Externship week one

My knife after six boxes of eggplants

Externship - welcome to a real world of cooking.
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The first year at the school is over and now it's time for the externship. Last Tuesday I started my externship at the Bon Appetite @ Google. Bon Appetite is a large company providing catering service for corporations, colleges, and another big organizations. That kind of service is beneficial for the business, as you do need to take care for many aspects related to the food production, starting from kitchen organization, purchasing, hiring qualified people, and so on. Yes this convenience comes at a cost, however for the big business is easier to absorb the cost.

My externship at the Google will be during the next five months. It will be a bi-weekly rotation between different cafes located on the main campus at Mountain View. For the first week I was placed to the one of the most busiest cafe Yoshka.

On Tuesday I spent about
an hour with the HR (human resources) filling out and signing papers. Then I started m work. The first impression was the quantity of food prepared at this cafe. The quantity is enormous. On Tuesday we were even busier than usual, because the main cafe (the largest one) was closed and many guests came to our place. For me it was a prep day a lot of cutting and chopping.

Wednesday  was probably the worst day of the week. The whole morning I was working with peppers. There were huge amount of peppers to deseed and cut. Bell peppers were alright, except for the red colour. Red bell peppers were so irregular shape so almost each one I had to think how to cut. Then I had gipsy peppers. These were not a fun. They had thin flesh and to deseed them it was necessary to cut top part off and then using the finger take out the core with seeds. The good thing is gloves required all the time. The bad thing is that regardless of gloves after an hour my hand was burning. It seems I am too sensitive to capsaicin the chemical in peppers human consider as heat. Even the next day I still felt my hand.

Thursday was much better. There were no peppers for me. I was sent to help the grill station. The grill stating is a front of the line during service time. They work with proteins and also they usually make one or two hot dishes. That day the hot dish was pasta with green peas, eggplants, mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes. My task was to prepare all vegetables for the pasta (cut them and start roasting). During the service time I was assembling the dish - reheat cooked pasta in a steamer, add vegetables and béchamel sauce and transfer to serving plates.

Friday was slightly easier. Friday is usually not so busy there are less guests. On Friday I was working on eggplants. I had to cut six boxes and then we started to season them and roast in the oven. After lunch I also worked on vegetables for the evening service.

After the first week of externship the general impression is somehow mixed. I am excited to work for a large scale production, however for me seems important to do a whole cycle starting from prep work and finishing with cooking. In case I do not move beyond prep work it becomes  boring. I do realize that this is just a beginning for my externship and also I do realize that people do not go to a culinary school to become a prep cook...