The easiest and hardest question asked by many culinary students is: how long do you …?

Poach an egg?
Bake the choux pastry?
Fry the chips?

Chef Christophe would probably use his thumb and index finger to act as a caliper, showing a few inches gap and say “this long.” Why did Chef want to give student a hard time? Why didn’t he tell his students the time needed?

Sometimes, student came to me and complained that although he/she followed the recipe given by me and baked the product for the same amount of time like what I did in class, the product did not turn out properly.

In general, pastry requires  precise scaling of ingredient, so following a formula is crucial. Yet, blindly following a recipe can be disastrous. One of the most common mistakes made by many freshies in the kitchen is over-obsessed with the time stated in the recipe.

Whipped cream becomes butter, tart with undercooked/raw dough, and  amazingly, burnt cake is left in the oven just because the recipe indicated that the cake should be baked for forty minutes. Mistakes after mistakes, they learned an important lesson: pay attention observing the condition of the product itself, not the timer.