Culinary school quotes of the week, Week 10

Call my lawyer
"You don't want egg shells in your pasta. What's that going to do? Probably get you into small claims court."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty (right, with pasta) as he pulled a small piece of shell from the mix in a pasta-making demo.

Call 911
"I had a knife emergency."
-- Culinary student Aline Brown explaining why her pommes duchesse overcooked. She dropped her chef's knife, bending its point and having to work it back to sharpness. All the while, her potatoes were in the oven, getting browner and browner ... 

Call the seasoning police
" It was 'just' beans and rice. But it goes to show you the importance of good seasoning."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty revealing that in another class, students neglected proper seasoning because they thought the food was too basic for it.

Call an audible
"I'm sticking with aioli. Hollandaise is too much pressure."

-- Culinary student John Briggs (left) after I said I would make hollandaise sauce to go with my artichoke for our competency exam. Despite making hollandaise successfully in practice, I decided at the last minute to go with the relatively easier-to-make aioli.
Call the doctor
"Lola's pans had butcher twine wrapped tightly around the handles. The dishwashers knew never to wash those pans or Lola would come apply those pans to the sides of their heads."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty on how a breakfast cook he knew cared for her egg pans, seasoning with salt, a little oil, a little heat and a lot of towel massaging rather than applying soap and water.

The shallot: a celestial beauty

Consider the shallot.

This small, unobtrusive, sometimes hard-to-find aromatic may well be the Pluto of the culinary solar system. We know it's there, yet we accord it little respect, often ignoring it completely. We prefer the bigger, stronger Jupiter-like onion. Or, we're drawn to the shrouded mystery of the leek: Like Venus, we surmise, something amazing must lurk beneath all that layering.

Yet it is the shallot that provides a sweet balance to a sauté, a delicate flavor to a sauce, a quiet complement to a simmering soup. Just as Pluto provides a delicate balance to the solar system, complementing rather than competing with the bigger orbs. It is small but significant, celestially speaking.

A shallot brought me to a small but significant moment of awareness Thursday as I completed my culinary school competency exam on vegetables and starches. Behind schedule, I was rushing to get green beans and red peppers into a sauté. The bacon fat was rendered, and next came the shallot. But in my haste, I had neglected to dice a shallot.

When I began culinary school just 10 weeks ago, dicing a shallot would have been a show stopper. I would have wrestled with cutting it open, removing the papery skin and figuring out a way to slice into the small object without slicing into a digit. The entire operation might take five minutes.

But now, in a seemingly magical transformation, I do it with ease. On Thursday, without pausing, I grabbed a shallot, sliced it open, peeled off the skin and fine diced the 2-inch beauty with a 9-inch chef's knife, all in 30 seconds. Into the sauté went the diced shallot, and I completed my dish with minutes to spare.

The episode was an emblem of my culinary progress, a small but significant moment with a small but significant shallot. Kind of like that small rock way out there in the solar system -- Pluto. Small, yes. Yet it has its significance.

Appreciating the artistry that is classical cooking

A painter takes care of his brushes, a soprano her voice, a photographer his camera.

And, a chef his knife.

Chef Tony Marano revealed, perhaps unwittingly, the artistry in his chosen profession and in himself today in class at the California Culinary Academy. Chef Tony lectured on knife quality, and as he did, he showed that a knife is more than a kitchen tool. He showed it to be an extension of the chef.

Much of his lecture was about what makes a good knife -- type of steel and its hardness, quality of the tang, the balance between blade and handle.

Yet, he returned near lecture's end to the principle use for a good knife: to help in the preparation of good food.

Those who appreciate good paintings don't think much about the brushes, and those listening to a soprano don't much consider what she has done to protect her voice.

Just as we who eat good food well prepared in restaurants don't wonder at the brand of knife the chef used or what the knife's steel hardness was. Yet without the knife, the meal could not have been created as it came to us for our appreciation and nourishment, if it could have been created at all.

The recognition of the knife as an extension of the artistic chef was implicit in Chef Tony's lecture today. And it made the practical lesson that followed -- to julienne and brunoise carrots -- all the more meaningful and important.