Hello, fellow food adventurers and welcome to my very first blog post! I’m starting this journey with a series called… All The Things Culinary, where I will be dedicating a series of posts to the Culinary Arts, passing on some of the lessons I’ve learned to you, the curious and hungry.
How do I relate to the Culinary Arts?
A large part of my journey started when I found myself enrolled in a Culinary Arts Degree. I say found, as it wasn’t initially where I thought I would end up, nor my first choice. However, it turned out to be both a great adventure and a rollercoaster of experiences. Therefore, I thought none other than fitting as a great place to start! My beginning is thus the beginning of this blog.
Studying Culinary was where I discovered that food is more than substance, it is also representative, communicative and essentially a language. For that reason, stories and accordingly memories are associated with food and our eating experiences.
It was here that the concept of everyone being on their own culinary adventure sparked.
To learn more about how The Culinary Letter came into existence head over to my About Page.
This is the very first in the series, All The Things Culinary. This is…
7 Things I Learned While Studying Culinary
Studying Culinary taught me a lot of things… practically, theoretically and otherwise. I learned not only about myself but also in terms of working my way around a kitchen. It involved a lot of commitment, multitasking, teamwork and most of all mental preparation. A part of me always dreaded changing into my chef uniform and walking into the silver industrial jungle that awaited. Cold silver benchtops and gas stoves organised into neat little workstations.
The other half of me was excited to try new things, new experiences, new tastes. And this course offered those opportunities. There were great moments for sure, but overall, it was certainly challenging. It took a while for me to get used to it. The fast-paced environment, the long hours and the pressures, all while making it look like I had it all together. It wasn’t until later on in my studies that I discovered the beauty of it all and was able to thrive. Coincidently, that was when we were able to construct our dishes and unleash our creativity.
Consequently, it was at this point that things started to make more sense to me. This was why I was here. It didn’t necessarily mean that things got easier. I just was able to better understand why I was doing it and more of my purpose. It also helped that I was able to connect with some great mentors and most of all, some great friends.
So, this is a collection of the most important practices I took away from my experience. Without further ado, here are 7 Things I Learned While Studying Culinary…
1. A Sharp Knife is the Best Knife
A sharp knife is the only type of knife you should be using. Any other knife is just a dangerous hazard. Sharp knives ensure that you use less pressure to cut through ingredients. This means that you are exerting less physical strength and doing your best to prevent a rather nasty accident by the slip of a hand.
The knife will do the work for you! All you have to do is guide it on its way to achieve quicker, neater cuts.
A knife, while the perfect tool, is also considered the most dangerous. Your utmost concentration is required at all times. Doing something just a bit too fast or not paying enough attention at any given time can result in some rather annoying battle scars. Scars that take a little too long to heal. I can say this confidently with experience… prepare the plasters and proceed with caution! Just like anything, it is what you make and how you use it.
A sharp knife will equip the user with almost all you need to progress through a recipe, preparation-wise that is. It’s the first card you play before you bring out all the fancy cooking techniques. As an essential in every kitchen, it can do wonders as a great assistant and partner in crime. It is something everyone should have in their toolkit.
RELATED: knife tips and tricks!
2. Preparation is your Best Friend
Preparation in planning, research, ingredients, equipment, you name it. This is particularly useful when in the kitchen and time is of the essence. If anything, most of it is mental preparation.
A kitchen, in particular, a commercial one, is a fast-paced environment that thrives on action and skill. There are times when the unexpected happens and you’ve just got to roll with it, adapt and be flexible. Sometimes, you have a bad kitchen day. Sometimes things don’t work out or go to plan. And sometimes, you’re not channelling in the ‘zone’ (a place where you feel unstoppable and reach your peak of most efficiency). Learning to work with these troubles and overcome them is the best thing you can do. As a result, you will come out the other end feeling stronger, wiser and like you have conquered. And this is because you have. The best outcomes often result from overcoming a difficult situation. This also applies to the kitchen.
Preparation ensures that you can tackle whatever lies ahead.
3. Mise en plus / Your Set-Up is Essential
Mise en Plus, meaning to put in place is essentially the set-up for success. It is the best way to get you started. We used a large tray, several containers and tiny bowls for our setup. All ingredients were to be measured out and mostly available in that one section of our bench. This is a good rule to follow but not always applicable in a home kitchen. But the main idea is to measure out your ingredients, so everything is ready to go, and you don’t waste time fluffing around searching for things.
Being able to see all the ingredients right in front of you does wonders for planning around a recipe and the processes of cooking you shall be conducting (or perhaps not cooking). It also helps as a visual stimulus. This means you are less likely to complete a dish without forgetting anything.
Organisation, in general not only cuts back time but is also helpful when you need to do the dreaded multitasking. Having the ingredients measured out in neat little portions for the recipe makes it that much better. This particular step, while time-consuming, does pay off. If you do it well, it’s something you can always fall back on.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with this one too! Your set-up and work style are exactly that, YOURS. Own it, live it, breathe it, test it. And if you give it a go and it doesn’t work out for you, try something else or a different approach.
4. Never Underestimate the Power of Cleaning as you go.
Particularly if you are limited in resources and equipment. It often gives the illusion of having less work to do, instead of a big pile of mess at the end of it all.
