Lotje learns to cook

Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for nearly 15 years, and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, de Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotters with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never too squeamish to set something on fire. On FavorFlav, Lotje shares what occupies her each week. This time: discovering that baking gevulde koeken is just as much fun as eating them.

I can hardly believe that there’s anything else you can do at school besides showing off your new leopard-print leggings, eating gevulde koeken and playing truant. But for the first time in my life, I want to know everything. A feeling that most resembles hunger, but that doesn’t go away, no matter what you eat. The difference between Zeeland and American flour, how to make kidney-shaped pastries, what Dubarry means (anything containing cauliflower), how to fillet a sole to turn it into a Sole Colbert. I think it’s all absolutely fantastic.

Wayward youngsters

I’m seventeen years old and I attend culinary vocational school. The pupils at that school are a colourful collection of the long-term unemployed, deep-sea sailors, more or less wayward youngsters (usually more), Jonnie Boer, and the occasional wandering grammar-school student. Me, in other words. I went straight from Caesar and Homer, with whom I felt no connection whatsoever, to vocational theory (capers are the pickled, unopened flower buds of the caper bush), menu planning and kitchen French. I was a sponge. Finally, useful, edible information.

It must be wonderful if, at the age of five, you already know that you want to become a Formula 1 driver, or world-famous. And then actually succeed. So I didn’t spend my entire childhood standing on a little stool next to my mother, enthusiastically baking biscuits. I do remember that, as a toddler, I already refused to eat canned Smac and ravioli, didn’t think packet desserts were very tasty (Bessola, a kind of chemical warfare) and turned up my nose at Chinese takeout.

Motherfuckers

I genuinely had no idea what I wanted to become. Maybe a chef, but I actually preferred to be a journalist. I was rejected by the school of journalism because they thought I didn’t formulate things sharply enough (how do you like me now, you motherfuckers).  So first, chef it was. Preferably as quickly as possible (a little millennial-like). That was possible at culinary vocational school. After two months, you were a ship’s cook (which was a little too adventurous for me), and three months later you could call yourself a restaurant chef.

Good at pastries

I learned to whisk mayonnaise by hand, use scissors to make a snip in white bread, debone half pigs and how many times you have to roll and fold puff pastry. I can still see myself counting the turns and quarter-turns in a layer of flour on my work surface. I was bad at sculpting dragons and fish out of lard as decorative pieces for cold buffets, but very good at pastries. Tompoucen, moorkoppen, tartelettes. For 10 cents, you could buy them after class and take them home. Or feed them to your punk friends.

Chef’s hat

My only real problem with that school was the outfit: a completely uncool chef’s jacket and trousers. At the time, there was only one model and one colour, so the only way to express your identity was through your shoes, the knot in your neckerchief and how you wore your hat on your head. That takes some getting used to when you’re 17 and love leopard-print leggings. But discovering that baking gevulde koeken is just as much fun as eating them made everything worthwhile. And both are even better. Let the record show.