Zut Alors!

It’s been a crazy week, even more than usual, but in a good way. Although this is our last "classroom" class before going to the bakery and cafe that’s open to the public, my current restaurant plating class is a production kitchen, which means we have daily orders to fill and deadlines to meet.

The first week of class was spent doing all the desserts for all the lunches and dinners held in conjunction with the annual Cookin’ School board meeting. In other words: high stakes.

Fortunately, our current chef is probably the best person I can think of to be in charge. I love him. Holy crap, he is adorable in every sense. He’s this boyish French guy who’s crazytalented and, thank God, never loses his cool.

I encountered a couple French chefs working in Vegas. There was my brief time working under the crazy, paranoid screamer who would steal people’s recipes, promote them as his own and then, when the person protested, accuse that individual of being out to get him. Charming. There was M, the left-handed sous chef whose comically bad English ("how many time you touch? Me? Thousand times.") was equaled only by his appetite for vodka and apple juice, a favorite from his native Brittany (try it... you’ll like it. Way better than the usual vodka and OJ). And of course there was Chef Lumiere, the garrulous, flirty Frenchman who looked like a bouncer and drove his golf cart through the hotel’s back of house like a maniac. No, worse. Like a Russian.

In any case, my current chef (for now, for want of a more fitting description, I’ll simply call him LeChef) is an altogether different Frenchman. He is equal parts mischievious schoolboy, firm but gentle schoolmaster and artiste. He’s teaching not only contemporary pastry techniques, but neoclassical as well, in addition to what to do with all the scraps... and usually dispensing all of that knowledge in the same sentence. Every day I’ve felt as if my head gets cracked open at 7 am and learning just poured into it like molten gold. Exciting, yes, but also exhausting.

I kept forgetting my camera this week, but a few classmates promised to email me photos, which I’ll upload to give you a visual idea of what I’m talking about.

Aside from being a passionate teacher and creative pastry chef (mini-bombolini - think Italian doughnut - flavored with anise and stuffed with ricotta and candied fennel, garnished with a fennel chip... Concorde grape sorbet with goat cheese dressing and dried grapes rehydrated in wine... deconstructed pine nut creme brulee... coffee savarin with sabayon made a la minute and chocolate twisty garnish... and that was just on one plate, for a dessert sampler), he has the cutest personality.

After my teammate and I cored, peeled, sliced and tourneed a few dozen apples (tournee is trimming each apple segment so there are no straight lines at all, only rounded edges), poached them in cider and Calvados and then dried them slightly on a rack, representing several hours of work, LeChef looked at them for a long time and then said "It eez nothing personal, but these apples, ah, zay are not to my heart. We will do again, okay?"

When a couple other classmates tried and failed to cook a sugar and glucose mix to soft ball stage a few times, he was on the edge of exasperation. Just the edge, though. He never stepped over the line. Mandilicious thought to test the different thermometers they were using and found each had a different reading, varying by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius. When she told this to LeChef, he gave this "mon dieux!" smile and started laughing in that distinctly French way, then added "that eez verrry funny, no?"

Instead of yelling at us to go faster, he’ll say "okay, guys, accelerate, okay?" When one of us does something particularly boneheaded, his eyes bulge a little and you can see he just wants to throw that person out the window, but then he swallows it down and chuckles, or makes a joke, sighs, smiles and says "Okay, guys, zees is what we do..." and then plunges ahead with Plan B.

He’s a big Plan B guy... several times this week, as we prepped and then plated various desserts for campus functions, he would look around, see that our skills didn’t quite equal his vision, and announce "Okay guys, we go now with Plan B," without missing a beat. I’m guessing he’s already got plans C, D and E figured out as well, just in case.

The closest he’s gotten to yelling came when a few of us, taking a rest between plating up lunch and preparing for dinner, were sitting on the floor outside the classroom. He came around the corner, saw us and said "Ah! Come on, guys! Zees is so unprofessionale, eh! Get up!"

I know several other chefs, including some of my other favorites, who would have laid the smack down on us and even written us up.

He does have his quirks, of course. We don't just sweep or mop the bakeshop at the end of each class. We sweep, scrub with soap and hot water, mop and then squeegee the floors... after getting on our hands and knees to scrub every above-floor nook-and-cranny. But then, there are worse things to be than a clean freak.

In between the lectures and the prepping and the plating and the putting out of fires, sometimes literally, LeChef finds the time to dispense wisdom gleaned from years of working in some big name kitchens here and in Europe.

"Before you take a job, eh? You go look in zee kitchen," he said one day while demonstrating proper flambe technique. "If you see a lot of dent in zee refrigerator doors, don’ go work there, okay? It means ze chef, he has a verrry bad temper and heet zee doors a lot wit’ eez hands, or he throw things a lot, okay, guys? You remember zees, eh?"

I’m guessing, just from his unflappably upbeat demeanor, that he’s never dented any fridge doors.

Vive LeChef!