Knife Skills

Today we completely skipped the lesson on Thomas Keller and had a full knife skills lesson. I mentioned last night that I was kind of bummed about this because Thomas Keller's recipes looked amazing. However, I trusted Chef's opinion that it was not a good lesson and the recipes don't turn out that great. After all of the wonderful food this week, it would have been a real disappointment to end the week on a bad note.

Not to mention, we all needed the knife skills practice. After 3 weeks in Module 4 where we rarely took out a cutting board, our knife skills were lacking. It is essential for a great chef to have adequate knife skills. So, this class was very helpful!

Obviously I wasn't going to take a picture of everything I chopped up today, so there aren't as many pictures as usual on this post. However I did catch a pic of the amazing heirloom tomatoes we had in the kitchen today. These were incredible!!! Just look at the shape of the one in the middle and all of the ridges. One of my favorite things about summer is the sweetness and freshness of heirloom tomatoes. We made a delicious tomato water out of these heirlooms that can be used for sauces, soups, etc.

Basically we spent all four hours chopping away, from mincing garlic, shallots, and herbs, to creating the revisited tourne cut. Ugh how I hate tournes!!! We also practiced making bouquet garnis and sachet d'epices. I enjoyed today's lesson more than I thought I would!

This weekend will be spent experimenting with some recipes for graduation. I brought home some special ingredients from the kitchen to aid in this experimentation :) Hopefully it'll turn out great so that I can bring it in to class for Chef Chris to try on Monday!!