TAILLAGE | Tie-yahj |

It's our first day of class.  Looking the cleanest we'll ever be in our chef's whites, and feeling like kids on christmas morning (having just received our tool kit), the first thing they do is let us loose in the kitchen armed with a set of extremely sharp knives.  Maybe not the best idea considering the over-anxious state of our nerves...but we survived with only two people's fingers worse for the wear.

After covering some of the basics regarding our uniform, our equipment, and the kitchen, it was back to our statons to learn le taillage.

Taillage refers to knife cuts: specifically, cutting vegetables into uniform size and shape.  This is important so vegetables cook at the same rate and, of course, because it's pretty.  The French like pretty food.

I drew a little illustration of what we learned:

To see it in action, watch this little video put together by my school.  It walks you through most of the cuts we learned our first day.

video link

Why my taillage, certainly, wasn't as perfect as chef's (see below), by the end of the afternoon I was feeling much more confident handling a knife.  Plus, I can now slay onions. To ciseler is probably the best thing I learned today.  You end up with finely chopped onions and no juices are forced out.

After lunch, we learned two very basic cooking techniques. First, À l'anglaise (ah lon-glez) or how the English would cook in the Frenchman's mind.  For vegetables this meant boiling, then stanching. Quick Tip: The water should taste like sea water.  The vegetables are in the pot for so short a time; thus, it needs to be overly salty in order to transfer the flavor.  Second, À l'etuvée (ah lay-too-vey) is a method of cooking to order. You gently simmer the veggies in a little bit of salted water--about halfway up the veggies--with a dab of butter, using a parchment paper-covered sauté pan until the water has evaporated. The little parchment lid is call a cartouche or "cartridge".

With lots of cutting and much slaughtering of French words, day one is in the books as the best first day of school to date.