This is going to be kind of short. I have a lot of work to do today. First of all, let’s wrap up Meat and Seafood. I got an A- in both classes. I expected lower grades in both, but certain assignments never get handed back to us, we never get told our daily grades, and things are weighted so heavily that it makes final grade prediction really hard.
We had a three-day weekend because of the new block, so I was able to accomplish quite a bit. Most of Monday was spent getting work done and organized for the first day of Skills Development I. On Tuesday ay 1:15, we had to do to a kitchen safety lecture to learn about fire extinguishers and the importance of non-slip shoes. Thrilling. Then we headed on down to Kitchen #4. It’s in the basement of the school, not too far from the Seafood ID room. The kitchen has lots of stations for students to prep and cook. There are three lines (rows of burners, ovens, low-boy refrigerators, salamanders, and counter space) just like a restaurant would have. The difference here is that the front of the kitchen has three HUGE steam-jacketed kettles. They are the big, free-standing kettles that you see on TV that places use to produce big quantities of soup. The Skills I&II classes are responsible for providing the school with stocks. Everyday, these kettles get turned over twice with stock. Basically, about 200 gallons of stock are made every day.
My instructor is Chef Velie. He is truly outstanding. This is the level of instruction that I was hoping to receive here. He is incredibly nice and helpful. If we have questions or need to know what to do, we can ask him without being afraid of him. Also, if he sees us doing something wrong, he doesn’t yell about how dumb we are; he comes over and shows us how to do it right. He is a Certified Executive Chef, one level under CMC, and he has worked everywhere. He really knows his stuff and I can’t wait to spend the next six weeks in his class.
On Tuesday, we had a tour of the kitchen, had a lecture/demo on stock making, and had a demo on basic knife cuts. Then we practiced mincing shallots and garlic. We also had to chiffonade parsley. We wrapped up with another lecture on broth making. On Wednesday, we had a bunch of group work to do at the beginning like peeling/cleaning all the produce that the class will use the rest of the day and getting the stocks started. Then we had another demo on other knife cuts. We had to make our first knife cuts tray for a grade. This is something that we are going to do every day. We have to mice two shallots, mince two garlic cloves, produce a tablespoon of parsley chiffonade, make battonnets of one potato, small dice another potato, julienne another potato, make four tomato petals, one tomato concassee, make one boquet garni, one sachet d’epice, small two onions, and make 1/8th inch slices of another onion. We had an hour to do this on the first week. I got a 10.5 out of 15 on Wednesday. My cuts need some work. We will get less and less time every day as the class continues. Also on Wednesday, we had to produce one gallon of beef broth per person.
On Thursday, after group work and knife trays (12 out of 15), we made vegetable beef soup with the broth that we made the day before. My soup had good flavor, the veg was cooked perfectly, was seasoned well, and was not at all greasy on top. However, he said that my knife cuts were a little off and was a bit heavy on the pepper. We also each reduced 2 cups of chicken stock into glace de volialle. It’s cooks down slowly into about 2oz. of really flavorful liquid that can be used to fortify the flavor of other sauces and soups. Glace is really tasty and sets up like jello when it’s allowed to cool. It’s handy stuff to have around. Finally, each group made 1 gallon of chicken broth.
On Friday, I was really proud of my knife tray. I even finished a few minutes before the deadline. I turned it in and got an 11 out of 15. He said my parsley chiffonade looked like grass clippings. Boo. However, we got to do our first real cooking on Friday. We made Onion Soup. WE had to cut a bunch of extra sliced onions and then caramelized them in clarified butter. Once they were brown and the pan had developed a dark fond, we deglazed the bottom of the pan with calvados and then flambéd it. This was fun, but it was scary to have 19 other kids do it around me. I was afraid for the life of my eyebrows. When I turned in my soup and chesse-covered croutons, he generally liked it. My soup had good base flavor, the onions were cooked well, it was seasoned properly, and the crouton was the right texture. Once again, though, I put too much pepper in. Turns out, I like things kind of hot from pepper. I guess I will have to be better next time.
This weekend has been really great. Saturday night, I went to my friend Stephanie’s apartment and made dinner with her, Jen, and a guy named Andrew from our Skills class. We made some fresh pasta, a salad, steamed artichokes, and white chocolate mousse cups. It was nice cooking and cutting without being graded. I was free to add as much pepper as I see fit…
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Farm-Raised Pacific King Salmon
This week became a little bit more routine than last week. I had Seafood ID every day. It felt nice to settle in. Let me walk you though my basic schedule each day.
9:00am- wake up and shower
9:30am- study the previous day’s material to be ready for Jeopardy
11:30am- get dressed and pack my knife bag
12:00pm- lunch
12:45- line up outside the Seafood Room for class
1:00pm- class starts; de-head, de-gut, and scale the fish for the day
2:00pm- clean the scaling sinks and do dishes
2:30- ID lecture
3:00pm- fish fabrication
4:30pm- organize the cut fish, re-pack the fish in the Ice Room, and clean the Fab. Room
5:30pm- Jeopardy
6:00pm- seafood tasting and palate development
6:45pm- Lecture
8:00pm- return to room to shower and start laundry
9:00pm- dinner
10:00pm- start on homework
12:00am- finish homework and watch one episode of Will and Grace to get fish off my mind before falling asleep around 1am
A few variations/details on this basic schedule:
Monday: I was on Ice Team this day, so I showed up to class early to pull out all of the fish that needed to be fabricated this day. It’s called ice team because you spend most of the time digging around in large bins of ice to pull out and count/weigh fish. At the end of the day, we have to pack the fish’s cavity with ice and burry them again. We work closely with Savannah, our TA, to make sure the inventory is all correct. She is really wonderful. She knows her fish backwards and forwards, she is the best multi-tasker I have ever seen; she can simultaneously fill orders, answer questions, and ask us review questions. Chef Boyardee had the day off on Monday so we had another one of the Seafood instructors, Chef Viverito fill in. He got us in and out of ID and fabrication in about half the time that Chef Boyardee takes. He was harsh and demanding, but it worked. During lecture, he was correcting mistakes in Chef Boyardee’s powerpoint. I developed instructor envy…
Tuesday: We had Writing at 7:00am. Woo hoo! Not much different in Seafood. Chef Boyardee continued to be ridiculously repetitive. I spent most of the evening memorizing fish identifications and information.
Wednesday: Ice Team again for Seafood. We had a practice ID test during class. We had to stand up in front of the class, Chef handed us a fish, and then we had to identify it and talk as much as we could about. I got in front of the class and Chef Boyardee says, “Brendan, you look like a smart guy. You don’t get a fish. Talk to me about halibut.” The thing is, there are 16 people in my class. We only had 12 species of fish in that day. I had to go without one in front of me. Fine. I know about halibut. So, I talked all about the family it’s in, how to identify it, how to cut it, its market form, the best cooking methods, etc. The only thing I forgot to mention was that halibut cheeks are sold separately as a delicacy. No biggie. Our tasting that night was mollusks (clams, oysters, mussels, etc.) I may or may not have regurgitated an oyster during the tasting. It was not a good night for my palate.
Thursday: Writing at 7:00am. I can’t tell you how irritating that class is. We had to peer edit papers again. My favorite…. In Seafood class, we had our cutting practical. We were each going to do quarter filets of a winter flounder. I was relieved. Flounder are flat fish and require the easiest of the three cutting and skinning methods. The problem is scaling. Flounder have thousands of tiny scales on both sides of their bodies. We loose one point for each scale that Chef finds. Well, as it turns out, I got all of my scales off, but he found four salmon scales down by my flounder’s tale that must have gotten on him in the scaling sinks. Lame. My bad. I lost four points and laughed out loud at my own stupidity. I got a 54 out of 60 for the cutting. When that was done, Chef Boyardee decided to surprise us with our Identification Final. This wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow. Well, Chef Boyardee realized that there wouldn’t be many different fish in stock on Friday because of the up-coming three-day weekend. Um, for those of you out there who don’t know, we here at the CIA have a three-day weekend at the beginning of every block. That happens every three weeks. Now, Chef Boyardee was a student here and has been an instructor for the last two or three years. I really don’t know how he could have forgotten. At the end of the ID test, I was really confident. I had probably only missed three of the 40 questions. Our tasting that night was crustaceans. Turns out, I really like whole-roasted langoustines and smoked shrimp. I was up rather late that night, along with my whole class, writing my research paper on wild vs. farm-raised fish.
