The Culinary Tales Week 28: Weiner Wonderland

August 14, 2014

 

We had reached week four of the term, and it was kicking my butt. The food production was a challenge all by itself, then we also had homework 2-4 times a week (production schedules, product requisition forms, platter designs/drawings, dolled up menus for the buffets) plus weekly quizzes. I found myself cramming on the two-hour commute to school, and my quiz grades reflected it.

 

I depended on the academic portion to pull my grade up, but things had gone topsy turvy. My actual performance was at the A/A-minus level (save for the pathetic “28” buffet) but my quizzes had been dismal. I kept telling myself that I would catch up on weekends, but there was never enough time. Nor energy.

 

Luckily, for once, I had the easy-grading teacher, and despite the pathetic Week Two buffet, I had an A-minus at midterm. I think perhaps they gave us a free pass for that week.

 

Week Four was all about sausages and forcemeat. We actually had to make sausages from scratch, and it was neat to work with the grinder and sausage machines.

 

 

We had a solid group, consisting of Annoying Girl (the original), Lightning Fury and Vanishing Dude.

 

Vanishing Dude showed up only half the time, and during sausage production went missing for a good portion of the time (he claimed he was outside smoking the sausages, but I’m fairly certain he was smoking something else.)

 

We had all week to prepare for one buffet presentation but sausage work was intense. It’s quite the ordeal: grinding meat, stuffing them in their encasements (they look like mile-long condoms, really, so the week was rife with sexual innuendo), smoking the meats, then finishing them off on the grill or pan. Each team was given a list of sausages to make and the culinary gods made sure we got the hardest one.

 

At least it was interesting; we got the African/exotic sausage list. But we had more sausages to make and we were one person short.

 

Of course.

 

And because Chef Frenchie is French-Algerian, he put added pressure on us to make our buffet good. I mean REALLY GOOD. He even went as far as making real African-style made-from-scratch couscous and harissa (a spicy sauce.)

 

We had to produce Merguez, Kafta, Thuringer and Makanek sausages, and a turkey roll. Additionally, we had to make Heywood and Beer mustards, plus an individual project of pate en croute.

 

“Pate en croute” translated literally means “paste in crust.” It’s basically a meatloaf wrapped in dough and then baked. Once again, we had to present this on a chaud froid platter. (No chaud froid issues this time.)

 

The thing about forcemeat is that this is a way for kitchens to make use of leftover ingredients that would otherwise go to waste, and make something expensive out of it. Like, upscale Spam. It’s a delightful notion, isn’t it, to make something out of “trash”, charge a lot of money for it, all the while being a little eco-friendly?

 

We weren’t too impressed with the taste though. I think maybe the school recipe wasn’t the tastiest. Most of us gave the pates to Annoying Girl, who was more than happy to feed them to her dog.

 

 

This was the week I decided to take on the role of team leader, and it really, really wasn’t the best time to do so. Whenever someone on your team needed something, it was the team leader’s job to get it. Our chefs wanted to limit the number of times the walk-in door was opening and closing, and therefore limited entry to team leaders only during production. So when somebody needed something, I had to put down whatever it was that I was doing to get it – and that didn’t help with trying to get my own tasks done.

 

There was a lot of cussing and harried last-minute pulling-together, but we managed to get all the sausages done. We even made a pasta with the harissa and threw in a mildly spicy hummus.

 

With all the crazy hubbub, I forgot to tell the team to bring decor for the presentation. Thankfully, Lightning Fury and Annoying Girl had the initiative to bring things on their own. I went out of my way to purchase an ethnic-looking jug and tagine.

 

A tagine is a conical earthenware cooking vessel that is used in traditional North African cooking. The idea for the conical cover is that as moisture evaporates upward, the cone allows the condensation from the steam to drip back down into the food, keeping it moist.

 

Annoying Girl and I had a similar aesthetic, and the stuff she brought (check out the ginormous mirror) complemented mine. Without any pre-collaboration, it was the best-looking buffet I had a hand in this term, and we all pitched in. (By “we all” I mean us girls.)

 

 

 

 

 

Since we only had one buffet to do, we had time for a pig fabrication demo and a field trip to the Cheese Store in Beverly Hills. The Cheese Store is a fantastic place where you can get hard-to-find imported products, and I happily laid down the plastic for some balsamic cream, Normandy butter, and triple-cream Brie (Brillat-Savarin.) Surprisingly, their prices weren’t Beverly Hills-ridiculous. In fact, their Plugra was priced cheaper than Trader Joe’s.

 

Our demo guy had a couple of pop quizzes for us, and whoever answered correctly got to bring home some goodies. Lightning Fury scored about $80 worth of serrano ham from Spain. I won $50 worth of Italian-imported prosciutto, which I brought to school the next day to slice using the industrial-grade meat slicer.

 

Put together some prosciutto, feta cheese and medjool dates, and you have one hell of a party platter.

 

One night, while dropping off some folks back at the main campus, Advertising Buddy and I happened upon Chef Bad Cop (aka the Good one) and Chef Satan. During the course of a conversation that lasted well past midnight, I had a revelation. After all the kicking and screaming and whining about how much I didn’t “get” baking, I had to admit that I missed it terribly.

 

There. I said it.

 

I. Missed. Baking.

 

The chefs assured me that completing the culinary program was in my best interest anyway. If I decided to be a pastry chef and a line cook calls in sick, I can fill in. Vice versa, a savory chef with pastry training is also a plus.

 

I can’t tell you when the tide turned. Perhaps I was just too stressed out making my deadlines during to realize that I was actually loving it. The fact that I scored my highest final ever (despite not finishing) should have been my first clue. Or maybe I should have known all along I’d take to it, having a major sweet tooth and all.

 

I felt awkward and a little dirty, as if I was cheating on savory cooking.

 

 

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