Going to culinary school is a dream for many.
After watching a few episodes of Chopped or a season of Top Chef, you might feel inspired
to quit your job and follow a new career path in the restaurant industry.
Here are some things you might learn in your studies.
You might think that culinary school is all about learning to cook, but the very first
thing you do is work on your knife skills.
Cutting ingredients down to size is all about getting them to cook evenly.
If you try to roast huge chunks of potatoes alongside tiny pieces of garlic, the latter
will burn before the former cooks through.
So, how do you cut oblong, tube-shaped carrots and weirdly-shaped onion layers into the same
shape as a round potato?
Practice.
Once you get the hang of it, you start to like making everything nice and even.
If your vegetables are chopped haphazardly, they won't have a great presentation, and
culinary instructors know that we eat with our eyes first.
If it doesn't look appealing on the plate, they'll call you out for it.
In addition to regular knife work like dicing, slicing, and mincing, you'll learn fancy knife
cuts such as julienne, chiffonade, brunoise, and more.
Before too long, you'll realize that you can't do any of this without a sharp knife.
"It's far harder working in the kitchen with a blunt knife than it is with a sharp knife."
A dull knife is a dangerous knife.
If it bounces off a carrot instead of cutting through it, it'll likely land in the tender
flesh of your fingers instead.
Luckily, learning how to sharpen a knife is another benefit of a culinary education.
Once you start cooking, most schools begin with broth and stock, the essential building
blocks of creating flavorful food.
Starting here also requires you to learn one of the most fundamental lessons in cooking:
patience.
There are all kinds of rules in culinary school broth.
You have to simmer it for hours, but never let it boil; skim the "scum" and excess fat
from the top as you go, but never stir it; and you shouldn't cover a broth with a lid.
When you leave culinary school, you no longer have to follow the rules and you can make
stock in a pressure cooker if you like, but the lesson is ingrained in your head.
You know, without a doubt, that learning to make stock is the best way to elevate your
cooking game.
Using a high-quality broth makes a huge difference, giving an impressive amount of flavor to everything
from soups and sauces to risotto and polenta.
"Will you just taste the soup?
Alright I'll taste the soup, where's the spoon?
Ah ha!"
If there are 15 students in a culinary class, all 15 of them will cook the same recipe every
day.
Guess what?
None of those dishes will taste the same.
Tasting the food of your peers is a wake-up call for culinary students because it's the
moment they realize that a recipe is just a guideline.
It's up to the cook to bring the ingredients to life.
"And tell the cook this is low grade dog food, alright?
And take this for yourself.
I had better food at the ballgame, you know?"
When you're first starting out, that recipe is necessary to set yourself up for success.
After all, someone went through a lot of trial and error to develop it, so why not learn
from the mistakes of others?
As you cook, you'll learn to trust your senses and pay attention to the methods used along
the way.
Did the recipe instruct you to start by sautéing onions in oil?
That's because some ingredients take longer than others to soften.
Did it have a deglazing step?
An instruction to bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer?
Take note of these methods and understand how they're useful in creating the finished
meal.
This is one of those secrets that will completely transform your cooking.
When you cook meat or vegetables in a hot pan, little bits inevitably stick to the bottom
as you go.
As long as they're not burnt, they can be used as the foundation for creating depth
of flavor.
Those bits are called fond, and they're basically concentrated little flavor nuggets.
What's happening here is something called the Maillard reaction, a chemical reaction
that happens when amino acids and sugars are exposed to heat.
When the food gets hot, it starts to brown and caramelize, and some of that reaction
sticks to the bottom of the cooking surface.
When you add cold liquid to a hot pan, the fond releases and dissolves.
Now, that liquid can infuse whatever you're cooking with extra flavor.
You can use any liquid you like to deglaze, from water or stock to apple juice, wine,
or cognac.
Keep in mind that, contrary to popular belief, alcohol doesn't burn completely off during
cooking.
It adds an intense amount of flavor to your food, but it's not best when serving children
or anyone who doesn't drink.
Learning about spice profiles is a crucial part of cooking without a recipe, something
all culinary graduates should be able to do.
Getting to know the spices is important, but you can learn that from reading a cookbook.
In culinary school, you learn how to coax out the maximum flavor from each spice.
When you're working with whole spices, you should always toast them first to bring out
their aromatic oils.
This can be done in the oven, but it's easiest to toss them in a saute pan, shaking it frequently
until the aroma of the spice fills the air.
When it comes to dried spices, the same tip applies, but it's harder to toast them because
of their small size.
To help them bloom, add them to the pan in the early stages of cooking, about a minute
or two before deglazing.
The oil in the pan rehydrates the dry spices and activates their aromatic compounds.
It's a small step, but it makes a huge difference in the end.
"They sent it back too spicy."
"What?"
"Too f---ing spicy."
Whether you're cooking from a recipe or creating something off the cuff, sometimes things don't
work out the way you intended.
