Mise en Place: 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!!