All is well, just really busy

Front of the house was a lot of fun and definitely a learning experience. I think mostly I learned that the idea of service goes a lot farther in fine dining establishments. Every detail is poured over and over again every day to ensure patrons have a wonderful experience. Before this I had no idea that there was a particular side dishes should be served from! Its gave me a much better perspective on why food costs so much in fine dining restaurants. It is not necessarily that the food is some rare or out of this world item. It's in the attention to detail in all areas. Most before the doors even open to the restaurant. It's having a different piece of silverware for each dish on the table. While I personally see it as wasteful in a fine dining establishment it is all about that extra mile that the corner diner isn't going to take. Now that is just Front of the house.

Edit: Forgot to add a link to a video I managed to take during a demo in front of the house tableside service of Crêpe Suzette.

With back of the house its not just a piece of steak or chicken with a side dish. its a Piece of food that has had the flavors, sauces and seasonings carefully thought out and paired with side dishes and drinks (usually wine) that will compliment each other creating not just a meal but an experience that you can only have at that restaurant with that staff.

This is why some chefs hate it when a patron asks for salt and pepper. they certainly understand dietary restrictions and allergies but needing salt and pepper is saying that the chef isn't doing his job and that all the hard work and attention to detail he put into that meal was useless.

I think that is kind of the difference between a cook and a chef. A cook will prepare food so it can be eaten. In other words it will be cooked properly along with whatever sides but the effort ends there. It is then up to the patron to make it taste how they like. Whereas a chef will prepare food so it can be enjoyed as is, no further action required. That, and chefs use fancier words to describe a meal.

Anyway, the past couple of weeks have been pretty dang busy. Besides completing on campus training I started to move all my stuff back up to my house, enjoy the holidays while not enjoying a cold, and look for and find an Internship!

Thats pretty much everything up until now. I have just started working at a bakery nearby. From what I have heard they are in need of a second pastry chef to fill in on the days the main chef is off. Since its so early they are still kind of feeling me out but no matter what I will find work somewhere, somehow.

So, once again I will keep on trucking and let you know if anything interesting happens along the way.

Still here!

Sorry for not posting. I was in management class for 3 weeks and there wasn't too much of interest going on. We did have a week where we explored the world of wines complete with wine tastings so that was pretty cool. we also had 2 field trips. The first was to a coffee roasters and the second was to a brewery/restaurant nearby.

The Coffee roasters was pretty cool. they had tons of stuff and being a tea drinker I was much more interested in their teas. They had a special tea set there where the teapot was a small clear glass pot that used special tea leaf bundles that when steeped would bloom like a flower. One of these days i may get around to trying it. Hopefully the taste will be as good as the view.

The Brewery was Rock Bottom Brewery and was quite interesting. While they do have the restaurant they also have the whole brewery on premises and is under the control of the brewmaster allowing him plenty of control to experiment with different brewing techniques. while he did have 2 beers they keep on tap at all times he had about 7 that were all experiments of his and we got to try them all. He even had one that after he had brewed it he aged it in an (if I remember correctly) oak barrel that was used to make bourbon imparting the flavor into the beer. That one had a heck of a kick to it.

The one other item of note during management class is I took the serv safe exam and passed giving me a card showing I have the necessary safety knowledge to run a restaurant. This has the potential of opening up some more positions to me.

After that I started working in Du Jour on the line and things got busy! Its been tough but a lot of fun and Chef Villarico is an awesome teacher. Since we only offer lunch service its quite similar to the pilots saying of "flying its multiple hours of sheer boredom followed by a few minutes of sheer terror" though for us its a few hours of prep work followed by an hour and a half of "GET THAT FOOD OUT!" and that time flies by. Whatever station It kind of seemed like the patrons found a way to target me. I worked the fish/pasta station yesterday and got slammed with orders for both. I think I fed most of our diners that day. Another day I was on Grill station and we had a high school tour come through and they had lunch as well. I think I put out over 20 steaks while there was 2 orders of pasta and 4 of chicken...

Oh well, i'll just keep on truckin as usual. next up will be front of the house. not something you would normally think of doing at a culinary school but they want to make sure we have a full education of what it takes to work at and run a restaurant. So, bring it on!

