number; create a focal point or center of interest; purposefully seek an off-center presentation to create interest.

Chef Dan reviewed three generations of food plating:

* Old School: Three distinct servings of food on a plate, separated from one another. Think TV dinner.

* Retro: Starch and protein together, with veggie as decoration and sauce drizzled along the edge.

* Contemporary: Smaller portions overall (6 ounces of protein, for starters) with one aspect placed in relation to another, including on top. Sauces often used as pointer arrows to draw attention to the centerpiece, the protein.

Chef told us that for our purposes, a basic clean plate will suffice, with some height, emphasis on the protein and balance.

Good cooking and plating are works of art, and we are learning to be the artists for our families, friends and customers in restaurants.

Or, as Chef has suggested, be your own artist by going to Hometown Buffet.

Turning up the heat in culinary school

"I want you to make some kick-ass food today, and the next day, and the next day."

Chef Dan Fluharty (right) presented that challenge today in introducing the agenda for Culinary Foundations III as the new six-week term began at the California Culinary Academy. It's the third and final class in the basic French-techniques curriculum taught at the Academy.

It promises to be a doozy, up several levels from where we left off last month in completing the second class in the triumvirate.

Chef Dan set the tone in an inspiring yet daunting rundown of what we will face for the next six weeks. Here are excerpts of what he said:

"Every day's cooking in here will be a competency exam on which you will get graded. ... I'd like to think when you leave this school that you have a good idea of what makes you a good cook, of what makes you marketable as a cook. ... We want you to achieve the highest level of performance here and in your careers. ... "

"Tomorrow we'll make beef stew. Will it be just any beef stew? We might tend to think, 'Well, it's just beef stew.' But we want it to be the best beef stew you ever tasted. ... So it's time we kind of draw the line a little bit. Do you agree? That means if it's good, I'll say so; if it's outstanding, I'll say so; if it sucks, I'm going to say so. ... Don't take it personally."

Chef said he wants the 10 of us in his class to be a part of the continuing tradition that the Academy "puts out better high-end chefs than the CIA (Culinary Institute of America, the granddaddy of U.S. cooking schools) or anywhere else."

Quite a charge, quite a challenge. Let's get cooking.

Menu No. 3: grilled pork chop

Continuing the rundown of menus for the Culinary Foundations II competency final exam, which will be Thursday and Friday. Grilled pork chop is the third main dish, to be accompanied by a choice of vegetable ("whatever is in the box," Chef said), risotto Milanese, sauce chasseur and a garnish.

The pork chop must be seasoned and grilled with appropriate grill marks (as in photo at left), and cooked to moist, with a minimal amount of pink inside. The quality of the chop's cooking will count for 10 points out of 40 total for the dish. "You only get one chop; you can't do it over," Chef Dan Fluharty warned us. "It will be five points off if it's overdone; zero if it's raw."

My vegetable will be broccoli florets, assuming they are available. I will trim to small florets, blanch in salt water, shock in ice water, finish in a butter sauté. If broccoli isn't available, I will do orange- and sugar-glazed carrots.

Risotto is cooked with chicken stock and must be brought to creaminess, including a small dollop of cream and grated Parmesan cheese to finish.

Sauce chasseur is made with butter, shallots, mushrooms, a sherry or white wine reduction, demi-glace, tomato concasséand seasonings.

My garnish likely will be a thick slice of compound butter, made with herbs and mushrooms.

Coming Thursday wll be a rundown of the final menu item: veal scaloppini.

The rules of engagement, culinary school style

Monkey wrench, curve ball, change of plans, the old switcheroo.

Or, maybe we should look at it as the surprise introduction of a new menu.

Call it what you will, but we students in Culinary Foundations II heard today what our lives will be like for the next three days, and it's interestingly different than what we expected, not to mention even more challenging.

First, on Wednesday, we will get a 50-question written final exam, rather than the 25-question exam we had been anticipating. Fair enough, I say. The written side of this is something that I for one am comfortable with.

Then comes the more challenging aspects of our final exams: the actual cooking on Thursday and Friday. We were looking forward to cooking two fully plated meals each day and have been working on our mise en place and production plans in anticipation.

