in our culinary school era

read it and eat - january(ish) '25

Welcome to read it & eat. This is the seventeenth edition of the newsletter to date. Things just keep on happening in the world, but we’re not here to talk about any of that, are we?

Hello, sweet followers. I hope you didn’t think we forgot about you (never!). I’d love to say we were traveling or something cool like that, but in fact, this was just a good, old fashioned “too busy to breathe” situation.

You see, last month Gary and I started culinary school at ACC (go Riverbats!). I also started a new full-time job, but not before signing up to do too many freelance projects at once. Timing is cruel, but we’re getting through it one Trello task at a time.

So, what’s culinary school like? So far, it’s been about what you’d expect. For example, this week we heard a chef-professor tell a fellow student “You’re regressing. This is worse than last week. And you need to clean up your station!”

Intense, but also weirdly familiar considering our original teacher was Gordon Ramsey (via many hours of Hell’s Kitchen, Master Chef, and Kitchen Nightmares).

What we’ve learned so far

Culinary school is interesting because you’re cooking, but also, you’re learning how to turn ingredients into money. One of the first courses we’re required to take is actually a math class, and this is especially troublesome for Gary who did everything he could to avoid math class the first time around.

It’s pretty darn fun, however, to start connecting all the dots between different measurements, learning how to convert (the right way), and seeing how many pounds of cornmeal you need to make 100 pieces of cornbread at 4 oz. per serving.

Knife cuts

In our Basic Food Prep class (shoutout CHEF 1301), the first thing we learned on were some of the standard knife cuts. Chef demonstrated each cut then set us loose with 50 minutes on the clock to produce them ourselves.

Even with a relatively simple task and so much time, we still sweat bullets like we were in a Top Chef Quickfire as the clock ran down. For the next 5 weeks, we’ll repeat this exercise every class, with the time getting shorter and shorter every time.

We’re supposed to get faster and better at the same time, but that remains to be seen. We’d like to think we’ll report back in a few weeks when we’ve made obliques our bitch.

Stock making

We’re not sure why we started with stocks—perhaps since they’re the base for soups, sauces, and dishes of all kinds—but we did. We learned about veggie stock, we learned about chicken stock, we learned about veal stock, and we learned about fumets and bouillons as well.

We got the opportunity to prepare, present, and taste some of our own, and here are the quick hits on what we’ve learned so far:

• Be patient with your ingredients. If you’re making stock with protein (chicken, veal, beef, etc.), add your veggies later in the process. We’ve been throwing them in with the chicken bones at the beginning of simmering, and it turns out that causes all the goodness to leech out over time, making for a much flatter tasting stock.

• Cheesecloth is your friend. Typically, we throw peppercorns, herb stems, bay leaves, and the like straight into the water with the idea that we’ll strain it all out later. Well, turns out there’s a cool little guy called a sachet d'épices that makes this unnecessary. Simply wrap all the goodies up in some cheesecloth to form a little sack and tie it with butcher’s twine. Et voilà.

• Roast. Those. Bones! We also learned that there are brown stocks and white stocks. One of the key differences is that the bones used to make brown stocks are roasted beforehand, creating a much richer, deeper, and more powerful flavor.

Much more to come

We kept this one short and sweet, but you can expect to be hearing a lot more from us on what it’s like to be in culinary school. When we first started writing read it & eat, we had no idea we’d be embarking on this journey. It’s kind of crazy (but also kind of exhilarating).

We started writing this newsletter as a food journal and a love letter to writing for the fun of it. After spending so much time writing professionally, we lost ourselves a bit, and having this outlet has brought us back.

Much in the same way but also strangely opposite, we’ve loved cooking for ourselves so much that we decided to pursue it professionally (although we have yet to determine what that truly means for us). The best part is that—with no real goal other than to further our knowledge together—we’re able to be as playful as ever with our writing and our cooking.

Ultimately, we’re open to wherever this path takes us, and we’re thankful that you’ve been here every step of the way.

Talk more soon,

— Si & Gary