M...is for MORE MEAT!

A note to my readers: The below contains some icky pictures and gross descriptions. If you are lame and weaksauce (or my pregnant sister) maybe you shouldn't read it, maybe just skim the pictures to get the drift. But if you are awesome, and tough and want to see what culinary school is REALLY like, check it out. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Well, the dreaded day arrived when I had to begin my Meat Fabrication. It is certainly the most feared class on campus and definitely the grossest. The chef is how do you say.....strict (I'm being polite). But, I survived. I didn't blog because I just couldn't bear it. Not in the middle of the chaos. Somehow that class just seemed so much more intense. I would come home everyday and have to take a 2 hour nap just to function! And a shower, because I smelled. Imagine me, Miss Neiman Marcus, coming home covered in blood and guts. Jose wouldn't even let me put my towels and uniforms in the same room, let alone load, as his dirty clothes. That bad. Apparently worse than stinky mens gym clothes. Anywho...

Most days consisted of either actual meat fabrication (or butchering of meat), making stocks and sauces, or making "family meal" (aka fancy school lunch). Everything in this class was really ramped up. In basics for example we would make a gallon of stock at a time with 8 lbs of bones. In meat fab, we made 10 gallons of stock at a time, with 80 pounds of bones! That's a lot of dead chickens and baby cows, respectively. The meat we fabricated is served in the restaurant at school. Some days it was red meat (beef tenderloin, NY strips, filet mignon, etc), others it was fish (halibut, monkfish, snapper, etc.) or sometimes shellfish like lobster. And we usually did a few chickens a day in preparation for our chicken fab test.

For the chicken fab test, we had to take a whole chicken and cut it down into it's parts and "french" them in 5 minutes to get an A. The very first time I did it took about 30 minutes. Frenching the leg takes some practice. Basically, imagine taking your leg (or a chickens) and cutting it off at the hip socket, then scraping all of the meat off towards your ankle in one piece so it is entirely inside-out and boneless by the time you finish. Getting around the "knee" is a killer. Did you even know that chickens have kneecaps? They do. Then you break the bones apart at the knee, cut all the cartilage out, and flip it back right-side out and stuff the bottom leg bone back in. This is a typical french preparation and often the legs are stuffed with filling, wrapped in caul fat (pig stomach lining) and cooked. Anyway, the pressure was on and I practiced really hard and was able to do it in 4:52. I was pretty proud until my girlfriend at school did it an entire minute faster and kicked my butt. But I'm still proud anyway.

One of the more fun things I got to do was to fabricate an entire hind quarter of a veal (baby cow, 3 months at slaughter) all by myself! It is the image on the right in the above diagram. Be thankful I gave you one of those instead of a picture. It was enormous, almost 75 pounds and cost the school over $700. I know it sounds crazy that I thought it was fun, but it was sort of relaxing. You cut all of the fat off and then find the natural separation between the muscle groups and cut. Pretty amazing. It really was neat to see how their bodies are made up, and really ours. Because they have almost identical anatomy in this part of the body. Chef said maybe I should have been a surgeon. Ha! Anyway, these are what I was left with when I was done....

I wrapped them up because they were quite bloody. Did you know that even after a cow is dead it has arteries and veins that still have blood in them? When you cut them, they bleed like they were alive. It's super weird. Pretty big bones though, huh? Especially for a three month old! (That is the Femur on the right and the Hip Socket on the left, fyi.)

But by FAR the grossest thing I had to do was to fab a monkfish....ICK (see photo above - and that is not a joke, it is what it looks like). Basically it is the worlds ugliest fish. It also smells worse than anything I have ever smelled. And it has a layer of blubber you have rip off before you can get to the meat, which coincidentally tastes just like lobster! A lot of nastiness to get to some good flavor. But I was so grossed out, I couldn't even eat it. In fact, cutting up fish is so gross to me that I haven't had a single piece of fish since I started school. I don't know how long it will be until I can eat it again. Because things like how I know that Halibut has both of its eyes on the same side of its head like here...

Umm - creepy. (I spared you another photo - you're welcome!)

I would like to now officially state that anyone who ever thought I was a sissy, or whiny girl, or baby, or not tough, or "weaksauce" was officially, for the record, WRONG. I survived meat fab, you cannot gross me out now. And I even got an A...which makes me really hardcore.

M...is for Meat.

Week 5 was all about meat. We started the week with breaking down and frenching chickens, then frenching racks of lamb, after that we moved into pork (breaking down a full Loin which is about 3 feet long and foot across), and then into beef. Some days were spent fabricating (butchering) and some days on cooking techniques for each type of meat. And let me tell you, there's nothing like having a little meat in the morning. One day I had lamb chops and fillet Mignon with Bearnaise sauce for my 9am snack. Nice.

Meat really doesn't gross me out, so I actually thought it was a pretty fun week. I think the lamb chops were the biggest surprise for me. I didn't know how much I would love them. We also made a French lamb stew, Lamb Navarin, that was pretty good. I didn't used to eat anything with a cute face (ie: lamb, rabbit, etc.) but that has quickly gone out the window. But I still hold firm to my no meat on a bone rule. Bone on bone (my teeth on animals bones) is just WRONG!

We did however have to watch 3 videos on butchering meat filmed in slaughterhouses. One from a beef slaughterhouse, a chicken one, and a pork one. They left NO details out. They started out alive and came out the end in little steaks, etc. Not for the faint of heart. Could easily turn a meatlover to a vegetarian. I may never get the image of ripping a cow's skin off it's face from it's body-less head out of my mind. And now you can imagine it too. YUCK.

I talked a little earlier about "Frenching", and it is one of the things I thought was coolest this week. It is basically leaving the bone attached to the meat, and then scraping with your knife blade to remove any meat, sinew, or connective tissue. It is more for presentation purposes, but also helps with flavor. It is the perfect answer to the meat/bone problem I have. Genius! It's pretty simple on a chicken, but a little tougher to do with lamb, but most 8 bone lamb racks are sold pre-frenched, so it saves you a step. (see picture above. It was the clearest picture I could find, but that person is totally butchering up the meat, in a bad way).

Oh and did you know that Pork is not actually "the other white meat"? It's not white meat at all. It is actually classified as a red meat. And raw pork is very red. Apparently, the pork people came up with that a few years ago as a marketing campaign to make pork seem healthy (bacon & ham, the most commonly eaten pork give it a bad wrap.) It does cook up white, much like chicken, but is actually red meat and most closely falls in nutritional value with the red meat family. Who knew?