Day eighty two

A courtesy of

Arctic Char what kind of fish is it?

Thursday, we had only one class for today - fish fabrication. Great thing that the class begins at 8:40 (the time we suppose to be in the kitchen and set up stations). So I was able to sleep a bit longer. This a bit was not enough after three days of waking at 6 and finishing work around 8:30 in the evening. So I came to the dorm after lunch and slept for an hour...

Yes, back to fish. Today we had arctic char. This is very gentle fish, it has very delicate flesh and require gentle handling, otherwise you can easily destroy it. The bones structure is the same as salmon. Arctic char is closely

Day eighty one

Salmon for today

What are the challenges to fillet and to skin salmon? Is it easy fish?

Moving forward in the fish fabrication. Today we handled tuna. At he beginning of the class we were shown how to fillet a halibut and how to portion these fillets. After that there was demo on a salmon, how to remove a spinal bone, how to skin fillets, how to portion them.

Salmon is quite a big fish. Fortunately it has soft bones. By soft we mean that they are a little bit easy to handle (to cut through) and as a result of this softness method 'up and over' does not work. You will cut through the bones and at the end you will have a fillet with irregular bones which you will have to remove anyway. Therefore we use 'straight' method - we cut through the rib bones holding a knife against the spinal bones using it as a guideline. After that we remove the rib cage bones, trim all fins and skin fillet if required.

Just in case I did not explain the method 'up and over'.... In this method

Day eighty

Today's first victim

Ratio to feed tuna? 1 to 15 (15 pounds of food to get 1 pound of tuna)...

Second day of Seafood identification and fabrication. I love it. It is much easier as to compare with meat. In general fish has similar bone structure (there are difference between flat fish and round fish, but in these categories, they are very similar) and also because fish is so gentle. You do need to apply any pressure when filleting fish. The weight of the knife is enough.

Today our fist victim was dover-sole family member, flat fish. We had two fish for everybody and we filleted one fish in full side fillets and the other in quarters. There were almost no problems with that. Only one guy practically butchered these poor creatures for ugly fillets, and guess who? The one who talks more than anyone in our group...

Then we filleted sardines. We received them already scaled, so there were no scales all over the kitchen. Sardines are dirty fish. When you cut fillets you cutting board is unbelievable dirty, like you have never washed it:-)

The last victim for today was

Day seventy nine

Today's victim

How long does tuna live?

New class has started today - Seafood identification and fabrication. That is very interesting, as I am not really familiar with fish. I know a little bit about seafood (crustaceans), but fish is not where I am confortable with my knowledge.

A few facts. While average food costs are declining during last decades, fish and seafood are increasing in cost. For the last 10 years cost of seafood almost doubled. Since so many varieties of fish were over catch, and some of them almost extinct, the sustainability is important part of aquaculture in developed countries (some countries do not care at all). According to international rules, each country has 200 miles zone and this zone belongs

Day seventy eight

Courtesy of

The end of meat study.

It was Friday and the final for our meat course. The final consisted of three parts. The first one was written test where we suppose to answer many questions about meat and poultry. The big unpleasant surprise was that the test was not multiple choice. That was a real surprise. 

The second part was fabrication. Everyone from our group was given a half of pork shoulder and had to fabricate from this piece of meat two roasts and tie them. All reasonable trimmings had to be cut for stew meat. Also we got one chicken each and we had to fabricate two airline breasts, two wings, two boneless skinless thigh, and two drumstick optionally Frenched. That was

Day seventy seven

Tasting menu for today, ready to roast

Last day of chicken fabrication.

Today was the second day of chicken. We did almost the same we did yesterday with some small variation. For one chicken instead of fabricating airline breast we did skinless butterflied breast and chicken lolly pops. The whole leg (thigh and drumstick) was deboned.

We tried also another way of separating chicken - to take off legs first and then to take off beast. Even though the chef said that this is not the best way in her opinion, I found it easier to do, because when you take legs off you work entirely on the breast and do not need to handle the whole side of the chicken. Again this is personal opinion, I can do both ways.

It was a chance for us to taste different birds today - quail, squab, chicken, capon, pheasant, and something else (do not remember). Squab had

Day seventy six

Varieties of birds from quail to capon
(there is hand in the picture, this is not bird:-)

Chicken, how many way to cut it do you know?

So we have moved to chicken. It looks like an easy bird, but it depends on the intended use, what are you going to do and how to cook it. Indeed a chicken is the most versatile protein. You may simply roast it whole. You can roast it spatchcock (kind of butterfly). You can cook it in pieces. And so on, the list will be endless.

We trussed our three chickens (what each of us got) first to show techniques. Then we fabricated these chickens. We removed plates (or wing flaps - middle part of wing). Then we removed carcasses and got two halves with legs and breast with wing attached. We separated legs from breast - it was easy there was only skin connecting these two by that time. Breast was fabricated to an airline breast (funny name), which means skin on, tender removed, wing attached. The leg was separated for thigh and drumstick. Thigh was debones and skinned. As for the time, we had 5 minutes to truss three chickens and may be 45 minutes to fabricate three chickens.

Let's try to count traditional