Life sends you on many journeys you never expected for yourself and this is definitely one I never imagined. Instead of making resolutions for 2010, I've managed to change my whole life. On January 2nd I moved to
Tomorrow I will be finished with my first rotation of classes. This 6 week term included Culinary Foundations 1 & Food Science & Safety. In Culinary Foundations we covered culinary & restaurant history, knife skills, kitchen equipment & usage, stocks, sauces, soups & cooking techniques. Food Science & Safety was all about everything disgusting you never wanted to know about restaurants & food. The symptoms and origins of dozens of foodborne illnesses & the proper handling of food through each stage of preparation. I expected this class to be boring but the gross out factor made it pretty interesting. I will never be able to go out to eat & look at a restaurant the same way again.
Throughout these first 6 weeks we have not been allowed to cook. Instead the chef has demonstrated many techniques & lectured on the fundamentals of cooking. After finals tomorrow I will move onto Culinary Foundations 2 where I will be required to produce each of the dishes and techniques that were demonstrated through the first term. As I move through CF2 I can catch you up on some of the great things that were made & the amazing dishes that come from extracting as much flavor as possible from the ingredients rather than through seasoning. My favorite so far, which I have already tried at home, is Flounder poached in fish stock topped with a Tomato Beurre Blanc (butter emulsified with reduced white wine). Absolutely fantastic! Very easy to do & one of the most flavorful dishes I have ever made.
Thursday night I had my practical exam on knife skills. We were given 80 minutes to complete 8 different knife cuts at varying amounts to precise measurement. After finishing, each cut was inspected & measured for uniformity and graded on a scale of 1 to 10. We were also graded on the amount of product waste that was left on our cutting board, whether or not the waste was separated between useable & non-useable & also sanitation. (Cleaning & sanitizing our knives & boards between each cut & type of product.) The 8 cuts included Paysanne, Julienne, Battonet, Concase (peeling, seeding & dicing a tomato), Ciseler (dicing an onion), Mince (garlic), Tourne (potato or carrot cut into a 2-inch long, 7-sided football shape) & Small Dice. I was happy to make an 86. I had points deducted because I cut myself twice and received anywhere from an 8-10 on all of the cuts. I was very pleased to do this well & thought the chef was being generous since my Tourned potatoes were pretty rough looking. They are by far the hardest to do & everyone in the class was cursing this cut.
Tomorrow, if it doesn’t snow again, I have two more finals. One is a written test covering everything in Culinary Foundations & the other is identifying 50 spices, herbs, oils & vinegars by sight, smell or taste. I am having the worst time with the oils & vinegars. In the practice sessions we’ve had I’ve relied mostly on color. Some of the vinegars you can definitely figure out by taste, others are very hard to discern. The oils are a little easier because of color, but I have a difficult time smelling them. (Too many nose bleeds in
I’m pretty sure I made an A in Food Safety & hopefully if all goes well I will make an A in Culinary Foundations. That one is a little harder to figure out since the knife skills test counted as 30% of the final grade & the tests tomorrow still count towards 25%.
Sorry it took awhile to get this going. There’s been a lot more homework & projects to do than I ever expected. Later I will fill everyone in on the lovely uniform I have to wear everyday & how strange it is to be back in school after all these years.
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