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iPhonetography Friday: Culinary School Beginnings

practicing knife cuts at home

I will be graduating from culinary school in five weeks! Yay! So, for the next five weeks I thought it would be fun to take you through my culinary school career for iPhonetography Fridays. Here are photos from my first class. We didn’t get to actually cook anything until we passed that first class. What we did all day every day was learn all about sanitation, how our taste buds work and are affected by various flavors, we made mayonnaise, and the thing we spent most of our time on was classic knife cuts.

Battonet, Julienne, Macedoine, Brunoise, and Tourne became the bane (marie :p) of our existence as young culinary students. While important, learning knife cuts was not fun, much less doing them all day every day at school and then going home to practice some more. My tourne cut has not improved as much as it should have since I started culinary school, and I am so glad that I do not work in a fancy French restaurant where I would actually use that football-shaped cut on a regular basis.

I do have to say, though, that mayonnaise from scratch is infinitely better than anything I have tasted from a jar! Also, all those sanitation practices have come in handy as I now use them not only at work in the test kitchen, but also at home and others’ homes. Just ask Elyse what a great sanitation teacher I am. 😉

macedoine (battonet in the background)
tourne
making lemons pretty
learning about taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami
about to make mayonnaise
mayonnaise – too bad we didn’t make french fries out of our battonet cuts
first knife cut test – C – look at all that waste!

 

0 thoughts on “iPhonetography Friday: Culinary School Beginnings”

  1. I am so glad we got to meet at lunch yesterday! It was such so much fun and I am so happy to have been introduced to your blog. Love this post. I really had no idea how much time was spent on properly using one’s knife. Your cuts are pretty awesome!

    Reply
  2. The only thing that’s missing is a side-by-side of your existing knife and lemon skills. This is fun. Has the time in school flown by or dragged on? Or is elapsed time always short in retrospect?

    Reply
    • I think it has flown by. Even when I was in classes it was going by very quickly. haha I wonder what grade I would get on a knife cuts test today. Part of the grade is how quickly you can cut two potatoes and how much you can get in 1 minute. The goal is high yield with as little waste as possible.

      Reply

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