Freekin Presidents...

With Monday of last week being a holiday celebrating presidents who are dead and probably don't appreciate it anyway, we stayed very busy for the three class days we had left in the week trying to get through four days of lessons and recipes.  Two of our six classmates were also absent for a day, so we were able to spend a little more individual time on full recipes, which was the silver lining to missing a few breaks.  Idle hands being the Devil's workshop, busy is good.   Up to a point.  We also have a temporary addition to our class, Daisy. She is actually finished with the rest of the course, but missed two weeks of cold kitchen when she started, so she is just picking up these two weeks with us.  Her knife is battered and scratched, so I guess we can look forward to some real work in the months to come. 

There have been many discussions in and around class that focus on the cost - vs - benefit of going to culinary school in general and to this school in particular.  These talks usually stem from the level of training we are receiving, and are often started with a simple statement like "Wow, today I made deviled eggs."
When part of your day involves learning to make things that most of us have made at home for years, like deviled eggs or a ham and cheese sandwich, it's easy to wonder what part of your fairly large tuition is being applied to that lesson.  I think it's important to remember that this is a course of instruction, so lessons are geared to the lowest skill level in the class and then built upon in subsequent sessions.  When we are stoked to get into more challenging work, it's tough to remember sometimes that we are less than 1/10th of the way into the course.  And I suspect that when we are further along and working our butts off, we will think back fondly on the ham and cheese day.  Methods will often be very different in the business of food as opposed to home meal preparation, and that fact can't be discounted.  Quick, make me a deviled egg without using mayonnaise, vinegar, mustard, or paprika.  I didn't think I could either, but I did.  This is just one example of the difference between home cooking and working in the food service industry (hereafter referred to as "the industry").

We did some exercises with eggs; frying, boiling, and poaching.  It was fun, with everyone trying to flip an over-easy egg with no implements (not that difficult, if you ask me) and limiting the loss of egg white when making a poached egg that is oval and pretty.  By the way, I believe I was the only one that successfully flipped the egg.  I'm just sayin.  We then enjoyed our eggs with our scratch corned beef hash made with the leftover corned beef from our Reuben sandwich lesson and our German hot potato salad.  Awesome eats. 

I think most of you would be surprised at how much use is made out of leftovers in the industry.  We'll come back to that another day.

Our week ended with the short-handed class making hamburgers.  Sounds like a possible gripe about another simple-to-make food, right?  Next time you make a burger, be sure to:
Grind your own burger (and measure the fat content to 10%)
Bake your own onion buns
Mix your own Mayonnaise, relish, and barbecue sauce
Weigh all your components to meet specific portion sizes
Do all this while interspersing lessons on use of the commercial mixer, chopper, and food processor.
I feel like we got in plenty of varied cooking instruction and technique, and so did the rest of the class.  Ultimately, I'm happy with the fact that we are laying a very basic foundation for our future lessons.  We have one week left of cold kitchen, then it's downstairs to the hot kitchen and the instruction of one Chef Klaus.

Things I learned this week:

No, you don't need mayo for deviled eggs 

or vinegar

or mustard.

According to Chef Otto, eating celery root will give a man...shall we say...strength and longevity at night.

I'm getting much better with the knife. 

Ants hate baking soda.

Later  days!