The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (10 page)

 

On a balmy June evening, the volunteers straggled into the kitchen one by one. To each we handed an apron, a notebook, and a cloth diaper.

“They make the best side towels,” Lisa explained of the diapers to the puzzled volunteers. “The middle is padded, so it's like an oven mitt. You use it to pick up hot pans and stuff.” Neither of us said it, but they're also dirt cheap.

Shannon picked one up and laughed. “I have these exact same diapers at home. I just don't picture them in a kitchen.”

“I swear, these are new,” I said.

“Oh, I believe you,” Shannon said, worried that she'd offended. “I just think it's funny.”

Diapers in hand, they wrote their names on pieces of masking tape because I had not thought to get name tags. They took it in stride and slapped the masking tape to their chests.

As Mike noted, our Seattle kitchen was too small to teach more than a couple of students at a time. If you've never tried, finding a kitchen that can accommodate a dozen students proves a bit more complicated than you might expect. Only a few days before the first class, I managed to secure the use of a kitchen owned by a catering company. I discovered the place via Anne-Catherine,
¹¹
one of my fellow classmates at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, affectionately known as “Ace.” “I can't wait to move to Seattle. It's where I want to spend the rest of my life,” Ace told the group while sipping
vin rouge
on a crisp fall Parisian evening out with our fellow students at a beaux arts bistro near Les Halles. My dream transported me to Paris, while hers was to settle in Seattle. Ace served as the executive chef of the catering company for a time and held a series of communal dinners in the kitchen's small dining room before she left to open her own restaurant.

The owner required a business license, insurance, and state health cards in order for us to rent her place. Lisa and I sat through a threehour kitchen sanitation and safety class with several hundred aspiring kitchen workers. The short version: Wash your hands often for at least twenty seconds, roughly the time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice, and don't defrost meat in the trunk of your car.

Everything secured, the owner handed me the first set of keys that I've ever had to a commercial kitchen. It wasn't
Top Chef
. The kitchen is housed in a 1950s storefront, most recently the site of a pizza joint. The extremely canted windows bring to mind the architectural works of Mike Brady. The trapezoid-shaped room feels as if it started life as a coin-operated laundry or perhaps a dry cleaner. The neighbors include a jumble of houses, a Chinese food joint, used-car dealerships, old-school mini-malls, and a Cuban place known for its mojitos.

Somehow, the owner made this spot work. A rugged six-burner gas stove anchored one wall, flanked by a grill and a pair of well-worn pastry ovens. A matching set of handsome stainless steel refrigerators lined the other wall to complement a six-by-eight-foot walk-in cooler. Organization reigned in the chrome industrial racks around the room, piled with the stuff you'd expect to find in a catering kitchen: stacks of plates, serving pieces, industrial-sized jars of oils, vinegars, condiments, and spices, plastic bins, bottles, pitchers, boxes of glasses, cooking utensils, stacks of pans and bowls. It smelled vaguely of floor cleaner, residual cooking odors, and the lavender growing in the front planter box.

The owner left Post-it notes stuck throughout the kitchen. The tone varied from shrill to verge-of-hysteria warnings: “For catering use ONLY!”; “DO
NOT
FORGET TO TURN OFF LIGHTS!” Despite its quirky charm, or maybe because of it, I felt lucky to have found this place.

Their hands washed after multiple renditions of “Happy Birthday” and their diapers tucked into their white aprons, the volunteers stared nervously at the pile of knives.

Each volunteer hauled in her own knives from home as instructed. The cutlery cluttered the stainless steel tables pushed together in the center of the room. With that, the project officially began.

I toured the selection. Sabra had purchased her serrated-knife block set with five knives for twenty dollars because “they looked cool,” she said. Trish had a set of Cutco knives custom made to fit into a shallow drawer in a house she no longer owned; she admitted that she used only a blunt vegetable knife for all tasks. Donna showed off a wedding present, an eleven-piece set from the Pampered Chef, kept pristine in the original protective covers. Cheryl brought in her knives, drawer and all, which featured everything from a few antique Ginsus to some classic all-carbon cleavers to her husband's assortment of hunting knives. Shannon had a set of expensive German knives, a wedding present from years earlier. Andra took three buses from Sea-Tac to get to the kitchen. “Sorry, I left the bigger ones at home. I didn't want to carry a big bag of knives on the bus,” she said.

