So we meat again
I finished up with meat on Tuesday. Had you asked me Monday afternoon how I felt about the final -- the ID portion in particular -- I would have said, "not good." We had a practice ID session at the end of class that left me quite disheartened. You're looking at these big cuts of meat in vac-packs, and they all look the same. Not all the same, but close enough. I was honestly thinking that if I could get 10 out of 20, I'd take it, and having gotten all the other points, I'd settle for a solid B+.
I studied meat for four and a half hours Monday night. Went to bed at 1:30, got up after a mere three and a half hours of sleep. Too much, you say? Not so. I got either 18 or 19 (there's one I'm not clear on) out of 20 on the ID portion of the final, aced the yield test and maybe missed one on the multiple choice section. So yeah... I'm a regular meat stud.
We wrapped up meat class by making 60# of sausage, 30 pounds each of sweet Italian and breakfast sausage. Start with cubed pork butt (that's the shoulder, remember, a great cut for sausage because of its lean to fat ratio), add spices, chill everything really well, run it through the meat grinder, then through the extruder and into casings. It was an easy, relaxing way to finish up a very intense seven days... the only bad part of all this is that we didn't get a weekend to recover.
And why was there no time off? Because we were expected in our next class, Seafood Fabrication and ID, at 6:05am the next day. The kitchen from which I normally get breakfast doesn't even open until 6, so I had to eat upstairs, not that there's a huge difference. After a quick kitchen run-through, we hit the classroom for lecture.
Chef Clark is pretty much the exact opposite of Chef Sebald. To use a phrase Chef Clark himself uses quite often, the two are "Night and day, black and white, Pinto Cadillac, Honda Harley" (he rides a Harley and doesn't consider any other brand a motorcycle). Chef Sebald is like a kindly grandfather, telling stories and sharing all he knows about meat. Chef Clark is a yeller. If you screw up, he'll let you (and the rest of the class) know. He even sets traps for the class, trying to get us to give incorrect answers in order to have an opportunity to point out our shortcomings.
This is not to say I won't learn a great deal in his class. I already know a great deal more about fish than I did two days ago, and yesterday I gutted and scaled a fish for the first time. He's also very serious about establishing and maintaining the chef-cook relationship, and by that I mean that he's always right, knows everything, and should do all the talking, while we are always wrong, know nothing, and should do all the listening.
There's a tremendous amount of stress in the kitchen, because nobody wants to screw up and get called on it. Stay busy, stay out of the way, and, when in doubt, look for something to clean. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it's not -- basically, this class is walking a fine line between "learning" and "surviving" for me.
I'm probably not going to talk much about fish. Don't take it personally. I'm just trying to make sure I don't say something I shouldn't.
I studied meat for four and a half hours Monday night. Went to bed at 1:30, got up after a mere three and a half hours of sleep. Too much, you say? Not so. I got either 18 or 19 (there's one I'm not clear on) out of 20 on the ID portion of the final, aced the yield test and maybe missed one on the multiple choice section. So yeah... I'm a regular meat stud.
We wrapped up meat class by making 60# of sausage, 30 pounds each of sweet Italian and breakfast sausage. Start with cubed pork butt (that's the shoulder, remember, a great cut for sausage because of its lean to fat ratio), add spices, chill everything really well, run it through the meat grinder, then through the extruder and into casings. It was an easy, relaxing way to finish up a very intense seven days... the only bad part of all this is that we didn't get a weekend to recover.
And why was there no time off? Because we were expected in our next class, Seafood Fabrication and ID, at 6:05am the next day. The kitchen from which I normally get breakfast doesn't even open until 6, so I had to eat upstairs, not that there's a huge difference. After a quick kitchen run-through, we hit the classroom for lecture.
Chef Clark is pretty much the exact opposite of Chef Sebald. To use a phrase Chef Clark himself uses quite often, the two are "Night and day, black and white, Pinto Cadillac, Honda Harley" (he rides a Harley and doesn't consider any other brand a motorcycle). Chef Sebald is like a kindly grandfather, telling stories and sharing all he knows about meat. Chef Clark is a yeller. If you screw up, he'll let you (and the rest of the class) know. He even sets traps for the class, trying to get us to give incorrect answers in order to have an opportunity to point out our shortcomings.
This is not to say I won't learn a great deal in his class. I already know a great deal more about fish than I did two days ago, and yesterday I gutted and scaled a fish for the first time. He's also very serious about establishing and maintaining the chef-cook relationship, and by that I mean that he's always right, knows everything, and should do all the talking, while we are always wrong, know nothing, and should do all the listening.
There's a tremendous amount of stress in the kitchen, because nobody wants to screw up and get called on it. Stay busy, stay out of the way, and, when in doubt, look for something to clean. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it's not -- basically, this class is walking a fine line between "learning" and "surviving" for me.
I'm probably not going to talk much about fish. Don't take it personally. I'm just trying to make sure I don't say something I shouldn't.
posted by JMB at
5:54 PM
1 Comments:
I want to be on the record here that I still think the idea of "Fish Fabrication" is hilarious.
Hope you and the other Barkers are doing well.
By
Chris Hafner, at 9:14 PM
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