Friday: Last day of Seafood Hell! It was going to be an easy day. There was only a little bit of fabrication to do. We knocked that out and cleaned the kitchen faster than we ever had in the past. Our tasting that afternoon involved a plate that was worth about $80. We each sampled 10 types of caviar, 6 or 7 smoked/cured salmons, and assorted other smoked fish. Um, I like some caviar. Some of it was too strong for me, but some of it was really quite delicious. The salmon and trout roe was gross, but the true sturgeon caviar had awesome flavor and texture. When it was time to take the final, Chef Boyardee handed back our ID tests first. I was a little surprised to find out that I got the Farm-Raised Pacific King Salmon ID wrong and then lost all the points below it for getting the ID wrong. The same thing happened to another guy in my class, Jim. When we went to ask Chef about it, he told us that “it’s a farm raised salmon from New Zealand, so you can’t call it a Pacific salmon because it wasn’t raised in the Pacific Ocean.” Um, well, that’s not quite true. New Zealand is actually surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. When I pointed this out to him, he told me, “well, that doesn’t matter because even Pacific Salmon don’t come from the Pacific.” I was lost and confused. He maintained that you can only call it a Pacific King Salmon if it comes from the wild. Otherwise, it’s just King Salmon. Well, I went back to my seat, pulled out my lecture notes and saw nothing to that effect. Then I pulled out his powerpoint print-outs and went to a slide titled Pacific King Salmon. The slide showed a map of the world and used two different colors to denote where they are cultivated (farmed) and where they are caught (wild). There was no differentiation between names. They are all Pacific King Salmon. I showed him this slide, and he told me that it does not matter, I still got the question wrong. Actually, I was right. I was more right than the rest of the class because I put the entire name of the salmon where as everybody else just put King Salmon. He tried to count Jim wrong on another question because he said that, “yellowtail flounder is the fish on which all other flounder are based”. Chef said that that did not make any sense in English. Chef Boyardee said that he needed to write, “yellowtail founder are the flounder that all flounder are based on”. Um, really Chef? Not only is that sentence hopelessly redundant, it’s also grammatically incorrect. I stood up for Jim from the back of the class and got him his point back. I guess I was visibly angry because when I went to turn in my written final, he tried to talk about the salmon again with me. We went back and forth for about 5 minutes before I just abruptly ended the conversation by asking to see how I did on the yield test. I wouldn’t have fought so hard for 10 test points back, but this ID test is worth 20% of our grade in the class. I realized that it’s pointless to use logic on him. Yes, he can cut fish very well. Yes, he can identify all the fish that the school uses. He may be able to cook well. But he really has no place teaching students.
The kicker to this whole event is that yesterday Jen, my friend from Florida who had Chef Viverito for Seafood, told me that they were required to write Farm-Raised Pacific King Salmon on their ID test. If they didn’t have that whole name, they would get it wrong. Ridiculous.
My notes and binder from that class are now sealed in a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of my desk. They smell to strongly of fish to keep with the others. My uniform, after two washes with Oxyclean, Tide, and Fabreeze is now odor, gut, and scale free. My grades should be up sometime this week. Skills Development I starts on Tuesday, and I could not be more excited. After two and a half months, it’s time to cook something!
9:00am- wake up and shower
9:30am- study the previous day’s material to be ready for Jeopardy
11:30am- get dressed and pack my knife bag
12:00pm- lunch
12:45- line up outside the Seafood Room for class
1:00pm- class starts; de-head, de-gut, and scale the fish for the day
2:00pm- clean the scaling sinks and do dishes
2:30- ID lecture
3:00pm- fish fabrication
4:30pm- organize the cut fish, re-pack the fish in the Ice Room, and clean the Fab. Room
5:30pm- Jeopardy
6:00pm- seafood tasting and palate development
6:45pm- Lecture
8:00pm- return to room to shower and start laundry
9:00pm- dinner
10:00pm- start on homework
12:00am- finish homework and watch one episode of Will and Grace to get fish off my mind before falling asleep around 1am
A few variations/details on this basic schedule:
Monday: I was on Ice Team this day, so I showed up to class early to pull out all of the fish that needed to be fabricated this day. It’s called ice team because you spend most of the time digging around in large bins of ice to pull out and count/weigh fish. At the end of the day, we have to pack the fish’s cavity with ice and burry them again. We work closely with Savannah, our TA, to make sure the inventory is all correct. She is really wonderful. She knows her fish backwards and forwards, she is the best multi-tasker I have ever seen; she can simultaneously fill orders, answer questions, and ask us review questions. Chef Boyardee had the day off on Monday so we had another one of the Seafood instructors, Chef Viverito fill in. He got us in and out of ID and fabrication in about half the time that Chef Boyardee takes. He was harsh and demanding, but it worked. During lecture, he was correcting mistakes in Chef Boyardee’s powerpoint. I developed instructor envy…
Tuesday: We had Writing at 7:00am. Woo hoo! Not much different in Seafood. Chef Boyardee continued to be ridiculously repetitive. I spent most of the evening memorizing fish identifications and information.
Wednesday: Ice Team again for Seafood. We had a practice ID test during class. We had to stand up in front of the class, Chef handed us a fish, and then we had to identify it and talk as much as we could about. I got in front of the class and Chef Boyardee says, “Brendan, you look like a smart guy. You don’t get a fish. Talk to me about halibut.” The thing is, there are 16 people in my class. We only had 12 species of fish in that day. I had to go without one in front of me. Fine. I know about halibut. So, I talked all about the family it’s in, how to identify it, how to cut it, its market form, the best cooking methods, etc. The only thing I forgot to mention was that halibut cheeks are sold separately as a delicacy. No biggie. Our tasting that night was mollusks (clams, oysters, mussels, etc.) I may or may not have regurgitated an oyster during the tasting. It was not a good night for my palate.
Thursday: Writing at 7:00am. I can’t tell you how irritating that class is. We had to peer edit papers again. My favorite…. In Seafood class, we had our cutting practical. We were each going to do quarter filets of a winter flounder. I was relieved. Flounder are flat fish and require the easiest of the three cutting and skinning methods. The problem is scaling. Flounder have thousands of tiny scales on both sides of their bodies. We loose one point for each scale that Chef finds. Well, as it turns out, I got all of my scales off, but he found four salmon scales down by my flounder’s tale that must have gotten on him in the scaling sinks. Lame. My bad. I lost four points and laughed out loud at my own stupidity. I got a 54 out of 60 for the cutting. When that was done, Chef Boyardee decided to surprise us with our Identification Final. This wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow. Well, Chef Boyardee realized that there wouldn’t be many different fish in stock on Friday because of the up-coming three-day weekend. Um, for those of you out there who don’t know, we here at the CIA have a three-day weekend at the beginning of every block. That happens every three weeks. Now, Chef Boyardee was a student here and has been an instructor for the last two or three years. I really don’t know how he could have forgotten. At the end of the ID test, I was really confident. I had probably only missed three of the 40 questions. Our tasting that night was crustaceans. Turns out, I really like whole-roasted langoustines and smoked shrimp. I was up rather late that night, along with my whole class, writing my research paper on wild vs. farm-raised fish.
