In the end: Lessons learned
I recently passed six months since I finished up my classes at ICC. And yet, only today am I publishing my final post on my last few days of culinary school…
Quite a delay, right? Why has it taken me so long to bring this narrative to a close? It’s procrastination on steroids; I literally had “Write blog” on my to-do list every day since the spring. Well, after extensive reflection, I’ve concluded that this situation arose from two factors: grief and inauthenticity.
First, grief: for the conclusion of my incredible culinary school experience; for the premature end of my externship in Per Se’s 3 Michelin star kitchen when the restaurant closed due to Covid; for the overnight pandemic-induced disappearance of culinary job opportunities; and for our world, which is such a scary place right now. The first stage of grief is denial, and pushing off this post enabled me to refuse to accept that this heavenly phase was behind me, and that, like all of us, I had been thrust into an unwanted era of challenges and uncertainty.
Next, inauthenticity: this had to do with my writing itself. Whenever I tried to start, I struggled to put more than 10 words on the screen. Then, it dawned on me that my resistance was coming from an attempt to complete this series in the same humorous, lighthearted tone as the rest of my posts, while my mental state during quarantine was the polar opposite. It only got worse with the heartbreaking news that ICC is closing for good. I couldn’t inhabit my old frame of mind — it felt inauthentic, and, frankly, it made my writing suck.
My class was on Cloud 9 on our last day of school. A lot has changed.
Once I acknowledged these factors, I was finally able to accept that it was all over, and I gave myself permission to wrap this series up in a way that represented my present thoughts. It sat better with me to to take a bigger picture approach to my last post in this series, rather than the usual play by play. More on that in a minute.
Eeesh! Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest…a quick interlude: in case you were wondering about the events of my last few days of school, I passed my final practical and written exams with flying colors — I got the top score in my class — nailing the Branzino with smoked tomato sauce and apple tart with vanilla bourbon crème anglaise detailed in my last post. I also completed a Top Chef-esque mystery box challenge, where we had no idea what ingredients we’d be cooking with when coming into class that day, and one winner would be selected from the class. Salmon was the mystery ingredient, so I ended up cooking a roasted salmon dish with lemon zest, lemon risotto, fried capers and chive oil. I didn’t win, but I was proud of my dish. It showed me what a long way I had come since day 1, when I could barely mince a shallot.
I was proud of my execution of this Branzino with smoky tomato vinaigrette and sautéed spinach with mushrooms for my final exam.
Here, my apple tart with vanilla bourbon crème anglaise, one of my favorite dishes of culinary school. This was the best it ever turned out — the crème anglaise was beyond creamy!
My mystery box competition dish: roasted salmon with lemon zest, lemon risotto, crispy capers and chive oil. In retrospect, I might have done a few things differently, but it was still tasty.
For our mystery box challenge, everyone had a few minutes to finish and plate their dishes before presenting them to the judges, Top Chef style.
While the day was technically a competition, we were all cheering for each other as it came down to crunch time.
And when all that was done, I graduated from little white beanie to big girl chef’s hat (otherwise known as a toque). I was proud of my accomplishments and ready to take the world by storm.
It was VERY exciting to trade in our little beanies for big toques, signifying how far we had come in just four months.
You can see that I’ve found my calling! Chef Chloe, reporting for duty.
Then, Covid happened, and everything came crashing down. The food world was turned on its head, and no one knew what was going on. While things are finally looking up now, it was a rough time, to say the least.
With all that said, I’ve had a lot of time to mull over my experience. While I still get warm and fuzzy over the memories of my final days of school, what’s most important to me, and what has helped me grow in these strange months, is the broader lessons and themes I picked up in school. So, without further ado, here are my top takeaways from culinary school that I know I will bring with me for the rest of my career, and for the rest of my life. I’ve taken the liberty of illustrating them with various dishes I’ve made over the last 6 months to show how I brought my culinary school education with me into the “real world” — or whatever world it is right now. Basically, I cooked like a maniac in order to cope with my feelings, and saw firsthand how much I had learned. As an aside, I apologize in advance for the less than stellar photography. This was food I was so excited to stress-eat that I snapped a photo as quickly as I could, and then dug in!
