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!