Bread Day Part 1

Okay, I'll be honest. Bread day was really only one day. But you don't understand! There was so. much. bread. On the menu for the day: 7 grain bread, focaccia, pita, and breadsticks.

For all 4 breads, we were using yeast to help with rising. There are 10 production stages for yeast breads:

1. Scaling the ingredients 
2. Mixing and kneading the dough
3. Fermenting the dough
4. Punching down the dough
5. Portioning the dough
6. Rounding the portions
7. Shaping the portions
8. Proofing the products
9. Baking the products
10. Cooling and storing the products

A lot of these steps are self explanatory, but I'll briefly go through them anyway.

So, we started with 7 grain bread, a heavy dough with tons of, well, grains. The 7 grains consisted of bread flour, rye flour, barley flour, cornmeal, rolled oats, flax seeds, and millets. First you need to start by scaling the ingredients and making sure that you have the right amount of everything you need. In baking, it's all chemistry. The only thing which changes the amounts in baking is the humidity. On a rainy or humid day, you may find your dough to be stickier than normal, and you should have extra flour on hand to add during mixing. Once you have all of your ingredients, mixing and kneading the dough comes next. This is one of the self explanatory ones. Although, maybe not. We started by adding the yeast mixture into a mixing bowl first, and sifting all of the dry ingredients together so that they were evenly distributed. If you add them directly in, you may get globs of salt or other tastes in your bread that aren't properly mixed in. Once the dry ingredients are sifted, they are then added to the yeast mixture, and mixed in and kneaded together. Fermenting the dough came next. Fermentation begins the second the mixing has finished, and continues until the point when the dough is baked. The dough should be covered in a bowl and placed in a dry, warm place in order for the dough to rise. Some people turn their oven on very low and allow the dough to rise on an open oven door, others prefer to not leave the oven door open and put the bowl on top of the stove with the oven on. After the dough has risen, punch down the dough.  Punching the dough down reactivates the yeast cells, encouraging more yeast activity. When portioning the dough you want all of the portions to be the same size so they can cook evenly. After you portion the dough, round the portions using the sides of your hands and kind of tuck it under to be rounded. Rounding stretches the outside layer of gluten into a smooth coating. This helps hold in the gases and makes it easier to shape. Once you're ready to shape the dough,  you have a bunch of shapes to choose from. If making a challah, you can make rolls, braided loaves, or pull apart challahs. For seven grain, we rolled the dough out into an oval, and then rolled the dough and placed it in a loaf pan. Proofing the dough is the last of the fermentation process, and is done while the dough is already shaped. Egg the loaves and bake the products until you've determined that they are done. Doneness can be determined by tapping on the top of the bread and listening for a hollow sound. When you cool and store breads, take the product out of the pan to cool on racks. Store breads at room temperature or freeze them. Do not refrigerate breads. They'll get stale pretty quickly.

I absolutely love this seven grain bread. After shaping the breads and washing them with egg, we added crushed garlic and rosemary to the top. You can choose any variety of toppings for this type of bread since it's so rich with grains; you can top it with oats, flax seeds, or any herbs and spices.

Tip of the day: When beginning the process of baking bread, you need to test the yeast to make sure it's active. Follow recipe directions, but when it says "warm water" to be mixed with the yeast, make sure the water isn't too hot. If it's too hot, it'll kill the yeast. You want your water to be about 90-100 degrees. Also, add some sugar to the yeast mixture, just a tablespoon or so, and it'll get the yeast bubbling real quick. 

Bake Shop Part 2

We're learning all of these new techniques that are pretty specific to baking and not to cooking, so it's been a rough week for me so far. I feel a little out of my element. I find myself double and triple checking each baking recipe because in baking, once you skip something, there's no turning back. I think cooking is a lot more forgiving in that way. Sure, there are recipes in which you can't skip a step, or mixing up the timing for certain ingredients can change, improve, or ruin a dish, but in baking, there's little to no forgiveness in these cases. You dump it out and start from scratch.

