Day twenty one

Do you keep tomato in a fridge? Do not do it.

Another day of liberal arts studying. Math in the morning, followed by product knowledge, food safety and first year experience.

This week is a bit better. Somehow I managed to go to bed before 11 p.m. so I have almost 7 hours of sleep. As a result no attempts to fall asleep during lectures. So slowly but surely getting into new schedule. This Sunday February 03 will be exactly one month since I came here to study.

Back to the day at school. Math was allright, we moved to the point where we have to standardize  recipes. This is a bit tricky, this is not as easy as to convert pounds to litres. Many different ingredients, some of them
are measured by weight some by volume. I believe this is only practise for us, but you never know, probably we will see something like this in the real world.

Product knowledge was about tomato, beans, carrot, radishes and beats. Finally there was  an explanation hy we should not keep tomato in a fridge. They are from a warm climate and cold temperature in a fridge cause uncontrolled enzyme activities and tomato will lose their ability to ripen. If they were already ripen, enzyme activity will result in mealy texture. So this part is easy. However, we should keep in mind that warehouses usually keep them refrigerated (to extend their shelf life). If a warehouse has facility to keep them in a warm room, still trucks to deliver usually do it at low temperature, so tomato are still going to be exposed to cold.

With tomato is also interesting part about selection. Scientists spend a lot of time and effort to develop new varieties with uniform shape, uniform color, varieties resistant to cold and diseases and so on. On this wonderful way of improvement only one thing has been missed. It completely skipped our mind that first of all we are looking for flavor. Now when we realized that tomato from hot houses have not taste and no smell, we brought to life heirloom varieties, which are basically tomato grown from the seeds which have not been subject to selection and/or modification for at least 50 years. I know sounds complicated. For me, heirloom tomato can be grown by farmers only, not by big companies.

Three different types of radish

Radishes were also interesting, how many varieties we have. I saw a black radish and thought that we used it a lot back to home durin fall. As it is in season now, I should look for it tomorrow. I like a salad from black radish.

Food safety we had another quiz. This time it was ridiculously simple.

And the first year experience is getting better. At least I did find some useful points which I can utilize in the future. So it was not bad at all.

Lunch was served by another group of students. Our waiter was really nervous. It was his first day today and for sure he had no experience before in a front of the house. He spilt oil on the table and was so serious. We asked him if we could have wine from te souse on a side and he explained that it actually already in a sauce.

After school with one of my classmate we went to see a house in St Helena. He is moving there and will be renting a room. One more room is going to be vacant by the end of February. I don't like a house. I has nice common area, but the room is really tiny and house inside has strong unpleasant smell. But the idea to find place to stay with a nice backyard is in my head...