Advanced baking: Sugar station

Sugar station was a lot of fun as well as being quite a bit painful at times. Most of the sugar has to be handled at uncomfortable heat levels until your skin starts to toughen up a bit. Even then during some parts of making the pulled sugar you have to handle it at burning temperatures with gloves and a thin nonstick mat between you and the burning hot sugar. The layers would protect us from the heat for about 5 seconds and then we would have to put our hands on the cold metal table to bleed the heat off our hands.



This was my first project. Various forms of pulled sugar used to make flowers, ribbons, leaves, and shells. After I had made a bit of each the assignment was to combine them into showpiece.




This was my second practical exam showpiece featuring blown sugar which I used to create the fish and dolphin. The green corral was created by pouring the molten sugar mixture into a pot full of ice. After giving the sugar time to set the whole thing is tipped out and the ice is allowed to melt while draining into a sink.

This is my final practical showpiece. This piece is based around the use of pastillage. Its kind of like clay but quick drying and very fragile when working with. Because of this pieces done in pastillage are usually 2 dimensional but I got and idea and was set on it. Even with the frailty of it I managed to pull it off and think I managed to make it look quite nice! It was required that one pulled sugar style element should be included. I opted for spun sugar because I thought it would work well for the piece and we hadn't had a chance to work with it yet in class and it was the last day. Turns out the reason why we don't work with it as a regular part of the curriculum is because it makes a heck of a mess. The way it works is after you create the sugar mixture you dip a whisk with the curved ends cut off and whip the ends back and forth over a large wooden dowel hanging off the end of a desk. The centrifugal force causes hair thin strands to string off the whisk and cool instantly as it drapes over the dowel. After you do that a few times you gather all the strands up, fold them over a few times without packing them too tightly and use them for your needs.

Ok, thats it for advanced baking! I started management class today. Mostly its bookwork and time in a classroom. There are a few field trips we will be going on and hopefully i will be able to take some pictures. If so, I will make sure to put them up here.

Advanced baking: Cake station

I really enjoyed cake station. We made a lot of really tasty Desserts and I got to work with piping icing using various tips and creating various designs.

This is a tiramisu item we made for Du Jour. Personally I am not too partial to coffee desserts so its not my favorite but it was a good dish. I quite liked the ladyfingers with a bit of the butter-cream filling on it. Lightly sweet with a bit of flaky crunch.

This item was created after another student asked if we could try making marshmallow. It was a success and afterwards we had a bunch of cubes left over so chef came up with a great idea of a S'more martini. We got to try it chilled and I don't know if it was served in Du Jour that way but I think it lost its flavor. The whole point of a S'more is a hot, molten marshmallow. Without that warmth its more like rocky road than anything else.

Kind of out of order here but this is a pistachio butter-cream cake I made for a practical test. The little fans you see on the top are white chocolate colored with what is known as "chefs rubber" it is used exactly like food coloring but is fat based instead of water based because adding any water to chocolate will cause it to seize up and become unusable.

Another cake we made for Du Jour. This one Raspberry.

Yet another cake for Du jour! This time chef gave us control of the flavor(s) and we chose to go with a cappuccino flavored butter-cream and garnish with crushed butterfinger. The chocolate square garnishes were done by me in chocolate station earlier. its a process of laying down some white chocolate and scraping out curved lines with a comb-like instrument, letting it cool and harden and then layering dark chocolate on top, letting that cool and harden and then attempt to cut it into squares without shattering them in the process. Only about half survived the process.

This was a practice run before our wedding cake practical. This is actually done on some layered particle board to save the cakes for actual desserts or practical tests. Real cake is used on the practical tests so students can take it home and share it with their family. Since I am alone in a small apartment so I opt to trash it. This school already allow me to eat so well I really don't need a giant cake waiting for me at home. The white icing is the cheap type you would find at dept. store bakeries. Easy to work with and cheap but tastes incredibly sugary, you know the stuff. All it is is powdered sugar and shortening. not good stuff. Butter-cream is a much better tasting icing. A lightly sweet, delicate taste with a light texture as well.








My wedding cake! It took some time and effort but it was a lot of fun and I really liked how it turned out. I particularly liked the roses and found I did a decent job on them. I made so many that I used more than usual and still had about 3 left over. The wicker basket design on the side takes a lot of time and but looks great when its finished.