So, Day 2 of bake shop was all about foaming. The foaming method is any method where the eggs are whipped or beaten to incorporate air before they are folded into the batter.

For Pate a Choux, or eclair paste, is not made by following the foaming method, it's done using the creaming method, which we spoke about yesterday. The dough must be thick enough to be piped through a pastry bag, and the dough will stay together and not bleed into each other.

Now back to the foaming method. I know, I get sidetracked. So, we made this delicious pastry filling (it had a custard-like consistency). We were going to be piping the filling into the eclairs. So, the pastry filling was made using the foaming method.

In a saucepan, we heated the sugar and milk until it became hot, and in a separate bowl, whipped the eggs, cornstarch, and sugar to incorporate as much air as possible into the eggs. Then, we tempered the egg mixture into the milk/sugar mixture. You don't want your eggs to cook or becomes scrambled eggs once they hit the hot mixture, so you add a little bit at a time, off the fire, and slowly bring down the temperature of the mixture, and raise the temperature of the eggs as they hit the heat. If you do this slowly, the eggs will be incorporated into the mixture. After it's all mixed together and tempered, butter is added so the cream becomes thicker. We used a vanilla bean to flavor the cream, and before we cooled it, split it in half, added melted chocolate to one bowl and instantly had two flavors!

Once the eclairs (or cream puffs) were out of the oven, we filled them with the cream and drizzled with chocolate icing and royal icing.

Tip of the day: When using vanilla to flavor things while baking, you can choose between vanilla extract and vanilla bean. Extract is easier to deal with and it's cheaper, but the flavor in no way compares to that in a vanilla bean. When using vanilla bean, split the bean down the center and use your knife to scrape out the insides of the bean to add to your dish. If you choose to use vanilla bean, add the flavor at the beginning of your baking process. In this case, we added it to the milk and sugar before we put it on the fire. This way, the cream gets the maximum flavor out of the bean. If using extract, add it at the way end. It has a stronger flavor and doesn't need to be in there for so long. 

Bake Shop Part 1

I'm not a big fan. Baking. It's fine, I'm not obsessed, though. I just don't feel like there's much creativity or freedom like there is in cooking. But let's talk about it.

One of the most common ingredients in baking is.... flour. There's a lot to flour, apparently. Flour is made up of some protein, and proteins coagulate. So in baking, flour acts as a builder. Gluten is a long chain of molecules that make the dough rise (high gluten flour is used for breads, pizzas, and bagels), and when you add fat to gluten, it cuts the long strain of gluten to make the product less chewy.

There are three main types of flour:

1. Cake flour- This has the least amount of gluten; it's used a lot in baking. 
2. All purpose flour- This is the middle of the gluten scale. It's used in cooking and has a mild effect on final products. 
3. Bread (or high gluten) flour- This is that long chain we were talking about. You use high gluten flour in things that you'd like to come out chewy. 

So, next time your recipe calls for a specific type of flour, don't just grab the AP flour. Gluten counts.

The thing we learned about on Monday was a technique called creaming. When baking, the sugar and butter are blended together first and then you slowly add in the eggs, one at a time. This ensures that the eggs get mixed in completely.

We worked on a few things on Monday. First up was a pound cake. We started the recipe with creaming the butter and sugar and then slowly adding the eggs, sifting all the dry ingredients together first, and then slowly adding them to the wet ingredients. We used the same technique when making two types of cookies: Lady fingers and chocolate chunk cookies.

Now, I'm not the biggest dessert fan, but the chocolate chunk cookies were to die for. They were fabulous. I'm not exactly sure why they turned out so good, but it's one of the best cookies I've ever tasted!

Here's a quick look of Bake Shop Part 1

Tip of the day: Before scooping out dough to place on a baking sheet, start with a piece of parchment paper that's the size of the sheet. Before you put the parchment paper down, use a little dough to act as "glue" to keep the parchment paper down so that it doesn't stick every time you put dough down for a new cookie. Also, use an ice cream scoop to ensure that your cookies are all the same size. 

