If you eat in Edmonton, you probably know about NAIT’s Culinary Arts Program, graduates from which staff many of our city’s restaurants. But culinary arts at NAIT doesn’t stop at full-time programs—they also offer a battery of continuing education classes on a huge variety of topics, for us minor-league players who want to step up our game.

 

When browsing through the course list, which includes such subjects as Thai food, wine tasting and basic mixology, something in particular caught my eye—a series of kitchen skills courses, five in all, that promised to improve basic culinary knowledge.

 

Now, I am an enthusiastic cook and an eager learner, and I know my way around the kitchen. I can read a recipe and I’ve got a good food vocabulary. But I cook in chaos, my kitchen a whirlwind of knives, bowls and dirty cutting boards, with food everywhere. I make good food, but often at the expense of my nerves. What I wanted was to improve my technique and to build better basics. So I decided to sign up for NAIT’s first “Kitchen Skills” course: The Art of Garde Manger and Knife Skills.

 

When I arrived for the first of the three four-hour courses, I was nervous, afraid my knife skills wouldn’t be good enough or that my fellow students would all be chefs. My trepidation was put to rest when my fellow students introduced themselves. We were a diverse group—men who’d never cooked before (interestingly, there were no kitchen-virgins among the women), people looking to pick up knife skills and others who were experienced recipe-followers and just wanted to learn more independence in the kitchen.

 

This diversity is the norm, according to Abraham Wornovitzy, the hospitality/culinary arts portfolio manager. Wornovitzy says “don’t be afraid if you don’t have any experience.” You’ll gain a lot of confidence. Alternately, people who think they know a lot find that the course “changes the way they view cooking.” 

 

Our instructors, Allan Roote and James Higuchi—both experienced chefs—agree. Roote, who has 23 years of experience under his toque, says improving your cooking skills can help you “move out of mom’s house,” and emphasizes the independence cooking offers, saying it lets you move from “processed foods” to a more “grassroots” approach.  Higuchi, who assisted Roote and has been cooking professionally since he was 16, also wants to make sure his students feel more independent while gaining a “basic understanding of certain types of cooking.” 

 

Our instructors wanted us to be independent, but they didn’t let us off the hook for shoddy work. We worked first on basic knife skills, chopping dozens of carrots into rounds, match-sticks (julienne) and cubes as tiny as a millimetre (brunoise). I thought I was doing okay, until Roote stopped by my station to critique my carrot rounds. They weren’t all the same thickness. I can feel you rolling your eyes, but it makes a difference. We eat with our eyes first of all, and small inconsistencies make a big difference in appearance. There is also a practical application to consistency—if your ingredients are different sizes, they cook at different rates, resulting in over- or under-cooked bits.

 

Higuchi also noticed my sub-par skills. When we proceeded to the second part of our course, creating sandwiches, he assigned me the task of cutting bread into equal squares that would be piled in alternating rows to create a checkerboard pattern. Simple, right? Well, my bread pile looked like an Aztec pyramid, not a cube. 

 

You might think this sounds more like Hell’s Kitchen than continuing ed, but in fact our instructors were encouraging and enthusiastic. Roote invited interested students to come in to class an hour early on our last night to participate in a cheese-making demonstration. When I say participate, I mean it. We scalded our hands stretching fresh mozzarella, and I brought home a good-sized chunk that I used on homemade pizza the very next day.

 

Higuchi says that his aim in teaching is not to “give people free rein to go and do whatever they want but to trust themselves,” and gain “independence.” While we were following recipes and practicing our technique, Higuchi was constantly asking us if we were happy with our product, and if we weren’t (or if he wasn’t), asking what we could do to improve our food. He exhorted us to “make it sexy.”

 

Roote didn’t talk about sex, but he did talk about love. When we were making mayonnaise, he told us not to attempt the recipe while angry, saying “if you don’t apply love to your food, it’s not gonna work.” Wornovitzky echoed this sentiment, saying that while professionals might be more pragmatic about food, “at the end of the day, it’s called culinary arts for a reason.”

 

Much of this course was informed by the instructors’ professional backgrounds—we arranged displays of our finished products on mirrored plates, and discussed symmetry and size with an eye for what looks the best to the “consumer.” A home cook often pays no heed to these matters. However, Roote says that one of his goals as an instructor is to give his students the ability to “understand the effort” that’s put into the food we order in restaurants. 

 

There was plenty in the course for home cooks too. I took home a lot more than fresh mozzarella, a litre of homemade mayo and a full spread of sandwiches and canapes. I gained an awareness of presentation, better skills with a knife, and a new appreciation for what goes into food prep, both in my own kitchen and at restaurants. Plus, my countertops are a little cleaner. Whether you’re an experienced home cook, an aspiring chef or a knife-wielding novice, there’s room for you to learn in this course. Wornovitzy advises you to “just try it once—it’s a little addictive.” It’s true—I’m already looking forward to my next course. V