Beat it – Heat it – Eat it — Sweet!
The world of creating culinary delights begins early.
“Students were up and at it by 7:00 a.m. this morning,” says Chef Dean Massey, Instructor of Clover Park Technical College’s Culinary Arts Program.
“Is that normal on a production day when the restaurant’s open?” I ask.
“That’s normal every day,” Dean says. “One of the things I tell students right up front is that if you think this is a 9-5 job, that’s not the case. You’ll be working 10-12 hours a day, standing all day long, probably no breaks (or maybe a short one), you probably won’t eat all day –”
“What?! No eating?” I ask, incredulous. The irony!
“Well,” he says, “a lot of times you’re working from the moment you start to the time you finish – so if you get anything to eat, it’s very quick. You learn to eat -
fast.”
You may wonder where an instructor starts, with some students whipping up soufflés when they walk through the door and others posing a danger to themselves and others when wielding a knife. Safety is important, and the first day is focused on training about how to hold knives and carry knives while walking through the kitchen.
The course always starts at the beginning, assuming all students know nothing. In the cooking business, many people have learned bad habits or take short cuts. Dean’s job is to break those habits and retrain them, from the beginning, in the correct way.
The kitchen is a playground that’s fraught with opportunity for both divine creations and misadventure. When asked to recall an instance that stood out as memorable, Dean demurred, saying every day holds memorable experiences, from cut fingers to things catching on fire – it’s the nature of this fast-paced, crazy business.
The Culinary Arts Program kitchen has several stations to handle everything from appetizers to entrées to desserts: prep station, pantry station, bakery section, grill station, and sauté station. Most important is the lead station, which receives the tickets from the server who determines what foods are coming out of which stations, calls out the orders to those stations, and times everything so that all the food comes up at the same time, and within ten minutes. Ask any cook – this is a feat.
“Sounds like conducting an orchestra,” I say.
“We call it organized chaos,” Dean quips. “It’s a hands-on program where students do undertake book work to build their base of knowledge, but without cooking experience, the knowledge doesn’t mean a thing.
“When you get out of this course and are hired, from day one, you’re expected to know what a béchamel sauce is – and you don’t have time to read up on it. You’re here to perfect your skills. Part of the fun is making mistakes. Then you ask yourself, ‘Okay, what did I do wrong?’ And you do it again and again, until you get it right.”
Chefs-in-training start on the basics, such as a tomato sauce, béchamel sauce, demi-glace, hollandaise sauce, a velouté (a broth that is thickened with roux). These are the core recipes, and they branch out from there.
And talk about being well-stocked – there are almost 2,000 ingredients kept in-house, not counting special-order items.
Does Chef Massey assess every cook’s creations every day?
“Yes, every day,” he says. “Sometimes I taste it, sometimes I don’t – otherwise I’d be full – and fat. I assess and give feedback. Sometimes they like their creations, sometimes they don’t. That’s part of the fun.” And, of course, with all kinds of taste buds, what is one person’s fabulous creation is someone else’s “Ehhh…”
So is it true that restaurant kitchens house the stereotypical temperamental chef?
“A lot of chefs are always on the edge – because it’s a fast-paced business,” Dean says. “You must produce and customers are demanding. There may be some raised voices or some temper, but it doesn’t usually go to extremes, even when mistakes happen, like dropping a steak on the floor. You just start over.”
By the time they get to their fifth quarter, students are writing, producing, and costing-out menus along with creating recipes for the menu. At that point, they have arrived, they are chefs (student chefs not actual chefs). They are running the show, managing people, costing and managing recipes, and ordering supplies (for budget reasons, Dean controls ordering).
Besides a certificate in cooking that students can obtain in three quarters, they may also earn a degree by taking two more quarters, adding the management side, a very important component in determining whether a restaurant makes a profit or not. About half the restaurants that start up fail within five years because they lack skill in management.
The Culinary Arts Program also caters events. Students gain the experience that comes from catering events with typical volumes of 200 or 300 that the Rainier Room (holding around 50 people) cannot provide.
Dean took me on a walking tour of the kitchen, beginning with the prep station.
A student approaches us with her creation, salmon cakes with wasabi and lime sauce.
“How’s it taste?” Dean asks.
“Good!”
Dean smiles. “Good color.” He lifts up a corner of the cake and discovers that the underside has been burned. “Ahhhhh, trying to hide it!”
Something crashes to the floor behind us. “That’s part of the kitchen, too,” Dean says. “A lot of clangin’ and bangin’.” This place is hopping with 30 students!
Then he’s right back to another dish before him. “I’d like to see your chunks of lamb a little bigger. And you also have a lot of oil. What was your thickener?” The student replies that there wasn’t one. Dean coaches, “So you could skim off the oil during your cooking process, or you could add a thickener, like flour, that would bind those together. Those are two options.”
Another creation, Turmeric Curry Chicken appears. Dean asks to what temperature the chicken has been cooked. The student doesn’t miss a beat: 140 degrees (Chef Massey’s note: bone-in chicken is cooked to 165 deg., thin boneless chicken breast can be cooked to 140 deg.). Dean nods, gives a quick assessment: “Looks good, nice color, presentation, the grill marks are good -- missing a little over here, but for where he is as a first-quarter student, good job.”
I ask, “So do you cook with gas?”
Dean replies, “Gas is king in the kitchen.”
Next, we come to the grande-manger (pronounced: gärd-mä?-zh?) or pantry. Prepped ingredients for a salad stand ready in little refrigerated compartments; it should take no more than two minutes to put a salad together.
Then, there’s the bakery section. Corn bread, a tort, someone is separating egg yolks from whites into a large bowl. Commercial-sized Kitchen Aids are at work.
We walk over to the sauté station, fast-paced, Dean’s favorite. Later today, twelve burners will all be fired up. Chefs need to be very careful – and despite their care, it’s inevitable that they’ll get burned at some point. “It’s part of the business, it happens,” he explains.
I point to something above the burners. Dean explains that it’s a long broiler, for toasting items such as crème brûlée, or, in New York, they have rows of these, at 1,000-1,500 degrees, for cooking perfectly-seared steaks.
I want to know about students who are living the dream. Dean tells me about a student who was offered a sous chef position (second in command in the kitchen, under the head chef) at a restaurant in Lakewood. Another shining star is Corina Bakery in Tacoma (check out the bakery’s website for some gorgeous examples of their work), where three CPTC Culinary alums are living the dream. Another is head chef for the Tacoma Art Museum. Another is with Stanley & Seafort’s. And yet another is with Primo Grill in Tacoma. Many students, happily, have jobs before they graduate.
As all of CPTC’s students know, dreams come in all kinds of flavors. Those dreams achieved through the Culinary Arts Program are especially sweet and satisfying.
Dianne Bunnell
Clover Park Technical College
About Chef Dean Massey:
Dean Massey trained at Clover Park Technical College when it was still a technical institute (1987-88). He then went to work for Restaurants Unlimited, which is the national corporation that owns Stanley & Seafort’s, where he worked for ten years. Afterward, Chef Massey worked at the Lobster Shop for five years. He has been Chef at CPTC for seven years now.
If you’re curious about these fine dining establishments, check them out on the web at: http://www.r-u-i.com/page/home the corporate company of http://stanleyandseaforts.com/page/home and http://www.lobstershop.com/.
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