Sylvia Kurczyn’s Chile Lesson

After breakfast in the hotel, we went to El Centro Culinario Ambrosía, Mexico City’s equivalent to the Culinary Institute of America. The school trains professional chefs in its excellent facility and has a student-run restaurant.

My first class was an in-depth review of chiles with Sylvia Kurczyn, a robust woman with a thick braid cascading down her back and a starched white chef’s jacket. Through a translator, Señora Sylvia discussed the characteristics of dried and fresh chiles in a unique way: she showed how to use all five of our senses in analyzing chiles and also in making taste comparisons, in much the way wine is analyzed. Of the 248 varieties of chiles used in Mexican cooking, 24 were displayed here. She made the point that chiles are not just used for heat; they also vary in flavors, so cooks can control how hot a dish is by understanding where each chile appears on the Scoville scale, the standard judge of heat. Cooks should become accustomed to tasting to determine how hot they want their dishes. This way of defining chiles would later be very helpful to me when teaching cooking classes and conducting server training.