Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

But it was very different. The entire student body was older than me. Many were in their late twenties and were career-changers, or people who had started at a traditional university before deciding to pursue a culinary education.

Even more surprising was that the general attitude of the students was poor. I went in there to do one thing and one thing only: cook. I wanted to soak up all of the knowledge I could in the shortest amount of time possible. I had been a cook for years already, but this was my ticket to becoming a chef. Most of the students looked at the classes as an inconvenient interruption of their leisure activities. While they were going out to bars and partying, I hit the gym every day and then spent each night reading cookbooks.

I started buying culinary magazines like Food & Wine and Gourmet while standing in the grocery store checkout line. They didn’t carry those titles in St. Clair, and I had never been exposed to fine dining. Suddenly, these cookbooks and magazines vastly expanded my awareness of the scope of the gastronomic world. There was this huge world that I wanted to explore, but I was incredibly naive. I had no understanding of the difference between haute cuisine and the classical education that I was exposed to every day. I joined the ice-carving club thinking it was going to be an important skill for me as a chef. I had no idea what a Michelin star was.

I breezed through the first several classes without any problem—they were incredibly basic. We began by learning how to hold and sharpen a knife, and then over the course of a week or two we progressed to actually learning how to cut something properly. Don and I would roll our eyes at these tasks—the knife already felt like a natural extension of our hands at this point—but to most of the class this was new information.

“This is stupid and a complete waste of time and money,” Don would say after we came home from class and settled into the tiny dorm room we shared. And really, I didn’t disagree.

We already had basic knife skills, knew basic kitchen etiquette, and most important, understood how a commercial kitchen operated. We were quick to task and had a strong sense of urgency. And we knew how to season food.

But slowly I changed my opinion, and I began to understand why the CIA curriculum started every student at point zero regardless of his background. Just because I worked in a diner since I was five didn’t mean that I knew the right way to do things. Sure, I could get by, but what they were teaching us was based on years and years of refinement, so much so that they were culinary traditions. I was willing to rethink the basics because it became clear that I had a lot to learn. And one of those things was simply patience.

Before I left home, my dad bet me that I couldn’t stay on the dean’s list the entire time I was there. I had nothing but my pride to wager, but my dad offered up his 1985 Corvette, along with a personal restoration and paint job—any color I wanted.

During my entire enrollment at the CIA I received only one mark below 85. Most of my scores were in the nineties, and I was confident I would finish my first six-month semester still above water on the car wager. The only class remaining before we went on our six-month externship was AM Pantry.

AM Pantry was basically cooking breakfast. It was going to be a lay-up. If there was one thing in the kitchen that I felt comfortable with, it was eggs and frying pans.

We had to wake at 4:20 every morning and make our way into a cafeteria-style kitchen, where we were lectured on the proper way to cook hash browns and flip eggs. I got a better course on that when I was seven years old. The instructor tried to humiliate the students one by one, and when she was done we would cook breakfast for the rest of the student body, manning the cafeteria line shoulder-to-shoulder to scoop the food out institution-style.

“Why don’t you show the group how well you can do this,” she snarled in my direction.

“Okay. How many orders do you want?” I asked as I reached across the stove for more pans and turned the gas on to fire up a few more burners. I really didn’t like this instructor and had decided to show her how to cook eggs. “You want humiliation?” I thought to myself. “Game on.”

I dipped the ladle into the clarified butter and splashed it into two pans. As I started for the third she physically stopped me and said, “Why don’t you start with just one?”

I ignored her, grabbed two eggs in each hand and with a swift, smooth motion cracked them simultaneously on the edges of the pans. My fingers hinged the shells open one egg at a time, while keeping the other eggs at the ready. Five seconds later the eggs were in their respective pans—boom, boom, boom, boom. I dropped the emptied shells in the garbage and repeated. The eggs bubbled in the butter. She was pissed.

She leaned in close to the pans to find eggshells that had fallen in.

Nothing.

I flipped both sets over, waited forty-five seconds, and flipped them back. Then I turned them onto the awaiting plates. They were absolutely perfect, the best I could do. I quietly stepped back to the group and Don gave me a big smirk.

I got a C minus in AM Pantry. But it was worth it.

The CIA required all students to leave the school and gain practical experience at an accredited food-service establishment for the six months directly in the middle of the eighteen-month associate-degree program. Even though I wasn’t entirely convinced that I needed or wanted any more practical experience, I started doing