Friday: Last day of Seafood Hell! It was going to be an easy day. There was only a little bit of fabrication to do. We knocked that out and cleaned the kitchen faster than we ever had in the past. Our tasting that afternoon involved a plate that was worth about $80. We each sampled 10 types of caviar, 6 or 7 smoked/cured salmons, and assorted other smoked fish. Um, I like some caviar. Some of it was too strong for me, but some of it was really quite delicious. The salmon and trout roe was gross, but the true sturgeon caviar had awesome flavor and texture. When it was time to take the final, Chef Boyardee handed back our ID tests first. I was a little surprised to find out that I got the Farm-Raised Pacific King Salmon ID wrong and then lost all the points below it for getting the ID wrong. The same thing happened to another guy in my class, Jim. When we went to ask Chef about it, he told us that “it’s a farm raised salmon from New Zealand, so you can’t call it a Pacific salmon because it wasn’t raised in the Pacific Ocean.” Um, well, that’s not quite true. New Zealand is actually surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. When I pointed this out to him, he told me, “well, that doesn’t matter because even Pacific Salmon don’t come from the Pacific.” I was lost and confused. He maintained that you can only call it a Pacific King Salmon if it comes from the wild. Otherwise, it’s just King Salmon. Well, I went back to my seat, pulled out my lecture notes and saw nothing to that effect. Then I pulled out his powerpoint print-outs and went to a slide titled Pacific King Salmon. The slide showed a map of the world and used two different colors to denote where they are cultivated (farmed) and where they are caught (wild). There was no differentiation between names. They are all Pacific King Salmon. I showed him this slide, and he told me that it does not matter, I still got the question wrong. Actually, I was right. I was more right than the rest of the class because I put the entire name of the salmon where as everybody else just put King Salmon. He tried to count Jim wrong on another question because he said that, “yellowtail flounder is the fish on which all other flounder are based”. Chef said that that did not make any sense in English. Chef Boyardee said that he needed to write, “yellowtail founder are the flounder that all flounder are based on”. Um, really Chef? Not only is that sentence hopelessly redundant, it’s also grammatically incorrect. I stood up for Jim from the back of the class and got him his point back. I guess I was visibly angry because when I went to turn in my written final, he tried to talk about the salmon again with me. We went back and forth for about 5 minutes before I just abruptly ended the conversation by asking to see how I did on the yield test. I wouldn’t have fought so hard for 10 test points back, but this ID test is worth 20% of our grade in the class. I realized that it’s pointless to use logic on him. Yes, he can cut fish very well. Yes, he can identify all the fish that the school uses. He may be able to cook well. But he really has no place teaching students.
The kicker to this whole event is that yesterday Jen, my friend from Florida who had Chef Viverito for Seafood, told me that they were required to write Farm-Raised Pacific King Salmon on their ID test. If they didn’t have that whole name, they would get it wrong. Ridiculous.
My notes and binder from that class are now sealed in a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of my desk. They smell to strongly of fish to keep with the others. My uniform, after two washes with Oxyclean, Tide, and Fabreeze is now odor, gut, and scale free. My grades should be up sometime this week. Skills Development I starts on Tuesday, and I could not be more excited. After two and a half months, it’s time to cook something!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Crustacean Station
I know that I say this a lot, but I never know where to begin these things. Trying the process every week is quite a challenge. Also, settle in….this is a long one.
Monday: I went into class early for Early Team to help fabricate for the rest of the school. I think that I broke down some beef top round, but I really don’t remember now. I do remember that I had to take about 30 denuded beef tenderloins (#190) and turn them into portion cut tenderloin steaks (#1190A). These are the steaks that are grilled for fillet mignon. That’s a whole lot of money on one sheet tray. Basically, I was not to screw up. It went fine; it just took a while. Then in class, it was lamb day. In lecture we went over all the primals, subprimals, portion cuts, quality grades, etc. When it was time to go down to the meat room, we watched Chef Schneller take apart an entire lamb. Then we each had to debone and fabricate a leg of lamb. That was actually really fun. In order to get the femur out, you have to hold your boning knife like you are getting ready to stab somebody. It’s called The Psycho Knife Grip from that famous stabbing scene. It’s awkward, but it works really well. I felt confident in myself by this day. My leg looked pretty good and Chef didn’t say anything to me about my knife cuts. He will usually call you out if he sees bad work.
Tuesday: Through the grace of God, I got a different group of people to go in for Early Team. This means that I got to eat lunch with my friends for the first time all block. I know it sounds small, but after how stressful things had been in meat class and how I knew they would be in fish class, it meant so much to me to take 40 minutes to myself. Every waking moment is dedicated to doing homework, studying, prepping for class, and being in class. I get maybe 20-30 minutes a day to watch some show online or not think about class. If you know me, you know how important “me time” is. The topic of the day was Poultry. We went over all the different varieties and sizes in lecture (duck, broiler chickens, guinea fowl, capon chickens, Cornish game hens, etc.) as well as poultry safety. In lab, we started by finishing some frenched lamb chops from the day before. Mine turned out really good. I used a trick that Alton Brown from the Food Network used to get the fat and meat off the bone. We trussed a few chickens and got graded on them. When he graded Jim next to me, Chef just kind of flicked the string to make sure it was tight enough. When he graded mine, he picked it up by the string under the legs and started spinning it around to check for tightness. Then he told me that it could have been tighter. Um, really? You mean that the string, after being hoisted up and spun around like wet laundry, came loose a little? Gee, thanks, Chef. I got a C- on my trussing. Outstanding. I ate a very quick dinner that night and spent most of the night, until about 3am, studying for our final the next day.
Wednesday: Since our Meat final was this day, we didn’t have to come in for early team. Again, getting 40 minutes to eat with my friends in the best part of the day. Speaking of eating, my favorite kitchen to eat out of is Cuisines of the Americas. I really love most everything that I have had from them. There is a lot of regional American food as well as Latin/Caribbean food. Their tortillas are homemade. Delicious! But I digress….When we went in for lecture on Wednesday, we learned about ground meats and sausages. Um, let’s just say that my love of Taco Bell has decreased slightly. They add ammonia to their meat and use radiation to kill pathogens because their beef is often tainted. Also, friends, no matter where you eat out, even if it’s a nice restaurant, please please please order your hamburgers medium well to well done. Ground meat, even when done correctly, can be so dangerous. In lab, we had to de-bone some Boston pork butts (I have done about 10 or 12 of these things now) and then use the meat to make 10 pounds of breakfast sausage. Half was made into patties and the other half went onto natural lamb casings to make 4in. links. The next morning, K16 and K11 Breakfast Classes served them. They were quite tasty.
At the end of class, we had to take our final. It included everything we learned, even the sausage material from that day, so we had to learn it the night before. There were 30(?) multiple-choice questions. We had to know all the primal, subprimal, and portion cuts from every animal, NAMP identifying numbers, as well as general knowledge about the grades and quality factors for every animal. Then there were 10 short answer questions where we had to basically explain the process for creating different cuts (like how to go from a full tenderloin to steaks, or how to debone a lamb shank). There was also a yield test. The last part was an ID test. Laid out on the tables were 20 different cuts of meat. We had to identify the full name of the cut, what animal it came from, and what the best cooking method would be (steak, grill, London broil, sauté, roast, braise, etc.). I think that I did ok. The multiple choice were hard, the short answer was not bad, the yield test was easy, and the ID’s were challenging, but I spent a lot of time studying them. I am truly shocked by how much that class taught me. I did not understand anything about where different cuts came from, how to make them, how to cook them, or anything two weeks ago. I am now well versed in meat identification and ordering and can hold my own when it comes time to cut it. Again, I had to eat dinner fast because there was a ton of reading, printing, and prep to do for Seafood class the next day. Also, there was a midterm the next day in Writing. Also, I had developed a really bad cold. Also, Anthony (my roommate) is in Breakfast class, which means that his sleep schedule is screwed up because he has class from 1am-9am. The world was conspiring against me.
Thursday: The day started off with the mid-term exam in my writing class. It was just an in-class essay. Not hard at all, just annoying.
Ok, if you know me at all or have read this blog before, you know that there are very few things that I hate more than seafood. I hate fish and the like when they are alive, I hate how they smell when they are dead, and I really hate how they taste when they are cooked. I have never dreaded a class more. All the seafood kids smell terrible after class. All the chefs are jerks. The TA’s are really hard on the students because they have to do even more work than the chefs. The product, fish, are very expensive and very delicate. Every class, the students have to play a round of Jeopardy. It counts as your daily quiz grade. You get one question. If you get it wrong, you get a zero for the quiz for the day. Also, I had no idea how to even start cutting apart a fish. I have never been so nervous/anxious/grumpy in my life as when I was standing outside the Seafood room door at 12:45pm on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010.