Chef Dan Fluharty (above) revealed today, almost as an afterthought, that half of us will do one set of menus on Thursday, and half will do the other. Then on Friday, we will switch. We will not know until Thursday who will be doing what.

We all had expected to do roasted chicken and poached salmon on Thursday, and grilled pork chop and veal scaloppini on Friday. Now we will need to be prepared for all on Thursday.

Additionally, Chef said, we will work four people to a station for the exams, rather than the two to a station we have been enjoying. That means more competition for prep space and stove burners and more crowded conditions overall.

As my wife would say: Breathe.

It will all be fine. Even if it isn't, b y day's end Friday, it will all be over.

Menu No. 2: poached salmon

Part 1 of the Culinary Foundations II competency final exam on Thursday will conclude with preparation of poached salmon. The complete dish will include a 4-ounce piece of salmon fillet, rice pilaf, sautéed zucchini, beurre blanc (butter sauce) and garnish.

Preparation of the poaching liquid, called a court bouillon, is the first step in getting the salmon just right. The liquid is one-half gallon of water, 1 cup dry white wine, 2 ounces of white wine vinegar, 1 cup mirepoix (diced onion, carrot, celery), herbs and spices and a bit of fresh lemon juice. These ingredients enhance flavor and cooking, including coagulation of proteins in the fish.

The salmon goes into the simmering liquid for no more than 6-8 minutes. The key is to cook it to moistness, leaving it slightly pink in the center.

Rice pilaf is cooked using a long-grain rice that has been coated in hot oil to opaqueness before chicken stock is added for a 15-20-minute simmer. It should be flaky and a bit moist, but not wet, and flavored with herbs added at the beginning of cooking.

The zucchini should be cooked to tenderness but not mushy, accompanied by crushed tomatoes, herbs and seasoning. Chef Dan Fluharty showed us a method using canned crushed tomatoes. I hope to use fresh roma tomatoes that I will blanch, concassé and dice before putting them in the pot.

Beurre blanc is a rich butter sauce made with shallots sweated in a reduction of white wine and white wine vinegar, thickened with introduction of cold butter bits at a time until an emulsion forms. Vigorous and simultaneous shaking of the sauté and stirring of the ingredients is required to create the emulsion.

(Photo: my practice poached salmon dish from last week.)

Culinary school quotes of the week, Week 11

A motto to live by
"It makes cheap and cheerful quickly."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty (right), describing the benefits of preparing and serving polenta.

Enough already
"I had more than my share of fried stuff today. I'm through with fried."
-- Culinary student Fontaine McFadden after "Fryday" in the classroom kitchen, where, basically, if it wasn't moving, we battered it and fried it. Oh, and ate a good bit of it. 

Dare you to mess this up
"This is probably one of the most stupid-proof sauces we have."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty describing a soy-ginger sauce used with tempura-battered fish. 

Aromatherapy culinary style
"It makes your house smell good."
-- Culinary student John Briggs, touting one benefit of braising. 

Cooking: glamorous? No, glabrous
"You can always tell a good sauté cook or a good grill cook: no hair on the forearms."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty, moments after pulling his singed arm away from the stove top when cooking veal scaloppini.

Hold your tempura; hold it 'til it's icy cold

Fried foods don't rank very high on my list of ingesta. Nevertheless, the technique of frying is one of the seven in the classical French repertoire and therefore part of the curriculum for Culinary Foundations II.

Thus, as Chef Dan Fluharty likes to call it, today was Fryday. We fried zucchini, we fried potatoes, we fried onion rings, we even fried shrimp and fish and mushrooms. By frying, I mean to say that we used the classic French approach, which is what we Americans would call deep frying. What we call frying, in a pan on the stove top with a little oil, the French call sauté.

Chef Dan demonstrated the technique with two batters, a beer-based and a tempura. The tempura to me was the easier to make, and it was lighter on the fish and shrimp for which I used it.

Tempura is made from corn starch, rice flour, pastry flour, a frothed egg white and cold, icy cold, water. Even once it is made to the right consistency, it must be kept cold. I kept the bowl mine was in sitting in an ice-water bath, even when coating the fish and butterflied shrimp.