Asian Fusion

Asian food. We all get it. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mongolian... But what about those other Asian countries? You know which ones I mean. I'm talking about Russia, Iraq, Egypt, and Kazakhstan. Why don't we order Egyptian cuisine on Christmas? Today really got me thinking about those cuisines which we don't honor when we talk about Asian cuisine. Poor guys.

You may be thinking that this post will honor the lesser known Asian cuisines. Wrong. We're gonna keep it traditional up in here. Maybe we'll talk about Borscht another time.

This morning we started with pot stickers. For those of you who don't know, but I know a few of you do (because we've made them together), pot stickers are Chinese dumplings. How did they come about, you ask?

Chinese dumplings are called guotie. Originally, the dumplings were boiled in a wok, the standard Chinese cooking pot. Legend has it that a Chinese chef boiled the dumplings but forgot about them while he was cleaning up, and when he returned to the wok, the water had boiled out and the dumplings were stuck to the wok. The result? Crispy, tender, delicious dumplings. And so, guoties were born. Guo, Chinese for Wok, and tie, for stuck.

We actually started our pot stickers by browning them first and then we moved to steaming. When I've made pot stickers in the past, I've used a skillet or a soup pot instead of a wok, simply because I don't have one at home (hint hint). A wok has a small bottom and wide sides, so you can only fry a few pot stickers at a time in there. In a skillet, your surface area is much bigger, so you can fry many at a time.

After we made the dough and the filling (ground chicken thighs, scallions, ginger, and spices), we made the dumplings, pinched the sides and started frying.

After the color developed and a few minutes passed, I threw in (a little too much) water. Chef says to put in about a cup, I probably did more and I think you probably need less than a cup. Maybe 3/4 cup. But who knows? Then I quickly covered it and let it steam for about 5 more minutes.

We served them with a mild dipping sauce and ate pot stickers at like 10:30 am. Pura vida.

Then we moved on to General Tso's chicken with fried rice. We marinated dark meat chicken tenders and then coated them in corn starch and deep fried them. We got some high temperature oil in a wok (hot wok, cold oil) and threw in some whole chili peppers. It was very cool actually, since the peppers weren't cut, they didn't give off an intense heat, but they flavored the oil just slightly to give the whole dish a little bit of a kick. We got the deeply fried chicken into more oil, because never too much oil, apparently. Poured some sauce in, added ginger and garlic, and finished it off with some scallions and bean sprouts.

The sauce had a great balance of sweet and salty. We even added some more soy sauce and sugar to intensify those flavors and the result was deliciousness.

Last dish of the day was Szechuan Beef with Lo Mein noodles. Szechuan is uber spicy. We took very tender meat, a surprise steak, and marinated that in dark soy sauce. I'd never worked with dark soy sauce before, it's thicker than regular soy sauce and tastes more like La Choy rather than Kikoman. We added chili oil, chili paste, garlic, ginger, and other spicy things so that it could live up to its name. We browned the meat first and set it aside, and then added sticks of carrot, celery, red and green pepper, put some spicy sauce on it, and added the beef back into the pan.

Tip of the day: When working with fried food, specifically deep fried, always have a wire rack on a sheet pan next to the stove. Take the fried food out with a skimmer or slotted spoon and put it on the wire rack so that any excess oil drips off. Paper towels are a popular choice when frying shnitzel and latkes, but if you want your food to stay crispy, put it on a wire rack. Even if you place on serving the food immediately after frying, do the rack thing for a minute or two and then serve. 

Try not to crack up from this post..

Let's face it. All egg puns are, to put it delicately, not too eggcelent. So, let's lay off of them, shall we?

But we should definitely talk about eggs.

Eggs serve many different purposes in cooking. They can be used as an egg wash for pastries, they help with rising, they help coagulate, they make souffles puff up, and they serve as insulation (like egging a cutlet before frying it).

There are tons of ways to eat an egg:

• Poached
• Fried
• Sunny side up
• Over easy, medium, hard
• Scrambled
• Frittata 
• Omelette 

On egg day, Chef told us to make a simple sunny side up egg. That's when you crack the egg straight into a hot pan with oil without breaking the yolk, then getting the yolk on the plate without a spatula. We did a few, then he made us do it with two eggs, then he showed us eggs over easy. Eggs over easy is two eggs sunny side up, and then flipped over in the pan without the yolks being broken.

