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.

Putting the French into French cooking

The complexities of French cooking, via all seven classical French cuisine techniques, were explained in an intense, fast-moving demonstration today at the California Culinary Academy.

Chef Gilles Penot (left) of Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts School in Ottawa, Canada, was on the San Francisco campus , which is a Cordon Bleu affiliate school, for the demonstration.

In one hour and 45 minutes, Chef Gilles trussed a chicken for roasting, tournéed carrots and potatoes and cooked a meal as more than 30 novice students, including yours truly, sat in rapt attention.

Chef Gilles' heavy French accent made following his lesson more challenging, but it added a genuineness to the afternoon's activities. There was both a seriousness and a light-hearted happiness to him as he worked, an obvious manifestation of his love for le cuisine Francais.

His teaching involved a facile recitation of the proper French terminology interspersed with rapid-fire questions to students about why he was doing what he did or what he should do next.

In the allotted time, he showed the trussing, browning and roasting of the bird, glazing of the carrots and sauté of the potatoes, plus creation of a brown sauce from the chicken fat's flavors and a hearty-looking stock.

Bonus: In the class that followed, as we practiced our knife work, Chef Gilles showed me an efficient and effective way to hold the potato for tourné.

'You've got to earn your way into our kitchens'

We're about to find out how little I know about cooking.

Nine months of what promise to be grueling classes at San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, an affiliate of Le Cordon Bleu, begin in eight days. The opportunities and the challenges were laid before me and 100-plus other new students on Saturday at the Academy by the chefs in charge.

"The first six weeks will be the hardest," Chef Michael Weller said in an impromptu hallway conversation with a group of us during orientation. "You've got to earn your way into our kitchens."

In other words, no access to the CCA's gleaming kitchens until we learn a few basics. First and foremost is passing the safety and sanitation class, followed by the first-level culinary class.

Chef Weller, who is senior executive chef at CCA and oversees the culinary arts program, laid out some of the basics.

In safety and sanitary, we will learn how to cook and keep clean in the kitchen, the right (meaning safe) temperatures for cooking and serving meats and a host of other critical pieces of information.

In Foundations I, the first culinary arts class, we will learn kitchen terminology and definitions, including fundamentals of the seven classic French cooking techniques, the names and purposes of kitchen utensils and equipment and the descriptions of and uses for sauces, stocks and soups.

We will also learn, Chef Weller assured us in a booming voice, that the culinary industry needs us because it needs new blood.

"This school is not just about chopping things up," he said. "It's about learning leadership to keep changing our business."

With all due respect, Chef, I beg to differ, ever so slightly: It is about chopping things up, most of all the preconceived notions I'm carrying about how to cook and do it well.

It will be fun and challenging to find out just how much I have to learn. In more than five decades of hanging around kitchens, I think I have learned a good bit. The next nine months are likely to shed more light on that knowledge but to add a body of knowledge that will inflame my passion for cooking ever more so.