My individual Pavlova with creme mousseline and chantilly

This week has marked the beginning of a seriously exciting journey. For the next 9 months I will be cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Bloomsbury 5 and sometimes 6 days a week, and will be gaining the grande diplome. The grande diplome is a comprehensive chefs qualification that signifies advanced cuisine and patisserie skills and is very well respected in the industry as one of the best culinary programs on the market. It’s the end of week one, and here is what I have to say on the matter.

Let’s talk about chefs baby:

Chefs are scary. They are french. They are male. They wear really tall hats. Every time they tell you something you have to respond ‘yes chef!’. They will not tell you something twice. Most alarmingly of all they act like an extra millimetre on a cube of carrot is going to make the entire dish inedible. Ok I exaggerated on the last one. But rulers are involved! Overall however the chefs are decent humans, and I get the impression they are being extra hard on us in the beginning just to set the tone for the term. They patrol the kitchen spouting corrections at every station, “turn the heat down, take your finger off the top of your knife, clean down your station, sauce too dry, mayonnaise is about to split, too much colour on those shallots, why are you cooking your spoon? Etc etc. You get the point. Each chef has his pet peeves, whether it’s idle chit chat between chefs during mise en place, wastage, more than one ingredient on a chopping board at once, rushing vegetable prep or service on a plate where you can’t see every freckle on your face in the reflection. Once these pet peeves come to light however, usually in the first five minutes of meeting them, it’s possible to navigate a voyage that pisses them off as little as possible. Happy days. At the end of every class we have ‘Service’ and the chef will give us a grade that works like a running average from class to class. The chef tastes and plays with our food firing praise and criticism a million miles per hour whilst we scramble to record their comments in our evaluation sheets. The chef signs off on the sheet, and we can breathe. Finally. I’m going to be frank. It has been a very stressful week!

The course:

I arrived bright and early last Friday expecting to receive a few materials and maybe some uniform and call it a day until Monday. I was wrong. I was told I had my food safety level 2 exam the following day. A Saturday. Yeh.

The uniform situation was a challenge. We had ordered our sizes a few weeks back but when trying them on all realised next to nothing fitted correctly. We had a real laugh in the locker rooms as we waded around in ginormous clown trousers and fought with our jackets to get them to close! My uniform consists of check trousers, a white jacket, a hat, a tie, an apron, chef shoes and two tea towels. The tea towels were the only thing I didn’t have to exchange. Up on the first floor corridor the scene was carnage... people hopping around with one leg in trousers, others trying frantically to jam their head into their hat. After what felt like a year, I was finally able to leave uniform purgatory with a slightly better fitting selection.

From Monday things went reasonably smoothly, although finding our way around the kitchen and sticking to time plans proved difficult at first. By Friday however the class was working like a well oiled machine and a bilingual student overhead the chefs saying in French that they liked our group and that we were good! High praise indeed, even if we weren’t supposed to hear it!

So what have I learned? Week one was mainly knife skills, salads and a naughty little pavlova to round off the day on Friday. The way the course works is the chefs take a demonstration lecture where we take notes on the methods and techniques, and then we are left to our own devices to replicate the dish in the kitchens afterwards. It seems simple enough but the demonstrations go on for hours and by the end of it you can’t even remember what ingredient goes with what recipe. There are usually 3 or 4 dishes being made simultaneously to avoid wasting precious time. Punctuality and correct, pristine uniforms are non negotiable and a general military style approach to discipline is palpable.

Overall impression:

The thing that strikes me most about this week is just how much we have learned in a few days. We have already made almost every type of pastry creme known to man, chopped vegetables of all kinds to every specification, and picked up the rhythm and patter of the kitchen like we’ve been there our whole lives. I genuinely cant’t comprehend the kind of progress we could make in 9 months if we continue at this level of intensity.

Chef investigating his Italian salad