To keep me and my classmates safe in this blog, we are going to refer to my Seafood ID chef/instructor Chef Boyardee.
We walked in and the first thing I noticed was the smell. It was overwhelming. The second thing I noticed was how small the room is. It is really narrow. The cutting room is only about three times the size of my dorm room. It has to fit my class of 16, Chef Boyardee, the two TA’s, a lobster tank, two big sinks (one for scaling fish and one for washing dishes), a desk, a large white board, plus our entire product on speed racks. The room is tile, from floor to ceiling, with big drains on the floor so that when it is time to clean, we literally just hose the room down and then squeegee it dry.
The first day, we were given lots and lots of information. I took about 10 pages of notes in my little memo book just on class procedures and information. We were given a tour of the walk-in and a lesson on fish storage. Everything is packed with and on ice. The fish stay fresh, but they are very very cold. Then we were set to work gutting and scaling farm raised Atlantic salmon and hybrid striped bass. Scaling a fish is a mess. We use little metal comb-like objects to rub against the scales. The teeth of the comb get caught underneath the scales, rip them off, and they fly everywhere. I mean, the room gets covered in them. Gutting a fish was surprisingly not gross. You just stick your fillet knife in by the anal fin (CUTTING EDGE OUT!) and rip up past the pelvic fin. Then you just stick your hand in there, pull out the viscera, cut through the esophagus, and you’re done. Chef Boyardee gave us a demo on the three different cutting methods for filleting a fish. I took notes like a crazy person. They were so bad, that I had to re-print and rewrite my notes that night. He made them look easy, but I knew that they would be hard to do on my own. There was no actual fabrication for us to do that day. Just like the Meat Room, the Seafood Room supplies the rest of the school with the fish and seafood that they use in the kitchens. Unlike in meat class where the students do tasks to learn the skills of meat cutting while the chefs, TA’s, and early team focus on the fabrication for the school, in seafood class, the students do all of the fabrication. There is no set plan for work, we just learn whatever needs to be done that day. On our first day, we didn’t actually have any cutting to do since all the fish ordered that day were ordered “as purchased”, or AP. This means that we didn’t have to do anything but gut and scale them.
Chef Boyardee and our TA Savannah are setting up for our Identification Lecture, where we are going to learn about the basic characteristics of each family of fish as well as see some of the major varieties in each family. We get the kitchen cleaned, get our notebooks ready, and stand around this huge 20ft. cutting table that has now been filled with fish. Savannah begins with the salmon and trout family. Again, I’m taking notes like a crazy person. But here’s where things get weird: I realized that I’m smiling. Um… I hate fish. Right? Well, turns out that I actually kind of like this class. I learned so much in just an hour and a half lectures about the fish families. I’m really looking forward to learning more about their identities and how they live and what they can be used for. I don’t know how this happened, but I promise that I will investigate and get back to you.
Class ended with a formal lecture in a classroom about general fish knowledge, storage, receiving, regulations, food safety, and the like. I went back to my room, ate a sandwich, and got busy with the memorizing, reading, and prepping for day two. I could already feel the butterflies set in as I made flash cards to get ready for Jeopardy.
Friday: This time I mean it: I have never been so happy to see a weekend in my life. I am still sick, had a ton of work to do, and just need to drink some wine with my friends.
I spent most of Friday morning studying all the information from day one. The chef and TA’s won’t answer questions that they have already said the answer to, so I needed to know everything. I went over all the knife cuts for fish, how the walk in was organized, the storage temps for all the varieties of seafood, freshness identifiers, market forms, everything that I was told the day before. We then go into class and look at The White Board. It’s this huge dry-erase board on one of the walls of the room that tells us everything we need to do. Listed under each kind of fish is now much needs to be cut, what kind of cut it needs, where it is going, and it’s AP weight. We have a ton, about 200#, of fish to gut and scale. Then we have to fillet and skin lots of salmon, stripped bass, and flounder. Well, we get our gutting and scaling done, but then chef decides that he wants to do ID before we fabricate anything. So the ID table gets set up with tons of fish. Again, I kind of enjoy this part. I knew NOTHING about fish a few days ago and now I’m pretty decent at describing most of the major varieties sold in American markets.
Anyway, fabrication begins and I get nervous again. A girl named Nicolette (she’s great…I love her, and she lived in Indy for a few years) and I are given a farm-raised king (wild is not in season now) salmon to fillet. We got lucky. Salmon is a soft-boned round fish, so it gets the easiest of the three cutting methods, a straight cut right down the backbone. Nicolette did an awesome job on her side. It game off very clean and she had zero waste. I then had to do the other side. Mine was almost perfect. I only had about one inch where my knife came off the backbone and I missed about a 0.5oz of salmon. Well, let me tell you, Chef Boyardee was not pleased. From across the kitchen, I get “Chandler! Why did you do that? That’s now money down the drain. How am I supposed to sell that trim?” It’s one of those moments where you know the question is ridiculous because clearly I did not intentionally miss product in order to be yelled at. Believe me, not a dream come true. You just have to say, “You can’t, Chef. I lifted my knife too much, Chef. I’m sorry, Chef”, and then live with the fact that you are lower than a cod worm. I think as punishment for my sub-standard cutting, I was the only person with salmon who had to skin their fillet. Not an easy task seeing as now fragile the fish is and it weighing about 5 pounds. I got it done, and it was perfect. I even laid it out flat in front of my work station so that he could see how perfect it was. I got every single bit of skin in one cut while leaving all the meat still on the fillet. I now know how angry .5 oz of waste makes him. When Chef Boyardee came back to me, did he say anything about my superior skill? No. He just told me to cut the fillet into 24-2oz portions. I got a 42 out of 50 for the day. Fine. Whatever.
After clean up, we went into the classroom for Jeopardy and a fish tasting. The room was so incredibly tense. One question: all or nothing. Sometimes it’s really easy, like giving the receiving temperature for live mollusks (35-40°F). Sometimes it’s really hard like naming all 10 freshness checks for finfish. Well, the girl before me got the question: Describe the storage procedures for round fish and flat fish. She got it wrong, so the question came to me. I powered through the answer. I talked about packing the drawn fish cavity with ice, I talked about perforated pans, the angle at which they could be turned, all of it. I was really happy with my answer. The chef asked me what direction they need to face in the ice pans. I thought I had said that already, but I repeat myself, upright, dorsal fin up, swimming away. “That’s not what I asked”. Actually it was, chef…you jerk. Well, Chrissy next to me starts whispering the word “right”. So I just say: “to the right” not really knowing why. Then he asks me why do they need to face the right. Well, this is not something I have ever been told or read. I looked through all my notes and reading after class and not once have I ever been told that they need to be facing the right or why. I start listing reasons like, uniformity, space saving, identification, ect. Then chef leads me though this long drawn out question and answer period where I eventually get to the answer that fish need to face the right since most Americans are right handed. When we go to remove ice from the top of the bin, our hands move from right to left. Since some fish like snapper have very sharp, poisonous spikes on their dorsal fin, keeping them in this direction helps us stay safe. I was on that quest with him for maybe 7 minutes while the class just sat in silent solidarity with me and my complete and utter humiliation. I KNEW all of that storage information backwards and forwards. The rest of the class was using my flash card to study. I was so damned prepared for that quiz, and he was going to make me look like an idiot for not knowing something that I have never been told before. Ah well, that’s the Culinary Institute of America for ya’. We also had to do a flat fish tasting. We tried 5 different flat fish like flounder and dover sole. They are low activity fish, so they don’t have too much fishy flavor. Actually, the skate wing was delicious. I might even be tempted to order it at a restaurant and pay money for it. I know… I don’t have any idea what’s happened to me. Again, I’ll look into it.
When I got back to my room, the locks on my door had been changed and I couldn’t get in. Ask me about that story and I’ll tell you in person. This entry has just gotten out of control. Suffice it to say: I had to wait in the lobby for 20 minutes to get my new key, while everybody who walked by me made some comment like, “oh, guess you’re in fish class” or “hey buddy, you smell like squid”. Great end to a great week.
