Day seventy

Half of hog to break down

 How pork is different from beef?

As scheduled, we have moved to a pork butchery. We have today a guest speaker (or guest butcher - sounds better), the guy from the American Pork Association. He was doing demo how to break down pork carcass American way and European way.

For the consumers the difference is not so visible as for the professionals. The main difference is in the loin, or how we separate it. In American style we cut it for three pieces rib eye, tenderloin, and porterhouse. European style is to keep loin whole. Also in Europe instead of making chops, they prefer take the loin from the bones and handle boneless loin.

Buying pork you should pay attention that pork is not PSE. PSE stands for pale, soft, exudative. This meat will be very tough after cooking, with watery taste, absence of flavor. Pork should be nice pink or dark pink color and has certain amount of marbling. In case you have concerns about your diet and trying to cut fat consumption, may be it's better to choose veal instead of pork, or other type

Day sixty nine

Tasting menu for today, veal loin, veal chop, scallopini
sweetbreads, and kidneys

Can veal be grown to a beef?

That was a question asked today during the lecture. It's really funny, the question is similar to 'can a kid grow up to an adult?'

So we moved forward today from beef to veal (it might be logical to go opposite direction, but this is what we have). So, veal is a young cow (calf). Since it is young, the carcass is not formed completely, muscles are tender, color is pink (not dark red as in beef).

There are probably two major difference between meat from beef and veal. The first one is that you don't have to age veal. You may use meat almost instantly after slaughtering. In case of beef you need to age meat, so enzymatic changes will take place before you eat it. Second difference is

Day sixty eight

Tasting menu for the class

Secrets how to cook steak.

It would have been an easy day, if I were in St. Helena. I had to drive from San Francisco and back. It was still a good day.

We did portioning meat from the last three days for steaks, cubes (for stew), and grind for hamburger. Also we made a few roasts (tied meat evenly).

Portioning sirloin for steaks was quite easy. The meat is even, so the task is to weight the whole piece and then evenly divided it for required amount of portions (8, 10, 12 oz each).

When we have tenderloin, the task is not so easy, because the tenderloin has a conical form. So you have to use your imagination where to cut. A margin of error

Day sixty seven

Rib Primal Cut is almost broken down by Chef

Do you know where is rib eye comes from?

It was a good day today. Today we have only one class - Meat Fabrication. We started around 8:45 in the morning and we finished around 12:30 afternoon.

In the class we have a guest speaker. One of the chef instructor came and showed us how to handle three cuts of beef - tenderloin, striploin, and rib part. He is really amazing in breaking down animal carcass. I saw him once breaking down a half of a pig and it took him about an hour to do everything, including verbal explanation for every step.

Today he explained all steps as well and we were able to do our job. An individual assignment was

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

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,

Day sixty four

I've finished my calculation.
We can't afford the dog.
It has to go..

This is official! The first semester is over!

Yes, it's over. Yesterday (sorry for publishing this late) I took the last two exams. One was Math and another was Nutrition.

Math was quite easy. There was one linguistic question and I asked question, just to make sure that my understanding was right. I missed one question (stupid me). Indeed it was ridiculous - instead of dividing I multiplied, and there were at least ten more questions for the same problem and all of them I did right. The good thing was that there were two extra credit questions, so my result is 100%.

Nutrition I think I did all right, probably missed a few questions. Now we are waiting for the results of all our exams and tests to be published on-line. I think during the next week we will see all results.