Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America by Jonathan Dixon

Author:Jonathan Dixon [Dixon, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: food
ISBN: 9780307589033
Google: zZ50Dj6DxskC
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published: 2011-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

CHEF DAVID SMYTHE WAS running a couple minutes late, but it was an early Christmas in the hallway outside his Cusines of Asia kitchen. A hand truck sat weighted with ingredients for that day’s cooking. Adam and Brookshire, Dan and Sean were buzzing around it like hummingbirds, darting their hands in, pulling out packages of lily buds and dried mushrooms, four or five bottles of different soy sauces, a bag of Chinese long beans, a trio of various rice wines that looked like the real thing, covered with bright calligraphy and import stamps, not packaged under the familiar Kikkoman aegis.

It felt like a particularly good time of year to be a culinary student. Christmas was three weeks off, followed by a two-and-a-half-week break. In the interim, we’d be studying the fundamentals of Asian cuisine, with a few days each spent in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. The schedule had an edge of impossibility to it; every one of those countries had a long, complex, and well-developed cuisine—way more long and intricate than France or Italy or America—and the idea that two days here and two days there would be anything more than a dilettante’s layover was absurd. But—and I’d used the analogy just recently with Nelly when we were talking about my three days with Sartory and the cooking of Mexico—this was learning a few chords from our scales, and it was up to us to figure out how to make rudimentary, then more advanced, music from it later on.

We each had different reasons why we were more excited for this class than we’d been for any other, except maybe Skills, when we first felt a stove’s heat on our faces. Adam, for one, was obsessed with the happy meeting of French or American food with Asian food, though he refused to call it fusion because the word had connotations of badly imagined food pairings, like taco pizza or something. He idolized Jean-Georges Vongerichten (who was living out Adam’s dream), had spent time in Thailand, Japan, and Vietnam, and saw these three weeks as an opportunity to let some seeds that had already been planted start germinating.

I myself suffered from a lot of misapprehensions about Asian cooking that I wanted to diffuse. I couldn’t figure out why every one of my stir-fries tasted fundamentally the same, or why the wok I used at home didn’t transform ingredients so they tasted like dishes in Chinese restaurants. I understood that adding lime leaves and coconut milk to a dish made it taste vaguely of Thailand, but very little beyond that. Once in a great while, I’d open one of the two Asian cookbooks I owned and make an attempt. But not often; I didn’t have many of those ingredients on my shelf. To make the dish, I’d have to trek to Chinatown or Jackson Heights in Queens, drop a small pile of money, and then bring them back home, where the volume of new and unfamiliar ingredients felt intimidating. I’d

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.