Extra Honey is a weekly-ish newsletter where I share short personal essays about life, grief, love and my time working as a pastry cook in restaurants. If you enjoy the newsletter, hit the ❤️ button or share with a friend. You can also find me on instagram. Thank you for reading!
When I enrolled in culinary school, I was what Anthony Bourdain referred to as “the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit” – a vegetarian. I opted for the pastry specific program because it didn’t require butchering whole pigs or grinding chicken liver into pate. If I had known that in less than a year I would be sampling blood sausage at my first ever kitchen job, I might have gone in another direction.
Still, baking had a special place in my heart and as much as I dreamed of being a food journalist, the thought of frosting cakes and cutting biscuits as the sun rose in some quaint neighborhood bakery was an appealing fantasy.
San Francisco Cooking School was a large building on Van Ness avenue with orange awnings and a big orange crab logo above the doors. Every morning, my anxious energy propelled me through the tenderloin, past the early morning commuters and men power washing feces out of the corners of the government buildings to my classroom where, through the large glass windows, I could see the big hobart mixer, a croissant sheeter and rows of stainless steel tables where students lined up, each with their own kitchen aids, rubber spatulas and perfectly folded kitchen towels.
I entered through the side of the building into the locker room, where I changed into a chef coat two sizes too big that fit like an overly starched tent on my small frame, paired with loose fitting black and white checkered pants and what looked like a white sailor cap that sat atop my hair, pulled back into a low bun.
There were 12 of us taking the full time pastry class, all women. Most had recently left their corporate jobs or previous careers to pursue their passion for butter and sugar. None of us had stepped foot in a professional kitchen and we naively believed that the life of a Nancy Meyers leading lady was waiting for us on the other side of culinary school.
Our instructor was a serious woman in her fifties with short blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. She had served as the pastry chef of some of the best restaurants in the country, including the three Michelin star, Eleven Madison Park (before it was vegan). She was the real deal and despite being hardened by the industry, her love for restaurants ran deep. She smiled proudly when recounting the rave review she received from
for her “dream” of a butterscotch pot de creme back in 1999. We were instructed to refer to her only as “chef” as a show of respect which we all took incredibly seriously (mostly because we were highly intimidated by her).Every week was broken into different categories, bread, chocolate, cakes, confections, viennoiserie, plated desserts and so on, a collection of hundreds of recipes that Chef had acquired during her decades of working in restaurants, which we filed in giant black binders and wrote our own little notes in, annotating the best butter or chocolate or olive oil to use.
We learned to make pate a choux for cream puffs, eclairs and gougeres, how to make ganache and temper chocolate and feed our sourdough starters, how to laminate butter into croissant dough and we even learned to make the famous butterscotch pot de creme, which I was, at the time, shocked to learn is pronounced with a silent “t”.
We made bagels and bialys, nougatine studded with pistachios and rose petals, crepe cakes and pavlovas, pear, apple and custard pies, creme brulee, chive biscuits, macarons, muffins, pretzel knots, chocolate babka, pain au lait — every pastry I could’ve dream of and many more I’d never heard of.
It wasn’t a traditional french pastry course. It was a contemporary curriculum created to best serve those of us who would go on to work in one of the many farm to table “New American” fine dining restaurants or renowned bay area bakeries like Tartine.
Every morning, Chef would give us a stack of recipes with a few verbal notes and then send us off in pairs to mix and knead, chop and fold, shape and bake. We were encouraged to ask questions (just not the stupid ones).
Once, pulling a hot tart shell out of the oven, she instructed me to remove it from the pan quickly. You have no sense of urgency, she scolded. Panicked, I grabbed for the nearest instrument to pry the thing out. That’s a hamburger flipper, she scoffed, pointing out to the class that I had mistaken a regular spatula for an offset pastry spatula, a laughable mistake to a pro like her.
Even more humiliatingly, she called on one of my classmates one morning and asked her in her monotonous tone, what’s on your fingers?
