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What makes a great chef?
A great cook and great chef certainly the cook itself or great chef in some restaurant very often do not have that much to do with the cooking anymore. You go to Wendell Fostoria for example. Then the chef, we have to contend with the several banquets of thousands, fifteen hundred people. So we will go organize of course, work out these menus, taste here and there, but that is just about it. If you want to make a distinction between a pencil chef and a skilled chef, and the skilled chef being someone who would have a small restaurant, someone like the Muscular here and will be behind the stove cooking, cooking day after day, morning after morning. So that is someone really involved in the cooking itself. Both though are chef, by definition I am not a chef only if I work in a professional kitchen with only the people working for me, though I am called the chef, which is the chief in front to run that kitchen. When I go back at home, I am the cook there and I work as a chef. What is the difference?
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How has a chef’s training changed?
There are so many young chefs coming now and exciting with what they are doing. I mean even at the French Culinary Institute, where I teach here in New York I am amazed by those young chefs, what they can do in six months of the program, which is 600 and some hours. What they can do at the end of those 600 hours, I would never have been able to do that after three years of apprenticeship, even after five years. We learn in a totally different way, when I was a child we stole the trade, we did not learn that easy, we would ask the chef what did this? And he would answer some type of stupidity; you say what is that called? He will say a nothing at all. He would never tell you how to do anything and one day he will tell you, tomorrow you start at the stove. So you learn, looking and eventually you will know how to do it. You become very proficient with your hand, because there are a lot of techniques and a lot of manual work to do, chopping, slicing, mincing and so forth, cleaning of the kitchen and so forth. Now, in a place like for example the French Culinary Institute and most of the school it costs first a fortune so you cater to the people, you show them, you explain and all that meaning that they learn much-much faster. However, they are not quite as proficient with their hand as we would have been as we were. When I was an apprentice, it was a different type of way of learning.
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Is the apprenticeship process still important?
Definitely, extreme important, because like any type of manual trade you have to learn the technique, you have to be a good technician. And this is what I call some trade on my teaching in the technique. I think which are very often difficult to explain in words that are very visual from chucking an oyster to doing a caramel cake or boning out chicken or doing an omelet and so forth. This is a technique that you have to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat so much that by the time you absorb them that you cannot afford to forget them. And then you can not afford to think in term of what the vegetable I will do, maybe the texture will go well with that, the color will go well with that. You think in term of the future the dish and your hand work automatically and prepare those things. As long as you are totally irritated if you want by the slicing of an onion and someone come and said, “Do you have any parsley here?” You sill say, “Do not disturb me!” Because you are working on that kind of minimal task of slicing the onion you cannot go forward. You have to get rid of that and by getting rid of that. You have to practice, practice, practice enough so that you can not afford to forget it. Just like if you are a painter you work two or three years in a studio and you learn the law of perspective. You learn how to mix yellow and blue to do green and you know you can do that with your thumb or with a spatula and all that until you have learned the trick of the trade. Meaning that after three years you a
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