I Finally Post Something About Skills One

In The Making of a Chef, Michael Rulhman often writes about a girl in his class who’s an absolute disaster. Her whites are always messy, she burns her consommé, she never scores well on practicals, and she can never seem to catch up with the rest of the class.

I’m that girl.

I know every class has to have one. But, when you have Skills I with Chef Skibitsky and you’re that girl, you almost feel like you should just abandon kitchen life all together. Skibitsky’s one of those old-school, hard knocks, pay your dues type chefs. He persistently glares about the kitchen finding faults with your knife cuts, your stocks, your mise en place, your speed, your proficiency. He runs his class like a boot camp- a grueling indoctrination into the world of the culinary arts.

This is not to say he isn’t an amazing chef. He just also happens to be a kick-your-ass chef. I worked on his team during the Worlds of Flavor conference and quickly discovered that he was the most knowledgeable person I’d yet met at the CIA. He’s also the most industrious. During Worlds of Flavor, Team India always arrived an hour earlier and left and hour later than every other team.

Of course that work ethic carried over to Skills One. By the end of the first week, almost everyone in the class realized that an hour of prep before class started was necessary just to get by. Likewise, we were always held at least one hour later than class was supposed to have ended.

Skibitsky originally taught at the Hyde-Park campus. He only just recently moved out to California to work at Greystone. Even more recently, he and his family decided California was not for them and that they were going to move back to New York. We were to be his last class at Greystone before he transferred back to the Hyde Park campus to teach the American Bounty Restaurant part of their curriculum. The tension between the relatively lax methods at Greystone and Skibitsky’s rigorous Hyde Park standards was permanently palpable. If prompted to talk about the differences between the New York and California campuses, Skibitsky would punctuate the descriptions of one coast’s school with quite a few eye rolls.

Despite the coastal culture clash, I did appreciate learning the foundations (stocks, mother sauces, knife cuts) from such a seasoned professional. Too bad I was too nervous around him most of the time to execute anything properly.

Every day immediately went down hill for me with the knife tray. The tray usually consisted of about seven to eight different cuts (dice, batonnet, bruinoise, etc) of various vegetables which we were supposed to complete in a daily decreasing time limit. On my first tray, the one with the greatest time limit, time passed and I’d only completed six out of the eight cuts.

On days that I did finish, I would watch Chef Skibitsky pick out the most heinously bad examples of my handiwork with a long metal needle. He’d line up my fine dice (supposedly quarter inch by quarter inch) against a ruler and shake his head at me when four lined up to an inch and a quarter. Tray after tray and I improved in negligible amounts. Everyone else seemed to score in the nineties. But not me. Not once. I started to get depressed thinking that I’d never be a good cook.

Still, it wasn’t all knife cuts, and sometimes Chef would allow me small victories- like the time he thought my soup was good enough to show to another teacher. In general, my food recieved adequate reviews: my consommés were usually flavorful but a little cloudy; my pommes puree had good consistency but was a tad too salty; my chicken velouté had good color but still tasted a bit like roux.

After I finally accepted that I had absolutely no natural talent in the kitchen, I think I calmed down a touch. The daily knife tray still gave me the jitters, but my “individual production” (the day’s recipes to be prepared and graded) usually scored eights or nines out of ten. I found the less nervous I was, the better my food eventually tasted.

The last day of class, we had our first practical. Typically Skills One doesn’t even have a practical but, of course, Chef Skibitsky thought we could handle one. In two hours we were supposed to cook pasta (made the day before) with pesto, broccoli with hollandaise, glazed carrots, and a chicken consommé. Everyone’s start time was staggered so that there was only a five minute window in which to plate and serve the four dishes.

I was first to start. I put my consommé on and worried over it as the raft seemed to only half-float. The color and clarity seemed alright, though, so I moved on to my pesto. Next, I whisked up some hollandaise and, straining it into a bain marie, crossed my fingers that the emulsion would hold for the next hour and a half. Then, I blanched my broccoli while preparing the glazed carrots. Ninety minutes into the practical, I was finished. I had everything ready, waiting to be warmed and plated, twenty five minutes before I needed it to be.

Once plating and grading finally arrived, I grew more and more terrified as Skibitsky tasted my dishes. The broccoli hollandaise was good though not great, the consommé (as always) not too clear, the carrots not so glazed, and the pasta a “little boring.” Chef asked me what grade I thought I earned and I braced myself for a C. He looked at the paper, tallying up the scores, then looked back at me- “Lindsay, you got a ninety.”