Externship week three

Flatbread ready to be served

Starting learning tricks in the kitchen

This week was a rotation week, so I worked in a new place. This is a remote addition to the main campus of Google and located about 7 minutes drive from the main part. The number of guests are much smaller and I like it. Not because it means less work, but because there is no excuses for low standards. However, the low standards completely depends on the chef. If the chef allows it, you can do nothing.

The chef at this place is great. He is the youngest executive chef at Google at 26. He is almost all the time in the kitchen, constantly paying attention that everything is done as he wants it. He has no problem to clean a spill, or wipe a table.

So what did I do during this week?


Tuesday (Monday was Labour Day). I started my day making croutons. We made garlic confit so we had infused oil for croutons and garlic for a later use. Then I had to slice two boxes of potatoes using Robocup (food processor). Then it was surprise for me as everyone is taking lunch at the same time around 10:30 in the morning. After lunch I roasted croutons and moved to cleaning green beans. There were two big boxes of these beans and it was a torture to clean them. It took me long time to finish this job. After work I went for a swim as we have a swimming pool next door. It's really good to swim after the shift.

Wednesday. In the morning a Philippine cook taught  me to cook adobo dish. He used cooked turkey. We cut meat for a bite size pieces. As he said adobo is a mix of soy sauce, vinegar, and water at the ration 1:1:2. He used onion (a lot of onion) and garlic as aromatics with black peppercorns and bay leaf. We caramelized onion first, then added garlic, then peppercorns and bay, added liquid and turkey and simmered to heat through the turkey. I think it would be better to start from a raw meat and sear it first, then caramelize onion and simmer altogether for a longer period of time. That dish was for a family meal. After that I moved to a pizza station. We had pizza and flatbread on menu. Pizza was with mascarpone cheese and smoked salmon with arugula and shallot salad on top. Flatbread was a vegetarian option. We used the mixture talagio cheese with mascarpone, spread it on top of pre baked dough and topped with a mixture of diced squash with corn. I built pizzas and flatbread and during the service did final bake and cut. After service we cleaned station and I did prep for the next day (separate pieces of salmon and prep corn).

Pizza build and ready to be baked

Thursday I was on pizza station again. This time I portioned dough and formed rounds to pre bake. The chef demoed for me how to make these rounds of  dough. Then I pre baked dough and built pizzas. The day was very similar to Wednesday, except for the fact that after 1 p.m. I was alone at the station. The girl we worked with went to make a dough for the next day. After service I did some prep for the next day for pizza and had a discussion with the chef. We discussed what was good during my first three days. He provided his feedback, which was quite positive. His position that the best way is to learn how to do things a right way and only then increase speed. It was really encouraging to have this conversation.

Friday I started helping prepping vegetables. These were two medium boxes of green beans (my favorite). After that I moved to a fish and chips station. The dish was fish deep fried in an oil with potatoes chips. There were two things new for me. Instead of blanching potatoes (frying it in the oil at low temperature about 320 F) we mixed it with oil and baked at 350 for 10 minutes. After that we deep fried at 375 F chips. The fish was rockfish portioned and ready for frying. Instead of using standard bater, the chef used mixture of rice flour with water (very thick). Instead of having a thick layer of bater we had a thin crispy layer of rice flour and it was not soggy at all. So that was interesting. During the service I was mostly plated fish and chips (started with cooking but then moved to plating; plating was one of the topics during our discussion on Thursday).

So that was my first week at HangOut (the name of cafe) and it was really great as to compare with Yoshka's.