If your dish tastes out of balance, you can easily fix it with one key culinary school
principle.
Use sugar to balance salt and acid to balance fat.
You'll also learn that a salty dish can't always be fixed, even with a bag of sugar.
Unfortunately, lessons like that are usually learned the hard way.
"Now, should we have served that sandwich?"
"No, chef."
If your food tastes a little on the salty side, you can't reduce the sodium content
unless you add more of every other ingredient.
Sometimes, that's not an option, so you can mask the salt by adding a touch of sugar,
honey, molasses, or maple syrup.
Depending on the type of dish you're creating, adding a naturally sweet ingredient like carrots
or sweet potatoes may be an option.
Similarly, if your dish tastes too rich or oily, you can add something tart like vinegar,
lemon juice, or yogurt.
These acidic ingredients can brighten up the dish, preventing it from feeling too heavy
on the palate.
This piece of advice can be frustrating, but it rings true 100 percent of the time.
It's super easy to get in the weeds when cooking for friends and family, and tensions run even
higher in a professional restaurant.
Time ticks away pretty quickly when you have garlic cooking in hot oil.
The difference between golden brown and black and burnt can be as little as a few seconds.
If you're not prepared to add the next ingredient to the pan, you may ruin what's in there already.
Culinary school teaches you to read through a recipe and chop, slice, and measure every
ingredient before you start cooking.
It's the reason why professional chefs use so many little bowls.
When you work in a professional kitchen, you might be responsible for cooking a dozen or
more dishes, so prepping your ingredients in a mise en place is the single most important
thing you can do to get ready for service.
Anyone who has attended culinary school can recite the phrase "hot plates, hot food; cold
plates, cold food" on command.
That's because it's been drilled into their heads a million times.
Controlling the temperature of the plates is an easy way to ensure the food stays the
right temperature on its journey from the kitchen to the table.
At home, this is as easy as sticking a stack of dinner plates into a 150 degree oven, or
chilling them in the fridge.
It is possible to take this one too far, though.
Almost every line cook can tell you a story about a dish that cracked from the heat of
the oven while it was warming, or a dressing that froze to a salad plate stored too cold.
But hey, finding those perfect temperatures is all about the learning experience.
Every culinary school student has a huge responsibility to keep their customers safe from harm.
That's easy to do when you cook something like a steak.
Hit the USDA safe minimum internal cooking temperatures, and you've met your responsibility.
When it comes to prepping those large batch items that will be reheated later, things
get a little trickier.
Part of culinary education is learning about the danger zone, a temperature range of 40
degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, where bacteria can double in number in as little as 20 minutes.
When you cook a five gallon batch of soup in a restaurant, it can reach temperatures
as high as 212 degrees.
If you threw the whole pot into the refrigerator as-is, it would take hours to cool down, sitting
in the danger zone long enough to become problematic.
You can't exactly drop ice cubes in the thing or it will dilute the flavors, so you have
to learn techniques for rapid cooling.
Since you probably don't have restaurant equipment at home, you can divide the soup into several
shallow metal pans to help it cool down more quickly.
Although culinary students take nutrition classes, most of the food you learn to cook
in school isn't necessarily focused on health.
It's all about flavor, flavor, flavor, and using fat is a great way to get there.
When Anthony Bourdain appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, he spilled the beans about how
much butter goes into everything.
"It is usually the first thing and the last thing in just about every pan."
Fat has a purpose, though, and butter is not the only way to get there.
The secret to mellowing out sauces, giving soups a rich finish, and creating mashed potatoes
with beautiful consistency?
Fats like oil, heavy cream, avocado, eggs, and cheese.
That's because fat helps carry all the other flavors.
It's an essential component to creating a balanced dish, so you can't be afraid of using
a lot of it.
Culinary students learn why it's important to cook several days worth of soups and sauces
at once, along with other recipes that reheat easily.
It not only saves time, but it also makes the food taste better.
In culinary school, you learn why leftovers often taste better the next day.
The flavors get to come together and meld.
It doesn't work with all foods, though.
Pre-dressed salads will be soggy and sad the next day because the acid in the dressing
breaks down the greens.
"You don't win friends with salad."
The quality of some cooked food decreases over time, too.
A medium-rare steak would likely overcook when you reheat it the next day, becoming
dry and tough.
And fried foods can never get as crispy as they were on day one.
But, if you're making things like soups, stews, curries, bean dishes, sauces, or braises,
it doesn't hurt to make them a day in advance.
Restaurants are not known for their big profit margins, which means every single ingredient
counts.
So if you're not using vegetable tops to make stock, grinding steak trimmings for your hamburgers,
or turning food close to its expiration date into soup, you may as well be throwing money
into the garbage.
Luckily, they teach you how to do all of that in culinary school.
This is also something that's easy to be mindful of in your home kitchen.
Grab a few zip-top bags and start a freezer stockpile of chicken parts and vegetable scraps.
When you've got enough, whip up a batch of homemade chicken stock.
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