the final exam

February 3, 2009

my classmate joe shows off his practicum work

our final exam for intro to professional cookery included a written portion and a practicum portion. we would have to make a small dice of onion, tourner of six potatoes, batonnet of carrot and medium dice of potato, and bring them to Chef along with a grading sheet. we had an hour and 15 minutes to work.

i carefully laid out my cutting board with two wet pieces of paper towel underneath to stabilize it, as Chef Bryan had taught me. i set out my vegetable peeler and my knives, which i had sharpened and honed the night before. next to my board i placed a bowl for scraps and two small bowls filled with water for my potatoes, to prevent oxidation from discoloring them. i had a few extra small bowls at my station to keep my prepped vegetables before bringing it all up to Chef.

pete and i set to work, he on the tourner and i on the medium dice–our own kitchen nemeses. about 20 minutes in, one student had already finished, and headed toward Chef’s table with his cutting board that held neat little piles of sticks, boxes and footballs.

“where is your sheet?” Chef demanded.

“oh, i left it at my station. we needed to bring that?”

“attention, everybody!” Chef called. “do not come up here unless you have EVERY-SING–all your vegetable and your sheet! or i will automatically take 2 points.”

i sighed and returned to my work. my potato sticks looked something like steak fries at this point. using my fingernail as a measure, i cut 1/2-inch by 1/2-inch by 1/2-inch little cubes out of the sticks and plunked them into my little bowl of water. pete was more than halfway done with his practicum by now.

though i knew i would finish in plenty of time, i wanted to prove to myself i could get everything perfect. i had spent the day before batonneting, dicing and slicing carrots and celery and making cubes and tourners of potato, turnip and whatever else crunchy i could dig up. my refrigerator at home was filled with Ziplock bags and plastic containers bearing a veritable rainbow of cooked and raw vegetables and their shavings. but that was just practice.

next, i carefully squared off the edges of my carrot until i had formed a retangular box. i lined up each side with the edge of my board, as Chef had shown us, neatly slicing down on the sides that were uneven to make each corner as close to a right angle as possible. i made sure my box was more than 2 inches long before i sliced it into 1/4-inch-thick planks. i lined up and stacked two planks at a time and cut 1/4-inch-wide by 2-inch-long sticks from the planks. i smiled at the absurdity of my tiny handful of lovely batonneted carrots compared to the heap of scraps i discarded to be used later for stock.

though the diced onion was a relief after the first two tasks, i was surprised at how much i agonized over something that i had done countless times at home and school. after piling up my finished cubes of onion, i found myself plucking out the imperfect ones, re-chopping the oversized cubes and generally nitpicking.

“that’s plenty. you’ve done enough,” pete assured me, bringing me back to reality. i thanked him, set the onion aside and began to tourner. more than 3/4 of the class had finished by now (including pete, who came back to station to brag about how he got the highest score in the class on the written exam). the kitchen was considerably louder, filled with blithe chatter and the calming sounds of cleanup.

all i had left to do was six tourned potatoes. i cut the lumpy tip off the first peeled, quartered potato, which had two flat faces and a third curved side. i made sure the cut was parallel to the cut at the wide end. i then picked up the potato, holding each end in between my forefinger and thumb, with the wide part on top and one of the flat sides facing me. envisioning the football shape it would take, i began making curved, vertical cuts with my tourner knife. i first made an exaggerated, round cut into the flat side because this was the hardest side to make curved, and the hardest side to correct, as Chef Bryan had shown us. i turned the potato slightly, making my way around with the knife until it had taken on somewhat of an oval shape. i tried to make my cuts in a single, fluid motion along the length of the curve to achieve faces of equal width. the perfect tourner has seven curved faces lengthwise and two equal-sized ends. i examined each end and found that one was slightly larger than the other, so i carefully shaved off little bits from the bigger end. i repeated this process five more times, and stepped back to admire my work.

i arranged everything on my board, grabbed my sheet (checking my name was on it) and made my way to Chef’s table. as he had done the first day, he gathered up my little sticks of carrot and examined them to be sure the ends were perfect 1/4-inch squares. “PEAR-fect on that batonnet,” he said, scribbling on my sheet. he approved of the onion and medium dice as well–so far my work had paid off. finally, he picked up a few of my tourned potatoes, turning them carefully to examine each side. “beautiful job on zose,” he said. “i’d say everything looks perfect.” i got 100% on my practicum.

later, as we packed up our knives, Chef gathered us around his table to discuss the next portion of the quarter: intro to stocks, sauces and soups. but his final words of the evening lingered: “remember when you first started here, you all were so worried and you complained about doing the batonnet and tourner, but i think you all did pretty good here tonight,” Chef said. “you all figured it out even though you said you wouldn’t be able to do it.”

it indeed was gratifying. i had been one of the students who dreaded the day of the final, thinking i could never become a “square” and master the batonnet. but i had learned more than i realized in those first five weeks. i would no longer fear right-angled cuts or football-shaped vegetables.

for the next five weeks my thoughts would instead be plagued by overcoming the five “mother” sauces: bechamel, veloute, espagnole, tomato and hollandaise. now, we would truly be cooking.