And after some delay...
I started culinary school!
It felt entirely natural to begin September by filling my backpack with a new notebook, snacks, a school uniform and traveling through a slightly-cooled New York for first-day orientation. The Institute of Culinary Education is on the third floor in Brookfield Place, the aberrant luxury mall in Battery Park. Most of the shops are closed now, but it was never very crowded there to begin with. Every afternoon I walk through an archway that feels like a metal detector but checks my temperature, and receive a wristband with the day of the week on it. I enter the school area, which is industrious and non-slip and smells like different foods every ten feet. There are large windows along one side overlooking the trees at the waterfront and the Jersey City skyline. My classroom looks like a commercial kitchen, ringed with heavy-duty ranges and Blodgett ovens, but with more open space in the center, where we sit at stainless steel prep tables separated from each other with plastic dividers.
I like my classmates. There’s a woman who’s been working in food pantries during the pandemic and wants to provide the healthiest most nutritious food for the people who come there. A Korean-American bodybuilder who learned about macrobiotics from his grandfather and wants to make high-protein plant-based (and maybe THC-based) food. A former pastry chef from Mexico City who realized she doesn’t like pastry, started a protein shake company, and now wants to open a restaurant in New York. A British-Indian woman who kept up an Ayurvedic blog for 15 years while working in finance before finally quitting her job just before the pandemic. Everyone cares a lot about food and food systems, sometimes to the point of stridently preaching to the plant-based choir, but they don’t seem to have the celebrity chef complex that I was afraid of encountering in culinary school.
Our instructor Elliot Prag is a jovial potbellied Long Island Jewish guy who went to the Natural Gourmet Institute in the 80s and got into Japanese food. He overshares sometimes and tells long-winded stories, but I like him. He doesn’t go for fussily-plated tiny dishes, to my relief, and lightly made fun of the bird-shaped sugar sculptures outside our room. (“Does the world really need things like that? You can’t even eat it.”)
Our first few days have mostly been administrative and food-safety lectures, plus some knife skills in the Japanese and French style. The difference seems to be the French are extremely fastidious about cutting everything into perfect cubes and a lot of each vegetable gets thrown away (or turned into stock, but I’m unconvinced that anyone could use that much stock). Chef Elliot said that we need to know what a dice or brunoise is, but that for the rest of the course it won’t matter if our shapes are perfect as long as they’re consistent enough to cook evenly. I’m getting the feeling that NGI is pretty different from the rest of the school or from most culinary school curriculums.
I got lots of cool stuff on my first day!
I’m familiar with most of it, except this weird “channel knife” for cutting strips of citrus rind, and a boning knife, because I’ve never boned anything 😏. An unfortunate side-effect of COVID is that we don’t have lockers at the school anymore, so I’m going to be biking back and forth to Manhattan with a bag full of knives strapped to my back.
Next week we’ll start actually cooking, as in boiling, simmering, blanching, poaching, and other techniques that I admittedly use a lot less than stir-frying or roasting. I’ll try to share more about what I’m learning, but as always, ping me back if you want to ask a question, or want me to ask my teachers a question, or just to talk!
What I’m cooking
End-of-the-summer panzanella
Panzanella is one of my favorite dishes any time of the year, because it’s just salad with bread and I love bread. Smitten Kitchen has at least four recipes for it, for every season, but late-summer tomatoes make the most classic and IMO delicious version. Lately I’ve been boosting the savoriness by frying some olives, capers, sundried tomatoes, and garlic into a mix that gets added to the salad but also flavors the oil that cooks the croutons. If you eat fish, I imagine you could add anchovies to that as well.
I’ve been using fire-roasted red bell pepper, shiso, and summer squash or corn in my salads, but you can use almost any produce that looks good. It’s very easy to scale up and also to pack and transport if you’re going to a socially-distant picnic (panzanella’s supposed to sit for a little while before eating anyway, so just mix it together before you head out).
Makes about two meal-sized servings, but all quantities are approximate — adjust based on what you like, whom you’re feeding, and how large your ingredients are.
Ingredients
Savory mix
5-10 olives, any kind
3-4 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon capers
3-4 pieces sundried tomato
Pinch of chile pepper flakes
Optional: a few sprigs of fresh herbs, like rosemary or thyme
Olive oil
Salad
Old bread (something hefty like a baguette or sourdough; it doesn’t have to be old, but slightly dried out is better)
Whatever produce you’ve got: 2 bell peppers or summer squash, 1-2 ears of corn
~4 medium beefsteak tomatoes (or a mix of bigger and cherry tomatoes)
1/2 medium red onion
Basil or shiso (or both)
Balsamic or red wine vinegar
Black pepper
Method
Roast the bell peppers (totally optional)
If you’re using bell peppers, you can fire-roast them on your gas stove. Turn the burner up as high as it goes, and use tongs to hold the bell pepper over the flame, rotating until it’s blackened on all sides. While it’s still hot, put the pepper into a heat-safe container with a lid and let it steam. After awhile (at least 15 minutes but up to a few hours), take the peppers out and peel off most of the skin, which should come off easily. Then cut them in half, remove their stem and seeds, and slice them up for the salad.
Prepare the dressing and croutons
Pit the olives if necessary. The easiest way to do this is to press them against a cutting board with the flat side of a chef’s knife. The pit should pop out, and it doesn’t matter if the olive gets smashed because we’re chopping it up. Chop the pitted olives along with the capers, sundried tomato and garlic cloves. If there’s anything else you’d like to add for seasoning, like rosemary or thyme or other fresh herbs, prepare it by picking the leaves off the stalks.
Tear the bread into bite-size chunks and set aside.
Heat a pan on medium-low and, once hot, pour in a generous amount of olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan plus a little extra. Toss in the mixture of olives, capers, etc, along with some chile flakes and cook until the garlic just starts to brown. Carefully remove all the bits using a slotted spoon into a bowl. There should still be oil in the pan, but if it’s not well-coated you can add some more. Once it’s hot again, add the bread chunks, working in batches if you have too much. Turn them frequently to get all sides coated in oil and cook until golden and crispy on the outside.
Put it all together
Prepare any other vegetables you’re adding. If using corn, boil and cut off its kernels. Other vegetables like summer squash could be pan-fried or you could eat them raw if you like the taste. Cut the red onion in half, and then slice it into half-moon pieces. Cut the tomato into big chunks, about the same size as your croutons. I try to retain the liquid from the tomatoes and scoop it into the salad bowl, because I’ll just drink it if ends up pooled at the bottom at the end. Tear the basil or shiso into slightly smaller pieces.
Put all the vegetables, the croutons, and the oily caper mixture into a bowl big enough for you to easily toss it. Add a dollop of vinegar and a few twists of black pepper and mix well. Taste and add more salt, olive oil, vinegar or black pepper if necessary.
Let the salad sit for at least five or ten minutes before serving, to let the bread soften. I’ve learned that more “authentic” panzanella is softened longer, up to four hours, but I prefer my croutons to still have some crunch. Find out what you like best, and enjoy!