This is my fondant cake! We were given full creative control on this cake and I think I made pretty good use of it! Fondant is pretty interesting to work with. After giving it a taste it reminded me greatly of marshmallow but is rolled out and draped over the cake after a crumb coat is added to give the fondant something to stick to. The kokopelli on top was also made out of fondant that we made earlier in the week so it would get a chance to dry. the base coloring of the fondant was mixed into the fondant and the more vibrant colors were done with an airbrush loaded with food coloring. I am not sure how well it comes through but the theme I was kind of going for was the Montezuma Well cave dwellings, represented by the design on the middle tier, and the kokopelli, which represents fertility, followed by the Verde river on the bottom tier and Green shrubbery representing growth or spring.

It looked great, but after a few moves to various places for photos and to be displayed the kokopelli couldn't handle its own weight. he got shorter, while I tried to fix him I broke a little more off the bottom, he got shorter. I came back the next day with my parents for an open house event and while I was gone... he got shorter. I haven't looked recently but I think at this point he is just shoulders, a head and a flute...

Anyway, that was cake station! I have now also completed sugar station and have a bunch more photos to upload so I should have that posted within a few days.

Advanced baking: chocolate station

I have been having a lot of fun in advanced baking and I might have a bit of a knack for some of the things we have been doing.

First week I worked at chocolate station which was very interesting. We would spend a good part of our day writing with small piping bags of a room temperature mixture of chocolate and cream called ganache.

We would also pipe out "Happy Birthday" along with a border design onto plates for the restaurant in case they found out one of the tables was celebrating a birthday. If they actually made a note of the birthday when the reservation was placed we could get a name and personalize the plate like I did in the second picture.

We also practiced interesting little designs known as arabesques. When making them for actual use we would use tempered chocolate that is firm at room temperature so we can pop them off the parchment paper and use them to top cakes and various other desserts. Because of their fragile nature they would break if I wasn't very careful. Many expletives were used.

We also made after dinner chocolates with various fillings we got to experiments with. It was almost like science class as we mixed different liquids into the main mixture to see if we could come up with some tasty results. One mixture I and another student tried was rose water and almond. It tasted good in the bowl but when it was in the chocolate it tasted way too much like a chocolate filled with perfume. I did make another mixture that was just a banana flavored filling but it was a big hit and many were "sampled" by the other students and I. Near the end of the week I decided to experiment a little bit and make more of the banana filling and add crushed butterfinger. They rocked and disappeared quickly. Below is a photo of the filling before I filled it over with more dark chocolate and put it into the reach in refrigerator to set overnight.

Nowadays its all done by machines but its cool to know how to do it myself in case I ever want to make handmade ones to give out for holidays or something.

Besides the production items we also had two projects to work on. First was a chocolate oven that beyond the dimensions of the oven we had full creative control of how the oven looked. Since most ovens made had a stove top I decided to go with a grill top. It meant I had to make a bunch of tiny little black strips. It was tedious but I think it turned out well.

I scored a 49 out of 50 on my oven. I decided not to put anything in the oven because I wanted to concentrate on the scene happening on top which, if you are having trouble making it out, is a big fish being grilled while a cat is keeping a close eye on it from above. The fish, cat, grill, and knobs are made out of modeling chocolate. Its exactly like play-doh and you can modify the color with chefs rubber which is a fat based food coloring as water based food coloring causes the chocolate to seize up. Making the cat was especially difficult because it would absorb the heat from my hands and become too soft to hold the shapes I formed it into so I ended up making the cat in three separate parts and then assembling them on the oven so I could let each piece cool off while I worked with the others. I must have formed the head 5 times but each time I was almost done it got so soft that just holding it made it start to flatten out.

Second was a small amenity showpiece where we had complete creative control as long as it fit on a cardboard base and was able to display a few individual chocolates.