Up first, my top cooking related takeaways from culinary school:
You should want to eat the recipes you create.
Sounds obvious, but bear with me for a minute. One day, staff members from Blue Hill at Stone Barns visited us after school to talk about cooking with local, seasonal produce. We were tasked with conceptualizing a dish based on the vegetables and grains available at the farmers market at the moment. In the middle of January, there wasn’t much. Taking a look at the root vegetables, I came up with a dish along the lines of “carrot carpaccio with crispy parsnips and kohlrabi slaw” — not that exactly, but something that sounded fancy and creative that I wouldn’t be very excited to order if I saw it on a restaurant menu. I wrote it because I thought it was what the BHSB staff would want to hear…but their feedback was not particularly glowing. One of my classmates, on the other hand, presented the idea of warm bread from grains milled onsite, slathered in black garlic-infused butter, made from the cows on the farm. My mouth watered. THAT was the kind of food I wanted to eat.
After that dish was presented, one of our lecturers offered us the advice that the food you make should “punch you in the gut” (in a good way) when you conceptualize it, and that really hit home. In quarantine, I embraced this philosophy head on, and I figured out the food that I love to cook the most: creative comfort food that’s simple, but elevated or interesting in some way. It satisfies me to my core. It’s the kind of food that, if I saw it on a restaurant menu, I’d just HAVE to order it. And while this may have led to a little bit of weight gain, it’s food that fulfills me creatively and makes me want to eat and eat and eat. Even if you aren’t making up your recipe from scratch, this principle still applies. You should be excited about cooking whatever selection you choose to make — otherwise, what’s the point??
Creamy sea urchin pasta with fresh chives and buttery breadcrumbs. I treated myself to some sea urchin shipped from the Fulton Fish Market during a particularly gloomy spell, and it was a true pick-me-up.
Spicy duck leg confit ramen in a double concentrated homemade chicken broth. There’s an egg inside there, of course. Fresh scallions were a must.
“Pizzaladière” with mozz, parm, caramelized onions, anchovies, grated garlic and thyme. It’s an interpretation of the French/Italian dish Pissaladière, made with pizza dough and cheese. I’m obsessed.
Time and care are ingredients.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that you can “taste the love" in a meal. I’ve definitely had this experience. But what does “the love” actually mean? Well, I think I figured it out in culinary school. To me, love = time and care. My instructors would say over and over that time is an ingredient: in the case of a braised short rib, for example, the key “ingredient" to getting that short rib tender to the point of falling off the bone is lots and lots of time simmering in a low temperature oven. But it takes more than that to make the short rib truly delicious, and to me, that’s care. Specifically, it takes caring about developing layers of flavors to get an out-of-this-world dish. You need to brown the ingredients at each step of the way until they are beautifully caramelized, paying close attention to the heat and its effects on the meat at first, and then on all the vegetables and aromatics after your meat has been seared. You need to care about picking the highest quality ingredients you can find, since they will be cooking for a while and all their flavors will be extracted. And you need to care enough to taste along the way to make sure your seasoning is right at each stage of the recipe. If something burns, you need to care enough to take everything out of the pot, pick out the burned bits, and move it all over to a new vessel to give it a fresh start. This is what love means in food, and I try to cook every dish taking the proper time and care because I KNOW you and I will taste the difference at the end.
Braised short ribs: the lower and slower you cook them, the more delicious they are.
Short rib ragù: a quick dish that tastes incredible because of the time and care that went into making your short rib leftovers, the base of your pasta sauce.
Caramelized onions: these take over three hours to cook down. That pot was almost completely full of sliced onions when I started, and they get sweet and jammy just from heat and time.
Because of the effort I put into the onions, my patty melt the next day was simply insane (you can see the onions peeking out from the bottom slice of bread.)