Next we turn to Eggs Benedict. It's something that I'm not familiar with since it's typically not served in kosher restaurants. Served on an English muffin, Eggs Benedict is complete with fried bacon (or kosher beef fry), a poached egg, and a hollandaise sauce. Everything needs to be times perfectly so that everything gets on the plate hot. 

I guess this class was the breakfast class, and no breakfast is complete without pancakes and french toast. 

And of course we finished it up with a delicious apple-cinnamon filled crepe. 

So, all items we made here contained eggs. I guess you wouldn't think that french toast is an "egg" dish, but I guess this just turned into breakfast all day long. All. Day. Long. 

Tip of the day: It's very important to use fresh eggs. And yes, there are ways to check to make sure eggs are fresh. 

-The float test: If an egg sinks in water, it's fresh. It means that the yolk takes up most of the space in the egg. When eggs aren't fresh, air gets in through the pores of the shell, and the air in the shell will make the egg float in water. 

-The spread test: When you crack a fresh egg, it'll stay close together and the yolk will be very high. Older eggs spread out a lot once cracked. 

What do you do with older eggs? Hard boil them. Eggs are actually easier to peel if they're older. 

Outside the Work

Hors D'oeuvres. We all know how it's pronounced, but none of us really know why. Do we even know what it actually means?

Back in the day, when a waiter wanted to impress a table (presumably to get a bigger tip), after a table would order, he would bring them an appetizer on the house. Usually, this appetizer was created by the waiter himself. He would slip to the back of the kitchen, sneak around and find odds and ends that weren't being used for dinner service. He'd quickly put something together and bring it to his table to impress his customers. This dish was made "outside of the kitchen," and so the dish became called "Hors D'oeuvres" which means "outside of work" in French.

Hors D'oeuvres are usually one biters. When you're a a cocktail party and you're meeting new people, you usually have a drink in one hand and an hors d'oeuvre in the other, and when someone comes to shake your hand, you need to act fast. So, you pop the food in your mouth, and viola! A free hand! Simple as that.

We know hors d'oeuvres as mini hot dogs and little potato knishes. On Wednesday, we took it a little further. We also learned something about canapes, which have a base of a bread, cracker, or chip. Canapes consist of a base, a spread, a body (protein), and a garnish.

My lovely cousin, Aliza, came to cook with us on Wednesday. It was such a great day for her to join and we had so much fun! We started on blinis with sour cream, smoked salmon, and garnishes. Aliza tasted the first one and immediately suggested that we add some heat. So, instead of chives, we added jalepeno to half of our blinis.

The blinis were made from a buckwheat flour mixture. It's very similar to a pancake mixture and the blinis are made similarly, too.

She's a natural!

We also worked on these (fake) crab meat wontons with an apricot dipping sauce. It wasn't anything I would have thought to put together in the mix, but they turned out to be delicious! We used the fake crab meat, mixed it with cream cheese, and added scallions, sesame oil, worcestershire sauce, garlic, salt, and pepper. We wrapped them in wonton wrappers (so time consuming when you wrap a hundred of them!) and then deep fried them. Meanwhile, the we made the apricot dipping sauce with apricot preserves, ginger, dry mustard, and red wine vinegar.

After everyone was done with their dishes, we made a banquet table filled with hors d'oeuvres.

And how great does Aliza look in (my) chef's coat?!

Tip of the day: When making small pancakes, or blinis, heat up the griddle and spray it with nonstick spray. Use a squeeze bottle as a way to keep the mess to a minimum, instead of dripping batter everywhere with a ladle. 

Just Beet it

This Monday was "Garde Manger" day. The Garde Manger in the kitchen is also known as The Pantry Chef, in charge of cold foods, elaborate buffets, salads and dressings, desserts, snacks, and most importantly, ice carvings.

