day four: and now, we cook!

January 13, 2009

i have cooked tomato sauce hundreds of times in my kitchen at home, trying every form of tomato imaginable: pureed, whole peeled, diced, stewed, sun-dried, sauce, paste, juice (when i was out of sauce one day). and i have perfected them in my own little way using all sorts of aromatics, meats, seasonings, cooking times and cookware. suffice to say i fear no tomato sauce.

but on day four, i was anxious to face a simple sauce of olive oil, shallots, garlic, roma tomatoes, tomato paste, fresh herbs, salt and pepper. but that’s the lovely part about culinary school. it offers a return to naïveté for cocky home cooks who thought we knew every tool and technique in the book.

we aren’t just cooking in our own home kitchens anymore. instead, we must find our way around a professional kitchen with new pots and saucepans, finnicky stovetops and ovens. we must maintain a clean prep area. we must never leave a pot of boiling water unattended, because this is wasteful and Chef will dock points from the day’s total. we must core, score, blanch, shock, peel and seed our tomatoes (cut slits in the end, lightly boil, dunk in an ice bath and remove the skin and seeds), before even cooking them, to create best sauce. we must lightly sweat, or suet, our shallots and garlic in the olive oil so they don’t burn. instead of chopping herbs and tossing them in the sauce, we must tightly bundle them together with twine, called a bouquet garni, and drop them in the sauce to be discarded later. most importantly, we must mind our seasonings should Chef deign to taste our sauce out of the 23 available.

when did tomato sauce become so complicated? how would i remember all those steps? i was no longer the seasoned home cook. i was more like a kid on the day of her first math quiz after studying her times tables.

after we unpacked our knives, Chef called out, “come here please!” i clambered to the front of the crowd gathering around the demonstration table, swallowing my home cook pride as i pulled out my little notebook and pen. i took extensive notes as Chef Pierre prepared that simple tomato sauce, tomato a la portuguaise.

once left to my own devices at station, i of course forgot a few things.

“mar-gar-et! we are nearly an hour into class! where is your sanitation bucket?!” Chef demanded. i looked up from mincing my shallot with no answers for his waiting gaze, and quickly fetched the bucket and a clean towel. damn!

“you forgot to seed your tomatoes, and your concasse is too big,” Assistant Chef Brian reminded my groupmate, pete. pete was just a few tomatoes in, however, so the damage was easily undone. he pulled out the slimy piles of seeds and chopped his tomato concasse, or rough chop, a little finer. i, on the other hand, had already chopped more than half my tomatoes without removing the seeds. sighing heavily, i plucked out seed by seed and cursed my oversight. a few minutes later, we were both cursing as we realized we had nearly forgotten to add our bouquet garnis to our tomatoes.

after my sauce, with all its flaws, had been bubbling away on the stove for about 20 minutes, i tasted it and added a bit of salt. i noticed that the flesh of the tomatoes had begun to soften, and the sauce was beginning to cling together nicely. i thought it tasted pretty good, but i wanted another opinion–or rather, validation, of my “first” tomato sauce as a chef. “is my sauce OK?” i asked Chef Brian. he drew a long tasting spoon from his pocket. “good, but it needs a little more seasoning. you should taste your food often during the cooking process,” he said. i re-seasoned and tasted the sauce again. sweet shallots and garlic, slight acidity from the tomatoes, a tiny bite from the pepper, all brightened and balanced by the right amount of salt, which took a few tries to achieve.

you don’t master something by getting it right the first time. screwing up, i find, is often the best way to learn. my tomatoes will never go unseeded nor will my sauce go untasted or under-seasoned. i will never again forget to have a sanitation bucket at my station. but i also will remember that first day of cooking as a chef, not a cook:

i remember the beauty of translucent, ruby roma tomato skins falling off the flesh after you blanch and shock them and the simplistic appeal of a tiny bundle of herbs each trimmed to the same length and tied with twine, bobbing around in a pan of red sauce.

i remember learning to fold a sheet of parchment paper over itself into a thin triangle and to line it up with the radius of the saucepan to cut out a perfect makeshift lid. “in professional kitchens, we almost never have lids,” says Chef Pierre. “so we have to make our own.”

what i will remember most is the excitement of tasting my first cooked food in the kendall kitchen, and finding that it was tasty, despite all the mishaps.