The pursuit of pastry starts with the basics. As any accomplished musician, athlete,
scientist, or chef will tell you, in order to reach their level of greatness,
you must start with the basics. You
can’t make a fruit salad if you don’t know how to safely use a knife.
Basics in the culinary world are not just involving knife skills and the preparation of food, but also food safety. Food safety is vital in the food industry for obvious reasons – you don’t want your customers getting sick – or worse. The first readings we were assigned were on food safety and sanitation. Most of this is common sense: come to work clean; cover your mouth completely when coughing or sneezing; wash your hands (the proper way, with HOT water, soap, and all over your hands, front, back, top and sides, in-between the fingers, under the fingernails, and don’t forget the wrist and forearms!)
And so it is with culinary school. We start with the basics. In this case, it was knife skills. In the pastry arts program, we simply had to
supreme an orange to demonstrate that we knew how to use a knife properly. In a culinary course I once took we had to
cut up carrots to show various size cuts, from cubes to brunoise. I must’ve gone through two dozen carrots!
I assumed that this project would be simple and straight
forward, and it of course was. Even so,
the cuts and slices must be perfect and the damn oranges didn’t want to
co-operate. The old saying, “good enough
for government work” doesn’t apply here.
Peeling the orange was simple as can be, but cutting a supreme perfectly
each time was a little annoying because I kept getting bits of the inner core
attached. By the time I finished with
the orange, it was not only good enough for government work but good enough
for culinary work.
Basics in the culinary world are not just involving knife skills and the preparation of food, but also food safety. Food safety is vital in the food industry for obvious reasons – you don’t want your customers getting sick – or worse. The first readings we were assigned were on food safety and sanitation. Most of this is common sense: come to work clean; cover your mouth completely when coughing or sneezing; wash your hands (the proper way, with HOT water, soap, and all over your hands, front, back, top and sides, in-between the fingers, under the fingernails, and don’t forget the wrist and forearms!)
We read about the various pathogens that cause foodborne
illness: fungi are the most common (think
moldy bread); bacteria, viruses (never occurred to me about viruses causing
food illnesses), and parasites are the other causes. And don’t forget the “biological toxins” –
those naturally occurring poisons in some food.
It’s because of biological toxins that I refuse to eat
mussels. Several years ago, in the late
1980s, I remember seeing a story on 20/20 or some other news show about a
handful of people around Canada that were stricken by a complete and permanent
loss of their short term memory. It was
wiped out overnight. A physics professor
could still drive to and from work and teach physics with no problem. But he could never remember where he parked
his car, nor who any of his students were, not only from day to day but hour to
hour. The one thing these people had in
common was that they had eaten mussels.
Apparently, there is an illness called Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP) that is caused by the consumption
of domoic acid. (If you ask me, it should be called demonic acid). It’s a naturally occurring toxin found in
certain algae that find its way into shellfish.
Mussels ARE safe to eat and they are tested regularly to the toxin. But the show had such an impact on me, I will
not touch them.[1]
The Escoffier School takes sanitation and food safety
seriously. So much so, that we are
required to keep a sanitation bucket and sanitation fluid (“sani-solution”) on
hand when we prep our food. We need to
make a new batch each week and include a photograph of a test strip showing the
proper pH balance with each assignment.
Our first live video conference was held mid-day so I was
unable to attend (gotta work to pay for school!). However, that is not an issue with Escoffier
– the conferences are archived and we are able to watch them at any time that
is convenient for us. Even if we do
attend, we are encouraged to watch the video again because we will always pick
up stuff we may have missed. As long as
we watch it to the end, it counts as attending.
I did watch the archived video in the evening. As expected, it was mostly introductory and
start-of-school information. But very
important and useful information.
Meanwhile, I have readings and other video clips to watch
before submitting my assignment over the weekend and continuing my pursuit of
pastry.
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| Orange Suprêmes |
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