Saturday, June 25, 2011

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!

0 comments:

Post a Comment