What we learned in culinary school this week: Week 9

Butchery demo kicked off the week:

"Pork butt" is actually the back of the pig's shoulder.

Pork stock is not a part of traditional French cooking, but is used in Japanese cooking.

Pork belly is uncured and unsmoked. Bacon is smoked. Pancetta is salt cured and is not smoked.

Leaf lard (fat from around the pig's kidneys) is primo lard for baking. Pork fat is rich, sweet and buttery and has the ability to take on the flavor characteristics of food you cook with, so if you use it in pie crust it won't taste like pork. If you used suet, it would taste like beef. Jowl fat is also primo fat; both jowl and leaf lard are expensive, but can be ordered online.

We're about to learn the different parts of a piggy.
Illustration by Chef.

And here's a chart showing where everything comes from.

145 degrees is the maximum internal temperature for pork. It's okay if the meat is still slightly pink. Trichinosis from undercooked meat was eradicated in the U.S. in the 1960's.

Trotters. Every part of this pig would get used.

We cooked pork in both wet and dry heat. Here's one of the results:

Double Stuffed Pork Chop plated...

...and the aftermath.

Thursday was charcuterie day. First off, pate is gross. We got to make sausage, which was great, although piping the links into the casings is a lot harder than they make it look on Food Network. Sausages can be fresh, smoked, cured or air-dried. Shoulder and shoulder fat (along with odds and ends) are best for making sausage. You can order shoulder meat with a big piece of fat on it from a butcher. Pate uses better quality of fat (belly and back fat) but is still gross. 

When grinding meat and fat together, both must be cold. You can play around with different sized grinds.

Basic sausage is meat, fat, seasonings and casings. You can go from there. We got to choose from a variety of ingredients on hand and each pairing came up with some really varied and interesting combos. My partner and used dried cherries and it turned out really well! In fact, if you are going to use fruit in sausage, you need to use dried, not fresh.

Casings (from animal intestines) usually come from hogs and can also be synthetic, however synthetic is considered undesirable. They are ordered either by the foot or "hanks" (30 feet per hank).

Harder than it looks, although they did pretty good.

Frying up our links. Notice the size of the links
isn't exactly consistent.

Our sausage recipe: 3 handfuls chopped dried cherries (I would use more in the future), 1/2 cup brandy, fennel, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper.

Next week: Our first lunch service!

Ketchup. It's what's for breakfast.

Epicurious on Facebook asks, Pasta? Rice? Pickles? Salmon? Tell us, how do you use and abuse ketchup?

Not joking about this.  I wish I was.

You can turn your foodie nose up at ketchup all you want (as did a number of people in the comments) but we all have our guilty pleasures, and ketchup is definitely one of mine.

Just not on pancakes.

Ingrate kitteh

Sophie hasn't touched the kitty grass I got for her at the Farmers Market last weekend.

Not even a nibble.  Keep in mind this is the same cat who will chew on power cords.  But not kitty grass, apparently, because it's actually good for her.

What we learned in culinary school this week: Week 8 (Part 2)

Wednesday and Thursday we switched over to chicken. This is why we served Coq au Vin for the dinner. For the upcoming lunches and our last pop-up dinner, the menus will be based on whatever we worked on that week.

Chickens bred for food today have been engineered to grow quickly and are ready to eat at about 8 weeks. They have lightweight bones and large breasts (the most valuable part of the chicken).  "Mass produced" chickens started in the 1940's, so classic French chicken dishes are not based on these "Frankenbirds".

There are two ways to cook chicken: Dry (roasting, grilling, baking, frying, searing) and wet (braising, stewing and a combination of browning then adding liquid).

Antibiotics and growth hormones given to chickens are chemicals and do not cook out. Bacteria (such as salmonella) will cook out.

When buying chicken, you can keep it in the freezer for up to six weeks. Beyond that, the taste will be adversely affected. Defrost slowly in the fridge, not at room temperature. You will lose a lot of moisture if it defrosts too quickly.

You don't need a separate cutting board or harsh chemicals for cleaning after working with raw chicken. Just wash well with hot water and soap.

Chef cutting up (fabricating) a whole chicken:

Chicken dishes:

Roast chicken.

Fried chicken.

Coq au Vin.

Chicken and Morels in a Chablis Cream Sauce
in progress.

Plating the chicken before adding the cream sauce.

Plating completed. This dish was amazing.

Feel the rain!

In case you hadn't heard, we've been having WEATHER here in Southern Cal. And by weather, of course we mean rain.  Don't panic!!!

Don't get wet.

What we learned in culinary school this week: Week 8 (Part 1)

We did do some other stuff in addition to the dinner.

We did pasta (dried and fresh) on Monday and Tuesday. I'd taken a pasta making class there before, so a lot of it was review.

