The violent hiss of oil just under smoke point. The waves of steam spilling into the dining room area. The glowing eyeballs of a delighted diner. The pleasing contrast of an elevated burger in a shoddy neighborhood. The scrappy and furious clanking of spatula in the criminally underrated food truck.
Food as craft, I live and breathe it. But it wasn’t always that way. Passion needs a little heat sometimes.
My food adventures spawned in my teen years, when I enrolled in the Sussex County Technical School culinary arts program in Northern New Jersey. I remember the application form with its distinctive yellow color: Interrogating me, sizing me up. Who knew that was a glimpse of what was to come?
The program featured a rotation of a bake shop, a kitchen, and a dining service component with a teacher in each. It was a bootcamp, and each teacher was intense. People on the east coast can be a little nasty sometimes when you're in the thick of it working alongside them. That Jersey intensity shines through in the operation of a kitchen. So pair that with an already hardcore teaching style and it felt like I was going to be deployed to a cookie baking war somewhere after graduation.
I was a skinny timid teenager, ill prepared for the bizarre evolution of palette, appreciation for all the minutia, and the deep satisfaction that comes with learning to cook.
Bake Shop
I started with the bake shop rotation. The bake shop was a legitimate operation: commercial scale, store front, cakes, cookies, breads, custom orders, you name it. Every day, students could pop in and buy chocolate chip cookies, Irish soda bread, cheesecakes, and other goods. We even fried donuts on the regular.
Each week you had to bake something, bring it in to class, show the class, and bear the brunt of the instructor. Mr. G was his name. Any substandard results would be ripped to shreds, or face an only slightly milder flavor of ridicule.
Students had to learn almost every aspect of the operation, short of closing the books. In retrospect I was there going with the flow to learn because I loved to cook, but I was really receiving a training in entrepreneurship. The cool thing about bake shop was you got to get your hands on every part of the job. There were no permanent roles or duties, you were constantly forced to try new skills and tasks and were punished for staying complacent. You need to go make bread now Mr. cookie man!
Only one job was sort of sacred in the bake shop. The most skill intensive. Cake decorating.
I could not even begin to master cake decorating. It was a rare individual that excelled at this aspect of baking craft, and it wasn't me. They had the fine-tuned motor skills and visual design skills to make the frosting into something meaningful. Mess and chaos like to follow me around so my feeble attempts at cake decorating looked like a Candyland crime screne. The instructor, at it for years, seemed to reserve his last bit of passion for cake decorating. The students who had the talent in this regard were clearly his favorites. It was hard to get mentorship in bake shop if you weren’t good with the cakes.For the rest of the cake delinquents, there was the arena of massive bags of flour, gigantic mixing machines, huge wooden benches, and lots of sweeping to do. If you didn’t have the cake skills, you spent a ton of time measuring flour, baking powder, scooping lard, running trays of cookies to and from the ovens, and all the other operational work.
My instructor didn’t like me much. While I was very in the zone when I cooked, baking was kind of boring to me. I hated the tedium of measurement. I hated that there was no chance to course correct a batch of improperly measured ingredients for a bread, or a burned rack of cookies. I remember I was working at the front counter, staring off into space one afternoon. It was like 3pm and boy do I hate that time of day. He snuck up on me and yelled, “what are you doing?” I nearly defecated myself. “You’re always daydreaming, you’re a space cadet.” Excellent, more feedback. Thank you, sir, for the feedback.
Culinary Arts
The kitchen component of this course was epic and forever solidified me as a passionate foodie. That’s why I’m putting it number two, it’s the meat of my sandwich.
I was having some bad luck in this program though. The kitchen instructor just like bake shop also hated me at first, like really hated me. I was really striking out with these instructors for some reason.
He was an extremely intense guy in general though. His face would turn bright red and he would lose it when the class wasn’t focused during his lectures.
The kitchen was connected to the regular high school cafeteria. One time he walked out during lunch when I was sitting with my friends. I forgot exactly what he said but he called me out for some mistake, at the top of his lungs, in this very public forum. I was humiliated and terrified of him for a while.
But nonetheless I kept showing up to class excited to learn. For a PlayStation addicted middle class suburban kid, this was my first real exposure to something the world could offer beyond the limits of my bedroom walls.
The kitchen was also commercial scale. Professional ranges, walk in coolers, and an arsenal of very sharp chef knives. Stock pots would be simmering soups and sauces, meats grilled to a succulent finish, and a plethora of vegetables roasting in the ovens. I learned how to prepare the five mother sauces, the difference between a chiffonade and a julienne, and how to juggle tasks. I was in love with every minute of it.
There was something special about slipping into a chef’s jacket. I felt like I was playing the role of someone I really wanted to be. The ritual of putting on the coat made me feel like I was stepping into a new universe every morning at the start of class. A universe where I belonged.
My most important lesson from the kitchen class was the power of learning fundamental techniques. Once you have the basics down, the world of possibilities skyrockets. You can take any variety of ingredients and spin up dishes on the fly. You transcend the recipe. This principle, I take with me to any new skill or endeavor now.
So much of what you learn in a kitchen extends past how to thicken a sauce with a roux. Not only do you learn how to satisfy a hungry patron, but you learn how to serve the world.
No longer am I scared of the unknown. You learn to chop your way through anything, and that the power of practice and repetition are transferrable to anything in life.
The Dining Room
The dining room component exposed me to something spectacular as well: structured chaos. In the dining room, you had to take orders from faculty and staff, running finished dishes from the kitchen out to the diners to satisfy the lunch rush. There was a real pressure to be timely while keeping composure. Modern work often presents this challenging balance. You must place nice in the sandbox, and heaven forbid you ever lose your cool.
The frenetic dance, the orchestrated action among disparate teens. The restaurant line is just like this it turns out. It turns you into an overly productive psycho, craving chaos and fearing the post rush stillness.
Occasionally a high-status person would show up at lunch to dine, and there was extra pressure to perform. You see, the dining room was a sort of external reflection of the quality of the program. If administrators were in to dine, they weren’t just there to munch on a Cesar salad, they were sizing up the whole show. The plates and silverware required impeccable placement. The napkins had to be folded just right.
It was a game of opposites, quantity and quality had to be achieved.
The dining service instructor was once again intense. But the cool thing about her was her extraordinary ability to delegate. She would shout commands through the dining room and could transform a disorganized mob into a well-oiled machine. She could execute through people, which looking back is truly a super skill I should have paid more attention to.
She had a way to ask and coach and get things done in a way that made you feel included and part of the mission. It was never condescending, even when the commands were harsh.
This is what exceptional soft skills looks like, the ability to speak in a way that moves people and makes change.
Graduation
I finished up school while working at a swanky lakeside upstart with a cigar smoking chef donning a Yankees cap.
I eagerly cut my teeth as a prep cook and dishwasher. I would work in restaurants for a few years, but then I moved on to a white collar 9–5.
I thought my adventures would lead me to study at Le Cordon Bleu, or perhaps climbing the ranks to executive chef somewhere in NYC.
Sadly, my delusions of grandeur faded, and I gave up the pursuit. The allure of college seduced me, and I altered course.
Yet my love of cooking persists.
You’ll likely find me operating around a heated oven or manning a sauté pan on any given weeknight, silently keeping the dream alive.