Go into the oven with it – culinary school in seven lessons

Working in a professional kitchen is completely different from happily pottering around in your kitchen at home. Still, I learned things at culinary school that everyone could apply in their own kitchen. Such as: go into the oven with your cake.

I don’t know exactly what I expected from culinary school when I started ten years ago, but I do know what it gave me: burn scars, an inexplicable love of bread baking, an obsession with a tidy refrigerator and, above all, enormous respect and admiration for professional chefs. I’ll sum up my time at culinary school for you in seven nuggets of wisdom, so you can skip my three years of slicing, sweating, baking, crying, chopping, peeling, turning, deep-frying and drinking beer and apply these valuable insights directly in your own kitchen.

Buy a good knife

I had that nervous new-school-year feeling of covering books and choosing a planner at the start of culinary school too: we had to have a knife set. Terribly expensive, and what do you really need? What every chef will tell you: in any case, a good chef’s knife. Go to a nice kitchenware shop, ask if you can hold different knives and feel whether a knife suits you. A bit like Harry Potter choosing his wand, so to speak. My wand was a Herman-den-Blijker chef’s knife from a savings promotion, but that was more of a budget issue, to be honest. Fine little knife, though.

… and take good care of it

From now on, you guard that chef’s knife with your life. Never lend it out, because according to the experts, a knife becomes shaped to your hand and, besides: someone else might drop your knife and then it will get a nick in it. Prevent your beautiful chef’s knife from becoming blunt by having your precious sharpened regularly and carefully honing it yourself with the honing steel (also included in the expensive knife set). Never put it in the dishwasher (never! NEVER!). The greatest sin: using a chef’s knife to open packages or cut through aluminum foil. Your reward for following these rules is the perfect knife, with which even slicing kilos of onions won’t be a miserable chore. Well, slightly less miserable.

Always read the recipe

Obvious, right? But it turns out that most people, even at culinary school, only take a quick look at a recipe and get started right away. Every now and then, they look to see what the next step is. And then suddenly it says: ‘let the marinade soak in for an hour’ or: ‘smoke for three hours in the Big Green Egg’. Tonight’s dinner will be a diagonal Febo snack, because you’ll never get this on the table on time. So: if you’re going to try something completely new, study your recipe as if it were exam material.

Measure to know

Is that enough soup for ten people? Is there enough salmon for thirty main courses? How many potatoes should I peel? If you’re cooking for two or four, you can estimate roughly by eye – although that doesn’t always work well with pasta – but when you’re working with larger quantities, for a party or a dinner for a group, your carpenter’s eye lets you down. Kitchen tip: measure. How much fits in a full soup bowl? How many grams of meat or fish are enough for one person? How many snacks do you eat yourself in one evening?

Go into the oven with it

How long does this need to go in the oven, chef? If someone asked the teacher that at culinary school, his standard answer was always: until it’s cooked. Duh, how do you know that? His second standard answer: you have to go into the oven with it. What he meant was: keep an eye on what’s happening in the oven. Don’t blindly rely on oven times in a cookbook. No two ovens are the same; perhaps your oven at home is set just a little hotter than the cookbook author’s. So regularly check how your bake is browning and cooking, and after a while you’ll get a feel for what you can roughly expect. Recipe for disaster: put the cake in the oven, set the timer and go watch Netflix. From experience.

Step back!

Does a pan fall off the stove? Do you drop your chef’s knife with a clatter? Does your cutting board tip over? Step back. Your reflex is to try to save the situation with an acrobatic move, but that never ends well. Let the hot frying oil run across the floor; that’s better than across your arm. Let the steak knives tumble off the workbench; that’s better than trembling in your palm. Get it? Step away!

Cooking is cleaning

Seriously, during my first year I thought I had ended up at domestic science school: it seemed we spent just as much time cleaning, washing dishes and tidying up as we did cooking. The chef’s motto: the kitchen must be spotless when we start, and even cleaner when we finish. At home too, don’t leave your kitchen looking like a smoldering mess; put things away while you cook, wash up in advance, keep the refrigerator tidy and run the dishwasher. So it is sort of a domestic science tip after all.

Also read:

• So this is how much salt should go into your pan of boiling water 
• 12 ultimate kitchen hacks 
• I asked Michelin-starred chefs about their ultimate guilty pleasure