When you are attending culinary school, you are there to learn new and improved techniques for cooking. The teachers should expect, however, that the students will have at least some idea of how to cook to begin with.

What would you do if your teacher was telling you how to boil potatoes, and he said that you have to add as much salt to the water as you think you need, and then add even more?

That is what happened to the student in this story, so she tried to tell him that she knew how much was needed since she had been cooking potatoes her whole life. He wouldn’t listen and insisted she follow his instructions, so she did.

Of course, the potatoes came out extremely salty and inedible. This is why teachers shouldn’t assume that students don’t know anything coming in. Read through the story below to get all the funny details.

Malicious Compliance at culinary school

I just want to state that most attitudes about the “right” way to cook something are silly, imo.

Everyone has different tastes, so there is no single correct way to cook.

There’s a reason they call it culinary arts, cooking is more an art then a science. Some of the best recipes have come about by people trying something new or making a “mistake” and finding what they made was delicious.

So, really the only thing that matters is that what you make tastes awesome to you. If that’s the case then you did it right. Recipes are guides, not hard rules.

Let’s see what happened at this school.

This happened about 20 years ago, while I was going to college for culinary arts.

The chef instructor in charge that day assigned me the job of boiling potatoes for mashing. Now how I was taught growing up, and how this school taught you to boil potatoes includes salting the boiling water.

Apparently, you need a lot of salt for this.

When doing this you have to add a lot more salt then most people who’ve never done it before would guess. They were trying to teach how to do this by feel, without needing a recipe.

But he found it difficult to get students to understand just how much they needed to add, so he decided to combat this he would really stress that whatever amount you think is enough, add that plus a fair amount more. A saying that I had actually heard before I ever went to school.

This is something she has a lot of experience with.

Now I’ve been making mashed potatoes, from scratch, most of my life. My family uses this method, so I’m very familiar with it.

I know how much salt to add. I explained this, very good naturedly. Trying to joke about how a lot of people, who aren’t familiar with the method, don’t and how frustrating that must be for him.

The instructor is not letting this go.

But he didn’t believe me, kept insisting I “add more than I think I should put it.”

No matter what I said about it, or what assurances I gave he didn’t seem to think I could possibly know what I was doing. I even suggested that if I was wrong it could be fixed, but no, he insisted I put more in than I thought I should.

Just following instructions, professor.

So, I don’t know if I was just in a bit of a bad mood that day, or he just said that “add what you think, than more” line one too many times. But I did EXACTLY what he said.

I put in what I knew was the right amount of salt, then added more. The result was the most insanely salty potatoes I’ve ever tried.

What a waste of food.

No matter what we did we couldn’t fix them either. This was a LARGE batch of potatoes, we had to use one of the huge standing mixers in the bakery area to mash/mix it.

The only thing that could have helped would be to make a ton more potatoes and mix them in, and that wasn’t really an option.

The teacher won’t make this mistake again.

After that he seemed a lot more prepared to take me at my word about such things lol

You would think that the smart thing to do would be to put in less salt the first time. You can always add more if the teacher thinks it is necessary.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a neighbor who had to take a direct approach to get the neighborhood parents to actually watch their kids.

Oh well, take a look at what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Love the Lord of the Rings reference.

This seems like a great way to do it.

A recipe is an important starting point.

Adding more salt is always simple.

Ok, very funny.

When a student tells you that they have been doing something their whole life, it is smart to listen to them. Even if she was wrong, he could have always instructed her to add more salt. If she were right, however, it would be impossible to remove the extra salt once it is added.

This seems like a really silly thing to take a stand on as a teacher in culinary school. Oh well, at least it left her with a funny story to tell in addition to the terrible potatoes.