Day 7 Friday, June 18, 2010
I kept adding a slow stream of clarified butter to my hollandaise sauce, not knowing when to stop.
I looked down. The sauce seemed all right. It hadn’t separated. I brought the sauce up to Chef X.
He looked at it with disdain.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Chef X said.
“How much butter did you add to the sauce?” he asked harshly.
I opened my mouth.
“I already know how much butter you added just by looking at it!” he snapped. “When you do your béarnaise sauce, I’m gon’ be standing right there.”
Speechless, I froze and then scurried away.
The mayonnaise I previously made had garnered a nod, but he only wrote down a grade for my hollandaise.
We were making emulsified sauces, trying to coax egg yolks to combine with clarified butter or oil.
I prepared the ingredients for the béarnaise sauce in a daze.
“Are you OK?” my partner Gillian asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my face stricken.
We put diced shallots, red wine vinegar, water and dried tarragon in a shallow saucepan to reduce. After all but a couple tablespoons of liquid were left, we strained the ingredients and saved the shallots.
I put two egg yolks in my stainless steel bowl. The bain marie, or hot water bath, was bubbling away on the stove.
Chef X appeared at my left elbow.
I tensed.
“You’re freaking out,” Chef X said. “Don’t freak out just because I’m standing here.”
I cracked up. My body instantly crumbled and relaxed.
“Now add your ingredients,” he said.
I added a little bit of the reduced liquid. Then I reached for a small plastic cup of water and dumped it in.
Chef X gasped, his eyes full of horror.
He snatched the bowl from my hands and poured most of the water out in the sink.
“When I told you to put the water in, I thought you knew how much water to add!” he said. “One teaspoon per egg yolk!”
The sauce was still salvageable. I began whisking the yolks over the hot water on the stove. The balloon whisk I used was as long as my forearm.
Chef X pointed out I needed to put more air in the sauce. He took my whisk. As he bent over the bowl, his right arm worked like a manual eggbeater, whirring over the sauce. When he was done, the sauce had exploded in size.
“A minute more,” he said and walked to another workstation.
I whisked the sauce as hard as I could. Making emulsified sauces seemed easy enough, but how did you know when the egg yolks were cooked? How did you know how much clarified butter to add before the sauce broke?
I showed the sauce to Chef X who said it was ready.
He turned to another classmate. “See? Look how much air is in there,” he said, praising his own work.
I went back to my station and began adding clarified butter to the sauce. My partner threw in the cooked shallots. She minced tarragon, while I added more butter.
Chef D, Chef X’s number two, had said the sauce’s consistency needed to be like Helmann’s mayonnaise. I lifted up my whisk, trying to discern if the globs that fell looked like ribbons that sprung back a little. The sauce seemed thick. I added a teaspoon of water to thin out the sauce.
The sauce was getting cold, so I put it back over the hot water bath. If we didn’t serve a warm sauce, Chef X would yell at us.
I added a pinch of salt and more of the reduced liquid to make it have more bite to it.
My partner and I showed the sauce to Chef X. He tasted it.
“Good,” he said.
But I was still shaken over the last sauce. I could not get hollandaise out of my mind.
“Are you OK?” Gillian asked again.
“Yeah,” I replied.
I knew Chef X didn't yell at people to be mean. He did it because he believed we could do better. I had failed at other tasks like cutting enough turnip batonnets to cook in salted boiling water. But I could not get over Chef’s criticism. Maybe because it fed into my fear that I wasn’t cut out for culinary school, that I was continually going to be slow at cutting vegetables.
I left hard news journalism to cook. I quit what I knew, and now I just felt lost.
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Other posts:
Why I'm going to culinary school
Panic before my first class at culinary school
Day 1: Who said cutting vegetables is easy?
Day 2: Cutting, boiling and sauteing vegetables in 35 minutes
Day 3: Culinary class leftovers
Day 4: The dreaded Tournage
Day 5: Making Stocks
Day 6: The Salt Experiment
5 comments:
Babe--You know why you made this move, and you have good reasons for doing so. Don't let fear take over those goals! Remember when you were learning how to report and write? When an editor first yelled at you? You made it then, and excelled in a field you didn't even want to continue in! You'll do the same here, with better results, because this is where you want to be. Ignore the fear, use his advice and ask questions to learn -- you'll be great! :)
-Whit
I'm really enjoying your posts on culinary school. Admire you greatly from moving out of your professional world to enter another, completely new, one. It's tough to learn such new skills as an adult; the ability to take criticism in stride is something to be rediscovered and might well be the most difficult skill to master! As "grown-ups" we are not used to being in that position - well done for taking the risk. The fact that you are keeping this blog as a sort of reflective learning journal seems to me to be proof that you have what it takes. Keep it up.
Whit: Thanks for the encouragement.
Injera: You are absolutely right. This is a reflective learning journal. Thanks so much for your thoughts!
Hang in there! You can do it. Like I said, I wish I had the guts to give up my job and do it.
oh wow your in culinary school so cool congrats you will shine lol
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