melon carving

Besides small things like mushrooms and potatoes, Chef Oakley can also carve all manner of decorations. In advance of us preparing platters for the Fall Semester Buffet in the PCR, he showed us how to carve melons.

To cut a honeydew into a flower, first cut petal shapes (almost like an elegant zigzag) around the circumference. This actually could make two flowers, since the top and bottom turn out the same (although we shave the petals off one half and upend it to make a base for the other).



Then trace petal shapes within the original petal shapes.



Cut into the outer layer of flesh for each petal and fan the petals outwards.



To finish, Chef took a small ice chisel (he does ice sculptures too) and carved lines inside.

Oh, and Chef also carved a poinsettia out of a watermelon too. So beautiful.

fun with potatoes

Another vegetable we were taught to carve with a paring knife was the classic tourné-ed potato. As with fluting mushroom, it required steady hands and repeated fluid arching motions, which looks deceivingly easy once you've mastered it but is incredibly hard starting out. This one was my... tenth attempt?



Chef Oakley also showed us other things we can do with potatoes, such as converting them into mushrooms (by whittling down one end and peeling spots off the other end).



We also saw how to cut potatoes into two interlocking pieces - I call them claws because they look like crab claws to me.



The next day when we were doing fruit platters I managed to recreate the technique on a kiwi. Just cut two vertical slits on either side, then with the fruit standing on a table edge, hold your knife at a 45 degree angle to the table edge and cut in till you hit the slit. Repeat with the other side, then pull the top and bottom apart!

fluting mushrooms

Besides meat/protein, occasionally we get to do fun things that stray into the realm of garde manger. Like fluting mushrooms.



I've fluted mushrooms before, with a channel knife, back in PCR for the shrimp louie salad. Fluting them with a paring knife is much harder, which is what Chef Oakley was trying to teach us. You know you're doing it right if the strips you carve out hang on the edge (see above) for you to peel off at the end.



Here's the line-up of mushrooms I practiced on - some of them have stars in the middle because Chef taught us how to make designs using the tip of our paring knives.



Besides stars there was also this pattern that spiraled outward to cover the entire mushroom cap.



My attempt is on the left. Chrissy got creative on the right and made a porcupine!

grinding meat

From time to time we'll take all the accumulated scraps of meat (some too fatty to be eaten straight) and grind them all into ground meat.



The industrial grinder we have is really scary. It sucks down multiple pounds of meat at a time and grinds it up in seconds. A complete monster and a marvel of machinery.

One day we took two sheet trays full of twice-ground beef and turned it into hamburger patties with this other monster of a machine.



You basically feed the top of the machine with ground beef and it ejects a patty at a time, complete with patty paper. All I had to do was take the ejected patties and pile them on a sheet tray and I couldn't even keep up with the machine.



Another thing Chef does with ground meat is turn it into sausage. This piece of machinery spits sausage mixture (not automatically but via churning) into casings, which are then tied up. I haven't gotten to use this yet, but hopefully once before the semester ends.

fish butchery

One would think that butchering fish would be similarly easy to butchering chicken. After all, it's easy to identify all of the parts. However, that is not true.



The list of difficulties is long, just like this salmon.

I think it has something to do with fish not being mammals, their structure is kind of alien. The scales, the slipperyness, the flaky flesh that tears easily.



The procedure is basically to cut into the head, take the two sides off the spine, then take the belly bones and fins and finally the skin off.



Then we had to pluck the pin bones out with pliers - they're small and embedded and remind me why I didn't like eating fish growing up - all the bones.

I've since grown into eating it - as least the boneless fileted versions of it, but the butchery's still hard.