I can’t believe that all of this has only been one week. As I sit here writing this on Saturday afternoon, it feels like my Meat final was two or three weeks ago. In two days, I’ve learned about 40 varieties of fish and how to gut, scale, fillet, and skin finfish. Things are happening so fast. I am so busy. My mind never stops focusing on what I am learning. The chefs are tough and the TA’s are demanding. They are not afraid to yell or belittle you; but they do it because we are supposed to be the best. They don’t just accept it; they demand it. It’s hard, but I know that I really love it. I don’t think that I could be happier with my decision to come here.
Monday: I went into class early for Early Team to help fabricate for the rest of the school. I think that I broke down some beef top round, but I really don’t remember now. I do remember that I had to take about 30 denuded beef tenderloins (#190) and turn them into portion cut tenderloin steaks (#1190A). These are the steaks that are grilled for fillet mignon. That’s a whole lot of money on one sheet tray. Basically, I was not to screw up. It went fine; it just took a while. Then in class, it was lamb day. In lecture we went over all the primals, subprimals, portion cuts, quality grades, etc. When it was time to go down to the meat room, we watched Chef Schneller take apart an entire lamb. Then we each had to debone and fabricate a leg of lamb. That was actually really fun. In order to get the femur out, you have to hold your boning knife like you are getting ready to stab somebody. It’s called The Psycho Knife Grip from that famous stabbing scene. It’s awkward, but it works really well. I felt confident in myself by this day. My leg looked pretty good and Chef didn’t say anything to me about my knife cuts. He will usually call you out if he sees bad work.
Tuesday: Through the grace of God, I got a different group of people to go in for Early Team. This means that I got to eat lunch with my friends for the first time all block. I know it sounds small, but after how stressful things had been in meat class and how I knew they would be in fish class, it meant so much to me to take 40 minutes to myself. Every waking moment is dedicated to doing homework, studying, prepping for class, and being in class. I get maybe 20-30 minutes a day to watch some show online or not think about class. If you know me, you know how important “me time” is. The topic of the day was Poultry. We went over all the different varieties and sizes in lecture (duck, broiler chickens, guinea fowl, capon chickens, Cornish game hens, etc.) as well as poultry safety. In lab, we started by finishing some frenched lamb chops from the day before. Mine turned out really good. I used a trick that Alton Brown from the Food Network used to get the fat and meat off the bone. We trussed a few chickens and got graded on them. When he graded Jim next to me, Chef just kind of flicked the string to make sure it was tight enough. When he graded mine, he picked it up by the string under the legs and started spinning it around to check for tightness. Then he told me that it could have been tighter. Um, really? You mean that the string, after being hoisted up and spun around like wet laundry, came loose a little? Gee, thanks, Chef. I got a C- on my trussing. Outstanding. I ate a very quick dinner that night and spent most of the night, until about 3am, studying for our final the next day.
Wednesday: Since our Meat final was this day, we didn’t have to come in for early team. Again, getting 40 minutes to eat with my friends in the best part of the day. Speaking of eating, my favorite kitchen to eat out of is Cuisines of the Americas. I really love most everything that I have had from them. There is a lot of regional American food as well as Latin/Caribbean food. Their tortillas are homemade. Delicious! But I digress….When we went in for lecture on Wednesday, we learned about ground meats and sausages. Um, let’s just say that my love of Taco Bell has decreased slightly. They add ammonia to their meat and use radiation to kill pathogens because their beef is often tainted. Also, friends, no matter where you eat out, even if it’s a nice restaurant, please please please order your hamburgers medium well to well done. Ground meat, even when done correctly, can be so dangerous. In lab, we had to de-bone some Boston pork butts (I have done about 10 or 12 of these things now) and then use the meat to make 10 pounds of breakfast sausage. Half was made into patties and the other half went onto natural lamb casings to make 4in. links. The next morning, K16 and K11 Breakfast Classes served them. They were quite tasty.
At the end of class, we had to take our final. It included everything we learned, even the sausage material from that day, so we had to learn it the night before. There were 30(?) multiple-choice questions. We had to know all the primal, subprimal, and portion cuts from every animal, NAMP identifying numbers, as well as general knowledge about the grades and quality factors for every animal. Then there were 10 short answer questions where we had to basically explain the process for creating different cuts (like how to go from a full tenderloin to steaks, or how to debone a lamb shank). There was also a yield test. The last part was an ID test. Laid out on the tables were 20 different cuts of meat. We had to identify the full name of the cut, what animal it came from, and what the best cooking method would be (steak, grill, London broil, sauté, roast, braise, etc.). I think that I did ok. The multiple choice were hard, the short answer was not bad, the yield test was easy, and the ID’s were challenging, but I spent a lot of time studying them. I am truly shocked by how much that class taught me. I did not understand anything about where different cuts came from, how to make them, how to cook them, or anything two weeks ago. I am now well versed in meat identification and ordering and can hold my own when it comes time to cut it. Again, I had to eat dinner fast because there was a ton of reading, printing, and prep to do for Seafood class the next day. Also, there was a midterm the next day in Writing. Also, I had developed a really bad cold. Also, Anthony (my roommate) is in Breakfast class, which means that his sleep schedule is screwed up because he has class from 1am-9am. The world was conspiring against me.
Thursday: The day started off with the mid-term exam in my writing class. It was just an in-class essay. Not hard at all, just annoying.
Ok, if you know me at all or have read this blog before, you know that there are very few things that I hate more than seafood. I hate fish and the like when they are alive, I hate how they smell when they are dead, and I really hate how they taste when they are cooked. I have never dreaded a class more. All the seafood kids smell terrible after class. All the chefs are jerks. The TA’s are really hard on the students because they have to do even more work than the chefs. The product, fish, are very expensive and very delicate. Every class, the students have to play a round of Jeopardy. It counts as your daily quiz grade. You get one question. If you get it wrong, you get a zero for the quiz for the day. Also, I had no idea how to even start cutting apart a fish. I have never been so nervous/anxious/grumpy in my life as when I was standing outside the Seafood room door at 12:45pm on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010.
To keep me and my classmates safe in this blog, we are going to refer to my Seafood ID chef/instructor Chef Boyardee.
We walked in and the first thing I noticed was the smell. It was overwhelming. The second thing I noticed was how small the room is. It is really narrow. The cutting room is only about three times the size of my dorm room. It has to fit my class of 16, Chef Boyardee, the two TA’s, a lobster tank, two big sinks (one for scaling fish and one for washing dishes), a desk, a large white board, plus our entire product on speed racks. The room is tile, from floor to ceiling, with big drains on the floor so that when it is time to clean, we literally just hose the room down and then squeegee it dry.
The first day, we were given lots and lots of information. I took about 10 pages of notes in my little memo book just on class procedures and information. We were given a tour of the walk-in and a lesson on fish storage. Everything is packed with and on ice. The fish stay fresh, but they are very very cold. Then we were set to work gutting and scaling farm raised Atlantic salmon and hybrid striped bass. Scaling a fish is a mess. We use little metal comb-like objects to rub against the scales. The teeth of the comb get caught underneath the scales, rip them off, and they fly everywhere. I mean, the room gets covered in them. Gutting a fish was surprisingly not gross. You just stick your fillet knife in by the anal fin (CUTTING EDGE OUT!) and rip up past the pelvic fin. Then you just stick your hand in there, pull out the viscera, cut through the esophagus, and you’re done. Chef Boyardee gave us a demo on the three different cutting methods for filleting a fish. I took notes like a crazy person. They were so bad, that I had to re-print and rewrite my notes that night. He made them look easy, but I knew that they would be hard to do on my own. There was no actual fabrication for us to do that day. Just like the Meat Room, the Seafood Room supplies the rest of the school with the fish and seafood that they use in the kitchens. Unlike in meat class where the students do tasks to learn the skills of meat cutting while the chefs, TA’s, and early team focus on the fabrication for the school, in seafood class, the students do all of the fabrication. There is no set plan for work, we just learn whatever needs to be done that day. On our first day, we didn’t actually have any cutting to do since all the fish ordered that day were ordered “as purchased”, or AP. This means that we didn’t have to do anything but gut and scale them.