The results were tasty, to the limited extent I care to taste fried foods.

Thursday we move on to poaching salmon and fully plating a meal, as we will be expected to do for the final competency practical next week.

(Photo shows my Fryday production. Clockwise from upper left: shrimp tempura, French fries, culinary student Alfie Regadio's siracha-based sauce for the fries, cod tempura with Alfie's tartar sauce, beer-batter zucchini, beer-batter onion rings.)

Is tomorrow Wednesday? No, it's Fryday

"Tomorrow is Fryday -- not Friday -- but Fryday. We will do all kinds of fried things, including tempura."

Chef Dan Fluharty made the announcement both at the beginning and the end of class today. We will fry shrimp, fish, potatoes and other deliciousness.

Fryday. Not the healthiest concept, but a necessary one to learn in the realm of culinary arts.

I shall approach it with the same curiosity and intent that I have every other aspect of cookery to which I have been exposed at the California Culinary Academy.

Culinary competence, confidence trump comfort

Am I getting comfortable with my skill level in culinary school? Hardly. Am I beginning to feel a bit of  competence and confidence? Yes.

That was very much in evidence today. The finished product, which is what matters in the culinary world, was successful in Culinary Foundations II class. It was our first full plated meal -- protein, vegetable, starch, sauce, garnish.

Forget for the moment the feel-good philosophizing about the journey and not the destination being the goal. The destination in culinary arts is most definitely the goal. It feels good and gives one a sense of competence to put a well-cooked, attractively plated and highly flavorful dish in front of someone. And the confidence of having done it right comes at the moment of plating, similar to when -- excuse the sports metaphor -- Barry Bonds swung the bat and knew, he just knew, that it was a home run. I knew when putting my roasted chicken on the plate today that it was a winner.

Roasting a whole chicken, potatoes and other root vegetables and making an accompanying sauce was the order of the day. Chef Dan Fluharty, as is his custom, demonstrated the techniques for the first hour or so, and then sent us to our respective cooking stations to create something similar.

We each trussed a chicken and put it in to roast. Then we prepared potatoes tourné, the fancy French cut to shape them as small and elegant footballs, and other root vegetables -- rutabaga, parsnip, carrot and turnip. Each was cut differently for roasting, for presentation and knife-skills practice.

The outcome for me was chicken done just right, vegetables that were cooked well and a sauce -- oh my, a sauce -- that did just what a sauce should do: elevate every other element of the meal. Importantly, Chef Dan agreed.

It was a living, breathing, highly edible example of both the competence I have built and the confidence I am beginning to feel in my culinary skills.

(Photos: Above right: Whole chicken, foreground, and root vegetables, background, awaiting preparation at my cooking station. Lower left: roasted chicken, just out of the oven.)

'Restaurant pace' comes to culinary school

The beginning of Week 11 in culinary school brought us to what Chef Dan Fluharty called "restaurant pace," meaning we are working by the day now at the pace and intensity we would be in a real restaurant kitchen.

Could have fooled me; I though we had hit that pace at least a week ago, if not farther back.

Today's pace was swift, but it didn't seem unreasonable or chaotic. In two hours of cooking time, we did mise en place and the cooking for three braised dishes -- a beef stew, chicken fricasée and red cabbage. Plus we made puff pastries, although they were from pre-rolled dough and not from scratch.

"It's braising day," Chef announced at the beginning of class. "It's one of the hardest days in the whole curriculum. Why? Timing and the long time it takes to cook."

Indeed, braising is a lengthy process because it involves slow, low heat cooking, designed to turn tough pieces of meat and poultry tender and draw out their flavors. "It's cooking that is as slow as you can get it," Chef Dan said.

The slowness is worthwhile. The flavors cajoled from meats in braising hit the top of the umami chart. Other students seemed to agree.

Chef Dan's remark that, "It couldn't be a better time of year to do braising, because it's colder than the dickens outside," inferred to me that braising focuses at least in part on what we would call comfort foods.

Not to mention that, if I do say so myself, I consider braising to be in my sweet spot when it comes to cooking. I have done it often, and it's my favorite culinary technique.

Evidence comes in the beef stew and chicken fricasée that I brought home from school today: There wasn't any left over.