We worked on preservation. A few techniques or tools in the kitchen can help with preservation, such as salting, jarring, curing, and pickling.

And beets. It was all about beets. Right beets are so good?

Pickling and preserving the beets is a tedious process, but I'm sure you know that I think it's worth it. First, we boiled the beets to soften them and make them easier to peel. We added vinegar, water, sugar, and salt to a pot with the beets and a bunch of onions, and got the mixture hot. Meanwhile, we had to sterilize the jars by floating them and the covers in boiling water, removing (carefully) with tongs and set them up on a wire rack over a sheet pan. We filled up hot jars with hot (delicious) beets, and then we had to process them. The time it takes to process the jars depends on the type of food and the altitude level. We placed the open jars of beets in a pot of boiling water and covered them for 30 minutes. Then we put the covers on but didn't screw them on tightly until the cap acted like a vacuum to seal it itself.

Finally, once we felt the cap get suctioned down, we were able to screw on the lid tightly. These jars can stay on your shelf for 10 years! It's amazing. And delicious. Did you know that I like beets?

Tip of the day: When working with vegetables which are difficult to peel with a peeler (like beets or potatoes) boil them first and the skin will just pop right off and make your life much easier. Also, when you work with beets, wear gloves. You'll thank me later. 

The veal deal

I always knew that there are a lot of people out there who don't eat veal, but I never really understood why. Just because it's a baby animal? But people eat pargiyot... so I never really understood what the difference was. Until today.

Just a disclaimer: I am pushing no political agenda here, nor do I think that my teeny little blog is powerful enough to change anyone's mind. The following information is just that: information.

The thing about veal is that it is a vender tender meat. It's tender because it comes from a very young animal. Most of the time no older than a year old. Young animals do very little exercise, so they build very little muscle, so their meat is tender. In the past, they've kept the animals in very small pens so they didn't have any room to move around and exercise. There were even animals that had their feet nailed to the ground so they couldn't move. The animals raised for veal are also only fed milk. Once they eat grass, they get more iron and their meat turns red. So, they keep them on a dairy diet. The animals are also raised in the dark so they become anemic. When they're anemic, their meat stays light, which is how people like their veal to be. Lastly, because the animals aren't getting any exercise and they're living in the dark, the animals can become very sick, so they have antibiotics fed to them right in their food. All in all, it doesn't seem like a great life for these animals. All for a tender piece of veal?

Again, I eat veal. I don't eat it regularly, mostly because of availability. So, this paragraph above is not meant to push any political or moral agenda. I honestly had no idea what the big deal was with veal. Now I get it.

I don't often work with meat at home when I cook for shabbos, so the idea of a stuffed veal chop, or a veal pocket, wasn't the first thing on my mind. But I'm glad it was on someone else's mind, because, boy was it good!

First, I got the stuffing ready. Sauteed garlic and arugula until it reduced, then I put it in the fridge to chill. I sliced a pocket in the veal chop (oh, so that's why it's called a veal pocket), and stuffed it with the cold arugula-garlic mixture. I dredged it in seasoned flour, seared it on a really hot pan, and popped it in the oven for a few minutes. Meanwhile, I made a Sauce Robert (the French way to say Robert), which is a shallot and white wine reduction with dijon mustard and demi. I have to say, if chef would have told me to throw together a sauce like that in the first week, giving me no amounts of any of the ingredients, I would've flipped out. But I think I did a pretty good job on the dish.

  To continue on our path in tenderizing meat by combination cooking (I mean, what else would we be doing?), we also made a Veal Fricassee. We started a dry cook by browning the meat a little, and then simmered it in a white wine sauce for about an hour so it really got tender. A Fricassee is very similar to a stew, it may actually be a stew, so you'd want to serve it over a rice or a mashed potato to be able to get all of the gravy.

Tip of the day: If you're interested in finding kosher certified meats and poultry which are antibiotic and hormone free and pasture raised, check out Grow and Behold. They deliver nationwide and provide you with healthy, safe food. Check it out!

How do you do under pressure?

