Basic Culinary at CIA and Chicken Jambalaya in Hong Kong

Yesterday I got back into Hong Kong after two weeks in Hyde Park. Slept through most of the day (and tossed through the night).

Week two was Basic Culinary. There were fourteen students in my class, including three parent-offspring pairs - father-daughter x 2 and mother-daughter. What a really nice thing to do together! Hopefully one day one of my children (!) would think it's cool to do this with me.

As expected, it was more grueling than Baking the week before - day One started off easy enough, with us spending most of the kitchen time learning to chop vegetables and fruit the right way. Of course, I'd been holding my knife and cutting wrongly the entire time - you're supposed to curl the fingers of the non-knife holding hand so that you don't chop off anything human on yourself, and grasp the handle of the knife firmly with the other hand, without the forefinger sticking out.

We learned to slice, chop and dice vegetable and fruit into different sizes, the professional way - as well as mince, batonnet and julienne. My favourite was the Supreme technique- where you peel the citrus fruit into one continuous long peel and then cut out pretty slices for presentation on a dinner plate. Chef also demonstrated how to make fresh pasta from scratch - simply 1 part flour to 1 part eggs, but it was the technique of flattening the pasta and cutting that was the challenge.

The rest of the days passed by in a blur of various cooking techniques - dry heat cooking with fat and oils (eg deep frying and sautéing.stir frying), the making of sauces, dry-heat cooking with little fat (eg roasting and grilling), moist heat and combination cooking (poaching, steaming, stewing and braising). We had for lunch each except for the first day when the student assistants (ie future chefs) cooked for us, we ate what we cooked that morning - each team basically cooks different items and everything is shared buffet style.

Chef Skibitcky was American and was a gregarious man in his late 50s/early 60s who had been teaching in the culinary for about 10 years, and headed the UN headquarters kitchen and various restaurants before ending up at the culinary.

Chef demoing pasta making

My most memorable item that I made was macaroni and cheese - there are tons of ways to make macaroni and cheese - I even vaguely recall a way that utilised Campbell's Cream of Chicken when we were teenagers (correct, Esther and girls??). The one we were taught in class was a bit more... professional/gourmet (!?). Bechamel sauce was made from scratch from flour, clarifier butter and milk, and that was the main binding cream. Cheddar was used, and generous chunks of bacon. The salty meat made the entire dish less rich and more palatable and that was a good thing because it meant you can eat a lot more!

the vegetable component - wheatberries, spinach, red lettuce .

 On the last day, in our teams, we were given a basket of items and we came up with our own menus and cooked them based on that, ensuring each item is used. Each team had a different basket and the results were quite beautiful as well as tasty!

my team's creation - miso glazed cod on a bed of clam croquette, with snowpeas, pepper and winter squash

We also had two beautiful organised meals at the American Bounty and the Escoffier - fine dining restaurants at the CIA. More on those later.

Oh, and finally, a quick mention about the Chicken Jambalaya I made for dinner tonight back in Hong Kong - the student assistants made this for us for lunch on day one and it was so delicious I had to try to do it at home, with much success, I'm happy to say!

It was surprisingly easy - recipe loosely adapted from here, though I left out the onions and garlic, and used regular vegetable oil to brown my chicken instead of olive oil.  I used two drumsticks and two chicken legs and the result was the moist, slightly paella-y and risotto-esque texture that I remember with the chicken tender and nicely browned and deliciously savoury with tomatoes and the various herbs.

Baking Boot Camp at the Culinary Institute of America

I'm sitting here in my hotel room, just before 7 in the morning, on the saturday after a week at the CIA - Culinary Institute of America - attending the Baking Boot Camp class. It's nippy out there, about 3 degrees celsius and I grabbed a cup of hot tea from the breakfast table downstairs and am sitting here munching on the chocolate chip and cinnamon scone we made in class last week.

The CIA at Hyde Park - a 1.5 hours drive from New York City, was founded in 1946 and is the premier culinary school in the United States - in fact, it's the only school in the US that is fully dedicated to the pursuit of culinary arts. There are two other campuses in the US, and the Hyde Park is the original one. I'd been looking forward to these two classes for months!

I'd signed up for two classes back to back - the Baking Boot Camp and the Cooking Boot Camp - both basic starter classes designed to provide both a culinary vacation in the fully immersed environment of a full fledged culinary school as well as go back to the basics of Baking and Cooking.

And I haven't baked in years and can count on one hand the number of times I've done a cookie or a brownie from a box in my decades on this earth!

Our class had thirteen students, consisting primarily of people who have been baking and cooking for many years at home, even including a couple of them who own a bakery and online cookie store back home. I guess I was the only true novice, but the Chef instructor - Chef Juergen Temme from Germany - made everything seem not toooo difficult to accomplish even though I felt I obviously lacked the flourish and ease that the other students seem to have. Though I still managed to churn out quite tasty products indeed!

For 4 days, I kneaded dough, used a mixer for the first time in my life, and made savoury biscuits, cookies, scones, pound cake, and braided bread dough to make a giant challah, shaped dough to make baguettes, and oh yes! pies! My team did an apple and chocolate cream pie. And we made our own lunch of pizzas on the last day.

The most interesting part for me apart from the actual class and lectures, was being amongst the students doing their associate (2 year) and bachelor (4 year) programs. A large proportion of them came fresh from High School with the requisite minimum 6 months of real experience in a kitchen (excluding fast food kitchens like Mcdonalds and Starbucks) for either cooking or baking, and some of them already have an initial (non culinary) bachelor's degree. The average age of the students is 23, and classes looked intense! I also saw the occasional student who looked more mature - in their 50s and beyond. Career changers, I imagine.

Basically, everything you eat  and that takes place at the CIA is made by and made to happen by the students - from the mass production kitchen (the cafeteria where we breakfasted and lunched everyday)  to the French and American restaurants Escoffier and American Bounty and the casual cafe Apple Pie Bakery. The service staff is made up of students too, obviously - even as you're studying to be a chef (Back of House), they want you to understand the Front of House, in particular if you plan to open a restaurant or head up a kitchen in the future.

Oh boy, I sure envied those students - rushing from class to class, 12-15 hour days hands on in the kitchens, being yelled at by their chefs. I'm not sure if I would ever go to full time culinary school since the original idea isn't to open a restaurant or be a purveyor of fine cakes online, but I suppose it was a combination of non stop learning in this beautiful, immersive environment, and the idea that you have your whole life ahead of you, that made me feel a bit wistful.

More deep dive details about the week to come!