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.