All of us turned to look at the poor girl expecting to see remnants of caramel or nougatine sticking to her fingertips. We knew immediately what the problem was when we saw the bright cherry red colored nail polish she was sporting.
You look like Kim Kardashian, she told the girl, whose face turned almost as red as her nails.
It was clear from Chef’s grimace that even on the female dominated side of the kitchen, femininity was not a badge of honor and there would be no tolerance for breaking kitchen rules. Any expression of femininity could be displayed only in the meticulous plating of desserts with buttercream flowers, gold leaf and chocolate twirls, but never in our appearance or attitude.
As scary as Chef could be, there was something in her that I was drawn to, a glistening in her eye, not despite what she’d endured in her time working in restaurants but because some part of her still loved and longed for the kitchens of her heyday. She could be cruel but only because she was a pastry badass. I wanted to be one too.
Up until that point, I had imagined myself spending my time post-grad working in bakeries. Bakeries are lonely, chef said. The money’s in cakes. Ice cream is easy. Restaurants are fun — fun for a masochist maybe, but soon I would understand what she meant, the camaraderie between line cooks during a grueling dinner service, the late night drinks, the dedication to the craft. I craved the excitement and passion of such a brutal and romantic lifestyle.
There were a number of guest chefs that came to teach us too — experts in naturally leavened (sourdough) bread, full time cake makers and owners of local restaurants like State Bird Provisions and Rich Table and bakeries like Craftsman and Wolves and B. Patisserie. We had field trips to chocolate factories where waterfalls of dark chocolate kisses rained from conveyor belts, flour mills stacked with hundreds of fifty pound sacks, commissaries where we got to taste test kouign amann and truffles, focaccia and honey cakes.
The classroom portion of the program was only four months long, but in that time we were equipped with a foundation of knowledge that would hopefully prevent us from looking like idiots in the professional kitchens we would spend the next couple months interning at.
We knew the names of different tools, hotel pans, sizzle platters, a chinois for straining vs a spider for pulling donuts out of fry oil. We knew to say “corner” and “behind” and how to properly grip a knife. We knew how to scale ingredients and use the window pane test to check if enough gluten had developed in our doughs. We learned enough to survive, but we weren’t necessarily skilled. That wouldn’t come until later, until we had paid our dues, peeling hundreds of apples at a time or rolling hundreds of rolls, repetitively doing our work day to day for years.
For our final exams, we were to complete a list of tasks and recipes with measurements but minimal instruction. I saw Chef wince a little out of the corner of my eye when I almost chopped my finger off as I struggled to dice a carrot into perfect tiny cubes for the knife skills portion, but piping the butter cookies and shaping the burger buns went much more smoothly.
Afterwards, relieved we hadn’t set the kitchen on fire, a group of us, including some from the savory class, who we occasionally caught glimpses of making béchamel and perfectly yellow omelets in the back kitchen, went out to celebrate at Liholiho Yacht Club, a hawaiian inspired restaurant up the street.
There we dined on poppyseed steam buns with beef tongue and miso aioli (I opted for a mushroom sub), salads of local tomatoes with konbu oil, puffed rice and coconut custard butter mochi for dessert. The kitchen sent us a few extra dishes, knowing we were culinary students which tickled us as we sipped on perfectly balanced cocktails made with yuzu liqueur and smoky mezcal, getting pleasantly full and tipsy.
I was intoxicated by the culture of restaurants, not just being a patron, but the whole production — being surrounded by people who loved food as much as I did, the cooks and servers who treated us like their own. I could count on one hand the meals that had blown me away prior to going to culinary school, but that quickly changed. Now, I lived in a mecca of culinary delights that filled up my soul as well as my belly.
Ok, adding culinary student to my long list of fig trees
Great read Jenny! What a kick that experience was. Would be fun to go back now and see how we all do. ;-)
P.s. Never forget Kim K nails. Lolz