“Okay, show me your favorite knife, the one you use most of the time. Hold them up.” They raised their knives aloft, like tentative knights at a medieval feast fearing their swords would not pass muster. Most held a vegetable or a paring knife. Only one person lifted a chef's knife. I had them put their arms down. I asked why more people didn't use a chef's knife.

“That kind of knife scares me,” Trish said. “It's so big.”

Sabra shrugged. “What different does it make? A knife is a knife.”

“Most of these knives look pretty expensive,” Andra said, perusing the collection.

“Your mileage will vary,” I replied. In an effort to present the spectrum, Lisa had raided a restaurant supply store and purchased several Mundial plastic-handled chef's knives, the default tool of restaurants everywhere. I had picked up a twenty-five-dollar OXO knife at Target and a ten-dollar knife at IKEA. I set them out next to my own collection of knives, a United Nations–style parade of metallurgy made by Wüsthof, Shun, Henckels, Global, and Sabatier and a ceramic number by Kyocera, among others. “Since I wrote a book with the word
knife
in it, people give me knives,” I explained. “Maybe my next book title should include
diamonds, cash,
or
Learjet
.”

We went through Knife Anatomy 101, starting with the obvious. “As you can guess, the blade is the sharp part. The blunt back of the blade is a spine, just like a book. Many knives sport a raised lip edge near the handle known as a bolster.

“See this Wüsthof?” Like a hand model, I stroked the length of the knife. “This is what we call a ‘full tang' because the blade extends all the way to the butt of the knife. It's held together by rivets. A bolster is heavy, designed to help balance the knife.” I put it down and picked up one of the inexpensive restaurant knives. “See? I bet the tang extends about an inch into the handle. Second, no bolster. It's flat.” That means that the knife has been stamped out of a sheet of metal, kind of like a cookie cutter. To make a knife with a bolster requires forging,
¹²
a more complicated process that requires human interaction, and so it's always more expensive.

“Take two key considerations into account when buying a knife. The steel and ‘the feel.' You want a knife with the kind of steel that can take an edge and hold it.” Not all steel is created equal. Harder steel takes an edge better, resulting in a sharper knife. But particularly hard steel can be brittle and trickier to maintain.

There's a complicated measure of hardness,
¹³
but for most retail knives the main concern is carbon content. “Carbon makes steel stronger. If you look for the phrase ‘high-carbon steel,' that's a start.” For instance, the knives from Victorinox, of Swiss Army knife fame, are made from high-carbon steel, and their chef's knives start at around thirty dollars.

“Marketers don't talk about steel since most consumers don't care,” Lisa chimed in. “Instead, their job is to try to blind you with a lot of features. They know that people like value, so they will pack a set with all kinds of cheap knives, but the reality is that you don't need them all.”

“Okay, here's what I use.” I picked up an eight-inch extra-wide German knife. “I used this one throughout my training at Le Cordon Bleu. It's heavy, but I have small hands, and for some reason, the extra weight just feels good to me. How a knife fits into your hand is the ‘feel.' Go to a place that has a good selection of knives, such as a cookware store, cutlery shop, and some department stores or restaurant supply places. Feel the subtle differences in the weight and the grip of the handle. A comfortable knife is a highly personal thing.

“Next, buy only the knives you'll use. Start with a good chef's knife. Supplement that with a paring knife and a bread knife.” I picked up my German-made bread knife. “With care, good knives last for a long time. My mom bought me this for my birthday nearly twenty years ago. Other than my life, still arguably the best gift she ever gave me.”

Trish asked, “What about a vegetable knife?”

