Two Plus Two Newer Archives - My education at the Culinary Institute of America (Year One)

Two Plus Two Newer Archives (http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/index.php)

- Other Other Topics (http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36)

- - My education at the Culinary Institute of America (Year One) (http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=318695)

My education at the Culinary Institute of America (Year One)

Several posters have asked me to post about the CIA, so here it is. Looks like I'm doing this in two installments. Feel free to ask questions.

Life and Times at the CIA

Senior year of college at Emory University I decided that I might like to cook for a living. So I get a job at a local pizzaria to confirm this desire. I start looking into culinary schools and quickly learn that the best in all the land is the Culinary Institute of America. I also find a good school in my home town which would be less expensive considering I'd be able to live with my parents and bike to school. However, the CIA is the best so if I could get in, that is where I wanted to go. I applied.

The CIA is the only culinary school in America that actually denies some applicants. Their acceptance rate is still around 67% though. Regardless, I was thrilled when I was accepted. They admitted me to the Oct 21, 2002 starting class. There are 16 different starting dates. About 90 students per start date. These would be the 90 students with whom I would take all of my classes for the next two years. Now, 18 of those students are in the Baking and Pastry program, while 72 are with me in the Culinary Arts program. Our 72 are further divided into evening and morning classes. 36 of us would take classes starting at 7am, ending around 1:30. The other 36 take the exact same classes from 2:00-9:00. My 36 are further divided into two groups of 18 for cooking classes. That is, I'd be taking a 6-hour, 5-day a week cooking class with the same 18 people for 9 months. Now, that's a bit of an exageration, halfway through, the 2 AM-groups get rejumbled. Point is, you spend A LOT of time with the same group of students.

I've been careful saying "students" instead of "kids". At 22, I was the third oldest in my group of 36. We had one 40-year old in our group. Most of the students in my group were 18 year-olds just out of HS. This may have had something to do with the Fall start date - our class averages were younger than CIA average. 12% of CIA students have a BA or better from a traditional 4-year college. I think 50-60% are just out of HS. The average age is 23. These students, most notably the young ones, are some of the most committed, driven students that I've ever had the pleasure of studying with. I was continually amazed by these 18-year olds considering that at that age I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living and was more interested in pot and basketball than anything else. So much of the Institute is student run. These kids create clubs on a whim and organize student-given lectures, get visiting lecturers/chefs, organize outings, etc. What is so incredible about this is the difficulty of continuity at the CIA. You have new students coming in every 3 weeks, old students graduating or leaving to go on externship (will explain later), not to mention the problem of AM/PM groupings dividing the student body in half. SOOO many student clubs doing so many exciting things. It was awesome. AND so many students taking advantage of these opportunities. I "learned" how to ice-carve (I've done only 2 sculptures) thanks to these groups.

The first 6 weeks were spent in academic classrooms taking classes like Culinary Math, Product Knowledge, Gastronomy, and food safety. These would be just like classes at any college. We'd meet 2 or 3 times a week for 2 hours or 90 minutes. Dress code would be either Business casual or chef's whites (chef jacket and houndstooth pants). During this time, 7 of us get together and form a basketball team to play in an intramural league (the league was divided into AM and PM divisions). Those games were a lot of fun. I lived on campus in a tiny dormroom shared with two others. The Campus at Hyde Park is absolutely beautiful. It is right on the banks of the Hudson River in a quiet town just north of Poughkeepsie.

Halfway through this academic session, we are told we need to pick a group leader. The group leader's primary responsibility is to meet with the teacher of our next class (we take a new class every 3 weeks, and only one 30-hour a week class at a time). The group leader also has to take some measure of responsibilty for keeping the group cohesive. The group leader gets a shiny pin. It is gold.

