Career Services helped me understand the similarities between my past life and this new life. As a theater technician, I learned about building a production from nothing. Cooking is similar.
Joseph Kalal
Hometown: Skokie, IllinoisCurrent City: Portland, Oregon
Course of study: Classic Pastry Arts
Graduation year: 2009
One food/beverage you can’t live without? millet!
Describe your culinary POV in three words: enjoy your food.
Best meal of all time? a piece of gluten-free cake. I saw the recipe in a dream. It was the first time I remember eating something that tasted better than the original version.
What would your last meal consist of? It depends. If I had 10 minutes to live, I’d have five croissants and a bunch of gluten food. For a slow death, I’d say really good sushi with a nice bottle of sake, followed by a milkshake.
Current job: co-owner and executive chef of the gluten-free bakery Dessert Labs
thedessertlabs.typepad.com
I was 12 years old. I was watching the World Pastry Championship on the Discovery Channel, and a chef from Japan created a four-foot-tall crane made entirely of sugar. All I could think was, I want to know how to do that!
Why did you choose The International Culinary Center?
I was already living in New York, working as a stagehand and designer for theater and movies. I liked the program. I looked into a few other schools, but The International Culinary Center just seemed right.
What were your goals going into the program?
Mostly I wanted to learn how to be a classically trained French pastry chef, and The International Culinary Center definitely taught me those skills. But I also wanted to do my own thing. I have celiac disease, which means I can’t eat gluten—no wheat, barley, or rye. For a long time, eating was horrible. A food would look great and smell great, and then I’d put it in my mouth, and it would be the most unfortunate experience of my life. So I wanted to take all the skills I learned at The International Culinary Center and apply them to a new medium: gluten-free cooking.
So your experience at the school was different from the other students?
Completely different. Since the majority of what I was cooking would make me violently ill, I had to get secondary information to judge the food. What’s the smell? What’s the texture? I asked my classmates and my wife how everything tasted. It was a gestalt experience—challenging, but also a lot of fun.
How did the chef-instructors figure into this process?
They were just a lot of fun. What I couldn’t taste, they had the vocabulary to describe to me, to explain what made it good.
How did The International Culinary Center help you transition to the real world?
I’d been working in theater for 10 years, but I had no idea how to get a job in food. Career Services helped me understand the similarities between my past life and this new life. As a theater technician, I learned about building a production from nothing. Cooking is similar. You start with base ingredients and build them into something visual and appetizing. I ended up interning with the cake designer Ron Ben-Israel, who is an instructor at the school. The school provided the conduit.
Any advice for people with food allergies who are considering culinary school?
Yes: Don’t take no for an answer! I’ve explored so much more food than before I went gluten-free. Now when people say, "Oh, you poor baby, you can’t eat anything," I just sort of chuckle. What I’m eating might be more tasty than what they’re having. Restricted diets aren’t really that restricted.