Day sixty five - new semester

A big piece of meat to work with.
If you trim the shank and cook it
for 8 hours that will be steamship roast 

Is it a special animal - kobe beef?

Today for me was the start of the second semester at the Culinary Institute of America. This semester is different from the first one. It's different due to a number of reasons. We have new subjects, the majority of them are going to be short, probably three to four weeks. The longest class we are going to have is College Writing. It will be for the whole semester.

We started day with the Introduction to Management. The course is very useful and I do hope to get a lot. Management is not my strength. Would rather do things by myself, unfortunately, I have only two hands and limited time. I have to learn how to deal with people at work. We started with very basics,
who is supervisor, management pyramid, different perspectives and expectations from a supervisor. Owner, customers, employees they are all have different expectations.

The second class for today was Meat Identification and Fabrication. We have the Chef Instructor who is very strict on professionalism, which includes many factors - attitude, dress code, what you do, how you do it. That should not be a big issue, as she is not asking anything extra. All her requirements are based on what we suppose to do.

Today we worked with beef round, which is back leg. We got a huge piece of meat (may be 120 pounds) and we broke it down for small parts (different muscles). Some parts were cut for a stew beef (cubes 3/4 of inch). This is really interesting to learn about meat, about different cuts, different types of meat.

Round broken down for large pieces.
They are from different sources, so
the colour and marbling is different

One of the thing which was interesting is kobe beef. I heard about it but have no idea what it really is. The kobe beef is prized for excellent taste and superior marbling (intermuscular fat). The production of this meat starts from the special breed of cow, which is called wagyu beef. It is fed by special diet and the beef can be grown anywhere. At the certain age (if you want to have real kobe beef) it is send to Japan,  where animal spend some time in 'resort'. They got massage and special diet, so the marbling reach very high level. After that animal will be slaughtered and consumed... There are a lot of myths around this, however I believe the situation is very similar to Champagne. You can not call sparkling wine made anywhere but in the provine of France Champagne.

Tomorrow we will be working with chuck of beef.