Skills 3...Chef B's World Famous!

After a three week vacation back home for summer, I returned to the Culinary to start the next class. Skills Development 3....what can I say? I can honestly say this class at one point gave me a unpleasant dream involving pasta but more on that later. This was our first production kitchen. We were responsible to opening the kitchen and serving 40 members of our fellow classmates. Our chef was a woman by the name of Elizabeth Br. This was a name that on numerous occasions was followed by a chuckle that could only mean "Hahaha...you're f---ed." Turns out the reason for this reaction was because Chef Br. was also known to be the type of chef that would change the menu up on you 3 or 4 times in one conversation. Our ability to adapt was about to be tested.

Chef Br., or Lady Br. as many called her, was bat shit insane completely mad a character indeed. Before leaving for break, I heard so many stories about this woman that I really had no idea what to expect. Genius? Why...yes! This woman had the ability to draw you in to every technique, every pot of soup, every slice of garnish and at the drop of a nail, blow up in your face, reducing you to nothing more then a deer-in-headlight, possibly drooling, shell of a human being. With that said the food she taught us to cook was absolutely amazing. Chef Br. showed us so many new tricks like how to make her special "Chef Br's World Famous" canoe tournèe or how to quickly brown onions for her "Chef Br's World Famous" French onion soup. She showed us her way of cooking the classic blanquette de veau, which was a white veal stew. We served this dish with some fragrant rice pilaf and people...this dish is still by far, one of my favorite dishes to make and eat at the CIA. It was a bowl of stew and rice that could make you smile and sigh in satisfaction even after the toughest day at work. We seared off the veal cubes to G.B.D. (golden brown and delicious...yea...its a term.) We sweated off mushrooms and reserved the beautiful liquor that the mushrooms released. That liquid was then reduced to a glaze and then we coated the carrots and pearl onions in that before they were added to the finished stew. So damn good.

Now when Chef Br. wasn't getting her hands dirty and teaching us these awesome technique, she was probably checking with the students to see if they liked what we cooked, or what was more likely, reducing someone in class to a wide-eyed, blubbering labradoodle. On one of the days, the dish was Saute Chicken Fines herb w/ fresh pasta and veg. My responsibility for the day was to make, cook, and plate about 4 lbs of fresh fettuccine. Meh...only 4 lbs, not too bad right? Murphy's law. Before cooking, the pasta looked and felt pretty good but either due to under cooking or over cooking, the end product was a craptastic broken sorry excuse for pasta. The single component of my teams plate that was horrible was my pasta as Chef Br. kindly announced at the end of class not to mention several times during service. That pasta ate at me (ha!) all day and eventually came back to haunt me in my dreams. I think somehow I burnt 10 pounds of pasta while cooking it in boiling water. How does that even happen?!

With all that said, I learned so many cool new things in this class and Chef Br. kept me on my toes with the way she ran her kitchen. Best part though? We were never late  for service AND I swear my fellow classmates can back me up on this one, I think we actually started developing a little fan base that started following our class around from kitchen to kitchen! It was legen...wait for it!

P.S. Sorry...no pictures this entry...I think there was a unanimous fear that any cell phone or camera would have been chopped in half if we took it out.

Skills Development.....PART DEUX!

Quick update! I've finished my first two terms at the CIA and have gone on to externship. I moved out to snowy Aspen, Colorado and will be starting at Viceroy Resort at Snowmass Village very soon. More on this later! Now to catch up on these posts...


Continuing on from Skills 1 was Skills Development 2 with the same class and same chef. In this class, we continue learning about vegetable cookery, starches, and protein. From day one, Chef B. began teasing us about day 4. The infamous egg day. Every time he or someone else brought it up in class, this sadistic evil look would spread across his face...and now that I think about it...that same sadistic evil look appears quite a bit at school...hmm..

Chef B in Demo

So in Skills 2, we continued to practice the fundamentals we learned from skills 1 such as stocks, which we made everyday, as well as items like the mother sauces, roux, and basic veg and starch cookery. The first couple days of skills 2 was dedicated to starches and vegetables. We then moved on to learning how to make fresh pasta. That was a fun day. Everyone got to make our own fresh fettuccine and also fresh cheese ravioli. Each team made a batch of tomato sauce. One team made a creamy mushroom truffle sauce under the instruction of Chef B. and it was #%(**& outstanding.

Then comes egg day. Every student had to know how to properly cook eggs in a variety of different methods. We learned over easy, over medium, over hard, soft scramble, hard scramble, hard cooked, country omelet, French omelet, and sunny side up. Chef B. told us a story in which one of his past students at one point during egg day, put down the pan, gathered his things and just left the class and X'd out. Not a word to anyone. Poor guy just snapped. Yea. Respect the egg.

