Home Butchery and Carving
You've got to love the California Culinary Academy. There is no subtlety in the names of their courses. I pretty much knew exactly what to expect from my four hours in the Careme room of the CCA. Basic meat butchery. For the consumer.
Now, this coursework at the real school is probably some large number of days, possibly weeks. As you might imagine, I did not leave the school feeling like some master butcher. But I did get some good advice on a variety of meat prep tasks. The cleanest way to break down a chicken, for instance. Something I've seen in a zillion different books, even good ones, but something I hadn't seen demonstrated, which makes all the difference. Or how to take apart a fish, in our case a might-as-well-be-freshly-killed Striped Bass, entrails and all. And a whole host of other things. Removing the silverskin off of various meats. How to follow seam fat to cut animals into their natural pieces, frenching bones for presentation, and even things like why you don't leave big sheets of fat in place; virtually everyone was trying to spit out the rack of lamb pieces where the top cap of fat was left on, even as we swooned over the version where it had been carefully trimmed of its most noticeable piece of fat.
But the message which Chef Toby tried to send is the same one Jeremiah Tower conveys in his newest cookbook. "Boning" something is nothing more than removing the meat from the bone. Sure, professionals make perfect cuts of meat with nice trim edges, but the real goal is just to get the bones out. He tried hard to give us the fundamentals to approach foreign cuts of meat with confidence.
But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, though in this case it was in the chicken, a 3-pound fryer I bought at the market that I practiced on last night. I have a long way to go before I can break down a chicken even in the five minutes that Chef Toby took, most of which was spent talking to us and pointing things out, but I did manage to get some nice clean cuts of meat off my practice chicken, which I will of course be enjoying for the next few days. And I'm eager to buy a whole fish so I can practice on that. And a rack of lamb. And...
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