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.”
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