I was actually having some trouble coming up with an idea for this piece. The day when we were supposed to start the project I ended up thinking about my niece Shayla and how she liked cookie monster so after a little discussion with chef Meyer and a little research in the computer lab I had my idea and got to work. After making some blue modeling chocolate it was apparent it would take way too much if i were to craft it out of solid chocolate so I ended up using a Styrofoam cup as the base for the head and two 4oz plastic portion cups for the hands. It worked surprisingly well since in the show his hands are about the size of his head since both his head and hands are occupied by human hands. I was planning to make the five fingers but after working with the modeling chocolate the fingers would have never held up under their own weight so he got mittens instead. I actually managed to finish the piece that day despite being given a day and a half to work on it. As I am usually over critical of myself I wish I had done a little better job in a few spots but Chef Meyer really liked it. He gave me a score of 50 out of 50 points and had me put it on display in the schools front entrance!

Quick post since i can't seem to get a long post worked out.

sorry everyone, things have just been crazy lately and trying to update kept getting pushed back.

Everything is going well. Very fast paced and a lot of work but the saucier kitchen is usually cooler than the bakery so it doesn't seem to sap my energy as much.

My last two weeks in bakery were awesome and I really liked it. the Roll-in station was responsible for laminated dough products like danishes ans croissants and getting them along with some other morning bread out for the morning breaks. After that was the bread station which I enjoyed even more. I was able to learn quite a few bread recipes and techniques. One of the more tasty breads is a cottage cheese dill roll which surprisingly almost everyone likes. Even people the don't like cottage cheese or dill love these rolls. For some reason the Combo works really well. A lot of the breads we made ended up being served in Du Jour and we got compliments on some of the ones we were able to get creative with. Especially a Cheese bread that we ended up rolled out more into a cracker than a bread and I chopped some jalapeños to sprinkle on top. Since the most of the Customers to Du Jour are elderly chef Foote wasn't sure they would go over well but we got back positive feedback.

I finished Bakery with an A so very happy about that.

Saucier has been challenging as well and has kept challenging me for the past 3 weeks now. My last day in saucier is tomorrow. The first station I worked at was Meat fabrication. I got a lot of good information out of it but did find spending most of my day standing at a cutting board a more tedious than I like. Good stuff to know but doing it all day? Bleh. Fortunately, it did get broken up now and then because we also made white chicken stocks, brown veal stocks and fish fumet as well as some Gravad lox (Scandinavian cured salmon) ground meats and sausages.

In fabrication we broke down just about every type of common and popular meat. We Fabricated multiple chickens daily because the whole school burns through them and chicken stock real quickly. We also worked with full pork loins and some beef tenderloins. We Fabricated multiple fish from the major groups; round fish, flat fish and nonbony fish. The nonbony fish was monkfish and that was a very different fish to work with. I am very glad they usually get them head and body removed since the meat is in the tail and they are some UGLY fish. Just working with the tail isn't a very pleasant experience. Though, after all that I did get to taste the final product and it was actually quite tasty.

After that I moved to Family Meal and really enjoyed that even though a lot of times it was more demanding because we had to have various products over to Du Jour each morning before break and then we worked on Feeding the school. I think a lot of the enjoyment came from being back to cooking after working meat fab for a week. Usually it was various soups that we had to make for the restaurant. after that we usually had some type of theme for family meal that we followed and Chef Siam would give us choices occasionally like what type of vegetable platter to put out or how to use a certain vegetable or starch.

Last but not least was the Saucier station this week. Today we had our final tests and cooking practical so no sauces today but still some tomorrow. Saucier is interesting because mostly its working with the mother sauces but there are so many ways to take the mother sauces after that and we made quite a few of them including some not based off of mother sauces. Just yesterday we made a sweet soy sauce recipe that was good and an easy recipe of just combining the ingredients and simmering for 20 to 25 minutes and then adjusting to the right consistency by either adding more liquid to loosen it or adding cornstarch slurry to thicken it. it did end up needing the slurry but the main thing that makes that recipe a pain is that there are around 15 separate ingredients at need to be collected and cut or measured so its all about the prep rather than the procedure on that one.

The market basket test is a day where we have an hour and a half to make an entrée consisting of chicken as the protein with starch and vegetable sides and a sauce but beyond that its up to us. We were allowed to get pretty creative but I chose to keep it simple to get a decent grade. Plenty of time get creative later on. I got a few practice runs in at home and at school but even with that when you are finally in the kitchen with a timer going and trying to work around 4 other people at a cluster of stoves it starts to get hectic. I ended up over reducing my supreme sauce to the point that I almost just had a charred mess in a pot while I tried to get the starch and vegetable ready. I added some more chicken stock and wisked it in but it was pretty much ruined. Maybe if I had more time on the clock i could have fixed it. Oh well.

