About this blog
- Greetings and welcome to the Kitchen Academy Blog! My name is Chef Peleg Top and here you will find the documented story of my cooking school experience. Since I was a small boy I have always loved to be in the kitchen. Being a Chef was something I only dreamed of becoming. So last year, I decided to fulfill a lifelong dream to become a certified chef. I enrolled myself at The Kitchen Academy in Hollywood, California and for the next 30 weeks I spent my time getting trained in the culinary arts by some of the best chefs in town. If you ever wondered what it's really like to be in cooking school, read on. This blog is where you can read about my cooking school experience. Ad don't be shy, drop me a line or leave a comment!
Cook Books I Love
« February 2007 | Main | April 2007 »
Word of the Day: Terrine
Comes from the Latin word terra, meaning earth. Refers to the earthenware vessel or mold used to bake or form pâté. The mold can be made from cast iron, terra cotta, or ceramics. Ours in class was ceramic with a metal base…
Week 11, Day 4-5: Small Wonders
This end of this week found us working in more miniature proportions. We created a spellbinding slew of hors d'oeuvres. This included brandade de morue with crisp toast, teardrop tomatoes, and baby greens. Brandade de morue is essentially cod that has been layered in coarse salt and drained. The resulting flavor is something that my taste buds seem to be horribly offended by. Moving on, we also made some ground lox and herb cream cheese sandwiches, chicken liver pâté, pork terrine, and black olive tapenade on grilled toast.
After preparing this diverse variety of mini-foods, we arranged everything in a butler-style tray. We worked in teams of 4 on these; Brian, Jennifer, and Aaron were in my group. We took all the pre-prepared ingredients from yesterday and spent a couple our hours finishing up and organizing our tray. For this exercise, all the groups got their grade based on the outcome of the tray. The chef really liked ours, though he thought it was a bit too symmetrical. (That’s what happens when you have a designer in the group!) After this short and fun experience making finger-foods we spent some time studying for finals. The final task of the day was getting to scrub carbon off all the pots in the kitchen! We each grabbed 3 pots and made them look spotless. Not the most exhilarating aspect of the kitchen. Perhaps it was a mental exercise to get us in the mindset for finals next week? Again we will have to recreate some of the dishes that we learned over the term. All that will be given to us is a list of ingredients every morning and nothing else. I can’t believe the second term is already ending!
Week 11, day 2: Southern Comfort
Today was Cajun day! We made 3 dishes in all. Crayfish Etoufee, shrimp gumbo, and pan-seared catfish w black-eyed peas and collared greens. The first task of the day was to kill live crayfish! We each got about 3 pounds of them, which comes to around 45 crayfish in all. Then we boiled them in hot water and salt. Again, the discomfort of having to kill another creature (or rather 45 of them!) was not the ideal way to start the day. But here too was another experience where we had to directly face the realities of cooking. Its not always pretty! After boiling, the crayfish got soaked in ice water and then the process of pulling them apart began…
The fabrication process for crayfish is rather lengthy. After 45 minutes of carefully pulling them apart, Jennifer and I were able to extract tiny little pieces of meat. It made me think that working with crayfish really isn’t worth all the trouble. I suppose they are like tiny little lobsters, which makes them a cheaper alternative? Still I’m inclined to let those creatures live! Overall it was a pretty intense day. The dishes were really involved, lots of ingredients and flavors to consider. The shrimp gumbo was no exception, made from shrimp, okra, kitchen, and lots of vegetables...
The first step to creating the gumbo was to compose a dark roux base. It was made with toasted flour, something I’ve never worked with before. Luckily we found an ideal level of darkness after mixing in some clarified butter. Regardless, I wasn’t sure that our shrimp gumbo was such a great contender. I thought the chef would tell us it was too dark, bland, and watery. But to our surprise quite the reverse response was gathered. He loved it! And told us it was exactly as it needed to be. This brings up the point that sometimes we create a dish and have no idea what the end result needs to look like. Its sort of like throwing darts in the air and hoping it sticks in the right place. Which seems to be a big difference between this class and the previous term, which relied heavily on demonstration. The only demo we got today was how to fabricate the catfish and that was pretty much it! Sometimes it would be nice to know exactly what to shoot for, though I do see the merits of having us sift through it ourselves. Perhaps in my classroom things would be a little different...
Tomorrow is English day! Fish and chips anyone?
Week 11, day 1: Found in Translation
Hard to believe, but there are only two weeks left in this term! Today we created some delightful Asian dishes, continuing our exploration of international flavors. We learned to make miso soup with tofu, wakame and green onions, shrimp and vegetable tempura, Asian spring rolls with plum sauce, and lumpia with chili sauce (sort of like a spring roll but from the Philippines.) Although it may on the surface seem like a giant undertaking, it was a relatively easy and smooth process to complete all these time-tested dishes. Especially since my new weekly station partner (Jennifer) and I have quickly gotten into a good workflow. She is really cool in general, and I’ve been enjoying her company. Today I was mostly in charge of rolling the shrimp and creating the filling for the spring rolls. I also made the tempura batter, which was really interesting. I was happy to learn that it is made from rice flour rather than wheat! (For my wheat-sensitive system this was a very welcomed concept.) Tomorrow we’re going Cajun! Gumbo, crayfish, and southern-fried black-eyed peas are some of the things we’ll be dabbling in…
*In addition to displaying photos from today’s Asian excursion, note the pictures of some overlooked dishes from last week…
Week 10, Day 2-3: Buffet! Ole!
Today we successfully presented our second buffet! Mexican food was the theme for the wondrous smorgasbord. Yesterday was spent preparing for the event; I helped construct the macaroni and cheese, guacamole, salsa verde, and rice. We also marinated some tri-tip in herbs, spices, and a special pasting sauce. This was soaked overnight only to be unveiled this morning to join a festive variety of colors and flavors. We showed up at our usual time today (6am) and immediately started setting up. Incidentally, it ended up not being as well attended as the first buffet we had. Perhaps it had something to do with the unpopularity of hearty Mexican food at 8 in the morning? Luckily Ricky showed up as my special guest and got acquainted with the crew. It was really nice to see him there. Anyhow, the whole thing turned out quite beautifully and Chef Jones gave us some rewarding words of encouragement…
He was especially impressed at how well we worked as a team. I had the added responsibility of being assigned sous chef. This meant I had to be extremely sensitive to the overall picture. I had to continually report the progress of 28 different people who were in about 7-10 different teams! The preparation and cooking of all the food had to be correct and timely. Different foods required different plans of attack so trying to keep it all balanced was definitely demanding. I felt the menacing pressure of the clock at every passing moment! As well as some challenges getting responses from people who weren’t used to having someone else at the helm. There were a couple of last-minute situations where certain foods weren’t heating up correctly and seasoning ratios were a bit skewed. But overall we certainly pulled it off, and with style! It was a really valuable experience. The energy flow during a buffet day is really exciting and I just love being a part of it. I also enjoy using the big kitchen, which has more possibilities than the room we typically inhabit. It is more like a real kitchen, rather than a room with multiple cooking stations. But what about the food?!…
The menu was really great. We had barbeque beans, hush puppies, country onion rings, refried beans, barbeque ribs, tri-tip, carnitas, guacamole, salsa and chips, to name a few…
