Day fifty one

A courtesy of

What is authentic food?

The liberal art classes again. It was usual set: math, gastronomy, nutrition, and first year experience.

At math we have moved forward and started recipe costing. Probably we had a recipe with a large number of ingredients, therefore it was a lot of work to do all calculations. The home work for tomorrow was alike. A recipe with 15 ingredients, almost all of them have different unit and purchasing unit, so have to convert one into another. That was fun, indeed.

At gastronomy we had interesting conversation about authenticity. What does it mean to be authentic in terms of food?
Is it only recipe that have to be authentic? If you replicate the recipe, let's say for Coq au vin, in San Francisco using local ingredients, will it be authentic? Does it really required to serve this dish in a side street cafe in France to consider this dish authentic? There is no answer. Probably everyone has to make decision. What is really embarrassing, is when a chef takes a classic dish, make adjustments ('my version'), and put it on the menu without any indication about these adjustments. In this case if you are not familiar with dish, you may not notice anything. but if you do know the dish, that will be disappointing experience, since you will get not what you expect.

Nutrition was about carbohydrates. We also spoke about gluten intolerance and celiac disease. This is a real problem. Technically, an establishment can not be 100% gluten free if they have any kind of wheat flour on premises. Because the risk of contamination is really high, the flour can be in the air, on the surface areas (ok, you may separate these). So it's really expensive. However, there are so many people who is 'gluten intolerant' because this is quite fashionable for now. Some people believe that gluten free diet will help to loose weight, therefore you can imagine the number of followers.

For the first year experience our instructor did a great thing. She organized a speed interview. There were a few faculty members who did the rounds of interview for all of us. I was able to be interviewed by three people. The each interview was five minutes and two minutes to get a feedback. What I need to work now is to make my short and long terms goals more clear and more specific. This is not an easy task. Do you know what do you want from life in 2 years from now, and what about 10 years?