Monday, March 16, 1998 | 9:12 a.m.
Ingredients of a successful cooking instructor:
One ample belly, rounded by years of sampling.
A hint of a European accent, for authenticity.
A pinch of fingertips that have grown immune to heat and hands that can measure a tablespoon by rote.
A dash of unabashed enthusiasm for culinary delights.
Above all, a sprinkle of aplomb, for times when things go awry.
Shake and stir and simmer, and serve before a class of eager pupils.
Linda Nitz knows a good cooking class when she samples one.
"A good class has a chef that explains techniques, where to get ingredients, and is visual, gives you a hands-on experience," says the cooking maven, who attended countless classes to pick up new recipes and ideas for her dinner parties.
Many who attend the classes, like Nitz, have a taste for the gourmet and like to entertain. Others are bored with rotating the same 10 recipes through their daily routine. Some are pros looking for new ideas. Others don't know how to cook at all.
"Most people are stuck in a rut, they have eight or nine recipes and they just repeat them," says UNLV cooking instructor Les Kincaid. "So they sign up for a class. Most everybody is interested in learning more about different foods they're unfamilar with."
And students find it is much easier to learn a difficult skill such as rolling a ravioli or de-veining a shrimp from a live person than a recipe book.
"You need to see the step-by-step, becase cooking books just don't make any sense," Nitz explains. "If you pick up a cookbook, you don't know what it means, what the phrases are, or what it's supposed to look like."
"It's not so obvious," agrees Donna Wooldridge, a beginning cook who signed up for classes at Community College of Southern Nevada. "With recipes, some of the things he showed us, I would never think of that. Now, you look at a recipe and know how to do it."
Kincaid figures there are things you have to learn and cooking is one of them. "Some things we think of on our own and some we don't," he tells his class, learning the art of matching food and wine. "We have to be taught how."
Searching for classes
Unfortunately, finding a cooking class around town can be tougher than an undercooked rump roast.
Casinos such as Bally's and Sam's Town, which once offered chef demos, no longer do. Clark County's Parks and Recreation Department cancelled its class when no one signed up, while Summerlin Community Center's classes are on hold while theiy find new instructors.
Canyon Gate Country Club's cooking classes are for members only. And Williams-Sonoma's popular classes taught by chefs from local restaurants such as the Coyote Cafe and Frogeez on Fourth, are already full this season.
On the bright side, Summerlin's new Portobella's restaurant has been offering Saturday lessons with chef Dan Drayer, with dishes ranging from glazes and pastas to risotto.
CCSN and UNLV consistently offer a variety of classes through their continuing education departments. The city of Henderson offers $15 classes in the spring on comfort foods such as pizzas and salsas.
And Williams-Sonoma still has space in all of its lunch series lectures and many of its evening classes, such as High Tea, Passover Seders, Condiments and Soy Foods.
"People want to cook in their kitchen, it's an entertaining thing," explains Williams-Sonoma manager Anne Chrysler, who sees newlyweds coming in for the more basic cooking classes and serious cooks drawn to lectures by the executive chefs.
"A lot of clientele call and sign up from every one of them," she says. "But we do hear a lot of people who say 'I've never cooked.' We try to be the resource for the serious cook and the not-so-serious cook who's just starting out."
While many rely on fast food and frozen dinners and take-out for nourishment, there remains a rare breed who take pleasure in doing it the old-fashioned way -- peeling the beans by hand, steaming the fresh brocoli, handrolling the pasta.
"I spend an hour just picking out my fruits and vegetables," admits Jill Susa, who finds the classes give her the "motivation" to try new dishes. "It's something I've always wanted to do," she says. "I set a goal, and I've done it."
Every class and each chef has a different teaching style and mood, from the casual to the formal, the comical to the serious, and, more importantly, as Nitz points out, "some chefs will give you a whole meal, some give you just a taste."
Oops! Sorry about that
Even watching the experts make a mistake can be valuable.
Such as when Klaus Bremer, CCSN's Chinese cooking instructor, realizes he has no lid for his wok. He deftly grabs a stand-in off his simmering chicken broth and tells the class his motto: when things go wrong ... "improvise!"
Or when Executive Chef Laurent Tourondel from Caesar's Palace's Palace Court restaurant, is concocting the notoriously tricky crepe souffle. ... Well, Chef Laurent, a French-trained gourmand recently named the "best rising chef in the USA" by Food and Wine magazine, doesn't seem prone to making errors -- at least, not any noticeable ones.
But when UNLV instructor Les Kincaid discovers that the 108 raviolis that he took all day to roll have melted into one giant ravioli mush, he doesn't panic or blush. He simply frowns and says, "that's really upsetting, I've never done that before," and dumps them all into the boiling water.
The class, half-tipsy on wine, doesn't mind the mishap, almost pleased to see a glimpse of frailty.
"You made us all feel better," one woman calls out gleefully.
Watch and learn
Chef Laurent's cooking tip: "Have a good knife. You can cook with anything, but zee knife eez very important."
Laurent Tourondel is a purist. "My cooking is based on fresh product, right from the market," he explains. "I don't use canned or frozen product."
That means his vanilla flavor comes scraped from the center of the long stringy brown bean. The sauce for his crepe is flavored with fresh passion fruits. His sea bass is flown in from Boston.
