Sugar Contains Plastic

Wow. What a week! We did breakfast cookery last week for three days. All solo production. It was great. Don't get me wrong, I got lucky and had some great partners throughout 101, but some of my classmates got stuck with some 50 pound bags of concrete to lug around. Also, there's nothing like having to bust it out all by your lonesome.














Quiche. Whoever wrote that book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" has obviously never had quiche. It's delicious. Bacon, onions, cheeeese, eggs, and heavy cream, IN A PIE CRUST!!!! How's is that not a man's breakfast? Not to mention that I nailed it and that is one fine photograph!














Cheese Blintzes. Again, yum. Crepes from scratch, stuffed with a sweet ricotta mixture, and served with a berry coulis (coulis as defined by Escoffier - the essence of one flavor). Seriously though, how pretty is that? As I told Chef Talyon (on several occasions throughout the block) I'm a good cook! And one kid carved a bong out of a potato so he could serve "a bong & a blintz" - like on Austin Powers. We thought it was hilarious. Chef Lange threw it right in the trash.

So after two days of eggs and one day of pancakes, crepes and toast - the French don't call it "French toast", they just call it "toast" (not really, they call it "pain perdu"), it was Finals time. With 40 kids in the class, it would have been pretty impossible to complete the tasks we were given all on the same day. So we got split up. I was in the group that did our practical on the first day. Here is the menu, evaluations, and scores:

-Consummé Brunoise - perfectly clear; very chickeny; brunoise cuts were "outstanding"; soup was not piping hot - 18 :(
-Beurre Blanc - nice nappé consistency; great flavor; just starting to break (pan was probably a little too hot) - 19
-Asparagus - perfect - 20
-Tourné Risolles - perfect cuts; nice golden brown; could use a touch more salt - 19

And then there was the "Eggs Florentine":













-Sautéed Polenta - creamy; golden brown; perfect (even through I forgot the parm) - 20
-Sautéed Spinach - nicely seasoned; not too broken down; maybe 2 seconds too long in the pan - 19
-Poached Eggs - nice runny yolk; fully coagulated whites; again, maybe 2 seconds too long - 19
-Hollandaise - great consistency; could use a pinch more salt and a few more drops lemon - 18

So that translates to a 94. Destroyed it. Then I had the written final on Friday. I buzzed through it, double checked my answers, and felt great about it. Then I watched Chef grade it. Eight wrong answers. WHAT!!????!!??! I was flabbergasted to say the least. Eight wrong answers out of 50 left me with an 84. There was bonus however. So I got +5 there for an 89, which I was told was the high score of the day to that point. Nonetheless, I demanded to appeal every discrepancy. So we went down the answer sheet question by question, checking the answers in the book. I even went so far as to try to pack more than 8oz of flour into a cup (can't be done without a hydraulic press). I did successfully dispute 1 of my "wrong" answers and win the points back. I finished with a 91 and an "A" in Culinary Arts 101. What a blast that class was and I will return frequently to pick the brains of Chefs Lange and Waggoner.

In addition to all of that business, I did my first service at Uchi on Wednesday night (did I mention that I nailed that practical on like 3.5 hours of sleep?). Man was it fun! It was really more of an "intro pantry position 101". I didn't get to really get my hands on tooooo much stuff, but I learned how to plate the starters, amuse, salads, oysters, and desserts. I also ran re-stock for the line cooks, so I got to do some prep during service. Overall, lots of fun.

Friday, I walk in to Uchi and Ben says he's going to have me knock out like 4 or 5 prep items and then send me to Uchiko for the evening. Awesome. So I buzzed through those items and headed up Lamar. For those of you not familiar, Uchiko is Uchi's "baby sister" restaurant. Brand spanking new. They're not actually "open" to the public yet. They're in the soft opening stage and are serving diners by invite only.

These guys are doing some REALLY cool stuff. I'm not sure how much I should be divulging (not that anyone over there would actually even come across this blog), but here's some hints: lobster gazpacho, mussels, beet salad, rabbit, pork belly, whole fish, fried chicken (not like grandma's), and 5 kinds of sorbet on 5 different killer desserts. Again, I was shadowing the pantry station and nowhere have I experienced "when it rains, it pours" more that Friday night. There was a few times when we were kind of standing around and they kept saying, "Here it comes. We're about to get hammered." And I'm standing there like, "Really? There's 0 tickets." And then eh-eh-eh-ehhhhh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-ehhhhhhh (that's supposed to be the ticket machine). That thing would chirp for a solid 60 seconds, and all of a sudden there was 9 desserts (each with at least 6 components). So they started hammering them out. Then, the expo starts calling apps. So before we knew it, there was 12 desserts, 4 salads, and 8 apps. Phew! It was intense. And that was at 6 o'clock. It only got crazier from there, but it was a lot of fun.

There's not a lot going on this week. I'm on summer break from school, but I'm not on break from work - did they not get the memo or what? I'm hitting Schlitterbahn tomorrow, might be smoking some meat this weekend, and I also may start a batch of mustard. Yea, you read that right. I'm going to make mustard. Watch out French's!

One more batch of jokes and info:
-Chef Waggoner - "Do you know what Schlitterbahn means in German? Giant toilet. Do you know what La Quinta means? Next to Denny's."
-The government's definition of "free range" is a 2'x2' cage. This was increased from 1'x1' so that the chickens could raise their wings. If you raised your own chickens, in a TRUE free range scenario and monitored their feed, you could eat raw chicken. Salmonella is a product of factory-style chicken farming. It is not a natural bacteria in chicken. ♫The more you know!♫
-"Crust is like a bad girlfriend. The more you knead it, the worse it treats you." -Chef Waggoner
-In the 60's, Domino Sugar switched from cane sugar to beet sugar (cheaper and easier to get considering the political unrest in the tropics in that time). However, the beet only yielded 10% sugar. So some scientists figured out that you could attach a petroleum-based polymer (plastic) somewhere in the beet processing to up the yield to 70%. Nowhere in the description of the production of beet sugar does it say how/when the polymer is removed. You're eating plastic if you're not buying cane sugar.
-Also, they referred to the bathroom as the "Urinasium" for the entire block.