Name: Mark Facklam
Background: Facklam had already decided to pursue a career as a chef when he was 12, and he started working for a major caterer in high school. After graduating from a two-year program at Washburne Trade School, he worked his way up from pastry chef to executive chef at a succession of restaurants. Five years ago, Facklam joined the staff at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago and has been executive chef there for three years.
Years as a cooking instructor: 5
Most chefs are notorious for not giving away any information. I don’t want to have any secrets. An instructor needs to be patient but honest with the students. Most important, you need someone who wants to give back what was given to him or her.
I enjoy sharing my knowledge with my students; helping someone else find the happiness I have in my career.
I teach one class every day. I have about 24 pupils in my class, which is the final level in the professional cooking program. By the time they reach me, the students have taken the entire professional cooking program of 20 weeks. In my class they learn how to put it all together.
Before the students arrive, I inspect the kitchens, make sure they are clean, that sanitation standards are up to par and that the refrigeration is working properly.
Class starts with a short lecture on all the items we’re making that day. The students should have read their recipes and be prepared for class. We talk about how the food should be designed; how colors, flavors and textures integrate with one another into a culinary masterpiece. We also talk about mistakes we made the day before and how we can avoid them. At 8:30 we start cooking.
The students separate into different stations. The chef’s station makes all the entrees and sauces, plates the entrees and sends out the food. The appetizer station makes the appetizers and cold sauces, like salad dressings. The third station handles vegetables, starches and soups. The fourth station makes pastries-at least four or five different kinds every day. The students at the fifth station make bread and also work in the dining room as waiters and waitresses. This helps them learn some patience and gain an understanding of the dining room staff and the patrons’ needs.
I walk around a lot during class. As I check on the students, I’ll usually be singing a little song. Something happy and positive makes the pupils happier. I’ll give them advice or tell them which procedure they might want to begin first. I’ll do demonstrations as well. If they have to bone out six or seven chickens for a dish, I’ll do one for them.
While they work, I’m watching things like their knife-skill techniques, their bread-kneading. They might have forgotten one of the fundamentals, like how to make hollandaise sauce. Or they might need to be reminded of little things, like “Be careful you don’t scramble the eggs for this dish.”
During class I’ll also check on the food in the walk-in refrigerators. Fresh products have to be rotated constantly. We order our food on a daily basis, and if I have time, I’ll call a few suppliers.
For one week of class, we’ll use close to 400 pounds of produce, meats and fruits; 40 pounds of chocolate, which come in 10 pound blocks; three cases of cream; 25 to 30 gallons of milk and six cases of eggs.
At noon we serve the dining room. We serve about 100 people, who can get a three-course meal for $11. I’ll be in and out of the dining room during lunch, checking on the diner’s reactions to the food the students have prepared.
We’re looking for things like: Was it salted right? Does it have nice grill marks? Was the meat cooked to the proper temperature? Something as simple as remembering to put hot food on the hot plates and cold food on cold plates is an important step that is easy to miss when you’re hurrying to serve a meal.
After we serve the dining room, everyone in the class picks at the dishes to discuss positives and negatives. Here the instructor acts more as a referee. The students are actually harder on each other than I would be. They expect a dish to be perfect the first time.
Just like painting a portrait, cooking takes practice. Chicken coq au vin might take a person 20 times to perfect. You have to learn to balance the red-wine acid against the mushroom and the onion and not overpower the chicken. It’s a blending and mixing of flavors, not one dominating any other, just like in a marriage. But the students expect perfection the first time around. They’ll say, “I couldn’t get $18 for this at my favorite restaurant.”
Before the start of every six-week class cycle, I’ll write 30 days of menus for the syllabus so the students know what they have to read and prepare for the lectures. This takes maybe eight to ten hours. These are all my own recipes. All the instructors at the school make up recipes.
We have to match the recipes with the time of the year, including one fish, one vegetable, one meat-all the different classifications-so there’s a balance. Then I have to balance it on the different cooking techniques the students need to learn. Every day I want them to make all five mother sauces: a Hollandaise, a demiglace, veloute, tomato and a cream sauce.
Then I make sure some things are grilled, some things poached, braised and sauteed so the different cooking techniques are practiced as well.
I also have to make sure the recipes are seasonable and that all the plates have the proper color, flavor and texture. It is a big balancing act.
We have people right out of high school who really know what they want to be. There are students in their early 20s who have a degree but decide to do something else. We also have a lot of people in here who have taken early retirement or have been laid off and need retraining. One woman in her 60s took the train from Barrington every day. She was taking the course for fun but liked it so much that she ended up taking a part-time job at a restaurant.
Anyone can learn how to cook better, but I personally believe you have to have a God-given talent to do it well.
You have to love the process as much as the product. Be romantically involved with the food. If you have to prepare 100 pieces of fish, you have to love working with every single piece of that beautiful orange-red salmon: “I get to work with this beautiful fish.”
I have learned that you don’t try to compete with people’s mothers. I’ll never be able to make an apple pie that tastes as good as your memory of your mother’s pie.
