Day twenty one

Do you keep tomato in a fridge? Do not do it.

Another day of liberal arts studying. Math in the morning, followed by product knowledge, food safety and first year experience.

This week is a bit better. Somehow I managed to go to bed before 11 p.m. so I have almost 7 hours of sleep. As a result no attempts to fall asleep during lectures. So slowly but surely getting into new schedule. This Sunday February 03 will be exactly one month since I came here to study.

Back to the day at school. Math was allright, we moved to the point where we have to standardize  recipes. This is a bit tricky, this is not as easy as to convert pounds to litres. Many different ingredients, some of them

Day twenty

Have you seen how Belgian endive grows?

The second day in the kitchen this week. Unfortunately the last one for the week. I would be happy to have four of them in the kitchen. Today we cooked chowder, English style fish chowder. I have to admit that I love it. I like a combination of cream with some veggies and fish. Yummy...

After our kitchen class we had a lecture from a guy who has endive farm here in California. Do you know that Belgian endive is grown in a complete darkness? I thought

Day nineteen

Why do we use lemon juice as part of seasoning?

Another day in the kitchen. Today we made Puree of Lentil Soup (individually) and Beans in a pot (as a team). I would probably say that this is not my favorite so far. It seems I am not a big fun of lentils and other beans. I can eat then if they cooked properly, but do I enjoy it? Not exactly.

Puree soups are a separate category of soups. We use beans as a thickening agent or starchy vegetables. Beans have better thickening quality, therefore we use less beans (2 pounds for 1 gallon as to compare with 3-4 pounds of vegetables). Since beans, as well as starchy vegetables, have not enough flavor, usually we use pork product to add flavor (salted pork, bacon, smoked pork, etc).

With the Lentil Soup we cooked today we have started to use additional seasoning - lemon juice. Why we do this today? The main reason is

Day eighteen

a courtesy of

Why do we have so many ingredients in this recipe? Is author nuts?

Today is Monday, the beginning of a new week. This week we have a lecture on Culinary Fundamentals. The lecture was about ingredients, their functionality and also about the main nutrients, such as water, carbohydrates, lipids and proteins.

Water is main composition of all food (70% and up). Green lettuce has about 95% water content. But milk probably has 80% of water. How that could be? Milk is more watery than lettuce. Milk also contains a lot of different elements, such as fat, protein (in form of lactose), micronutrients (calcium and so on).

Water is also quite amazing liquid. It has

Day seventeen

a courtesy of

How many types of potato do you know?

Today's class for product knowledge was about potato and onion. A lot of useful information regarding these simple vegetables. The variety available is huge. This is really important to know your product. Such a simple veg as potato can be great if right type chosen or awful if wrong one.

For example, you want to make a German potato salad (really great dish), you come to shop or even worst to farmers market and  you see 10 or 15 different potato. What to chose? Such a difficult task, but not if you generally know different types of potato. You definitely do not want to use potato with low moisture and high starch content, because this potato will not hold a shape after cooking and your salad will not be appealing.

In case you want your cooked potato to hold a shape of the pieces you cut tem, go for potate with moderate moisture and moderate starch, sometimes called

Day sixteen

a courtesy of

What is the biggest plant on the Earth? 

Another day of the liberal arts study. Math in the morning, following by product knowledge, food safety and yes, my 'favorite' - first year experience.

We started recipes conversion at the math class. That's really useful. Let's say you have a recipe for a wonderful goat cheese tart and it calls for 10 oz of goat cheese and the yield is two tarts 12 oz each. Now you decided that you do not want two tarts, but you want one and you don't want a huge tart 24 oz, you want normal size 15 oz. So, the question is how much goat cheese do you need? This is really useful to be able to calculate recipe conversion factor and apply it.

Back to the question of the day. Do you know what is the biggest plant on te Earth? I did not know myself this morning. There were many guesses - eucalyptus, baobab (African tree), sequoia and so on. But the answer is -

Day fifteen

a courtesy of

What is the most popular vegetable? That's right - potato.

Today is the second day in the kitchen this week. We have started a new topic - cooking potato. This is really amazing - such a simple vegetable, but so many wonderful dishes you can make. Today is the first day when we cooked not one dish, but two! This is just beginning, I know we will be doing three and four dishes at the same short period of time.

So, the dishes we made today are Vichyssoise (potato and leek soup) and Pomme Puree (mashed or whipped potato). On a side note, I would tell that French names are