The rest of class was learning to make completed plates: Each completed plate was typically composed of a protein, a starch, a green vegetable, another vegetable, and a sauce. And guess what? I have pictures.

Herb and Cheese Risotto

Deep Poach Salmon, Haricot Verts, Squash noodles
Parsley Potatoes, Sauce Beurre Blanc

Shallow Poached Paupiette of Sole
Steamed Spinach, glazed carrots, rice pilaf
Sauce Vin Blanc

Roasted Chicken w/ pan gravy
Roasted root vegetables
Broccoli Rabe au Beurre, Sauteed Potato tourne

Braised Short Rib w/ braising liquid (demi glace)
Polenta, Haricot Verts au Beurre
Root vegetable tourne

Chicken Friccase (White Chicken Stew)
Pommes Puree, Broccoli au Beurre
Garnished with pearl onions and sauteed mushrooms

Fried Pork Cutlet
Cole Slaw, Spaetzle
Sauce Piquante

Grilled New York Strip Steak
Pomme Frites, Grilled Vegetables
Bearnaise Sauce

Sauteed Tenderloin medallions
Broccoli Rabe au Beurre
Potato au Gratin
Onion Rings
Sauce Chass

So...anyone else hungry?

Skills Development 1

Three weeks go by both seafood fab and ID as well as meat fab and ID are done. Now on to some actual cooking! My class enters skills development where we start out by learning all the basics. Sauces, stocks, knife cuts, and basic vegetable cookery like blanching. Chef B., who is probably my favorite chef thus far, was awesome. He not only taught us the "how" of cooking, but the "why" as well. This played exactly to the way I loved to learn. He stressed the importance of stock and also made a point to tell us that every single gallon of stock that left our classroom to be utilized by the school WILL be the best stock available. He wanted the flavors to be perfect and the color/clarity to match. Each day, our class produced a good 20-30 gallons of chicken stock, white beef stock, or brown veal stock. Class started at 6:30 every day but everyone was normally in the classroom no later then 6:15 to get set up. Every station was set up with cutting boards, personal tools, sanitizer buckets, gloves, paper towels, trash/compost/useable trim buckets, and of course salt and pepper.

Chicken Stock!

Steam Kettles

On our first day, Chef B. walked us through the classroom and gave the introduction and standard operation procedures for the class. He then explained to us that he's going to be challenging us more, having us do more, and expecting more from us then other classes although I'm sure all the other chefs tell their class the same thing to pump the class spirit up....or weed people out. Details! Then we started working on knife cuts. Every day, the class would start off by doing whats called a knife tray. It's basically a timed exercise that had us practice our basic knife cuts.

Knife Tray

 Our knife tray was slightly different from the one above as I forgot to take pictures earlier on in the class...oops..but it's pretty close. We had to julienne onions and dice onions, mince garlic and shallots, chiffonade parsley, tomatoes concassé (peeled & seeded), and make a little herb bundle called a sachet d'epice. We also had to dice up potatoes into brunoise (1/8" cubes) and small dice (1/4" cubes). Chef B. would walk around with a ruler to measure how accurate we were, docking points if we were over those dimensions. The first day, we were given 90 minutes to complete the knife tray and most of us needed the full 90 minutes. By the last day, we were down to 30 minutes. The record was like 18 minutes or something by one of the chef's past students. How crazy is that! Peel and clean everything AND cut it down to the proper dimensions. Amazing.

The rest of the course was dedicated to learning how to make the 5 mother sauces: bechamel, beloute, espangnole, hollandaise, and tomato. We also learned the technique to make certain classic soups like purees, chowders, broths, cream soups, and consomme (a clarified soup). Every day, Chef B. would demo techniques and everyone would gather around, scribbling notes down in our little pocket notebooks and then we would disperse to replicate what we saw as best we could. At the end of class, chef would taste our product and grade us appropriately. The extra soups and sauces we made would then be bagged up to be used later on or be sent to one of the other kitchens would would use the extra product for production. Though this school's food cost is pretty high, the chefs still try to minimize the amount of waste by using as much as we can from production everyday.

Chef B. teaches with sarcasm. He's able to hide jokes and insults in when he corrects you that aren't really terribly mean but then after you think about it...you feel like a complete moron for messing up. He oddly enough, also has a very extensive music library in his head. I've caught him whistling tunes like "76 Trombones" and 'If I had a brain..". The latter usually as he was walking away from someone who scorched some soup or burnt a sauce. Other times, we'd walk in on him rapping along with Tupac, Dr. Dre and Eminem. Disney tunes find their way into the collection as well here and there. It was very amusing.

