Seafood Identification and Fabrication

Hello again! Today we’re going back to school with a recap of my experience in Seafood Identification and Fabrication at the CIA. After making it though Meats, you’ll move onto Seafood ID and Fabrication. Unlike Culinary Fundamentals, it’s much more difficult to train yourself in Seafood ID and Fab. In the Meat and Seafood classes, one would require another level of dedication because of sourcing and cost in order to practice. If you don’t live near an area with an abundant seafood source, the costs, and accessibility to find different fish to study and practice with becomes much more difficult and costly. In these classes, you’ll watch the instructors butcher though carcasses with ease and grace, while you struggle to complete the same tasks in double the time. The classes were intimidating and awfully cold when you’re essentially learning in a refrigerated classroom. Seafood ID was another tougher class since it required a lot of memorization and learning about different species of fish that you likely haven’t been exposed to. Both classes are only 3 weeks long so the material is crammed in. Each class could easily be its own semester-long class with the amount of information and practice you need to become a butchering legend.

I found that the information about the different ways seafood is sourced was particularly interesting. It’s sad that so many species of fish are becoming rarer and rarer due to overfishing not to mention habitat destruction. In addition, farming fish and seafood has its own pitfalls when it comes to raising them responsibly and can sometimes lead to an inferior product. The amount of information is fascinating and my chef was a great lecturer. A lot of the motivation was fear since you start the class with Jeopardy-style questions that impact your grade tremendously. This led me to be pretty studious and keep on top of my readings.

The biggest challenge for me in this class was working in extremely cold temperatures. When you arrive in class, you begin working as a team to scale, gut, and clean fish. This can lead to many cuts from fines and bones poking your ice-cold hands. Flying scales are also no fun, nor are fish guts all over the place. Afterward, you get a demo of butchering the style of fish, which is either and up and over technique for something like bass, a straight cut technique for something like salmon, or flatfish cutting for something like flounder. After the demo, you get one of the fish you’ve clean and you cut them to specifications needed for the day’s orders. Like Meats, Seafood is responsible for sourcing the seafood needed by the other classes at the CIA. When you make mistakes, the students in other classes have to use your product. After finishing your work, you clean the fish room and move over to the classroom for tastings and lectures.

The tastings were pretty straight forward and you simply ate a cooked plain piece of fish. The more interesting tastings involved caviar, but we’re by no means leaning back and eating canapes. My biggest criticism of this class is how fast we moved through shellfish. The only fabrication we got was learning how to shuck oysters and clams. For lobsters, we got a class demo and there was no coverage on crab, octopus, or squid. That being said, this was still one of my better classes in terms of practicality and knowledge gained. In the future and present, it’s more important than ever to learn about different ways to make good decisions about eating and sourcing your seafood due to overfishing. I still recall the days when tilapia was $0.99/lbs. Due to overfishing, cost and supply are trending unfavorably and the industry is facing negative milestones in the next 25 years. For more information about sustainable seafood, check out Seafood Watch.

Our Engagement

Weny and I got engaged! I proposed last Thursday night after she got back from her friend’s place for dinner. I struggled over the last few months to find a way to propose and having the ring sitting idly in the back of my mind was also weighing on me. Getting the ring was a challenge itself since shipping delays caused it to come much later than expected. Keeping the ring discreet was also a challenge since we’ve been spending so much time together since the pandemic started. Most people would say too much time together. There were times where we drove each other crazy, but getting engaged was always my goal this year. COVID-19 just delayed the inevitable and challenged me to find a way to surprise Weny.

The time we spent together made the proposal a challenge, especially since she had wanted to go somewhere romantic. That being said, it would have been impossible to surprise her if I had been like, “Let’s go to a nice beach to see the sunset.” Weny would have responded, "Why? Are you going to propose?" I wanted to go for the surprise, so I decorated a picnic blanket with lights, flowers, our playlist, and photos for when she got back, which was reminiscent of our second date. Although she realized what was going on immediately after seeing the lights, part of her reaction was denial due to the surprise. There was also some disappointment about not doing it somewhere more scenic, but I guess not everything can go perfectly all the time.

