The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman Page B

Pardus had demonstrated with his own, and at last brought it to the chef for his inspection. It was a good, good-looking, flavorful consommé.
    Making consommé was strangely satisfying. Something happened that you could see —an objective improvement. It was sort of like sanding and oiling a piece of wood that had started out pale and rough. After I’d finished my consommé and Pardus tasted it and liked it—“You could be a good cook, Michael,” he said, a little surprised—all I wanted to do was taste my consommé and stare at it, remarking on the clarity and color.
    I wasn’t alone in this feeling. While I was staring at mine, David Scott, who had already finished his consommé, stood across from me, his head bobbing up and down. “That was really cool,” he said, grinning.
    Pardus even tacked on an elegant little bonus to this consommé class, circling back around to the stock from which the consommé was made. We were going to make the white beef stock and chicken stock a new way, borrowing from the consommé principle.
    â€œI’m going to start with boiling water,” the chef said, “and we’re going to add some acid. We’re going to save all our tomato scraps from today, and we’re going to add it to our white stock. We’re going to try to make a self-clarifying stock. It’s apparently a technique they’ve been using in Europe for a long time. I never heard of it. I talked with Chef Hestnar and he said,
‘Yeah, it’s true. We don’t teach it here at the CIA, but you can do it and it works pretty well.’ Chef Griffiths tried it last week and said it works great, came out nice and clear and took an hour off the cooking time. So you already know the official CIA way, and we’re going to go a little beyond that and learn another way. We’ll all learn this together. It’s a new one on me. This is an experiment. If it doesn’t work, then the next time someone tells me, ‘Oh, yeah, this works great,’ I’ll tell ’em, ‘No, it doesn’t . I’ve tried it.’ And if it does work, great. Then you guys have two ways of making a good stock.”
    When lecture was over, I would walk out of the Culinary Institute of America into the cold February night like a kid leaving an amusement park, a kid with an open pass for all the rides for as long as he wanted. Chef Pardus had said today that I could be a good cook. I knew that of course I’d be a good cook. But I left the Culinary that night more uplifted than usual because he had recognized it.

Day Eight
    I should have known that Day Eight would be different from all the others preceding it by looking at my own prep list and comparing it to Day Three’s:

    DAY 8
    Consommé
SMEP
Velouté
Béchamel
Clam Chowder
Clarify 5# butter
White Beef Stock

    The card hints that I suspected timing would be a factor since I had built into my game plan the order in which I would present the items to the chef—consommé first, béchamel last, and only when that was done would I finish my knife cuts. I’d show him the knife cuts after the six o’clock deadline, which was all right so long as you had them done by six; between five-thirty and six-fifteen a line formed to present pots and bowls to the chef, and he would set out a sheet of legal paper on which to sign our names so we wouldn’t waste time standing in line, staring at our reflection in bowls of
consommé growing cooler by the instant. At six o’clock, he would draw a line under the last name and anyone below that lost points on their food.
    The pace had picked up abruptly the day before. On Day Six we were still at the mise-en-place-and-one-soup level. Day Seven became standard daily mise en place (plus julienne and brunoise carrots, and tourner four pieces of potato), consommé, split pea soup, and béchamel. Béchamel, a mixture of flour and