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Stock tips: at the Texas Culinary Academy, in Austin, I chopped vegetables, roasted bones--and got a taste of what it's like to be a chef.

Article Excerpt
AT SIX-TWENTY ON A TUESDAY morning last fall, jittery from too much coffee and not enough sleep, I stepped into a classroom kitchen at the Texas Culinary Academy, in Austin. Chef-instructor Gary Ackerman was directing half a dozen student volunteer's who were hustling around preparing trays of ingredients for the class. Ackerman, 45, seemed to be doing about ten things at once. "Nice to have you here," he said, looking up from a cutting board. "Have a seat." Then he went back to chopping off carrot tops. [paragraph] I found a chair at one of several long tables and put on my borrowed chef's jacket and toque. The large, high-ceilinged room--more than two thousand square feet--was filling up with the forty students who were taking the class. They straggled in, fumbling around for their recipes and helping one another tie their scarves ("This is the manly way; that's the girly way," someone said, indicating a Windsor knot and a granny knot). Everyone had on a white jacket, the traditional black-and-white-checked pants, and close-fitting white caps. (I got to wear a toque, which students are awarded when they graduate, because I was a guest.) Although most were in their twenties, a few looked like middle-aged career changers, with a 3 to 2 ratio of men to women. The majority were Anglo or Hispanic, with only one black student (the class had no Asian students, though they make up about 10 percent of the academy's overall enrollment). This diverse group included chef wannabes who had come from as far away as Michigan to gamble that they could parlay $36,000 into a lucrative job. I had come because I wanted to find out what it was like to train to be a chef these days. And, frankly, I wanted to see how I would perform under pressure: Would I rise to the occasion like a souffle or collapse into...

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