The most important ingredient in cooking

Fail to salt a vegetable or a piece of meat, and its flavor will be lessened.

Don't put sugar in lemonade, and it will be too sour to drink.

Remove all fat -- butter, oil, other rendering -- from cooking, and it becomes much more difficult, in fact nigh impossible.

So which of those is the most important ingredient in the kitchen?


None of the above.

"We only have so much time," Chef Dan Fluharty told us in a recent lecture in Culinary Foundations III class. "You must make it your friend."

And your most important ingredient. More than anything else, time can make or break a meal. Day after day in the last 18 weeks of classes, we have faced one time crunch heaped upon another. In some cases, we spent too much time on something, in others not enough, and in still others time simply ran out.

Take Wednesday's time crunch in the competency final exam. We had 15 minutes to fabricate -- cut into specified pieces -- a whole chicken. We had 45 minutes to cook a five-part meal with one piece of that chicken. We had one hour to cook another five-part meal right after that.

Time-line organization and planning were keys to success, along with execution of the time line. In each instance, time was tight, and there was some, but not much, margin for error.

Most of us completed the chicken fabrication with plenty of time to spare. Mine was done in 9 minutes.

My chicken dish, too, came together according to my timeline and plan. I was the first in class to present the dish to Chef, with about five minutes to spare.

The grilled New York steak went to the last tick of the clock. The steak itself was the final ingredient to go on the plate, and I placed it there literally as Chef walked by to declare time was up. I could have used another 3 or 4 minutes, time I had lost on two do-overs -- my potato mixture for which I had forgotten the egg yolks and my spinach, which I had over-blanched, leaving it as a small glob of green.

We've seen it on "Iron Chef", "Top Chef" and "Chopped". The tming matters, more than just about anything else.

Sharpening my knife and my mind for final exams

Fabricating a chicken -- that is, cutting it up for cooking -- to meet American Culinary Federation standards is required to pass Culinary Foundations III. The test will be on Wednesday, and we will have a maximum of 15 minutes to complete it.

(My latest practice effort took 7 minutes, but there was no pressure.)

The ACF certification requires cutting the bird into 10 parts:

* The wishbone. This is the collarbone, and it is removed first, to make it easier to cut the breasts from the bone. Not all chefs or butchers remove it first, but it is required for ACF certification.
* 2 legs and thighs, with "oyster" intact. The oyster is a small lump of dark meat on the back of the thigh, prized by many as the most tender and flavorful part of the bird.
* 2 breasts, both boneless, one skinless.
* 2 tenderloins. The tenderloin is an oblong piece of white meat attached to the breast by a thin piece of membrane. It can be pulled off or is easily cut off.
* 2 wings, including one with the meat pulled down off the bone "lollipop" style.
* The remaining carcass. This is inspected to ensure that as much usable meat as possible has been cut from it.

Martin Yan of "Yan Can Cook" fame fabricates a chicken with a cleaver in under 20 seconds, as seen on this YouTube video. Included is Yan's heartfelt lesson to the students about the need to entertain restaurant guests.