Now to make up for not having a whole lot of pictures to post about the class, I'll post some random ones! Wheeee!!

Eating with friends in Farq Hall

Wild life on Campus

A nice day in Hudson Valley

Duck with cous cous and a spicy sauce from Garde Manger
No...we did not harm any wild life on campus for this dish!

Hudson River

 

Blue Berry Tart

Fruit Tart

Apple Pie Bakery's famous macaroons

Clean dry board! Clean dry fish!

Whoa...hey this blog is still alive! Yea...it's been busy around here. So I'm going to try and catch up a little bit. The next several entries will be photo heavy.

So after meat fabrication and ID, I started the 7 day class in seafood fabrication and Identification. We learned how to filet the fish, skin them, and also breaking various mollusks and shellfish.

First of all, the chef...Chef C.. This man was absitively, yes this warrants made up words, insane. Loud random exclamations, a stare that could make Freddy Krueger piss himself, and just eccentric as hell. The man had just about every Spongebob themed novelty item you could imagine. He even had a Spongebob chef toque! I didn't even know they made those! I think he also confused me for another Asian guy in my class for the first 3 days of class.

Chef C. showing us Hake

However, with that said, Chef C. was awesome. He really knew a LOT about fish and tried to teach us as much as he could within the small amount of time we had. He also had a ton of experience to pass on to us about life in general. He would frequently shout out things like "BASS SNAPPER GROUPER! BASS SNAPPER GROUPER!" when explaining the different families of fish. "LITTLE NECK, TOP NECK, CHERRYSTONE, CHOWDER!" in reference to the size of clams. And of course..."CLEAN DRY BOARD! CLEAN DRY FISH!"

Other things we did in this class was tastings. We tasted all the fish in one form or another. We also tasted the shellfish and mollusks as well. On the last day, we also tasted some caviar. Let me just say, I don't care how great caviar is normally...10 o' clock in the morning? Not so great.

In any case, to keep it short, this class was awesome. I got to filet mahi mahi, which by the way is one ugly fish but has the most amazing colors. I cut up yellow tile fish, black sea bass, flounders, cod, king salmon, and even got to fabricate some live soft shell crab. The only down side to this class was the laundry. Basically had to do a batch of laundry every night because anything and everything you take into that kitchen will smell like fish. The air you breathe for several hours after class smells like fish. Your tools, water bottles, notebooks, everything. EVERYTHING!!!

Top to Bottom: King Salmon, Atlantic Salmon,
Steelhead Trout, Artic Char, & Rainbow Trout

Top to Bottom: Yellow Tile Fish, Red Snapper,
Hybrid Striped Bass, Black Sea Bass, and Red Drum

Cod, Pollock, Hake, Haddock, Cusk

Top: Halibut. Bottom Left: Yellowtail Flounder.
Bottom Right: Turbot

Can't really see these all that well...but the little one
is a dorade and right next to it is a monkfish tail.

Caviar Tasting!

I seeeee yooouu!! Eye of an Opah fish.

Mollusks prep for tasting!

Learning the Cuts...Part 2

Part DEUCE!

We went over veal, which are very young calves that could range from just a few days old to around 35 weeks old. Know anyone that's against eating veal? Next time you can tell them that the average broiler chicken is taken to slaughter at about 6 weeks. Lawyered.

Veal....I think the top round, bottom round and knuckle?

Look we fabricated a bat!

First one to guess what this is gets a prize!

Here's an untrimmed Tenderloin PSMO.

Costco sells these things for about $50 a pop. We can get roughly 8 to 9 4-oz portions that would sell for at least $20 bucks in the restaurant. Oddly enough, this is the cut that makes the least amount of money in the restaurant. In any case, steak night anyone?

My buddy Sabatino on the left posing, thanks for the photos!
Chef E. on the right wondering what the hell Sab is doing.
And oh yes....that's the carcass of a headless, skinless
lamb hanging out on the demo table.

Chef E: (Chuckles) "Mary had a little lamb...I slit the b----'s throat."
Yep...butcher's have a unique sense of humor.

Reaching in to pull out some unusable trim.

Look we found a jelly bean!

Just kidding...it was an adrenal gland.

Yes...that is a hacksaw.
How else are we supposed to cut through  the spine?
 >=]

Preparing the lamb rack for Frenching.

Frenched Rack of Lamb. Fancypants!

Frenched Lamb...knuckle?