Chef Boyardee and our TA Savannah are setting up for our Identification Lecture, where we are going to learn about the basic characteristics of each family of fish as well as see some of the major varieties in each family. We get the kitchen cleaned, get our notebooks ready, and stand around this huge 20ft. cutting table that has now been filled with fish. Savannah begins with the salmon and trout family. Again, I’m taking notes like a crazy person. But here’s where things get weird: I realized that I’m smiling. Um… I hate fish. Right? Well, turns out that I actually kind of like this class. I learned so much in just an hour and a half lectures about the fish families. I’m really looking forward to learning more about their identities and how they live and what they can be used for. I don’t know how this happened, but I promise that I will investigate and get back to you.
Class ended with a formal lecture in a classroom about general fish knowledge, storage, receiving, regulations, food safety, and the like. I went back to my room, ate a sandwich, and got busy with the memorizing, reading, and prepping for day two. I could already feel the butterflies set in as I made flash cards to get ready for Jeopardy.
Friday: This time I mean it: I have never been so happy to see a weekend in my life. I am still sick, had a ton of work to do, and just need to drink some wine with my friends.
I spent most of Friday morning studying all the information from day one. The chef and TA’s won’t answer questions that they have already said the answer to, so I needed to know everything. I went over all the knife cuts for fish, how the walk in was organized, the storage temps for all the varieties of seafood, freshness identifiers, market forms, everything that I was told the day before. We then go into class and look at The White Board. It’s this huge dry-erase board on one of the walls of the room that tells us everything we need to do. Listed under each kind of fish is now much needs to be cut, what kind of cut it needs, where it is going, and it’s AP weight. We have a ton, about 200#, of fish to gut and scale. Then we have to fillet and skin lots of salmon, stripped bass, and flounder. Well, we get our gutting and scaling done, but then chef decides that he wants to do ID before we fabricate anything. So the ID table gets set up with tons of fish. Again, I kind of enjoy this part. I knew NOTHING about fish a few days ago and now I’m pretty decent at describing most of the major varieties sold in American markets.
Anyway, fabrication begins and I get nervous again. A girl named Nicolette (she’s great…I love her, and she lived in Indy for a few years) and I are given a farm-raised king (wild is not in season now) salmon to fillet. We got lucky. Salmon is a soft-boned round fish, so it gets the easiest of the three cutting methods, a straight cut right down the backbone. Nicolette did an awesome job on her side. It game off very clean and she had zero waste. I then had to do the other side. Mine was almost perfect. I only had about one inch where my knife came off the backbone and I missed about a 0.5oz of salmon. Well, let me tell you, Chef Boyardee was not pleased. From across the kitchen, I get “Chandler! Why did you do that? That’s now money down the drain. How am I supposed to sell that trim?” It’s one of those moments where you know the question is ridiculous because clearly I did not intentionally miss product in order to be yelled at. Believe me, not a dream come true. You just have to say, “You can’t, Chef. I lifted my knife too much, Chef. I’m sorry, Chef”, and then live with the fact that you are lower than a cod worm. I think as punishment for my sub-standard cutting, I was the only person with salmon who had to skin their fillet. Not an easy task seeing as now fragile the fish is and it weighing about 5 pounds. I got it done, and it was perfect. I even laid it out flat in front of my work station so that he could see how perfect it was. I got every single bit of skin in one cut while leaving all the meat still on the fillet. I now know how angry .5 oz of waste makes him. When Chef Boyardee came back to me, did he say anything about my superior skill? No. He just told me to cut the fillet into 24-2oz portions. I got a 42 out of 50 for the day. Fine. Whatever.
After clean up, we went into the classroom for Jeopardy and a fish tasting. The room was so incredibly tense. One question: all or nothing. Sometimes it’s really easy, like giving the receiving temperature for live mollusks (35-40°F). Sometimes it’s really hard like naming all 10 freshness checks for finfish. Well, the girl before me got the question: Describe the storage procedures for round fish and flat fish. She got it wrong, so the question came to me. I powered through the answer. I talked about packing the drawn fish cavity with ice, I talked about perforated pans, the angle at which they could be turned, all of it. I was really happy with my answer. The chef asked me what direction they need to face in the ice pans. I thought I had said that already, but I repeat myself, upright, dorsal fin up, swimming away. “That’s not what I asked”. Actually it was, chef…you jerk. Well, Chrissy next to me starts whispering the word “right”. So I just say: “to the right” not really knowing why. Then he asks me why do they need to face the right. Well, this is not something I have ever been told or read. I looked through all my notes and reading after class and not once have I ever been told that they need to be facing the right or why. I start listing reasons like, uniformity, space saving, identification, ect. Then chef leads me though this long drawn out question and answer period where I eventually get to the answer that fish need to face the right since most Americans are right handed. When we go to remove ice from the top of the bin, our hands move from right to left. Since some fish like snapper have very sharp, poisonous spikes on their dorsal fin, keeping them in this direction helps us stay safe. I was on that quest with him for maybe 7 minutes while the class just sat in silent solidarity with me and my complete and utter humiliation. I KNEW all of that storage information backwards and forwards. The rest of the class was using my flash card to study. I was so damned prepared for that quiz, and he was going to make me look like an idiot for not knowing something that I have never been told before. Ah well, that’s the Culinary Institute of America for ya’. We also had to do a flat fish tasting. We tried 5 different flat fish like flounder and dover sole. They are low activity fish, so they don’t have too much fishy flavor. Actually, the skate wing was delicious. I might even be tempted to order it at a restaurant and pay money for it. I know… I don’t have any idea what’s happened to me. Again, I’ll look into it.
When I got back to my room, the locks on my door had been changed and I couldn’t get in. Ask me about that story and I’ll tell you in person. This entry has just gotten out of control. Suffice it to say: I had to wait in the lobby for 20 minutes to get my new key, while everybody who walked by me made some comment like, “oh, guess you’re in fish class” or “hey buddy, you smell like squid”. Great end to a great week.
I can’t believe that all of this has only been one week. As I sit here writing this on Saturday afternoon, it feels like my Meat final was two or three weeks ago. In two days, I’ve learned about 40 varieties of fish and how to gut, scale, fillet, and skin finfish. Things are happening so fast. I am so busy. My mind never stops focusing on what I am learning. The chefs are tough and the TA’s are demanding. They are not afraid to yell or belittle you; but they do it because we are supposed to be the best. They don’t just accept it; they demand it. It’s hard, but I know that I really love it. I don’t think that I could be happier with my decision to come here.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Loins, and Trimmings, and Brisket...OH MY!
I don’t even know how to begin to describe the roller coaster of my week.
Kristofer and I drove back to NY from Indiana on Sunday night/Monday morning. We left at midnight and then drove through the night and morning. While it was great to be back at the CIA early enough to get my things together for class the next day, it threw my sleep schedule for a loop.
On Tuesday, I had Writing at 7:00am per usual. We just got more work to do for the next few weeks. We still don’t have our first essays back. Then I went back to my room for a nap, then ate lunch, and then went off to my first day of Meat Identification and Fabrication.
Every day, Meat class starts out with an hour or two of lecture. We talk about the individual animal (beef, veal, pork, lamb, etc.), go over their anatomy, and talk about the primal cuts, sub primal cuts, and portion cuts. We also talk about good cooking methods for each sub primal. We also learn about the different quality grades for each animal and what to look for when purchasing that meat item. Then we head down into the sub-basement of the school for a few hours of lab/fabrication. The Meat Room is two floors below the main building. If you are going with the whole my-school-is-Hogwarts analogy, think Potions room: a cold, dark, and smelly basement. It’s cooled to about 55°F and has two sets of fans blowing air around. It’s a little chilly. It’s good for the meat, bad for us. We usually watch a few demos by Chef Schneller and then go back to our tables and do what he showed us.
