Kitchen Day 10

On to the Meats!

We are right on the verge of getting to the meaty part!

We are finally getting to the good part! WE (not Arby's) have the meats! 

On Friday we started to learn how to not only cook meat dishes, but prepare the meats themselves. We started with the most common meat, chicken.

I've never carved a chicken before, especially a raw one. Of course Chef made it look so easy. He even told us that he would "slow down" so we could observe, haha! He still did it so fast and with such grace, we all managed to just get by. Definitely a really cool thing to learn, as he mentioned to us, it costs more for cut chicken because we paid someone else to do it. This is by far a skill I will use for the years to come.

Plating

This was also the start of Plating. No more will we have a large buffet style lunch, where we all individually place our dishes on to be tasted and critiqued. Now we will plate a full dish, with all the components for everyone to enjoy.

Our lovely cameraman (Bubba Cross). He looks stressed here! :-P

For our first dish we were creating a poached chicken with asparagus, some incredible rice (made by the amazing Masha), and sauces. It was a great first dish, very simple but full of flavor. By far the best thing was the rice!!!

This incredible rice dish was amazing. The little sour berries were so good with the creaminess of the whole dish against the savor from the saffron. Thanks Masha!!!

Plating is such an important part of any dish, it's the first impression anyone gets. It can however be done in so many ways that it isn't always the deciding factor right as you take the first bite. Some of the best Chef's in the world intentionally mislead you by design, go look up the "Tomato/Strawberry" dish of the great Grant Achatz of Alinea.

This is my dream come true so far! I can't wait to see how we progress into more complex dishes and then entire meals!!!