Julia Child's influence hits home, yet again

Chef Dan Fluharty will tell you that he does things his own way.

Chef says his potatoes tourné tend to "look like Fred Flintstone carved them," instead of the perfect seven-sided pieces prescribed in classic French cooking.

He says his ciseler of an onion is the "German method, not French."

And Chef Dan sometimes will add a dash of cream when it's not called for (pommes duchesse) or rescue a broken sauce with a little water.

Yet, his movements, his teaching and, most important, his results, bring us back to the basic and classic outcomes.

Could it be that this chef of lengthy experience both in restaurant and classroom kitchens, was influenced by the dame of French cooking in America? Yes, is the decided answer.

"I was in eighth grade, I believe, and I was a latch-key kid. You know, I had my own key to let myself in. I would get home about 2:45 each afternoon and turn on television. Julia Child came on at 3 o'clock. I would sit there and eat my cookies and watch her. She made an impression that stayed with me for many years."

Up until right now, I would say.

Chef's recollection came last week as he taught us how to make the classic French omelet. His memory was prompted by my remarking that he had called to mind Julia Child's program in which she showed how to make the French omelet, dropping two beaten eggs into a pan and shaking until the omelet took its shape and she plated it. Sixty seconds of perfect technique resulting in a perfect omelet.

Julia's influence continues on for me. In this manifestation, Chef Dan Fluharty's passion and his considerable skills are the vehicles.

Meat and potatoes? No, protein and starches

We all have heard someone referred to as a "meat and potatoes" person, or of "eating our greens." In the culinary world, the talk is different. "Meat and potatoes" is "protein and starch"; "greens" are "vegetables."

Add a sauce and a garnish to make up the five components encompassing a typical service for a restaurant meal.

It is to that end we are headed in Culinary Foundations II. The last two days of class -- Dec. 17 and 18 -- for the final competency exam, we will prepare four plates, each with those five components. Look for the full rundown of the menus in a blog posting in the next few days.

To get us prepared, Chef Dan Fluharty will take us through a week of practice beginning Monday on the seven classic French cooking techniques. They are braising (Monday); roasting (Tuesday); frying (Wednesday); poaching and poëler (Thursday); grilling and sauté (Friday).

My Sunday cooking plans already included making braised short ribs, sauté of green beans, wild rice and a brown sauce from the braising liquid. I will pay especially close attention to proper technique in preparing them.

Egg on my face ... and everywhere else

Egg day dawned bright and prospects were good going into the kitchen Friday in Culinary Foundations II class. Then clouds began gathering -- clouds of too much browning, over-cooked and poorly folded omelets, pan too hot, not hot enough, too sticky, too oily.

"If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs," Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once said.

We culinary students wish it were just "a few eggs."

Instead, to make perfect French omelets, by Chef Dan Fluharty;'s standards, we had to break many an egg.

When thinking omelet, one must disabuse himself of the image of a good old-fashioned veggie and cheese omelet or of the offerings at IHOP and the Denny's Grand Slam or anything approximating them. As we should know by now having been steeped in French culinary standards for 10 weeks, the omelet is the height of delicacy, perfect in constitution, shape and presentation.

"We will learn to cook the French omelet," Chef Dan had said earlier in the week. "Why French? Because this is a French culinary school, (affiliated with) the Cordon Bleu."

Learn we did. Well, sort of. A half-dozen tries into the process, I presented Chef with my latest effort, a somewhat sadly shaped mass of yellow.

"It has good texture, good color," Chef allowed. "What about this shape? You want something more shaped by the contour of the pan, like this." He put his hands on it and began shaping it to his liking.

"This isn't for a grade, is it?" he asked.

"Well, Chef," I stammered. "Uh, no." I then hurried off to try another.

Eventually, Chef joined me at my stove top, showed me two straight times how, even lent me his magic spatula (certainly, that was the key to it all!). My next two efforts were disastrous, and with time running out on the day's exercise, I finally plated one that led Chef to show me mercy: "That's better. A little brown. I'll call that an 8." Eight, meaning out of a possible 10 points. Most generous. I took it and moved on to egg poaching.

Nothing like going from the frying pan to the near boiling water.