On Day 1 (Tuesday), we had a general introduction to meat in lecture. In lab, we learned how to de-bone a beef shank, trim a top round and then break it down into a flat iron steak and the heart of the top round. We then turned the top round heart into four roasts. This gave us an opportunity to practice roast tying. I had absolutely no idea what was going on the first day. I felt completely lost, and judging by the looks on my classmates’ faces, they did too. Butchery has it’s own language. It is filled with words that take a while to learn. If you don’t know what a piece of meat is, it’s very difficult to break it down or figure out that to do with it. I hate not knowing what’s going on. It makes me feel so stupid and low. Apparently this did not show, because my class asked me to be group leader. All this means right now is that I have to take as purchased weights and at the end of class every day, and I have to make sure that I weigh every single thing that has been fabricated that day. Then I have a team of people who cryovac everything, then I put labels on it and put it away. It’s not that hard, but trying to keep over 300# of meat a day organized can be a challenge. On top of the day of class, I then had to go back to my room and do 3-4 hours of homework (reading, videos, study questions, key terms, mental mise en place, etc.)
The next day, I went down to the meat room at 11:00am as part of our class’s Early Team. Richard, Nick, and I go in about two hours early every day to help the meat room get some production done. Every piece of meat that is served at the CIA goes through the meat room for fabrication. Since it is cheaper to buy large sub primal cuts of meat and then break them down in-house, that’s what the meat room does. I helped my TA, Kevin, de-bone some boston pork butt into cottage butt roasts and cubed a bunch of lamb. Then in class, we learned about beef in lecture. We went into quite a bit of detail on dry aging. In lab, we denuded beef tenderloin and broke it down into portions. This is the stuff that filet mignon is made out of. It’s really quite expensive. I was very nervous. We also fabricated a beef strip loin. When we were all done cleaning, we got to do a tasting of dry aged beef. We tasted a 30-day wet aged striploin, a 30-day dry aged strip loin, and a 20-day dry aged strip loin. The 30-day dry aged was delicious. The best way I can describe it is that it tastes how meat should taste. It covers the palate and stays there. It is incredibly rich in flavor. All in all, I was in the meat room from 11am-8pm. Boo. Again, four hours of homework plus dinner and a grocery store run.
Thursday started with another 7:00am writing class. Then I went back to the Meat Room at 11:00am for more early team work. I de-boned about 6 more boston pork butts. I also took apart another beef top round, turned the heart into roasts and turned the trimmings into beef stew cubes. In class, the topic was veal. The day involved watching a baby calf being slaughtered. It was more than a little traumatizing. Let’s just say that it started with a gunshot to the calf’s head. In lab, we watched a demo on how to take apart the whole veal leg. We also reviewed beef cuts. Then we got to fabricate veal osso buco. Then we trimmed the various cuts of meat from the leg and turned them into veal cutlets. Even though I was going through the motions of fabrication, I still felt really lost. Understanding all the different cuts, how to make them, and where they came from is quite a bit of information to take in. Again: lots of weighing, bagging, and labeling. Lots more homework, and finally bed.
Friday was a turning point for me. After going in to Early Team and making some oxtail and ground beef and going to class lecture on pork, I finally started to feel like I knew what was going on. When chef would use a work like centercut tenderloin or veal shank, I could picture it and understand what to do with it. It felt very, very good to get to this point. Now, don’t get me wrong. I still know very little about meat, but I am getting to the point where I understand it more. Does that make any sense? Anyway, in lab on Friday we were fabricating pork products. We de-boned an entire pork loin, which was actually kind of fun. You have to use a boning knife to slide around the ribs and back of the vertebra. The meat from the center is a perfect cylinder so we tied those into roasts and got graded on them. I got an 8.5 out of 10. Some of my spacing was off and one knot was too loose. It shouldn’t matter too much though because I got some extra credit for coming for early team. We turned the ribs into baby back ribs and saved the other bones for pork stock making. We also had to de-bone a boston pork butt. I had done about six of these so far in early team, so mine turned out nicely. We turned the cottage butt into roasts and the trim into cubes for stew. We were graded on our cubes, but I don’t know how I did.
I have never been so happy to reach the weekend. Getting out of class on Friday night at 8:00 and knowing that I didn’t have four hours of homework ahead of me was such a liberating feeling. I have three more days of Meat Fabrication left, and the Seafood begins on Thursday.
Kristofer and I drove back to NY from Indiana on Sunday night/Monday morning. We left at midnight and then drove through the night and morning. While it was great to be back at the CIA early enough to get my things together for class the next day, it threw my sleep schedule for a loop.
On Tuesday, I had Writing at 7:00am per usual. We just got more work to do for the next few weeks. We still don’t have our first essays back. Then I went back to my room for a nap, then ate lunch, and then went off to my first day of Meat Identification and Fabrication.
Every day, Meat class starts out with an hour or two of lecture. We talk about the individual animal (beef, veal, pork, lamb, etc.), go over their anatomy, and talk about the primal cuts, sub primal cuts, and portion cuts. We also talk about good cooking methods for each sub primal. We also learn about the different quality grades for each animal and what to look for when purchasing that meat item. Then we head down into the sub-basement of the school for a few hours of lab/fabrication. The Meat Room is two floors below the main building. If you are going with the whole my-school-is-Hogwarts analogy, think Potions room: a cold, dark, and smelly basement. It’s cooled to about 55°F and has two sets of fans blowing air around. It’s a little chilly. It’s good for the meat, bad for us. We usually watch a few demos by Chef Schneller and then go back to our tables and do what he showed us.
On Day 1 (Tuesday), we had a general introduction to meat in lecture. In lab, we learned how to de-bone a beef shank, trim a top round and then break it down into a flat iron steak and the heart of the top round. We then turned the top round heart into four roasts. This gave us an opportunity to practice roast tying. I had absolutely no idea what was going on the first day. I felt completely lost, and judging by the looks on my classmates’ faces, they did too. Butchery has it’s own language. It is filled with words that take a while to learn. If you don’t know what a piece of meat is, it’s very difficult to break it down or figure out that to do with it. I hate not knowing what’s going on. It makes me feel so stupid and low. Apparently this did not show, because my class asked me to be group leader. All this means right now is that I have to take as purchased weights and at the end of class every day, and I have to make sure that I weigh every single thing that has been fabricated that day. Then I have a team of people who cryovac everything, then I put labels on it and put it away. It’s not that hard, but trying to keep over 300# of meat a day organized can be a challenge. On top of the day of class, I then had to go back to my room and do 3-4 hours of homework (reading, videos, study questions, key terms, mental mise en place, etc.)
The next day, I went down to the meat room at 11:00am as part of our class’s Early Team. Richard, Nick, and I go in about two hours early every day to help the meat room get some production done. Every piece of meat that is served at the CIA goes through the meat room for fabrication. Since it is cheaper to buy large sub primal cuts of meat and then break them down in-house, that’s what the meat room does. I helped my TA, Kevin, de-bone some boston pork butt into cottage butt roasts and cubed a bunch of lamb. Then in class, we learned about beef in lecture. We went into quite a bit of detail on dry aging. In lab, we denuded beef tenderloin and broke it down into portions. This is the stuff that filet mignon is made out of. It’s really quite expensive. I was very nervous. We also fabricated a beef strip loin. When we were all done cleaning, we got to do a tasting of dry aged beef. We tasted a 30-day wet aged striploin, a 30-day dry aged strip loin, and a 20-day dry aged strip loin. The 30-day dry aged was delicious. The best way I can describe it is that it tastes how meat should taste. It covers the palate and stays there. It is incredibly rich in flavor. All in all, I was in the meat room from 11am-8pm. Boo. Again, four hours of homework plus dinner and a grocery store run.
Thursday started with another 7:00am writing class. Then I went back to the Meat Room at 11:00am for more early team work. I de-boned about 6 more boston pork butts. I also took apart another beef top round, turned the heart into roasts and turned the trimmings into beef stew cubes. In class, the topic was veal. The day involved watching a baby calf being slaughtered. It was more than a little traumatizing. Let’s just say that it started with a gunshot to the calf’s head. In lab, we watched a demo on how to take apart the whole veal leg. We also reviewed beef cuts. Then we got to fabricate veal osso buco. Then we trimmed the various cuts of meat from the leg and turned them into veal cutlets. Even though I was going through the motions of fabrication, I still felt really lost. Understanding all the different cuts, how to make them, and where they came from is quite a bit of information to take in. Again: lots of weighing, bagging, and labeling. Lots more homework, and finally bed.