Sous vide beef is a technique that isn't really used at home unless you have a temperature controlled bath. Sous vide actually means "under pressure," where the meat (or any protein) is vacuum sealed and placed in a water bath at the exact temperature you'd like the beef to be cooked. The magic of the bath is that it's impossible to overcook the meat you put in it.

You can add any spices you'd like to the bag before you seal it, and it definitely needs some oil. We added cracked peppercorns and crushed garlic and some thyme to our bag and placed it in the bath at 131 degrees. This temperature produces a medium-rare meat which is what we wanted before we grilled/seared/broiled it to add some color at the end.

So first we started with getting our beef in the water bath, because it could stay in there as long as we'd need.

While the beef was cooking, things got real hectic. Probably the most hectic for me in the kitchen. Chef told us that by the end of the day we needed to present a full plate, meaning: protein, carb, and a vegetable. The protein, obvious. Except, we needed to serve it with a sauce. Chef asked me to make a Bordelaise sauce for the entire class to use. No problem. Shira, first, strain all the mother sauces that are on the fire, then get your mise en place ready for the Bordelaise, and then fight everyone else who is working on the stove to get a burner to make the sauce for everyone. No sweat.

Also, chef had us working on this Pommes Maxim dish which is potatoes sliced to 1/16 of an inch thick, cut in perfect circles, dredged in cornstarch, and formed this circular thing that we'll pan fry and then use some mashed potatoes to help stand it up on the plate.

Also... I TOTALLY fluted a mushroom! A few mushrooms, actually. Were they perfect? No. Give me a break. I'll get there.

Things finally came together: the beef, the sauce, the potatoes and the vegetables. It was the most stressed I've been, probably my least favorite day because of the stress. But, I got to sous vide some meat and it tasted great.

Tip of the day: When cooking meat, you can use a meat thermometer to see how "done" your meat is. If you like your meat very rare, you want a temperature of about 120-125 degrees. That's about 12-15 minutes of cooking time per pound of meat. If you like rare meat, 125-130 degrees, 15-18 minutes per pound. A medium cook is 135-140 degrees, 18-20 minutes per pound of meat that you're cooking. 

A beef

You know how people say "they have a beef," instead of saying, "they're fighting," or something like that? I hate when people say "a" before it. I feel like it's, "they have beef with each other." Am I wrong? I'm not wrong. They have beef. That's what it is. Okay. Let's have some beef.

Beef gets a full 3 days this summer. So, we're up to day 2. If you ask some of my friends, they'll tell you that day 2 of beef was The. Best. Day. Ever.

I left you off last post with the shredded beef. After I shredded it, I let it cool, covered it, and put it in the fridge. First thing the next morning, I popped it right back in the oven to continue to melt for another two hours. When I took the beef out, I toasted some slider buns, put on some bread and butter pickles and made the cutest, most delicious pulled beef sliders. Yum.

Right?

What else to pair better with sliders than a good, dark beer? I personally dislike the dark beers (and many others), but it was fun to use it while I cooked. I used it while I cooked, I didn't drink it while I cooked. Relax, Dad.

To start a Carbonnade De Boeuf Flamande (bless you), you start by seasoning swiss steaks with salt and pepper. Careful not to put too much salt on kosher meat since salting the meat is part of the kashering process. I dredged the steaks in some seasoned flour and seared them in a hot pan to get some color. Once they were at the desired color, I removed them from the pan and added the sliced onions. Once the onions were covered in the fond from the steaks, I added brown sugar to start caramelizing the onions. This trick came in handy (adding the sugar immediately as opposed to adding them with the rest of the ingredients) and it made the onions so much sweeter in the finished product. I added the steaks back into the pan, poured in the beer, bay leaf, and veal stock. Once that came to a boil, I covered it and put it in the oven for about 45 minutes. Dry cook + wet cook = combination cooking to tenderize the meat.

I added some green beans and almonds to the plate to add some color. We also fried some leeks to put on top and boy, were they delicious! 

This is one of my favorite dishes that we've made so far. Definitely in my top 3 of the summer so far. Now I'm craving it. Great. 