Soaking is also your best friend. Do it always.
Nothing cleans pots faster. It’s good to get in the habit of adding a bit of water to a pot/dish/bowl that has done its part before it gets all crusty with the food bits. Your future self will thank you.
Between each stage of cooking/ preparation, setting time aside to clean will help you in the long run. Sometimes this may involve something as simple as wiping your chopping board down or even turning it over. However, it is an important step to prevent cross-contamination and to ensure that your apples don’t taste like onions (oops!).
A clean workstation empowers you to think clearly, power through that complicated recipe and generally makes life a whole lot easier. Think clean space, clear unclouded mind.
Assuming that cleaning can wait until the end when everything is done and dusted, is a mistake. Don’t give in, don’t do it, don’t go there, it’s not worth it. You’ll not only end up with the dishes from cooking itself but also the dishes from eating and plating up, which is a whole other set of washing.
Being able to manage a clean and organised workspace shows you are in control. And you always want to be in control.
5. Trust your Instincts
More often than not, your instincts will be a warning sign before the disaster strikes. The flavour doesn’t seem right, the texture is off and this isn’t cooked enough. All of these worries are valid, that’s often why they give you time frames in recipes/ baked goods. Sometimes you have to rely on your instincts and knowledge, to understand when something is done or not. The visual cues, the textures and your senses. If you feel in your bones that something is off, don’t ignore it. Listen, evaluate and if in doubt, call a friend (ask a peer, you do what you got to do). Knowing what to look out for and using all the senses (smell, taste, look, touch, feel etc) will help.
Sometimes you will have to start again and that’s ok. Starting something again vs trying to fix something that’s too far gone, can save you a lot of struggle and torment. This is something you learn with time and experience. Furthermore, if you’re unhappy with one element of the dish and it hasn’t worked out, then it’s often best to leave it out. Let it serve as an unsuccessful practice run and a reminder of a lesson learned. Don’t plate what you hate friend.
6. Taste as you go & Flavour at Every Stage
This is a vital one if you want an end product that is full of flavour and just overall tasty. Allowing to do so will help develop the flavour of a dish, making it deeper and more complex. It also ensures that you can correct something before it’s too late.
Tasting as you go is something you learn very early on. It tells you if you need to add more seasoning, if you need to correct seasoning and if you’ve got a balance of all that is sweet, savoury, spicy, sour and umami. Essentially this gives you a preview of the end product and a quick look into the future. It sets the tone for the basis of what the dish will turn out to be. And you want to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, rather than a detour or overall sinkhole.
Adding flavour at every stage is also key to any dish. This includes seasoning because you need every element to taste good separately before they are combined.
The separate elements need to make up the whole and complete it, but not overpower or overbear it by turning it into one big ball of mess.
Seasoning is also not just salt and pepper, it’s the spices, herbs, vegetables and all the good stuff to get your dish tasting more than one dimensional. Salt should be used to enhance flavour not replace it.
7. Nothing Works Better than Practise
The best way to learn is to get involved and put what you have learned into practice. This is particularly important for the culinary arts as a practical subject, that offers action at its forefront.
Experiencing something first-hand and doing it yourself, definitely commits itself to memory. The right texture, the right consistency and the right taste are based on feeling and knowledge. This is where your kinaesthetic learning comes into play. It’s one thing to learn something in theory and a completely different thing to do it yourself.
Accordingly, doing something enough times, will lend itself a place in our muscle memory and make things a lot easier. You’ll know when things are right and ready and when things are not quite so. This means you can begin experimenting and trying something new, or in other words, the really fun stuff! This means trialling your ideas and developing your own style and food identity. Just don’t forget that it starts with the basics, it’s important to learn those first.
Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to get success. But practise, repetition and improving your technical ability/ techniques can help dissolve the mysteries of a complicated dish. It also helps to understand why. Why certain things are done, why this technique works better than another and why things are done in a specific order. For example, vanilla can be used to lift ingredients in a recipe, which is why it’s so important, other than the flavour. Or that salt can reduce and mask bitterness, bring out the sweetness of foods and effectively enhance the flavour.
It used to terrify me, the thought of having to do so many things at once. But when I was able to break it down into smaller manageable steps, it didn’t seem so complicated anymore.
Practise and patience are all it takes; you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. While it is a commitment and things may be frustrating at times, there’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort.
And that concludes 7 things I learned while studying culinary.
Thanks for reaching the end! Hopefully, you were able to gain some insight into the culinary world and take even just a little bit of knowledge away with you. Or, at the very least, some entertainment.
The Culinary Arts offers creativity, diversity and perspective in all that is the food industry. Things are always changing, which is what makes it so dynamic. We change the way we eat, the way we gather and the way we talk about food. But food always has the power to bring people together and make a difference in people’s lives. It’s more than substance and is a total package and experience. Being in the industry is a lot of hard work, is challenging, and no day is ever the same, but it can also be rewarding.
Leave a comment below with what you thought was the most interesting piece of information from this post or even something that you have learned!
If you enjoyed this post, then head on over to part 2!
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Stay tuned for further posts in the All The Things Culinary Series. More exciting content awaits.
Until next time, stay curious!