Dried pasta: If you don't have the time or inclination to make pasta from scratch, buy Barilla or DeCecco at the grocery store. These are both high-end, Italian pastas, in fact Barilla is the most consumed pasta in Italy. When shopping for pasta, look for Italy as country of origin. Even inexpensive Italian pasta is okay.

When cooking pasta, always use a lot of water and always salt the water. Then it's just a matter of following the instructions on the package.

Noodles should be sopping wet when they go into the sauce. The water helps the sauce adhere. Then toss the pasta and sauce three times, then onto the plate and serve.

Basic and very easy tomato sauce: Olive oil,
Marzano tomatoes, garlic and basil.

Bolognaise sauce in progress. It will cook down
until it's almost dry.

Finished bolognaise with pasta.

Fresh pasta: We used the Kitchen Aid pasta roller attachment to roll our pasta. I had bought one last year after taking the recreational pasta class. Making fresh pasta really isn't that hard - it's just semolina flour, all-purpose flour and eggs. If you haven't tried it, you should.

Once you've got the basic pasta dough, you can run wild:

FOOD SERVICE WIN!!!

OMG we did it!!!

We had our first food service, a pop-up dinner for family and we nailed it! It was just beautiful too - it's amazing how they turned the kitchen/class space into a gorgeous dining room.

Menu

Wild Mushroom Veloute

Cendrillon

Butternut Squash Ravioli

Vire Clesse

Coq Au Vin

Beaucharme

Chocolate Souffle

Stumptown Coffee

We drew for which course we'd do and I drew soup, along with one of my classmates. I didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that I drew what was possibly the least impressive dish, but it turned out amazingly great and we got to be the first out. Mushroom veloute is basically a cream of mushroom soup. We also had to do two vegetarian and one vegan serving. For the vegetarian we had to make a roasted vegetable stock and used oil instead of butter to saute the mushrooms. For the vegan, in addition to these changes, Chef had some cashews soaking, which we blended and used in place of cream.

It was a long day that didn't end until about 10pm, but it was a good tired. We were just so stoked with how it went. It was funny, because at orientation I remember how horrified we were when Chef told us we'd be doing our first dinner less than two months into the program, but it worked!

It rained during the day, but cleared up in time
for dinner.

Five pounds of mushrooms.

Table setup in progress.

Chicken feet stamps in honor of our main dish.

From the east kitchen, looking into the west
kitchen/dining room.

Dishing up dinner.

The kids were VERY interested in dessert, and
Chef was there to catch the look on their faces.

The Brother showed up and really enjoyed dinner.

Consider the cronut. Or not.

A classmate brought some in recently.  Tried one.  Don't understand the hype.  And that's coming from someone with a healthy appetite for both doughnuts and croissants.

Every fad has its day.  Can't see this one lasting, especially when a doughy sweet tooth like mine doesn't become an instant, willing slave to your sugary, fattening concotion.

End of review.  Really, that's it.  Sometimes a doughnut is just a doughnut. Because that's all it needs to be.

At Venice Pier

Stopping to admire the scenery halfway through my channel-to-pier walk/jog (and back) this afternoon, made necessary by the fact that we started on pasta today in culinary school and ingested large amounts of carbs.  Tasty, delicious carbs, but carbs nonetheless!

Oh, and also because I really, really needed the exercise anyway.

What we learned in culinary school this week - Week 7

Monday was a holiday, so on Tuesday we kicked the week off with potatoes. Potato pancakes, potato gnocci (which I didn't care for because the texture reminded me of soggy bread) and Pommes Anna (which I'd never heard of, but loved). We also got to read about How the Potato Changed the World.

Pommes Anna

Wednesday we went over legumes (beans), which I'm not wild about in general. When soaking beans, don't add salt to the water (it slows down the softening of the beans - can add salt later). Also, soak them in the fridge - if the water gets too warm the beans can start fermenting. We made hummus, which turned out pretty good.

Thursday we moved on to grains. Rice is the most consumed grain in the world. Rice can be stored indefinitely in the freezer. Always rinse white rice before cooking (except for arborio, which is used in risotto and paella). Rinsing helps keep the rice from sticking. Rinse until the water runs clear. When cooking: 1 part rice to 1-1/2 cups of liquid. 

Quinoa is like tofu - it takes on the taste of what it's cooked with.

Then there's corn, which is the most prolific crop on the planet. 

On Friday we took our ServSafe test after a very comprehensive review. I'm confident that I passed and in fact may have done pretty decently. 

Last night's reading assignment

Gotta love culinary school.

I added the adult beverage to the assignment.

If you can't own it, embrace it!

Week 7 starts today and I haven't exactly been wildly successful with culinary school like I had envisioned (at least not yet), so this is how I'm choosing to deal with that situation:

H/T to Happy, Sexy, Shameless on Facebook.