dicing tomatoes

Another fixture of prepping for Latin Quarter was making salsa fresca.



I don't know how many portions that was, but 40 tomatoes went into it.



And by 40 tomatoes, I mean 40 tomatoes small-diced by hand. But you know, that's in addition to those 6 onions, 6 bunches of cilantro, 4 bunches of scallions, and 12 jalapeños all small-diced. Repetitive motion injury aside, this meant a lot of time meditating on how tomatoes could be diced better/faster.

So the one thing I hate about cutting tomatoes is that usually the skin is so tractionless that the knife experiences resistance trying to cut. So I wanted a dicing method that would sidestep cutting into skin. Several experimental methods later, I settled on this one.



First cut the sides of the tomato off so the tomato is one block (this is good practice for cutting cube-shapes out of any cylindrical-shapes, like a carrot for example).



Cut the block into slices (vertical cut) and then cubes (horizontal cut).



Take the tomato sides/ends and slice, then dice those.

And there you have it, the dicing tomato method that is almost all flesh and no skin. Now salsa fresca your way to happiness!

mass production

It happened pretty fast, a third of the semester went by and it was time for us to rotate into Chef Hammerich's section, or the mass production every day section.

My first station was prepping for Latin Quarter, a culturally-themed cafeteria outlet run by third semester students. We made things like carne asada and queso and mexican rice, which was what I did the first day on station.



And there you have it, a gigantic rondo (round pot/pan) full of mexican rice. Not hard actually, just sweat onions/garlic in butter, dump rice grains in and mix till shiny, then add water & canned tomatoes, season, and cover + simmer until done.

When I made mexican rice at home today I did a different take by using a rice cooker. I sauteed onions, mixed in fresh tomatoes, then some canned pasta sauce, then poured in the mixture into the cooker with rice and chicken stock (made by diluting "better than bouillon"). It came out pretty well.

I have to say though, after cooking massively quantities of things, home cooking begins to look like small peanuts. The stock pot I once thought was huge now looks like a bowl.



(Said stock pot with homemade pasta sauce inside, roughly the one for this lasagna recipe.)

But really, I think that anyone who can cook at home can also cook massively. The processes are pretty much the same, it's mainly the equipment that's different (which makes it seem daunting). And the large quantities just mean that mise en place is ever more crucial, because at home you can afford to zip back and forth between the refrigerator and prep, but in an industrial kitchen? Fuhgeddaboudit!

entree station

Next was the daunting entree station, where I was alone with the work of producing 120 portions of something. Well, usually starch station (in charge of making the accompanying rice/pasta/potato/etc.) would help me out and we would partner up to do both things, but there was this one day where I roasted 120 portions of chicken by myself, and if it weren't for the fire alarm that disrupted everything, I wouldn't have gotten the chicken out in time for cafeteria lunch service. Sadly that was one of the days I forgot to bring my camera, so I don't have evidence of that catastrophe/accomplishment.



Other things we did in entree station were, for example, frying 120 portions of fish (I did the flouring of the fish filets, which was fun - slap, flip and pat down, a rhythm you could get a groove into).



What distinguishes a culinary school cafeteria from a regular one would be the little touches - for the fried fish, it was the beurre meunière Chef Ogden piped with a pastry bag - butter we flavored with parsley, lemon and black pepper. Sadly I don't think anybody but us got to see the piped rosettes - the butter melted soon after meeting the fish (a match made in heaven).



The one thing I super enjoyed in entree station was the making of tamale pie, otherwise known as tamale filling + cheese sandwiched between slabs of cornbread. The cornbread dough had to be hand-spread to cover the bottom and top of the hotel pan, and I don't know what it is, but working with dough just makes me happy.



It's a kind of respite from the hustle that is everything else.

soup station

My introduction to main kitchen work was with soup station. Even though my task was to make 120 portions of soup a day, I thought the work was easier than in the PCR setting, because having everything you're doing going into one big item is just so much less involved than assembling a dozen little small plates. In big cooking you don't have to sweat the small stuff.



But like with anything you gotta mise stuff en place (French for "putting stuff in place"). That was the mise en place for minestrone soup, practically took up the entire work bench.



So you don't have to sweat the small stuff, but we sweated (heated/softened) 15-20 lbs of hand-diced mirepoix (the standard being 50% onions, 25% carrots, 25% celery, all diced). Besides bones and meat, this is the stuff that gives stock and soups flavor.



Then we added chicken stock. Like 10 gallons of it. And two ham hocks, crucial for depth of flavor - that was the lip-smacking part about drinking this soup.



After simmering for over half an hour we added cabbage and zucchini, and canned tomato + tomato paste. The tomato products give the soup more body and savoriness (or umami).



And right before the soup was done we added spinach, a super soft vegetable that would've wilted and lost color if we had put it in any earlier.



And there you have it, a gigantic steam kettle full of minestrone soup!

(The other soups we made were chowders and black bean soup, not half as photogenic as minestrone soup so I won't even bother showing them.)



Oh but we did make vegetable stock, something easy for everyone at home - just simmer mirepoix scraps (onion skin, carrot peels, celery ends) in water for half an hour and then strain the scraps out. The liquid you can pour into containers (or ice cube trays) and freeze. Then the next time you need some veggie stock or want to add some flavor to rice or pasta, just pop one out and throw it in.

salad station

Before I dive into all the mass production type main kitchen work that I did, I just wanted to finish up with the only other station I worked in PCR - salad station. It's the station I wanted because it was the most relaxed, and at that point in the semester I really just needed to relax.

Every day at salad station involved coming in to check the mise en place (ingredients prepped and ready to assemble for the final product). A lot of times the herbs and lettuces would wilt overnight, so I would have to replenish those. And every couple of days I would need to do a batch of something or another, whether it was vinaigrette or glazed nuts or poached pears - and by the time I rotated out of the station I had prepped every single item that went into the salads, which was nice.

The station was so relaxed that I actually had the time to run a special salad of my own design if I wanted to. But I didn't. I stuck to making the three salads on the menu: heirloom tomato, fall greens, and the shrimp louie (seen below in the brief second it sat on the pick-up line before it was whisked away to a diner). What I realized about fine dining salads in relation to regular salads is that there's just a couple of elements that seem hard to replicate at home. In the shrimp louie, that element would be the poached mushroom cap. The pleats etched into the mushroom required a special tool (a super mini bottle-opener of sorts), and poaching required some brief submerged simmering in a white wine/water mix (which is simple but just unobvious enough).



What was fun in salad station was that I had my own printer for ticket orders, so my ears became attuned to the noise of printing - as soon as it started I would spring into action, a sort of muted adrenaline rush (in comparison to the hot line for grill/entree-firing). I would regret not being on the hot line (and maybe I kind of do), but I've discovered that I don't crave that spike of adrenaline. Being on the hot line is the kitchen version of being on the front line, and I really don't need to get shot.



So instead I was in my little corner, doing things like slicing up the heirloom tomatoes and arranging them nicely.



There were small challenges though, like the parmesan crisp that was the mystifying adornment atop the heirloom tomato salad. It's embarrassingly simple - you lay out grated parmesan cheese in circles and bake them until they get crispy. I couldn't get the crisp part down right - either I put them in the oven and they didn't get crisp fast enough, or I stuck them in the broiler and they got burned. On my last day in salad station I got it right. They broke in half nicely for me to use them on my heirloom tomato salads, finally.



It's always the small things that get you.