Claire Raposo
May 6 2018
On Friday, I made donuts. I did not know I was making donuts until halfway through the process and I used an industrial sized mixer for the first time. Apart from that and making the house focaccia, which has rosemary and fleur de sel and extra virgin olive oil, nobody really seems to know what to do with me in the kitchen. All the chefs are male and except one either new or temporary line cook, they are all white. I watched a lunch service done by just one chef who had just gotten into a car accident and talked to me for three hours straight. In between explaining food safety, bacteria, and viruses, he explained that there is a difference between cooking because you like being in a kitchen and cooking to pay the bills. Everyone should respect everyone in the kitchen and a lot of the time, head chefs are allowed to be verbally abusive towards the rest of their staff and this should not be the case. Chef John also said that the Townshend kitchen is different. Colin (the head chef) treats everyone with respect and is a creative and kind person. Apart from that, the rest of the kitchen staff seemed apprehensive about asking me to do stuff. Maybe they did not want to ask because I’m a young girl and lacked the ability or maybe they were wary because I was new. Either way, every single chef apologized for swearing in front of me. I did make donuts and had a lot of fun learning how to use various gears and safety mechanisms of the mixer and weighing out flour and sugar on a bakers scale from enormous rolling containers on the floor of the pantry. Sage, the man helping me make the donuts, seemed very concerned that I might injure myself and I did not actually put the donuts into the fryer because he was worried that I might burn myself. The donuts were delicious and I ate the test one which came out beautifully. You could taste the vanilla bean and mace (nutmeg like flavor) and the outside was crisp whilst the inside was soft and pillowy.
Earlier, I had been told that while most restaurants worked their interns to death, I would have a very different experience. I had spent the previous day researching the chemistry behind using a levain (sourdough starter) as the rising agent in breadmaking. My textbook, which I carried to the bus stop and waited with for about about weighs fifty pounds, was about the size of a watermelon, around 1000 pages long, and was the first volume in a set of six. I think that I would learn a lot about chemistry and hopefully the other cooks in the kitchen will learn to see past the fact that my chef whites falls below my knees.