Altogether I made a pan seared chicken breast with supreme sauce, Sauteed asparagus, and pan fried batonet potatoes with brunoise red and yellow bell pepper and minced garlic. The reason for batonet and bruniose is because we needed to choose two knife cuts off a list of four or five and include them in our entrée somehow.

OK, whew! one more day in Saucier and then I will be moving onto advanced baking.

Whoa! look what i forgot to do for a while!

Sorry about that. I guess Baking had me really involved these past few weeks. Also, working for nearly 8 hours in an incredibly hot and humid kitchen seems to drain my energy severely. From what I have heard the meat-fab kitchen isn't as bad but we shall see. maybe I'll just start getting used to this level of workload. I hope so.

We did a few attempts at watermelon cucumber sorbet and it did turn out alright but usually too sweet when simple syrup was used to balance the Ph. It turns out the Ph level isn't too important. I think its mostly used to make sorbet that will set at about the same time interval as usual for the ice cream machine. If its off it may cause the liquid to take more or less time to set. We never did reach completion of it in class as i moved onto a different station and had plenty of work to do. I will continue to work on it myself, though. Apparently you can pick up a Cuisinart ice cream maker for a fairly decent price. I wont be buying it right away, however, as I have already spent quite a bit of money recently and need to conserve. so, for now it get written down until I can get around to it.

If anyone want to give it a try basically all you need is cucumber and watermelon juice. The part we were last on was figuring out the proper ratio to get the sweetness of the watermelon without overpowering the flavor and freshness of the cucumber. In fact, cucumber juice on its own can be quite nice and might make a refreshing sorbet on its own. OH! I just had a thought... maybe you could just do cucumber sorbet but serve it in a piece of watermelon shaped into a bowl and chilled. If you want some Tang in the sorbet a good dose of lemon juice could do the job. We also made a small batch with a bit of lemon juice and a dash of ascorbic acid to give it a good kick. I haven't tried it yet but I had a thought that crushed lemon flavored hard candy sprinkled over a serving might have a good taste and give a bit more color for the eyes. Also, we did try a version with salt since some people do like salt on their watermelon but we used too much and decided to shelve that version for the time being.

To make the cucumber and watermelon juice isn't too difficult. First, you want to wash before you cut the cucumber and watermelon just to prevent any materials or chemicals from getting passed into the flesh when you cut it up. Skin (a peeler works well) as many cucumbers as you want and rough chop them. you can leave the seed in because you are going to puree it in a blender and strain it either with a fine mesh strainer or if you don't have one of those a large coffee filter. Possibly many coffee filters depending on how much juice you have decided to make. To strain it place the puree in your strainer and push it against the sides. If some of the solid pass through you can always strain again with a coffee filter. If you start with the coffee filter put in only enough that you can wrap the filter closed and squeeze the juice from it. depending on the durability of the filter you may need to be gentle or it will tear. Not the end of the world, though. Unless it was your last filter and the store is closed for holiday.

You should probably start with about a quarter of a watermelon as you will get a ton of juice just from that quarter. Remove the watermelon flesh from the rind just as you did with the cucumber and rough chop it small enough to fit into a blender as well or use a method that works for larger pieces. Ripe watermelon is so soft just about any technique will work for juicing. Heck, yelling at it would probably juice it as well but I imagine you can find a speedier method.

Oh! I just remembered a tip for picking out the best fruits from my instructors. Use your usual methods to weed out the unripe and damaged and when you are down to a few to choose from if they are about the same size its best to weigh them as the riper the the fruit the more water it is carrying and it will be the heavier of the bunch.

Anyway, once you have your juice all you have to do is pick a ratio of watermelon to cucumber and give it a go. As I recall we mostly tried a 1:1 ratio and it usually resulted in the watermelon overpowering the cucumber. While not bad we wanted to balance the flavors more. So, you may want to try a ratio of 1:1.5 or 1:2 and see how it comes out.

Now, I will be talking about how baking went soon but I feel a need to do something else for a bit and didn't think this all did any good sitting as a saved draft until I get back to it.