And his preparation is just as precise. His 10 black Nicose Olives must be fresh, and cut around the pit. The pot of Fava beans must be boiled and individually peeled. He carefully exorcises the center of the garlic cloves, because they are "bad for the digestion."
Wearing a crisp white apron, Laurent and his assistant prepare a Chilean sea bass, passing around each ingredient as it is prepared for the class to inspect, including a plate of truffles, the in-food of the fungi family, which can sell for up to $1,200 a pound.
The class of 16 sits quietly around the cooking area in Williams-Sonoma, in the Fashion Show Mall, soaking up his every word -- partly in awe of the chef's credentials and partly just trying to figure out his words through his heavy French accent.
Laurent, 31, who has already worked at Club Med in the Bahamas, London, Moscow, and Paris, will soon add Las Vegas to that list -- after being lured here from his spot as Executive Chef at C.T./ Claude Troisgros restaurant in New York to work for Caesars, he will return to New York next month to start up a new restaurant named Cello.
When Chef Laurent teaches a class, he not only draws "housewives" but "food critics, who wanted to get more educated about food.
"I like the passion of people when they come to a class," he says, although he admits he often forgets that his students doesn't possess nearly his level of professional skills. "You have to take your time and explain it to everybody."
This he does occasionally, showing the class how to cut garlic without letting the smell pervade the area -- wrapping it in a plastic bag and cutting it with the dull side of the knife.
For Nitz, it is little tips like this that make the $45 class worthwhile. "We learn secrets it's taken years for these chefs to master," she says.
Classmate Jill Susa agrees. "I think the garlic in the Saran Wrap," she declares, "was awesome."
Cookin' with Kincaid
Kincaid's cooking tip: "Fresh corn always. Corn in a can is ca-ca."
Kincaid, who attended culinary school in San Francisco and owned restaurants in California, has been teaching cooking classes for UNLV for the past 13 years.
He is also host of "Les Kincaid's Lifestyles," a nationally syndicated radio show on cooking that airs in 21 states across the country (although not currently in Las Vegas).
This particular $35, three-hour class on combining food and wine is being held on a Friday night at Beverages and More. Kincaid wears a white apron with its "Creative Cuisine" logo, the equivalent of a professional athlete sporting a Nike swish.
Kincaid is brimming with useful instructions, including: how to serve champagne at the proper 34 degrees (put it in a slush of ice water); boiling the husks of the corn to avoid losing the flavor; how to avoid overspicing a dish (always pour spices into your hand first); how to bring out three times the flavor of nuts (toast them); how to avoid tearing up when cutting an onion (freeze it for 10 mintues); and how to use a knife safely (put a thumb and a forefinger on each side of the blade to maintain control).
A cooking connoisseur such as Kincaid finds it hard to discuss a subject -- salt for example -- without launching into a 10-minute digression on the five different types of salt (sea, table, Kosher, bay and rock). "Now, you know more about salt than you ever wanted to," he sums up.
He begins to advise on proper eggplant selection, then launches into a description on the perfect sliced eggplant sandwich: "Take a red or a green bell pepper, maybe a red onion, put it on a nice crusty French bread with some olive oil, and you've got an outstanding sandwich," he says dreamily.
Going Chinese
Klaus Bremer's cooking tip: "Read recipes twice, then again before you start cooking."
Over at CCSN's culinary lab, Klaus Bremer, a psychologist for the department of prisons, is beginning the second of five $40 Saturday afternoon Chinese cooking classes on how to cook wontons, Oyster Beef and shrimp with lobster sauce, a skill he picked up when stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam war.
"Obviously, I didn't learn Chinese cooking from my mother," the native Berliner says in his heavy German accent to the group of five. "I picked up a cookbook and my wife suffered."
Chinese food, he tells the class, is considered one of the two classic cuisines. However, Bremer is not one to offer a history lesson. "I'm not into going over the yin and yang," he says. "Just eating good quality Chinese food."
Teaching the class, which he has done for the past nine years, is just a hobby to Bremer, one he calls "therapeutic." "If I was to call myself a 'chef,' it would be pretty obnoxious of me," he says. "I'm just a serious amateur, but very specialized with what I know."
With his easy demeanor and the cozy atmosphere (it's impossible to dislike someone who is cooking for you), it doesn't take long before the class is clamoring for him to go heavy on the sake, and bombarding Bremer with questions: "How do you keep a Wok clean?" "What's the difference between using fresh and dried mushrooms?" "Can you freeze pork?"
Not quite a purist, as are the other two, Bremer agrees that "you do lose some quality when you freeze anything," but is not above using canned chicken broth or water chestnuts. And dried mushrooms are actually more intensely flavored than fresh, he says, because they've shrunk in size.
Bremer's class leans towards giving his students hands-on experience, inviting them up to roll wontons and passing around Oyster sauce, curry powder and even his favorite brand of paper towels, Viva Ultra, for the students to smell and sample.
After passing around the Lee Kum Kee Oyster sauce, he makes the students raise their hands and swear to still try the Oyster Pork dish -- despite the sauce's putrid smell.
And as each dish is sampled, the group does an "Ah Check" -- they all sigh "ahhhh..." with pleasure.
"God, I'm good," Bremer agrees, leaning back against the oven and sampling a bit of his own creation.
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