The first time culinary student Ron Gaj is instructed to cut up a whole chicken into precise parts, he confidently moves forward with the surgical procedure. By the time he has finished the task, his chicken looks like it has just gone through a wood chipper. And so begins the zany odyssey of a sexagenarian who has just mistakenly entered the world of culinary arts thinking the learning experience will be a culmination of creating elegant fare while engaging in casual conversation and sipping a glass of wine. He could not have been more wrong. Approaching retirement means different things to different people, but to sixty-something Gaj, who had always loved to cook, it meant trying something new-culinary school. As he details his often hilarious journey through the world of culinary arts with a cast of characters who seemed better groomed for reform school, Gaj provides a glimpse into how he sharpened his rudimentary cooking skills through weeks of chopping, dicing, boiling, sauteing, and participating in the solution of simple math problems that were treated like quantum physics-ultimately becoming a braver soul in the kitchen. Purple Chicken shares one man's entertaining foray into the often unpredictable world of culinary arts as he learns to produce delectable creations and discovers the unexpected.

Purple Chicken

The Adventures and Misadventures of a Wannabe ChefBy Ron Gaj

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Ron Gaj
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6967-2

Contents

Preface............................................................................1Chapter 1 Interviews and Adventures in Admissions..................................9Chapter 2 Uniforms 101 and Initial Culinary Excellence.............................22Chapter 3 Food Sanitation and Other Kitchen Tales..................................26Chapter 4 Leaders and Everyone Else................................................35Chapter 5 The Dark Side of the Kitchen.............................................40Chapter 6 Finding My Groove........................................................47Chapter 7 Brace Yourself for Reentry...............................................58Chapter 8 Kitchen Shenanigans 301..................................................67Chapter 9 Baking, Pastry, and Thievery.............................................86Chapter 10 International Cuisine and Interesting Conversations.....................102Chapter 11 Externship..............................................................114Epilogue...........................................................................135

Chapter One

Interviews and Adventures in Admissions

Engaging in this exercise, my goal is to review, select, and complete a curriculum of culinary arts. I go into it with the commitment that this is for purely educational reasons. I have absolutely no intention at working in the food-service industry. As a technology consultant to hotels, casinos, and restaurants, I have been in the back of house of a hundred food-service areas. I've seen the creativity and chaos. It is not the life for me. Working for a chef who morphs into a composition of neurotic emperor, deep-space alien, and prison warden is out of the question. Whatever studies I am to complete, the only place where those newly acquired skills will be demonstrated is in the kitchen of my home—oh, and on my beloved outdoor grill.

I have no illusions or expectations that people will call me chef once I complete a chosen culinary-arts program. That would be insane. I'm doing this because of my love for food. Cooking is a continuous learning process, and anyone just out of school will most likely have the fundamentals down. After that point, it is up to that person to have the desire to be challenged. It is my goal to do just that—to get the fundamentals through a culinary arts program—so I can explore my love of food on a whole new level. The four schools in my area are all for-profit schools. This is one seriously important fact to remember. If anything, the marketing and recruiting departments for all of these institutions are slick, savvy, smart, and smooth. Their television commercials, websites, printed promotional materials, and sales staffs are flawless in presenting spotless modern kitchens, comfortable student-to-teacher ratios, an education like no other, and the wondrous possibility of becoming a chef. In every video and photo, a handful of students and their chef/ instructors are all beaming big smiles while a student holding a pastry bag is making raspberry rosettes on a chocolate mousse cake. One would be hard-pressed to find marketing materials where so many people are showing off all their gleaming snappers. Everybody is always happy.

The ugly truth about what to expect from a culinary school is that the first and most frequent assignments will be chopping carrots, onions, and celery. Peeling and quartering a fifty-pound sack of small red potatoes is commonplace. All of the repetitive prep work will be delegated to the lowest person on the totem pole, and that's you—the rookie student.

More often than not, this apprenticeship will go on long beyond a few months, and during this period nobody should expect a six-figure salary. In fact, you will likely begin making something just above minimum wage. They don't tell this little gem to potential students at the recruitment office. This is where their marketing gets somewhat skewed. The truth is, working in a food-service facility typically involves long hours, hot sweaty kitchens, and very moderate paydays. It could also be said that even people with business smarts and financial backing should expect long hours, hot kitchens, and little "pay" until they are established. Even with that, I don't know many students who come out of school and immediately have the ability to lay down a couple hundred grand to open up their own joint.

The other dirty little secret is the dropout rate—people who enter the culinary world and leave it within two years of completing school. It's my understanding that the rate is as high as seven or eight out of ten who will leave and never return. That percentage far exceeds the restaurant-failure rate, which stands at around 59 percent within the first three years of business. These statistics are published by the National Restaurant Association from time to time. The marketing departments of these schools do not relay these statistics to potential students during the interview process. They pitch and cleverly orchestrate the theory that successful graduates are on their way to becoming great chefs, and celebrity status is within their reach.

After thinking about what I expect to get out of a culinary school, I dive into my investigation. I am not concerned with taking general education courses as I already have a degree in engineering. Repeating basic mathematics, public speaking, and business administration courses are of no interest to me. I only want to take culinary classes, and most importantly, I want to have fun with it. All of the schools offer an array of programs that basically mirror each other. The programs include studies toward an associate degree in culinary arts or pastry and baking, a bachelor's degree in culinary arts or pastry and baking, and a certificate program that only includes the culinary classes along with a mandatory class involving food safety and sanitation. It's the certificate program that I eventually choose.

Now I have to pick a school. Of the four, I eliminate one almost immediately. My decisions are based on the type of curriculum offered, the location of the school, the time(s) of day the courses are available, and the duration of the courses and overall program. I schedule my interviews and review and tour the three remaining schools. This process proves to be most interesting.

I will call the schools A, B, and C. School A is first on my hit list, and I meet with a recruiter. I choose this school first because after doing my basic research, I find myself biased toward their program and reputation. The recruiter I meet with is young, cute, smart, and has nothing but the most positive answers for all my questions. After the initial interview, I am taken on a walking tour of the campus (a multistory large building). Here I am escorted past kitchens where through a large window I view students and instructors going through their routines. The classrooms (kitchens) I see are conducting advanced classes. Nobody in these classes is rough-chopping carrots and leeks. One class has students placing a two-foot-long dolphin made out of cooled liquefied blue sugar on a cake; the dolphin is jumping out of white wavy frosting. I am transfixed on this creation, and the recruiter casually indicates it is just another day in the pastry department. Of course, I am thinking, Hell, I can do that. My cooking hormones are out of control....