Baking week one

Chocolate hazelnut cake

How difficult is to make pie dough?

We started Baking and Pastry Development skills last week. This is school practise - send bakers for three weeks to the kitchen and send cooks for three weeks to the baking side. Our instructor welcomed us on the 'bright side' (he calls kitchen 'dark side'). Baking shop is very different from the kitchen side. It has different mentality. You have to use exact measurements and for large volume they are grams and ounces (or pounds), not spoons or cups. As soon as you form your product and place it into oven you are not able to change anything, it's done. In the kitchen you can adjust seasoning, add some flavor, and so on. Our instructor is really

Garde Manger week two

One of our plates from Friday

Salt perception on the same product when it cold or hot...

The second week of Garde Manger was even more intense, but interesting. We made a lot of forcemeat (galantines, terrines, pates) and we made very interesting flavours.

Monday was the sausage day. All class was busy making sausages. I made sweet Italian sausages. Before I mixed seasoning I asked the chef if the recipe is accurate in terms of salt. I remember making similar sausages in meat fabrication class and the recipe was really off for the amount of salt. The chef said the recipe isfine. So I made sausages as per recipe and it was over seasoned. Later I realized why did this happen. I was making half a recipe and used full amount of spices and salt. I poached them first and then grilled. The poaching

Garde Manger week one

Our piggy for the class

Why knife skills are so important in Garde Mange?

This week we started a new block - Garde Manger. This block is all about cold buffet, appetizers, and different techniques for preservation. We are going to make sausages, pates, and some other exciting dishes. The instructor for this block is extremely knowledgeable about the subject and very passionate. Also he is very open minded and understandable. His position is that mistake could happen, but you should analyze your mistake and learn from it, to avoid the same or similar mistake in the future. Garde mange is all about presentation. As a result knife skill

Cuisine of Asia week three

Spicy Lemongrass Tofu

Cuisines of Asia is over!

The final week of Asian cuisine class. I was so happy that this class is over. It has been probably the biggest disappointment for the whole school so far. The instructors for the two pm classes did not do great job. The main idea for the whole block was that we are not going to be experts in Asian cuisines anyway, so why to bother. It's true that this is not feasible to learn a cuisine even for one country in three weeks. However, looking back I guess that Cuisines of Europe was the heaven.

Cuisine of Asia week two

Miso marinated Black Cod

The continuation os Asian cuisine.

We continued our 'trip' in Asia. This week we started with Korean cuisine. Then we moved to Japan and finished in Vietnam. It seems the class in general is not well organized. Our production is consistently low. We have too much time to prepare these dishes, and our class is only 13 people. The sister group is 20 people, what they are going to do is a big question.

Cuisines of Asia week one

The dish of the day on Friday:
Lion Head Meatballs

Chinese cuisine...
As we finished our short 'trip' in Europe and Mediterranean our next destination is Asia. The first stop was China, or to be more detailed Chinatown in Oakland. On Tuesday, the first day of class, we went to a field trip. We visited Ranch 99 Chinese grocery store in Berkeley, Dim Sam Palace Chinese restaurant in Oakland, Koreana Plaza market Korean grocery, and Chaat and Market an Indian store and cafe in Berkeley.
This field trip was interesting, but we spent way too long time at grocery stores. Our instructors needed to buy some ingredients for class and we got 45 minutes time to discover unfamiliar ingredients. In a normal day, when I do grocery shopping it rarely takes 30 minutes for me. Here I got 45 minutes, and I did not buy anything.
Dim Sam Palace was

Cuisines of Europe and Mediterranean week three

Sauerkraut with sauasages

How to chose the menu?

The final week in the Cuisines of Europe and Mediterranean. For this week we had four days of normal classes and Friday was our special project. For the special project we had to prepare the menu of the country chosen on day one by drawing. It had to be a full menu - how it would be in the country. We were not allowed to cook any dish we prepared during our class. Our country was Morocco. We chose really simple menu, which was easy to execute and it paid off. The chef said we were the best team, the menu was Moroccan, very traditional.

During the week we finished Central Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary), cooked English Islands menu, and had Scandinavia and Russia for