First Lunch at the CIA
Culinary Fundamentals is the first kitchen class you take at the CIA when you are on the Culinary Arts path. The class is a semester-long (15 weeks), while the remaining kitchen classes are a block (three weeks long). In this class, you learn how to operate in a professional kitchen. The first few days are spent on a tour of the kitchen, knife skills, demonstrations, lectures, and cleaning. The basic knife cuts include batonnet, julienne, small dice, brunoise, and chiffonade. Some chefs will also have you cut fine julienne, fine brunoise, and tourne. You will also get comfortable slicing and dicing onions, shallots, garlic, parsley, and potatoes. In each class, you’ll put together a knife tray of different cuts on each ingredient the chef asks for and be evaluated. In addition, as a class, you’ll make large batches of stock that will be used by other kitchens at the CIA. You’ll be consistently making vegetable, fish, chicken, and veal stock throughout the semester.
"Make me consomme" -No One
After making stocks, you’ll advance to making soups. You review cream and broth-based soups, vegetable soups, and chowders. You’ll be tested on learning basic ratios and formulas as well as presenting a finished product to the chef. The first few times I presented food to the chef, I was so nervous and still get nervous to this day. The daily flow is typically arriving to class, set up your station, prep for stock as a class, get a demo from the chef, execute the demo, clean, and then have a lecture.
After stocks and soups, you move on to basic vegetable and starch cookery. These will become the side dishes that you use once you move on to basic cooking techniques like roasting, grilling, frying, sauteing, poaching, steaming, etc. Learning how much salt, butter, and cream really goes into restaurant-quality mashed potatoes was pretty eye-opening. Another particularly fun but stressful day was egg day. On that particular day, our class of 20 or so students annihilated about 2 cases of eggs. We had to scramble, hard boil, poach, fry 2 ways, make an omelet, and custard. I remember was cursing and running back to the walk in to get more eggs each time I ran out only to have to keep going back because I wanted to get the perfect looking eggs for evaluation.
The most I learned in Culinary Fundamentals was sauce making. I grew up not eating a lot of rich French-style sauces, so learning how to make them was insightful. It made more sense to me as to why the Saucier in a kitchen is typically more senior. Getting the nuance and consistency in a sauce can be a challenge especially when you need to have a lot of delicious sauce ready during service. To this day, I still get terrible flashbacks to when I failed to produce bearnaise in time for a plate because it kept breaking on me. One thing that I miss about the CIA is having easy access to good veal stock for sauce making. It’s a pretty large endeavor to make veal stock at home because of the cost and time to deal with beef bones. The first time I made marchand de vin (brown sauce typically paired with steak) was a point of pride.
Over the course of the semester, you really get to bond with your classmates. Even though class can be stressful, you learn about the importance of efficiency and teamwork in the kitchen. One of my closest friends during the first year at the CIA was at the station next to mine and we would constantly grab each other bowls, pans, ingredients for each other to save trips around the kitchen. I looked back at one of the first photos I had and it was pretty shocking to see that a third of the class dropped out by the time we got back from externship for a variety of reasons. It just goes to show you that you’re never guaranteed anything in life.
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