Finally got her.

The rest of the night was spent trying to get some good pictures, which resulted in mostly bad pictures and telling as many people as we could before it got too late. Proposing was definitely a fear I had for a long time because of the commitment of it all. I didn’t really think too much about marriage until Weny came along. I really thought that there was a possibility that I would have remained forever single for the longest time. I’ve spent years watching friends get into serious relationships, get engaged, get married, and have kids. I was slowly losing friends due to their availability and commitments not to mention pressure from family and relatives. Once I decided to attend culinary school, dating definitely took a back seat. I guess it just goes to show you that love can always happen when you least expect it to.

To anyone reading this that may be single, please know that it’s okay to be single. Even though you might be feeling pressure from society, family, and friends, being single gives you the time to know yourself and gives you the freedom to commit to yourself. Who knows what’s going to happen in the future? The pandemic already annihilated everyone’s vision for the future. In fact, I posted on Facebook about hitting back at the shit show that is 2020 by celebrating a happy moment when just hours later, RBG passed away and Weny sprained her knee getting out of the back seat of a Mini Cooper and is now in a knee brace and on crutches. Anything can happen, but you just need to put yourself in a position to succeed and take what life throws your way.

Parade Rained On...

But Ice Cream Makes Everything Better.

Meat Identification and Fabrication

After finishing Culinary Fundamentals at the CIA, your next kitchen class is Meat Identification and Fabrication. For this class, your classroom is in the sub-basement level in the main class building. The classroom is in a refrigerated room so you are constantly cold while trying to learn. My chef was like the weird uncle you always see on TV, in a good way. For class, you set up your station with a chef’s knife, boning knife, steel, cutting board, and shared pans for waste and trim. After a chef demo, you practice on the said cut of meat for evaluation. Then, you’ll clean the classroom, have a lecture, and practice identifying cuts of meat. First, you’ll start off learning about beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and finally game meats.

In our chef demonstrations, we’ll watch chef takedown primal and sub-primal cuts of meat and even go as large as a half carcass. It’s pretty wild to see up close when most people only see something like that in movies like Rocky or depressing documentaries about the meat industry. The biggest challenges for me early on were adjusting to operating in the cold and then adjusting to cutting with speed and confidence as I got more comfortable. In most restaurants, the butchering is left to the senior cooks and sous chefs due to the cost of the product. The fear of messing up comes from seeing a sad chef hunched over a mangled piece of meat that could have cost a diner $30.

Someone is gonna get a good meat sweat in real soon.

In the lecture portion of the class, you learn about the meat grading process, cuts from the animal, and different ways that people will try to rip you off when you are buying meat. Sounds like a well-meaning kooky uncle to me. You’ll also get an introduction into sausage making, which is new to most of the students. It’s pretty fascinating to see piles and piles of meat get ground up and fed into tubes for delivery into the mouth. The meat that you butcher will eventually go to the other classrooms and restaurants at school. Overall, this class was one of my favorite classes because of the amount of information I learned and the practice I got to pick up. However, I’m badly out of practice since my meat consumption is rather limited at home beyond chicken, ground pork, and ground beef.

Over the years, my meat consumption has gone down because of the effects it has on the environment and the health implications it can cause. Eating meat has always been something I took for granted, and I think that my education has made me appreciate good meat as a luxury. Although I don’t ever see myself becoming a vegetarian or pescatarian, I think the world would benefit from small dietary adjustments like reducing meat consumption especially beef and lamb. Weny likes to call chicken here hormone chicken because the chickens in Indonesia are so small. Although I sometimes feel attacked when she says this, I can understand why because of the freakishly large chickens you sometimes find at the supermarket, most notably the non-organic/fee-range chickens. I don’t want to preach too much, since I still have a long way to go before reaching an ideal diet. I’ll sum it up using a quote by Michael Pollan “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”