School Jitters

About author / Rebecca Michaels

Queen of the desserts and pastry chef extraordinaire; graduate French Culinary Institute; Golden Scoop Award winner; Flying Monkey Bakery founder

I will never forget my first day of cooking school. I was an absolute nervous wreck. It was a very hot August morning as I made my way through the streets of SoHo dragging my big bag containing my uniform, a notebook, and a couple of pencils. I arrived at the locker room and looked around. There were about ten other women there and they all looked as frightened as I did. Phew! Fellow mortals!

I put on my brand new crisp double-breasted chef’s coat complete with the French Culinary Institute’s logo in blue above the right pocket. I donned my black and white houndstooth polyester kitchen pants, tied the neckerchief around my neck, grabbed a big red toolbox filled with all sorts of baking gadgets and headed off to the pastry kitchen.

Our first assignment was to make a French apple tart. The chef patiently explained how to make the crust and mold it in the tart pan. He made it look so easy! Fretful eyes darted around the room. Someone turned the ovens on. It was time.

The chef taught us the proper way of peeling and slicing apples. No problem, I thought, I’ve peeled and sliced plenty of apples in my day! Yet once I started, I got so nervous and discombobulated that I sliced my apples in the wrong direction, so the slices looked a little strange. This was supposed to be easy! This was only the first recipe we were preparing and I couldn’t even slice an apple correctly! I’m already failing at my career!

My hands shook as the head chef watched me peel. I tried to laugh it off. The room was silent. Everybody was concentrating intently on their peeling project. The tension was so high you could feel it in the room. Would I ever get to the point where I was comfortable peeling and slicing an apple?

Between the ovens and my own anxiety, I started to sweat. It was so hot in that room! My tart crust was sticky and kept tearing when I would try and lay it in the pan. This was just awful! My fancy French apple tart was going to look like apple goulash tart!

I was convinced that my tart was going to be the laughing stock of the whole class. But alas, my sad mangled apple something-vaguely-round looked like everyone else’s. That’s when I realized that we were there to learn how to do this stuff. Right! Somehow my colleagues and I had managed to get through our first day.

Years and literally thousands of apples later, I gained confidence in my work product. When you create anything by hand, your work, that very core of you, is on the line for inspection. As it turns out, we are usually our harshest critic. Of course the chefs didn’t expect us to do everything perfectly on the first day. They’d seen this drama play out plenty of times before. I’m sure they knew the pressure they were putting on us. It was a good way of keeping us on our toes. And it gave us a taste of what it is like at a traditional French cooking school, where everything you do is taken very very seriously.

It taught me that good baking is not only a well executed product, but also the confidence to stand behind one’s work. It taught me to bake with precision but to add my own personality without apologies. Since then, my own style of baking has evolved to a more relaxed, less stuffy approach. But I do not regret that fateful day of sweat and almost tears where I mistakenly expected perfection to be expected.