10 Butchery

Saturday January 29, 2005

For the first time since starting at the CCA six weeks previously, our class has a new chef. Since a typical restaurant experiences high turnover with its staff, the CCA and most other cooking schools design their curriculums so that students experience high turnover with their instructors. Although we have the relative comfort of working with the same classmates every day, every three weeks we have to learn the rhythms of a new kitchen and the quirks and preferences of a new boss -- how they like us to wear our uniforms, how well they expect us to clean every night, and what standards we need to meet in order to submit passing work.

If we’d hoped that our new Butchery chef would be at all like the relatively low key Chef Steve, we were in for a shock.

“HELLO CLASS!” Chef Jude booms over the ventilation fans that keep the Butchery room at a frosty 58 degrees. A few of us jump slightly from the volume of his voice and everyone quickly swivels around to face the front of the long, narrow room. While Chef Steve was a little on the short side, Chef Jude towers over his desk, his tall toque lending the appearance of even more height to his sturdy frame. A man who looks to be in his thirties, Chef Jude’s somewhat fleshy face reminds me of the stereotypical well-fed butcher. Though not at all fat, he has the appearance of someone who eats well. His freshly starched and pressed uniform shines brilliantly underneath his well tanned face and blonde goatee, and a wedding ring winks from his left hand.

After being met with silence, Chef Jude continues. “You are entering a profession based on hospitality, and hospitable people respond accordingly when someone says hello. Let’s try this again: HELLO CLASS!”

“HELLO CHEF!” we yell back. Chef Jude smiles – we’ve learned our first lesson.

Chef Jude lectures for the entire duration of our first five hour class, giving us a comprehensive overview of what we’ll be learning, the grading criteria, and an introduction to all of the equipment in the classroom (“You mess up with this meat grinder and you’ll have a mangled hand for life.”). He performs a close inspection of our uniforms and knife kits, and he goes over his material with the meticulous detail of someone with military training. In many ways, I feel like we’re in boot camp.

It is clear from the start that Chef Jude is both incredibly organized and bright. Whereas Chef Steve generally lectured off of someone else’s notes and did not always give us accurate information, Chef Jude knows his subject inside and out and lectures with precision. Instead of rambling off topic with stories of his career, Chef Jude speaks in bullet points, always writing up the main ideas on the board for us to copy into our notes. During his demo of knife sharpening he interjects a comment about the Brinell measuring system for judging the relative hardness of metals, and he speaks in detail about everything, including his preferred methods for cleaning (let gravity do its work – sanitize from the top down) and the best way to tape a production order to a par cart (wrap the tape around a metal bar so that it attaches to both the front and back of the order). This man knows his stuff, and after the first day I feel like I’ve already taken in more new information than in many days of Basic Skills put together.

Although Chef Jude studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and throughout Italy, I suspect his mastery of the Butchery curriculum comes from teaching the same class for over 4 years – he has made this same introductory lecture to over 60 different classes, and can anticipate our questions and comments before we even know we have them. His experience comes at a cost, though -- as competent a lecturer as Chef Jude is, I often get the feeling that he is just going through the motions and does not feel a personal connection to our class in the same way that Chef Steve did. This actually will become a recurring theme to our class’ education at the CCA – our favorite Chefs are generally the ones who have not been teaching the same class for more than a few months at a time.

A day in Butchery class is broken up into two parts. During the first half of class, Chef Jude lectures on the different types of poultry, beef, lamb, pork, fish and other meat products that are available, and helps us memorize the names of different cuts of meat and how they’re ordered from a meat purveyor. During the second half of class, Chef demos how to butcher the cuts that we’d most likely have in a restaurant setting, and then we break down into groups and work independently to fill the days order. The Butchery class fabricates all of the meat for the rest of the school, including the Careme Room, the CCA restaurant. Consequently, we often need to produce dozens of rosy-pink salmon filets, neatly tied top-round roasts, and literally hundreds of boneless skinless chicken breasts. We get less practice with the lesser-used cuts, though they’re always available for us to work on after we’ve seen a demo.

Butchery is hard on the class. Whereas in Skills we were cooking new food every night and eating what we made, in Butchery there’s nothing to eat. Additionally, it’s COLD. During the first few days my hands get so numb that I can’t write properly, and we all quickly start wearing mittens, wool hats, and long underwear beneath our uniforms. During lecture, we sit on our hands or stuff them in our armpits to keep them warm while we huddle on our cold metal stools, and during production I often go to wash my hands – not for sanitation, but to revive my blue fingers under the warm water.

The Butchery room is also cursed with a foul smell of purge, raw meat, and sanitizer solution that permeates our clothes, books and knife bags. I worry that it clings to my hair and that Andrew will be repulsed by the odor when I get home. Although we clean thoroughly every night (indeed, Chef Jude is one of the strictest martinets about cleanliness in the whole school), the smell of the Butchery just doesn’t go away. Even now, many weeks after I last stepped foot in class, a faint odor still lingers around my Butchery notebook.

For all the unpleasantness that goes with Butchery, however, we can’t help but learn a lot and get experience that we’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. You can’t easily learn butchery techniques from a book, and unless you can break down dozens of chickens at a time, it’s hard to quickly gain expertise at even that relatively common task. Where else can you practice filleting dozens of whole salmon (each easily worth $70-100) without worrying about the cost of what you’re butchering? Where else would we ever get experience with trimming a whole beef tenderloin, the most expensive protein available in a professional kitchen? Where else would learn to french a rack of lamb, or cut and cook a Baron of Beef? Butchery class is one of the primary reasons we’ve paid $45,000 to go to CCA (one of only six schools in the nation to offer instruction in the subject), and so despite the cold and the smell and the somewhat aloof instructor, I can’t help but appreciate the class – I just can’t wait to get out of it and start cooking again.

Next: 11 Garde Manger
Last: 09 Basic Skills Part 3

Filleting a whole salmon is one of the most difficult things we learn how to do in Butchery class.