Tip of the day: After searing meat in a pan, you have something called "fond" at the bottom. This is all the fat and delicious crispy pieces that are left over once the meat has been taken out. Don't. Throw. This. Out. It's the best part! Add it to the dish. In this dish, we used it to start sweating the onions. It's built-in flavor. 

It's What's for Dinner

That's right, people. It's beef time.

But first, we have to butcher. As you know, this is my least favorite part of the class. Chef gives me this:

This is called deckle. It's the cover of the ribs and it is a very, very tough piece of meat. Chef told me to trim it and make it look somewhat appetizing.

This wasn't all of it... The bigger piece was on a different sheet pan. Anyway, I was in charge of tenderizing this meat. A large part of day 1 of beef was knowing the difference between the tender and tough cuts of meat. So, the deckle and chuck are much tougher than the shoulder or the first cut. The first cut of the ribs is the rib that is closest to the sirloin. According to Jewish law, the sirloin is not considered kosher, so the first cut is the closest thing we have to it.

I took the deckle and put on this FANTASTIC dry rub. I don't know everything that went in it, but I do know that it's one of the most incredible things I've tasted. Sugar, salt, and a ton of spices, is my guess. Anyway, after I put on the rub, I oiled the meat and placed it into an already smoking hot rondue. I browned the meat for about 10 minutes, flipping a few times, and then deglazed the pan with cider vinegar. Then added (homemade) barbecue sauce and some water to thin it out, and I boiled it hard. Once it came to a boil, I covered it tightly and put it in the oven for about an hour and a half. This meat will continue to get more and more tender the longer it's in the oven, but you just have to make sure it has enough liquid. The intention was that the meat would be in for 3 hours but we didn't have enough time. Once I removed the meat, I started shredding it. Can you guess what we're making? You'll see tomorrow!

Although this was really the meat of my job in the class, we also did a beef and broccoli to see how to work with extremely tender meat. We heated up the woks and added the beef for about two minutes, mixing constantly. The beef was removed and the sauce was started. Very chinese restaurant themed. Soy sauce, sesame oil, chilies, and a slurry (cornstarch dissolved in cold water) to act as a thickener. The beef was added back to the wok and everything was tossed together and served over rice.

Rice. Let's talk about rice. Some of you know, and I think I've mentioned it here before, I suck at making rice. It is my Everest. I got through rice day with no problem, and I had a feeling that was largely due to my buddy. It's much easier to get through a dish, even if you're making your own dish, with some moral support.

This day was a bit different. Every once in a while, Chef will ask an individual to make something on their own, kind of like he asked me to take care of the deckle. One day he asked someone to make a rice pilaf. Just put up a rice pilaf for us, please. The rice on that particular day did not come out as planned, and so, everyday after that, Chef asked that individual to make a rice pilaf until it was perfect. Just a disclaimer: that individual was not me.

Because of my history with rice, I have been petrified that Chef was going to casually asked me to make a rice pilaf, when I haven't made a rice since rice day. I don't remember the process, technique, or measurements and I'm very nervous that I was going to screw it up and Chef would have me make rice everyday for the rest of the summer. And then. He asked me. To make a rice pilaf. For the whole class.

My buddy and I were now on completely separate assignments for the entire day and it was a little disheartening. We didn't like it so much. But, I guess we have to prove that we can work independently, blah blah blah. Turns out, I didn't make enough rice, so Chef asked my buddy to make a double recipe, but for the time that I was making my rice, we were on different dishes.

Anyway, the water reduced by half and I covered it and put it in an oven at 300 for 20 minutes. When I took it out, I kept it covered until we were ready to serve with with the beef and broccoli. Then came the taste test.

Right on the money. That's a direct quote.

Mic drop.

Tip of the day: When braising your meat in a liquid, be sure to check on it and flip it. Also, make sure that your liquid is not reducing too much; you want plenty of liquid in with your meat to get it tender. If you see that you're running out of liquid, you can add more water or barbecue sauce and cover it tightly.