The Culinary Tales Week 7: Starting Over and Lessons in Poultry
We graduated onto Intro II, which meant: New chef (new rules.) New recipes. (New angst.) New floor (new bathroom, hence new favorite toilet.)
It turned out that our new Chef instructor was actually cool. Unlike chefs Good Cop and Bad Cop, Chef Chill was laidback and easy on us (quite unlike the first impression I got when he visited us during finals week in Intro I.) For starters, he knew that most of us had day jobs and gave us a week to turn in our homework.
I liked his relaxed teaching style though like a good masochist, I missed being pushed. Chef Chill wasn’t so harsh when we brought up dishes that weren’t good (“Don’t worry about it,” he’d say), which was fine and dandy, but I had gotten used to Chef Good Cop’s snippy comments and making mistakes.
If Intro I taught me anything, it was that mistakes were a good thing. A bit like how falling off a bike teaches you how to ride, because you learn not to do it again. And in cooking, making mistakes also teaches you how to save a dish.
It took a while to get used to the new classroom as it was organized a little helter skelter(ly). Instead of our stations arranged in neat columns, they were all over the place. There was no particular order to the reach-ins (industry talk for fridges) and storage racks; they were scattered throughout the lab. No matter how prepared I came to class, I always, always ended up scampering all over the kitchen to get my product anyway.
The course itself was organized by meat type and Week One was all about poultry.
On our first day, we fabricated chicken and duck. Fabricating meat means to chop it up into pieces and trim it (of fat, skin and other disposables.) I’d always been scared to buy whole chickens, but it was pretty neat to really handle them for once. I was actually surprised to learn that one does not need a heavy duty knife to hack these birds. A regular chef’s knife could do the trick, but we used a filet knife, with a blade no wider than 3/4″ and no longer than 8″. (Really interesting how the word “fabricate” means one thing in plain old English, another in cooking terms, and yet another in fashion.)
We also learned how to “French” bones: preparing a piece of chicken breast with part of the wing bone attached (also called “airline”) and the end trimmed of its meat, skin and cartilage. It also works for drumettes and leg/thigh combos and other kinds of meat, where the rib bones are trimmed prettily.
I finally learned where the hell the chicken’s “oyster” is (actually, there are two, and they’re located at the top-back end of the thigh.) And in case you’re wondering where a chicken tender comes from, it’s the flap of meat that’s found between the breast bone and the breast itself. I just always thought they were cut up chicken breasts.
We also learned how to “truss” a chicken – the process of tying it up in a tight little bundle with butcher’s twine – which is done mostly to cook evenly.
One marked difference between Intro I and Intro II was, instead of slapping our dishes into individual plates and presenting them at different times, we had to turn in, during a specific time window, a composed plate with meat, starch, sauce and vegetables. And we had to pay particular attention to presentation.
In Intro 1, the closest training we had to this was our last day of finals, when we had to put all of our items on one plate. Making it look really pretty wasn’t too big of a concern as long as the edges were wiped clean, but now, all of a sudden, we were making patterns with the sauce and having to make fancy little rainbows and comet twirls, molding the starch and making the meat sit prettily against it, like artists getting ready to sketch a nudie portrait.
I also roasted my first whole chicken, and may I say that it tasted divine. Just a tad overdone though not dry, but with my paranoia about foodborne illnesses, I sometimes think overcooking meat isn’t a bad thing. (I said “sometimes.”)
I felt quite accomplished when, while browning the chicken prior to roasting, my pan caught on fire (several times actually) and I kept my cool. No screaming, no jumping back, no “Oh my god, my pan’s on fire” panic.
But I was still injuring myself, mostly on roasting accidents rather than cutting; I became fast, intimate friends with BurnJel.
We also cooked duck, used caul fat (it’s a spider web-y sheet of fat that is used to wrap meat), deep fried, “turned” vegetables other than potatoes, and made coulis (a sauce made of vegetable puree) … all submitting them within the window (it didn’t matter how fast you get your stuff done; if Chef said to bring it up between 9:00-9:20, that was when you had to do it). I met almost all my deadlines.
I actually enjoyed working with meat, even though some of it was gross (we occasionally had to clean the poultry of their insides.) But the novelty of the experience was exhilarating and made up for the yuck factor.
I also had the opportunity to work in my first commercial kitchen, doing prep work for the Oscars. Wolfgang Puck caters it every year (as he does the Grammys, the Emmys, and a host of other high-profile celebrity dos) and he’s great about hiring local culinary students to help out.
My first task was to cut up tortillas into julienne strips, and they were going to set me down 10 feet away from Chef Puck himself. Frankly, this scared the shit out of me – didn’t want the man himself scrutinizing my skills (or lack thereof.) Thankfully, we were moved into the back kitchen, where I chopped in peace. I must have cut up a million julienne tortillas, taking three hours to fill up a vat. Seasoned pros could have done it in ten minutes, but I was new and still getting used to the “sense of urgency” part. My finger blistered after the first twenty minutes, but I soldiered on.
After that, I was assigned to mold mini-beef patties in the butcher room, which was as cold as a freezer. I lost feeling in my fingers about ten minutes into the task, but I was willing to make that sacrifice, knowing that George Clooney could possibly choke on the food I was making. (I scanned the news and found no reports of any food-related accidents from Oscar night. Huge sigh of relief.)
Back in class, I also had my first turn as sous chef. Chef Chill did not have a co-instructor, so a student was designated sous chef each night. I was first alphabetically in class, so I got to do it first.
We didn’t actually get to instruct, but the nice thing about being sous chef was that we got to keep Chef’s extra prep work for our own dishes after the demo was done.
Working closely with meat was almost enough to kill my appetite for it. I finally understood why people go vegetarian (especially after watching a few documentaries about chicken and cattle farms.)
I found myself intrigued and grossed out all at once, kind of like when you slow down to check out a bad accident on the road. It’s morbid, but your curiosity gets the better of you.
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