On day 4 of 7, Chef E. pulled me aside and told me he wanted to talk to me after class. I was thinking oh crap, I must've been doing something wrong or maybe I was going too slow or something. I was rather anxious for the rest of the day. On top of that, day 4 was pork day and it also happened to be our practical skill assessment day on meat fabrication so I was already nervous. Lucky I did pretty well and got high marks for the day. w00t! Still, the talk after class was weighing heavily on my mind. After our little break, cleaned up the room, and got ready to head out for the day, I stayed behind to see what the deal was. Chef E. motioned me over to his desk/podium and said, "I rarely do this with pre-extern students but there's an event in a few weeks, catering for 250 people. If you want to, I'd like you to come work it with me. I don't know what it is you got, but you got it. You're shining in this class and I want to see what you can do." HOLY FRICK ON A STICK! I was blown away. I immediately said yes and left class with a big ol' smile on my face. It was awesome. 

So this happened a little over a month ago and I've been working with Chef E. and the team every weekend and a few times during the week for prep. We've worked car shows, weddings, birthdays, graduation parties, etc, serving Texas style BBQ, in-house made hot dogs (Jalepeno Cheddar Hot dogs....freaking religious experience), burgers, and sausages. The food is simple and delicious. The other recruited students that have been working with ETC (Elia's Texas Connection) are really chill. All in all, its a pretty sweet gig. I did however get a nice new burn scar on my arm from the smoking rig though but that's another story. 

Learning the Cuts...Part 1

 Okay first of all, sorry for the lack of posts! The last several weeks have been filled with full days of class, work, homework, and whatever few hours of sleep I can get a night. Its crazy! Alright, now back to it!

"You'll never know how much I care about the industry until you learn how much I care about you."

That's what the chef that taught me how to fabricate meat said to us on our first day of class. Master Butcher Chef E. started cutting meat when he was 14 years old and has been doing it for almost 4 decades. Needless to say, the man knows his stuff. He also was a Master Sausage Maker (teehee! ... jk) He knows 100 year old recipes passed down to him directly from an old school German sausage maker. Crazy right?

Beef Poster...yep...

Anyways, this classes objectives were to teach us how to identify and fabricate the different cuts of meat from all the major land based proteins...beef, pork, lamb, poultry, veal (yes..veal)...and just for fun, sausage making. Every day we went into class at 5:30AM. B T Dub, the "classroom" was actually a refrigerated butcher room kept at a brisk 45º-50º degrees when the fan is off. With that chilling fan on, the room gets down to about 40º. One guy from our class was right was stationed right in the path of the chilling fan and was basically chilled blue for 6 or 7 hours every morning for a week. First day of class, a few friends and I went in early to help set up. 20 minutes in, the chef walks in with a face that could only say "Don't F--- with me or else." That pretty much set the mood for the rest of the week. Without realizing what we were doing, the entire class lined up at attention. I'm assuming Chef E. was amused by this but didn't show it as he went with it by going down the line inspecting our uniforms while scribbling notes on a clipboard..again with that scowl on his face. Part of our pre-day 1 homework was to tie a bunch of butcher's knots for tying roasts. Some people either forgot or came in with knots that didn't meet chef's standards. Well he damn well made sure they knew.

"This is whale shit. This belongs at the bottom of the ocean. Get this garbage out of here."

Needless to say, we were all scared shitless.

So on our first two days, we went over beef fabrication. We cut up beef round, shank, loins into tenderloins (filet mignon anyone?), sirloins, striped loins, and everything in between. Photo Bomb!

Whole beef round being demo'd by chef...

Boning out the round

Boned...

That little hook on the bone on the left was a PAIN to get around.

All the sub-primal pieces of the Beef Round.

I think these were beef cubes ready for vacu-sealing.

Fabricated pieces from the beef loin.

Look how puuurty that looks! All tied up and ready for roasting....mmm...

tsk tsk tsk...

Okay so tip of the day here! Some grocery stores or shops will sell the bright red piece of meat on the left as skirt steak which is very flavorful and delicious and a bit expensive cause there are only two pieces in each cow right by the diaphragm . However! the bright red piece is actually a cut called the sirloin tip and is butterfly'd.

This is how we took ID quizzes. Here's a piece of meat...WHAT IS IT?!

Portioning out pieces of sirloin steak.

All packaged up and ready to be chilled.

I'll put up part two with some cool pictures of lamb fabrication and other meat room craziness. I need to catch up with these posts! I've got stuff on seafood id and fab, skills 1 class which goes over stocks, soups, grand sauces and the first week of skills 2 which is so far, fresh pasta (chef let us make a sauce that costed $150...and we ate it for lunch!), rices (cheese risotto...drool), all sorts of egg cookery techniques, and just this past Friday, poached salmon with a beurre blanc sauce. So yea! Much more to come!