“Honestly, I don't know what you would do with a vegetable knife that you couldn't do with a chef's knife or a paring knife,” I told her. “I use a chef's knife at least ninety percent of the time. I use a paring knife once in a while. I have a boning knife and a cleaver from my set from Le Cordon Bleu that I break out a few times a year. I haven't used my fillet knife in months. My chef friend Ted has four knives: a chef's knife, a paring knife, a bread knife, and a fillet knife. That's it. He was a professional chef for twelve years.”

Dri raised an eyebrow and nodded her head. “All of this is good to know,” she said. “My budget can handle getting one good knife. I was looking at three hundred dollars for a block set and thinking, There's no way.”

“You can get a decent knife for thirty to fifty dollars, and that's a better deal than buying a cheap block set,” I said. “But honestly, if you spend money on anything in your kitchen, invest it in the best knife that you can afford. If you take care of it, you'll have it for twenty or thirty years.”

I looked at the clock. “Okay, no more looking. Find a chef's knife and pick it up. You can use any of mine, too.” The women stirred, staking out a spot at the stainless steel table.

Cheryl reached for a Henckels knife close to her. She had her infant son, Liam, strapped to her bosom in a BabyBjörn. “I couldn't get a sitter,” she had explained at the start of class. “Don't worry. I cook with him like this all the time.” It is not every day that you see a baby next to a pile of a hundred knives. Liam reached for the shiny, pretty things. Cheryl kissed his head as she pulled his small hand back, “Oh, no, sweet pea, those are not for you.”

“Show me how you hold a knife.” All of them held it the way that I had before I went to culinary school, by making a fist around the handle.

“Don't strangle your knife,” I said. “You want to sort of shake hands with it. Place the handle across your palm. Wrap your hand around it. With your thumb and index finger, pinch the juncture where the blade meets the handle. This will be on the bolster, if your knife has one. This should leave your other three fingers tucked around the handle.”

I watched as they all tried this out, a study in collective awkwardness and furrowed brows. Lisa and I walked around the table, inspecting and adjusting holds here and there. It reminded me of my first day in the kitchen at Le Cordon Bleu, when the pleasant Chef Bruno Stihl walked through and stopped to correct my own grip on my brand-new knife.
“Non,”
he said as he gently unwrapped my fist and carefully reworked my fingers into the correct position. He held my hand in his as he demonstrated the rocking motion to use when cutting.
“Oui, comme ça. Un couteau doit être une extension de votre main,”
he said, smiling, and then walked away. Loosely, the phrase translates to ‘Your knife should be one with your hand.' Once I figured out that phrase in French, I never forgot it. I never thought a knife demo could make me so nostalgic.

“How does that feel?”

“Weird,” Sabra said. Other people nodded.

“It's a little bit like how you hold a golf club,” Trish observed, looking at her knife as if it had somehow just become miraculously attached to her body.

“The reason you want to hold it like this is that you'll have more control over the blade,” I said. “Plus, your hand won't get as fatigued. Okay, now hand your knife to the person on your right, handle first.
Carefully
.”

“This one is a lot heavier,” Sabra said. She had been holding an inexpensive knife from her own block and shifted to a Japanese brand. “This is, like, well, a real knife.”

“This is why it's great if you can test out a knife before you buy it. A comfortable knife will prompt you to chop more, which will encourage you to cook, and that's the whole point,” I said.

Someone asked where to store knives without a block, so I pulled out a simple black plastic sheath that clipped on to the blade. “This is a knife cover. Slip it on like this”—I clicked it in place over a blade—“and voilà. It will protect your knives and your hands from the blade when fumbling around in a drawer.” Magnetic strips on a wall work great. Mike ingeniously snapped powerful bar magnets from IKEA on the inside of our stainless steel stove hood. Knives snap solidly to the outside, up and out of the way. “I wash them by hand as soon as I use them, and then bang! They snap right to the magnet, high and out of the way.” That brought up an important point.

“Always wash knives by hand. Never, ever, put a knife in the dishwasher. Steel is tempered with heat. The high heat from your dishwasher will damage the steel, dull the edge, and probably not do much for your handle either. Knives should never go into the dishwasher. Ever. Say it, everyone.”