Hello again! Today we’re going back to school with a recap of my experience in Seafood Identification and Fabrication at the CIA. After making it though Meats, you’ll move onto Seafood ID and Fabrication. Unlike Culinary Fundamentals, it’s much more difficult to train yourself in Seafood ID and Fab. In the Meat and Seafood classes, one would require another level of dedication because of sourcing and cost in order to practice. If you don’t live near an area with an abundant seafood source, the costs, and accessibility to find different fish to study and practice with becomes much more difficult and costly. In these classes, you’ll watch the instructors butcher though carcasses with ease and grace, while you struggle to complete the same tasks in double the time. The classes were intimidating and awfully cold when you’re essentially learning in a refrigerated classroom. Seafood ID was another tougher class since it required a lot of memorization and learning about different species of fish that you likely haven’t been exposed to. Both classes are only 3 weeks long so the material is crammed in. Each class could easily be its own semester-long class with the amount of information and practice you need to become a butchering legend.
I found that the information about the different ways seafood is sourced was particularly interesting. It’s sad that so many species of fish are becoming rarer and rarer due to overfishing not to mention habitat destruction. In addition, farming fish and seafood has its own pitfalls when it comes to raising them responsibly and can sometimes lead to an inferior product. The amount of information is fascinating and my chef was a great lecturer. A lot of the motivation was fear since you start the class with Jeopardy-style questions that impact your grade tremendously. This led me to be pretty studious and keep on top of my readings.
The biggest challenge for me in this class was working in extremely cold temperatures. When you arrive in class, you begin working as a team to scale, gut, and clean fish. This can lead to many cuts from fines and bones poking your ice-cold hands. Flying scales are also no fun, nor are fish guts all over the place. Afterward, you get a demo of butchering the style of fish, which is either and up and over technique for something like bass, a straight cut technique for something like salmon, or flatfish cutting for something like flounder. After the demo, you get one of the fish you’ve clean and you cut them to specifications needed for the day’s orders. Like Meats, Seafood is responsible for sourcing the seafood needed by the other classes at the CIA. When you make mistakes, the students in other classes have to use your product. After finishing your work, you clean the fish room and move over to the classroom for tastings and lectures.
The tastings were pretty straight forward and you simply ate a cooked plain piece of fish. The more interesting tastings involved caviar, but we’re by no means leaning back and eating canapes. My biggest criticism of this class is how fast we moved through shellfish. The only fabrication we got was learning how to shuck oysters and clams. For lobsters, we got a class demo and there was no coverage on crab, octopus, or squid. That being said, this was still one of my better classes in terms of practicality and knowledge gained. In the future and present, it’s more important than ever to learn about different ways to make good decisions about eating and sourcing your seafood due to overfishing. I still recall the days when tilapia was $0.99/lbs. Due to overfishing, cost and supply are trending unfavorably and the industry is facing negative milestones in the next 25 years. For more information about sustainable seafood, check out Seafood Watch.
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