First REAL day

I was going to do a post yesterday about our first REAL day in class but I ended up having too much homework to do it. I would have probably been up until two in the morning had I finished this blog. It wouldn’t have made any sense from my tired brain anyways, and considering this blog isn’t top priority (sorry), I had to let it wait until today. Anyways by “first REAL day” I mean “first real day in the kitchen.” We learned how to hold a knife, which is shown in the picture (notice where my index finger is, and sorry about the serial killer picture lol).

 We learned how to cut, which is with our arm bent 90 degrees at our side and to move our arm back and forth like we were cutting with a saw, and we also learned different cuts. There are a bunch of different names for different cuts and apparently it gets pretty confusing. Chef didn’t put that much priority into teaching us the names of the cuts but I know it will come up a lot in the future. For now we just need to focus on making those cuts. First thing I learned from the day was how to properly or more easily peel a potato/carrot/etc. He taught us that using our peelers up and down instead of just in one direction is easier and less time consuming. We also learned how to mince garlic by either chopping or smashing the clove with the flat side of our knife. Chopping a garlic clove gives you the option to having either chunky garlic or having smaller bits. Smashing will create more mushy garlic and it doesn’t look as nice. I think the main thing we learned this day was that the shape and size of cuts are extremely important when it comes to making a beautiful dish. If you type “Julienne cuts” into Google you’ll see what I mean. After we learned to cut a bit the Chef helped us to better understand our taste palates by making us taste sweet water (boiled and cooled sugar water), salty water (boiled and cooled salt water), umami (boiled and cooled mushroom water), sour (a lemon), and some bitter flavoring that tasted like Dayquil that I wasn’t able to get the name of. We tasted each of these to figure out where our tongue tasted the different flavors.