Knife Skills Class
I signed up for some classes at the California Culinary Academy. Fortunately these were all paid for before I got laid off! Anyway, yesterday was my knife skills class. Now I've been cooking for a while, and obviously know how to use a knife. So I was wondering how useful the class would be.
Quite useful, as it turned out. Mostly what I learned is that I have a lot of bad habits accumulated over the years as an autodidactic chef. We learned the proper grip, honing on a steel, and some basic cuts. Some of it was stuff I already knew, some of it was new stuff. Overall I'd say it was worth it, especially if you're not comfortable with a knife already.
The thing about the CCA weekend classes is that all the classes have to get food in the big banquet hall by 1:00pm or so (one imagines it's stricter for the full-time students), because then there's a huge buffet of all the food. That included our class, so after spending 2 1/2 hours learning knife skills, we had 1 1/2 hours to get all of our food made. Mostly our class did salads, and our chef instructor insisted that we prepare a large platter with some nice presentation, as well as a single dish that we needed to plate as if we were serving in a restaurant. My dish was a spinach salad with sliced onions and orange wedges (sliced out of the membranes to look nice) and goat cheese fritters. The recipe called for goat cheese disks to be coated with nuts and then baked, but our teacher suggested coating them in flour, egg, nuts, and then frying them. By the time the rest of the class got to taste it, the fritters had cooled down quite a bit. But I snuck a couple as soon as they were cool enough to handle, and they were way yummy. I'll be making those again sometime soon!
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