Day Two

Today I became part of a French culinary school tradition that is centuries old, so Chef tells me. Chef is the guy who will instruct me and evaluate me over the next few months. The best of the industry's best, he explained, began their own career's with this same tradition. This tradition is for first year students to make La Soupe a L'Oignon Gratinee (French Onion Soup) on their first kitchen day.

French Onion Soup is one of my faves and I'd made it numerous times before. This will be a fabulous and fun day, I thought.

A fab day it was, as I was in a kitchen instead of a cubicle, but Le Soupe was much harder to make than I anticipated. A properly made French Onion requires perfect execution of onion carmalization. When I failed to carmalize my onions perfectly, I was shocked. Not only did I think of myself as an advanced home cook, but I've been carmalizing onions for as long as I can remember. Had I really been doing it WRONG the entire time?!

Turns out, to carmalize onions properly, one must stop carmalizing exactly when the onions have achieved an equal balance of sweetness and bitterness. Onions begin bitter and turn sweet as they release water and carmalize. If carmalization continues for too long, the onions turn back to bitter. Onions which are too bitter, or too sweet, are highly detectable in French Onion (since onion is really the only ingredient). In the end, I made La Seriously Sucks Soupe, and therefore will be re-making it tomorrow.

The afternoon consisted of a two hour lecture about recipe writing, delivered by the Head of Everything. He believes 99% of recipes on the Internet are utter garbage, not to mention unprofessionally written. Ok, I thought, he is now going to reveal where to find good recipes and detail exactly how a recipe should be written. He pulled through...I think.

Apparently, over the next six months I will learn every recipe I'll ever need to generate A+ food. I'm required to record these recipes, to the exact standard of the Head of Everything, and keep them in a notebook so I'll never have to surf the web for recipes again. No worries, I will share the fruits of my labor with all.

He provided a "recipe," written to his standard, as a model for us to follow.

La Soupe a L'Oignon
Ingredients
Onion
Fat
Liquid
Wine

Method
-Carmalize onion
-Deglaze
-Add liquid and simmer until it is finished

THAT is what he calls a well written recipe? No one said it, but we must have been wearing our thoughts on our faces. He only said, "Zhis is not zee lhast 'oh sheet' moment you will hav here."