Day sixty six

Beef shank before fabrication

How much meat do you think we can get from a beef shank?

Back to routine of the new semester. What I like here is that we have more free time. Or may be I am missing something? There is crazy course - English writing. It's crazy because it's on-line course. We were told that many people worked to create a platform for this and another courses, a lot of cash was spend. However, for some people (like me) this is a real pain in the ass, just to understand what to do, when and how.

Management was about authorities and management styles. Many things we were told are quite obvious, when you hear them. For example authorities. Authorities may be granted as per positon you have. Authorities might be earned by the way you lead people. As a result you may have authorities granted and no real authorities, because people do not trust you as a leader. It was interesting to go through management styles and see how different they are and how they suit different situations.

So far, the main point of this course is that the hospitality is really tough industry. The majority of people working there is an hourly paid employees. Many of then work until something happen. It can be anything, promotion spouse gets, another opportunity and so on. In case you are great leader, people might consider to stay and work for you. In case you are not a great leader, well they will leave your establishment as soon as something comes up.

In the middle

At Meat fabrication we did beef shank today. This is a labor intense cut for fabrication. It took me may be 5 minutes to get all muscles off the bones, but then it took me more than an hour to clean meat from sinew and silver skin. We did a yield test on the shank. Result is shocking - my yield was 33.28% and I got 2.15# of usable meat. This is not because I am new in butchery, but really, there were so many trims and unusable parts. The good thing is that since these muscles are hard working, they will be full of flavor.

Tomorrow we are going to cook marrow from these bones.

Tonight I am in San Francisco. I am a cat sitter - cat is along and he needs attention, food, and medicine. So for the next couple days will be commuting from SF.