Day seventeen

a courtesy of

How many types of potato do you know?

Today's class for product knowledge was about potato and onion. A lot of useful information regarding these simple vegetables. The variety available is huge. This is really important to know your product. Such a simple veg as potato can be great if right type chosen or awful if wrong one.

For example, you want to make a German potato salad (really great dish), you come to shop or even worst to farmers market and  you see 10 or 15 different potato. What to chose? Such a difficult task, but not if you generally know different types of potato. You definitely do not want to use potato with low moisture and high starch content, because this potato will not hold a shape after cooking and your salad will not be appealing.

In case you want your cooked potato to hold a shape of the pieces you cut tem, go for potate with moderate moisture and moderate starch, sometimes called
waxy potato (Yellow Finn, Yukon Gold and other). If you are going to serve baked potato or Pomme Puree, take low moisture/high starch potato (baking potato is just great for this).

We have and use other types of potato - sweet potato (I don't like it, too sweet for me), fingerling potato (this is cool, small long shaped potato), yams (botanically is not a potato, but application is very similar to potato), Japanese sweet potato (with purple flesh inside), they are all great if used properly.

I like this class, because now almost every class we have some snack. Today the chef cooked different types of potato and we were  able to try them.

Onion was also quite interesting topic. We have dry onion and green one. Green is simple, may be a couple of different types. But dry onion is also has so many varieties (like potato). There is yellow onion (common one), white onion (sweet onion), cipollini onion (has flat form), shallot and so on. As always - use product accordingly what you want to achieve. In salads sweet or red varieties are perfect, because of sweet flavor for one and great appearance for another. Sweet onion is more expensive than the yellow, so if you are making stock, you may use sweet onion, but there is no reason for that.

At math we had a quiz today, will see should be fine.

The Food Safety was about food flow and cooking temperature, have to memorize this and should be fine on the test.

Today was able to visit Social Security Administration. They have accepted my application, as today everything went through and Homeland Security confirmed my status as a student.

My ride to San Francisco was really good. And this is it for today. Weekend is ahead. Will have to do homework again. On Monday we have special lecture so will go to school early.

Have a great weekend everybody!