Friday was a turning point for me. After going in to Early Team and making some oxtail and ground beef and going to class lecture on pork, I finally started to feel like I knew what was going on. When chef would use a work like centercut tenderloin or veal shank, I could picture it and understand what to do with it. It felt very, very good to get to this point. Now, don’t get me wrong. I still know very little about meat, but I am getting to the point where I understand it more. Does that make any sense? Anyway, in lab on Friday we were fabricating pork products. We de-boned an entire pork loin, which was actually kind of fun. You have to use a boning knife to slide around the ribs and back of the vertebra. The meat from the center is a perfect cylinder so we tied those into roasts and got graded on them. I got an 8.5 out of 10. Some of my spacing was off and one knot was too loose. It shouldn’t matter too much though because I got some extra credit for coming for early team. We turned the ribs into baby back ribs and saved the other bones for pork stock making. We also had to de-bone a boston pork butt. I had done about six of these so far in early team, so mine turned out nicely. We turned the cottage butt into roasts and the trim into cubes for stew. We were graded on our cubes, but I don’t know how I did.
I have never been so happy to reach the weekend. Getting out of class on Friday night at 8:00 and knowing that I didn’t have four hours of homework ahead of me was such a liberating feeling. I have three more days of Meat Fabrication left, and the Seafood begins on Thursday.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Short Ribs
This is going to be short:
I got an A- in Product Knowledge. I don't know what happened. Baby Jesus must have come to my aid.
Meat Fabrication is crazy. I am so busy. I am group leader and have to be in class two and a half hours early every day. Lots of reading and memorizing. Also, lots of laundry.
Today is my 22nd birthday. My friends and family are great. Thank you so much for the birthday wishes.
I got an A- in Product Knowledge. I don't know what happened. Baby Jesus must have come to my aid.
Meat Fabrication is crazy. I am so busy. I am group leader and have to be in class two and a half hours early every day. Lots of reading and memorizing. Also, lots of laundry.
Today is my 22nd birthday. My friends and family are great. Thank you so much for the birthday wishes.
Monday, January 4, 2010
The Final (grade) Countdown
Oh, dear lord! It’s been a very long time, folks. The end of the block got very busy and then there was winter break. I am so sorry.
I don’t even know where to begin. How about Math? There is nothing much to say. The class got interesting, but not any more difficult. I finished with a 100% as my final grade. Who would ever have thought that me, the B- average math student in high school would receive an A+ in math in college? I was pleasantly shocked.
Writing class was very busy at the end. We had our first big essay due. I wanted to do well. I enjoy expository writing, and I hope that it showed in my final copy. We were required to do peer editing in class. There is nothing I hate more than peer editing. Kristofer, my friend from Boston U who is getting his masters degree in secondary English education agrees with me. It is incredibly frustration to read a poorly written essay. I want to take it out of the other student’s hand and just rewrite it for him. It would be easier than trying to correct all the mistakes and contest issues. Also, it leaves those of us with fairly good writing skills out because we don’t get edited by other good writers. Getting “good!” with a smiley face next to a paragraph or “I don’t know what you mean” are not helpful comments. I don’t know how I did on the paper yet, but I’ll get my grade in class tomorrow morning. The class is not over until March, so no final grade yet.
Gastronomy was actually very fun the last two weeks of class. I did very well on a few exams, quizzes, and a group presentation. We studied some modern food movements as well as the controversy over genetically modified foods. On the last day of class, I accidentally told Prof. Forrest to “shut up” when she announced that we were supposed to get a foot of snow over the weekend. Oops. There I go again with my lack of a filter. It didn’t affect my grade too much because I came out with 97% for my final grade.
Ok, now there is Product Knowledge. The last two weeks of class were spend on squashes, herbs, apples, pears, grapes, berries, stone fruits, citrus fruits, bananas, melons, specialty fruits, nuts, seeds, cheese, yogurt, milks, and creams. Oh my. It was a lot of info to take in. At this point, I was going to the storeroom every other day to keep up on my ID’s and quality factors. I was doing well. My friends even asked me to go with them to help them study. I had a 95% going into the final. I spent the night before going over all the info with my friends for hours. I don’t know what happened. Apparently I didn’t know the information as well as I should have. The final was made up of 20 practical questions. Some were just straight identifications, where all we had to do was write the name of the product. However, most of the time we had to name the product and then answer several questions about it as well, like naming quality and condition factors, storage temperatures, varieties, where it came from, etc. If you miss one part of the multiple part question, you miss the whole point. And in this class, one point on a test or quiz is one percentage point of the final grade. I’m pretty sure I failed the final. It was very very hard. However, even if I miss all 20 points, I’ll still have a 75% in the class, which should let me pass the class. This final was over two weeks ago. Our grades are still not posted. Take a guess how I feel about that….
I then went home for two weeks for Christmas and the New Year. I had an absolutely fantastic time. It’s always hard leaving friends and family back in Indy, but it’s nice to be back in school. Meat Fabrication and Identification is the next seven class days, and Fish and Seafood Fabrication and Identification is the seven days after that. Meats class starts tomorrow. I’ll keep you all updated.
I don’t even know where to begin. How about Math? There is nothing much to say. The class got interesting, but not any more difficult. I finished with a 100% as my final grade. Who would ever have thought that me, the B- average math student in high school would receive an A+ in math in college? I was pleasantly shocked.
Writing class was very busy at the end. We had our first big essay due. I wanted to do well. I enjoy expository writing, and I hope that it showed in my final copy. We were required to do peer editing in class. There is nothing I hate more than peer editing. Kristofer, my friend from Boston U who is getting his masters degree in secondary English education agrees with me. It is incredibly frustration to read a poorly written essay. I want to take it out of the other student’s hand and just rewrite it for him. It would be easier than trying to correct all the mistakes and contest issues. Also, it leaves those of us with fairly good writing skills out because we don’t get edited by other good writers. Getting “good!” with a smiley face next to a paragraph or “I don’t know what you mean” are not helpful comments. I don’t know how I did on the paper yet, but I’ll get my grade in class tomorrow morning. The class is not over until March, so no final grade yet.
Gastronomy was actually very fun the last two weeks of class. I did very well on a few exams, quizzes, and a group presentation. We studied some modern food movements as well as the controversy over genetically modified foods. On the last day of class, I accidentally told Prof. Forrest to “shut up” when she announced that we were supposed to get a foot of snow over the weekend. Oops. There I go again with my lack of a filter. It didn’t affect my grade too much because I came out with 97% for my final grade.
Ok, now there is Product Knowledge. The last two weeks of class were spend on squashes, herbs, apples, pears, grapes, berries, stone fruits, citrus fruits, bananas, melons, specialty fruits, nuts, seeds, cheese, yogurt, milks, and creams. Oh my. It was a lot of info to take in. At this point, I was going to the storeroom every other day to keep up on my ID’s and quality factors. I was doing well. My friends even asked me to go with them to help them study. I had a 95% going into the final. I spent the night before going over all the info with my friends for hours. I don’t know what happened. Apparently I didn’t know the information as well as I should have. The final was made up of 20 practical questions. Some were just straight identifications, where all we had to do was write the name of the product. However, most of the time we had to name the product and then answer several questions about it as well, like naming quality and condition factors, storage temperatures, varieties, where it came from, etc. If you miss one part of the multiple part question, you miss the whole point. And in this class, one point on a test or quiz is one percentage point of the final grade. I’m pretty sure I failed the final. It was very very hard. However, even if I miss all 20 points, I’ll still have a 75% in the class, which should let me pass the class. This final was over two weeks ago. Our grades are still not posted. Take a guess how I feel about that….
I then went home for two weeks for Christmas and the New Year. I had an absolutely fantastic time. It’s always hard leaving friends and family back in Indy, but it’s nice to be back in school. Meat Fabrication and Identification is the next seven class days, and Fish and Seafood Fabrication and Identification is the seven days after that. Meats class starts tomorrow. I’ll keep you all updated.
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