Free Work Clean by Dan Charnas

page. Another two sections ask the student to listresources, “Equipment” on the left and “Foodstuffs” or ingredients on the right. But the most prominent of the four areas of the form is the daily “Timeline.” It isn’t enough to simply list the tasks. From their first days at the CIA students have to
order
those tasks in a timeline, deliberating how long each step will take and when to do them.
    Sequence is everything. You can’t make the sauce until you’ve made stock; you can’t make the stock until you’ve roasted the bones and cut the vegetables; you can’t roast the bones until the oven is hot; and you can’t turn on the oven until you’re in the kitchen. Experienced students unpack nested tasks and break them down into their component actions. Then they put them in sequence.
    New students aren’t used to thinking this way. They wrote their high school term papers the night before they were due without scheduling either a trip to the library beforehand or time for revision after. Most kids don’t properly sequence their actions because nobody teaches them how.
    For chefs-in-training the timeline becomes an integral part of their culinary coursework. When they find themselves running behind or missing things in the kitchen, their chefs refer to the students’ timelines. Usually, the chef can point to the error in the students’ planning that caused the error in behavior.
    By the time they reach their turn in one of the college’s restaurants, students have caught the planning bug. They stay up late and spend hours designing their own, more detailed timelines. They divide prep into lists of things they need to do, things they can prep well ahead of time, and things they’ve already done. They distinguish the equipment they’ll need before service from the things they’ll need during service. For their stations, they make maps showing where they’ll place their ingredients and tools for the different phases of service. They draw them on paper and color code them with markers, print out spreadsheets made on their computers, or write them on a stack of index cards.
    Students also come prepared with a binder containing special checklists of equipment and procedures for each specific dish. Chances are you have a few of these in your home as well: They’re called recipes.

    The timelines and the recipes, macro-plan and micro-plan, represent the core of kitchen planning. Still, some of the better students, especially those to whom cooking feels natural, become flippant about planning. For CIA baking student Arbil Lopez, the value of making timelines became clear during her first practical exam. She didn’t write out her equipment list, so she spent the first precious minutes trying to figure out what tools she needed to gather. She listed her tasks without the necessary timing. The lack of information made her nervous. Her nerves engendered more mistakes. Lopez’s puff pastry collapsed on itself, and her éclair was dry. She delivered on time, but her product was not servable. The chef failed her. Lopez called her mother and cried.
    â€œWhat could you have done better?” her mother asked her.
    From then on, Lopez prepared. The culture of planning is such at the CIA that the students develop a remarkable ethical sense about it. “The only thing worse than failure,” Lopez says, “is passing by accident.”
    When culinary students graduate and begin working in professional kitchens, they enter a world that often expects them to internalize that planning. Wylie Dufresne—the James Beard Award–winning chef-owner of innovative New York restaurants like wd-50 and Alder—developed his own approach to “becoming one” with his list. From the time he showed up on the doorstep of Alfred Portale’s Gotham Bar and Grill as a culinary student, to working as a sous-chef for another young