Rouxbe’s Community Blog

I’m amazed how loosely the media uses the word chef. The Food Network show Top Chef showed a dozen young “chefs” blind-tasting 30 ingredients or so, and the winner of the competition was only able to identify 4…most, in shame, less than 3. Chefs indeed! Culinary schools claim they train people to become chefs. Well that is bogus…unless, of course, a chef is someone that can identify only 4 ingredients in a blind test, is young and sexy, has swagger, possibly a tattoo or two, knows how to climb over people, loves attention, is not camera-shy, and can sous-vide foie gras. In Spain, the media has coined their young handsome wild-haired gastro-experimental chefs as the “next genius generation”; interestingly, they all refer to their childhood memories in the kitchen with mom and grandma as the beginning of it all. Chefs are now talked and written about like Hollywood stars; and the ones with greatest style – not necessarily content – get the most attention, however superficial it may be.

I teach people to become cooks - professional cooks. In fact, that is the only concept I devote my life to: learning how to cook. It takes much more than damn good cookin’ to become a chef, and it can only be learned through many years in the industry, and that’s a whole different story. But becoming a cook is, to my mind, far more genuine, far more about the food, far more about defining yourself now, forever. What fascinates me about the great chefs of the past such as Antonin Careme and Fernand Point is not so much what they accomplished as chefs, but how they defined themselves as cooks. What I would give to have been there when Careme was a teenager learning his craft. I’m sure I’d walk away with the secret of how a passionate boy so quickly and so deeply learned his art. He simply cooked!

It’s too bad cooks get very little attention. In fact, the media portrays them as either getting dumped on or rising meteorically, artificially, to superstardom, but nothing in-between. All our visiting chefs, the one’s we respect and invite to our school to talk to our students, emphasize slowing things down, not to be in any hurry to become a chef. Good, logical advice. Hope the tv producers, journalists, food critics, and even the public, one day give hard-working cooks the quality attention they deserve. There’s nothing wrong with the word “cook”, but I’m sure if we had a one syllable word for it in French, instead of cuisinier (four syllables), cooks’ professional and personal lives might improve dramatically overnight.

I’ll come back to this one, I promise.

Cheers (especially to the cooks & dishwashers out there),

Tony Minichiello, Cook Instructor

Re-published with permission from our partners, The Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver