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.