OK, so at the end of the first 6 weeks of academic classes, we go to our first kitchen class. Meat and seafood Identification. We spend 7 days butchering meat for production kitchens and 7 days fileting fish. These classes would work like so: we arrive at 7AM, and sit down for 30-45 minutes of lecture. Then we'd go into the back and start our butchery. After 2 hours of butchery, we'd eat lunch from one of the production kitchens - perhaps even eating meat or fish that we had butchered the previous day. We'd get back from lunch, and go directly back to more butchery - maybe another hour and a half. We'd finish the class with another 30-45 minute lecture. These classes were fun, but the fish room was damn cold. I learned so much and forgotten at least half of it, I'm sure. We'd get graded on academic and kitchen performance. I got my worst grade at the CIA, an embarrassing C- in Seafood identifictation. The teacher of that class, Chef Clark, is perhaps my favorite Chef in the whole world. He's on that short list of best teachers I've ever had. This man learned to cook in the US navy in Vietnam. He stayed in cooking, obv, and had a distinguished carreer, I'm sure (all of our teachers did). He was incredibly strict. One day he locked me and two others out of the classroom for failing to return in time after a 5-minute break. I had left the classroom 30 seconds earlier to visit the water fountain across the hall. When he let us in, he told us to "pack our knives and go" - that he was failing us. We knew better by that time than to argue, but mercifully, it was a bluff. This man told us some awesome cooking stories, but more importantly, he built the foundation for a professional attitude towards cooking.

After butchery, we move to three more cooking classes - Skills I, Skills II, and, yes, Skills III. Skills III is our first production kitchen - we'd cook meals for other students or CIA personal to eat. Skills I & II were a total of 28 days with the same teacher spending 2 days on potatoes, 3 days on eggs, etc - we learned things like how to make a Hollandaise or how to make a consomme. Every day we'd have a timed kinfe skills development period - Chop an onion, chop parsely, chop carrots to a particular size, etc. We'd then show our product to the chef who would tell us how to do it better/faster. A "Medium dice" is a cut measuring .5x.5x.5. We need to know how to do this exactly so that when a chef tells us, "give me a medium dice of potatoes - 2 pounds" he doesn't have to waste time showing us the size of the dice that he wants. These knife skills cuts are then given to production kitchens for their use. We are also making stocks for production kitchens (and for our education).

After the skills kitchens, we move on to regional cuisines. 3 weeks of Asia, 3 weeks of the Americas. These are production kitchens in which we are cooking for other students and administrators. In Asias, for example, I'd be on a 3-man team (probably 4-5 women in a class of 18). Each day we'd have a different assignment. Lets say the first 3 days of Asia were Chinese cuisine - we'd wok stir-fried pork on day one, roll spring rolls on day two, and on day three we'd make the hot & sour soup. The night before we'd write out recipes (98% of the time given to us by the Chef) and we'd divide up responsibilities within our team - i.e., "you cut the Carrots, onions, and peppers, I'll gather and mix our sauce." In these classes, we'd spend 30-45 minutes at 7am going over our minimal homework (term identification, perhaps reading a certain section of On Food And Cooking, etc) We'd then prepare lunch for the student body. We'd eat our own lunch (whatever we cooked that wasn't "sold") and then return to clean the kitchen. We'd then spend 30-45 minutes discussing the region of the day and its food.

If you're curious, a member of the student body can't just choose to eat from Asias one day and then from Americas the next. Every student had an assigned kitchen to get their meals from and a card to swipe insuring that they are at the correct kitchen. You still get incredible variety of food - 5 entrees per day, and for these cuisine classes, you knew that the class was cooking New England food today, but tomorrow it might be SW US food, or northern mexican food. I have NEVER in my life eaten as good as I did at the CIA. MY GOD! The amazing thing is these are all dishes that the students have NEVER MADE BEFORE!!!! They come in at 7am on Day one knowing nothing and then must produce food for someone else to eat 4 hours later. The Chef/instructors just have great systems in place allowing it all to work. Much credit must be given to the Chefs for making this work. We'd also have the Bakers bring over their creations from across the way for dessert.

The two most difficult classes were Breakfast and Lunch Cookery. For Day one of Breakfast, we reported to class at 2:30 AM. Every other day it was 4:00 AM. We'd be cooking breakfast not just for a small handfull of people, but for EVERYONE. All AM students had the right to eat breakfast meaning we had to be ready to cook for over 100. This is difficult.

The final class before externship is Garde Manger (pronounced Gar-mon-je). This is where we learn the art of the cold kitchen.... or salads. Also pates, tourines, amuses, cheese, gelees, etc. We were also excitedly telling each other where we would be spending the next 5 months. I would be going to Hawaii for my externship (which was AWESOME!). This has gotten quite long, so I'm cutting it short here. In the next installment I'll talk about my externship, year 2, and now that you've got the groundwork for how the school works, I might talk about things like how the class got along, etc.