A little sauce goes a long way.
French food is famous for its sauces. In fact, there’s a complex web of dozens of sauces that derive from five “mother” sauces, many of which we learned to make in school. I was thrilled to learn how to execute a killer hollandaise, and from there I could make béarnaise, the perfect complement to steak. Similarly, learning the technique to make a béchamel led me to sauce mornay, which is a version of the cheese sauce you’d want in the archetypal oozy mac and cheese. These sauces go a long way to bring a meal from good to great, but it’s not just French sauces that elevate a meal. A simple dinner of roasted chicken and vegetables becomes special when you add a chimichurri, gremolata or spiced yogurt to dress it up. These sauces aren’t hard to make, but they do wonders in elevating a dish. Keep this in mind for a night at home, and especially for a dinner party. You’re bound to impress!
Here, I topped my seared salmon with a simple butter sauce, which I flavored with some leftover salsa verde lying around in my fridge.
Here, an herby yogurt sauce was the perfect accompaniment to savory roasted vegetables under a beautiful, simple chicken.
I love this gremolata, made with basil, lemon zest and juice, and chopped almonds or breadcrumbs. It cuts the fat of these chicken thighs and gives them some texture, elevating them from ordinary to extra special.
When designing a meal, play with complementary flavors, and create contrast with divergent textures and temperatures.
As you create your meal, think carefully about the flavor profiles of what you’re going to be eating, and choose other ingredients to enhance them. As I said above, a rich steak goes incredibly well with a creamy béarnaise sauce. But if you’re serving those together, it might not be the best time to have a buttery mashed potato puree on the side. Instead, serve something crispy to counteract the creaminess of the sauce and tenderness of the meat. If you’re going to serve your steak with a bright, tangy and cool salsa verde, serve something warm and rich on the side like sautéed mushrooms that could also be brightened up by the sauce. If we dig deeper into the steak example, you can even plan your sauces and sides around the cut of meat you’re serving. With something like a filet mignon that doesn’t have much fat, a creamy sauce and/or side would be wonderful. But if you’re serving a fatty ribeye or wagyu strip, choose something acidic and/or fresh to cut the fat and wake up your tastebuds. Another example of playing with textures is how much a smooth and creamy pasta is improved by a smattering of garlicky breadcrumbs on top, like in my sea urchin pasta above. It’s a party in your mouth!
If you need a little help with pairing flavors, I'm obsessed with the book The Flavor Bible for when I’m dreaming up meals and need a little inspiration. It’s basically like a thesaurus for ingredients, telling you what makes other ingredients sing, and which to avoid pairing. I also recently bought What to Drink with What You Eat by the same authors, which offers beverage pairings (not just wine) for various ingredients and dishes. It even has White Castle sliders in there! (In case you’re wondering, they suggest off-dry Riesling, rosé and white Zinfandel.) It goes the reverse way as well, giving you the perfect ingredients to pair with that white Burgundy you’ve been saving for a special occasion.
Here, a soft tuna carpaccio with lemon zest and chives benefitted from the contrasting crispiness of fried capers and toasted pine nuts. Taste wise, the capers emphasized the brininess of the tuna in a good way. A drizzle of high quality extra virgin olive oil tied it all together by adding some fat and subtle richness to balance the lean tuna.
This was one of my favorite creations of quarantine: roasted cauliflower with brown butter, hazelnuts and crispy sage. It’s an example of utilizing complementary ingredients, as the roasty notes of the cauliflower were echoed in the nuttiness of the brown butter and hazelnuts, and the earthiness of the crispy sage added an interesting vegetal note to an otherwise warm set of flavors.
This dish was over the top: scallion pancake “tacos” with Korean fried chicken and quick pickled cucumbers. Here, the fattiness of the pancakes and chicken was cut by the pickles, and their cool temperature worked to offset the hot chicken as well.
Fresh herbs are your best friend.
I can’t overstate the importance of fresh herbs to add depth, brightness and complexity to your cooking. I always make a habit of buying different types of herbs at the grocery store or farmers market and challenging myself to use them in as many ways and dishes as possible: as a garnish, in a sauce, or in the cooking process. Woody herbs like thyme and rosemary are wonderful when incorporated early into the cooking process, like when slowly simmering beans on the stove, while delicate leafy herbs such as parsley, basil, mint, chives, and tarragon make a dish pop when mixed in at the end or used as a garnish. A simple potato salad with mustard sauce becomes transcendent when you toss it with lots of chives and parsley, tarragon or dill. And topping off a fresh pasta with torn basil or parsley takes it to restaurant level. Next time you go to the grocery store, buy an herb you don’t use very often and then do a little research on what it goes well with — or reach out to me! You will be shocked and delighted at what a difference it makes.
This sous vide lobster was made extra special by infusing it with tarragon butter throughout the cooking process.
I played with herbs in every component of this fish dish, from the chive beurre blanc on the fluke, to slivered mint on the braised leeks, to chopped parsley on the slow-cooked chickpeas.
Herbs have a place whether you’re making a fancy meal or a quick snack. I almost always have dill around, and I love put it on my smoked salmon toasts. This combination can’t be beat!
Get your shit together.
You may have heard the term (or remember me writing about) mise en place, the process of “putting things in place” before you start cooking. I can’t think of something that better sets you up for success — or failure — in the kitchen. Mise en place involves measuring and prepping your ingredients, laying them out neatly, having all your tools nearby, and making sure your necessary cookware is close at hand. It's the opposite of flying by the seat of your pants, and it is a non-negotiable in my kitchen now. I can feel and see a difference in the quality of my cooking, as well as my stress levels, if I don’t have everything chopped and ready to go before I get started.
Don’t get me wrong, if your recipe has a lot of passive time and you can do some additional food prep while things are slowly simmering or braising, go for it. But even then, mise en place should also describe your mental state, where you know your plan (and/or recipe) before you get started so that you aren’t stumbling through the steps as you go. When I’m cooking a new recipe, I read it through at least three times before I get started, and once again after I finish my prep / before I start cooking. If I’m making it up as I go along, I’ve at least read a few recipes for inspiration and put some advance thought into ingredients or spices that I plan to use. I think this is one of the areas where beginner cooks fall short, and just getting your mise en place in order will give you a huge advantage when it comes to successfully executing a meal.
Midway through my mise en place for the salmon and lentil dish I put up in the “sauce” section. Note that I always keep a bowl on hand for garbage and/or scraps so that I don’t have to go back and forth to the garbage all the time.
Once everything is in order, I feel comfortable beginning the cooking process. This helps keep me organized and make sure I don’t leave anything out while I’m cooking. After putting a lot of thought into a dish, that would be a shame!
And now, my top personal takeaways that apply to all aspects of life beyond the kitchen (you can quote me here!)
“Perfect practice makes perfect.”
My classmate Melissa nailed this motto, and it really resonated with me. The only way to hone your carrot julienne is to practice it repeatedly, but if you are sloppy and rushed every time you practice, you’ll just reinforce less than stellar habits and muscle memory. No one wants an un ugly, uneven julienne — it defeats the purpose. Rather, practice getting your thin strips to the exact right dimensions until you could do it with your eyes closed (not really, don’t cut yourself!) and then work on your speed over time. While there’s no such thing as perfect (another lesson I learned), the more disciplined you are in your practice, the better your outcomes will be when it really counts.
“It’s good to be nervous — being nervous means you care.”
One of my instructors repeatedly offered this advice from the beginning of school, and I felt comforted, encouraged, and seen (thanks Chef Ben!). You might remember that I was so nervous on my first day of school that I could barely hold my knife because I was literally shaking. Same with my end-of-level exams, as well as during the high pressure environment of family meal. It was a vicious cycle: I would get heart-poundiogly nervous, then beat myself up for being nervous for objectively low stakes events, then feel even worse! When I reminded myself of this guidance, though, I was able to move away from self-criticism and be proud of the fact that I cared so much about the outcome that I was putting my all into it.
“Measure your progress against yourself, not against others.”
This lesson certainly applied to my experience in school, when I suffered insecurity noticing how much faster some of my classmates were at prep and cooking compared to me. It’s also become relevant in the time since, as I try to make a name for myself when it feels like I’m starting over — it can be challenging at times when I see people five years my junior at a point in their careers that I aspire to. But if I learned anything in school, it’s that the only thing you can do is work on your own craft, and comparing yourself to others is not productive or especially useful. Instead of channeling energy towards comparison, I try to focus on my own development and what I can do to push myself to the next level.
“Don’t underestimate yourself and what you are capable of.”
There were a number of things in culinary school that I never thought I would be able to do, which I got through and even excelled at. For example: killing a lobster by piercing its head with a chef’s knife; unleashing giant columns of flame with a brandy flambé; butchering and deboning whole chickens; deep frying; making a flaky and tender pie crust…I could go on. Whether I was afraid or just doubting myself, I went into these activities with the attitude that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull them off. But I had no choice, so I just pushed through and got it done. I realized that no one knows what they are doing at the beginning, but some are more confident than others. And that’s a choice. So, you can choose to either be confident and get it done, or shrink from the challenge. Now, I aim to push myself and get it done. This has applied to food I’ve made in the time since (hello flaky pie crusts, layer cakes, and more!), and even to picking up driving as a skill, something I hadn’t done in many years.
“Trust your gut.”
I remember one day when we were making a variety of tarts during our pastry module, our instructor gave us a detailed demonstration of the delicate task of rolling out our chilled, buttery dough it from a thick disk to a thin sheet. It was important to handle it as little as possible so that the dough would stay tender and flaky, and not get tough. Well, when it came time for us to execute our own rolling, one a classmate started using her rolling pin to bang the disk flat rather than rolling it out gently, even though our instructor had definitely not demonstrated this as one of his steps. But another person in the class witnessed her doing this and followed suit, presumably because they thought they had forgotten this key step. Soon enough, the entire class was cacophonously banging their disks of dough. “STOP!!!” Chef had to scream three times before quiet ensued. “No one told you to bang on your dough! What is wrong with all of you?”
This was an important life lesson for me: if people around you are doing something wrong and you know it, don’t follow suit! Trust your knowledge and instincts, and if you really aren’t sure, ask for help. Trusting your gut also applies to the process of cooking food itself. If a recipe says to bake your cookies for 20 minutes but they look done at 15, take them out! Same with seasoning - if you think your food needs a little something extra that doesn’t match up with the ingredients on your list, go for it! 95% of the time your outcome will be better than if you ignored your instincts.
“Do the right things.”
This relates to the “trust your gut” lesson. If you notice something is wrong or out of place, go out of your way to fix it. Even if no one around you is doing it and you are in a rush, it makes a difference to pick up that towel on the floor or clean out the sink drain. It just comes down to being a good citizen. Ultimately, it will serve you well. Plus, if you model good behavior, others are likely to follow suit, and then everyone wins. And if they don’t follow you, it will likely come back to hurt them later.
I learned so much in culinary school, and my thoughts above are just the tip of the iceberg. I am grateful for every day I spent in those intense kitchens at ICC, and I will continue to miss the experience. But now that this blog post is done, I do feel ready to move on to the next big thing, which is already in the works — I can’t wait to tell you about it!. My blog will evolve to cover my journey going forward, too. So just because this is goodbye to ICC, it is most definitely not goodbye to Chloe Cooks. Plus, who knows, I may revisit my experience with even more lessons learned in a part 2…in six more months!
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for following my amazing journey through culinary school. If nothing else, I hope you laughed and learned something new, and even better if I inspired you to chase your dreams too. I hope that you will continue to read my writing going forward! More to come.
What’s your favorite dish that I made in quarantine? Which lessons resonated the most with you? Leave me a note below!