Second service and chuck

Yesterday I was on the griddle station, where I was responsible for cooking cornmeal pancakes, French toast, and croque madams to order. I had a little trouble with the griddles– they tended to be either too hot or too cool– but once they were the proper temperature everything went well. I also suspect that the ideal temp for the French toast would have been lower than for the pancakes. While ordinarily I could have had my two griddles at different temps, yesterday one of the burners wasn’t working, so I only had three burners and with the reduced hot real estate had to make do with a single temp. I managed to keep up, and one of the other Chefs complimented me for having worked clean (not getting crap all over my whites), so I was pleased. Once again I noticed that, even on a station, one just does one’s job and doesn’t worry about abstractions much. On the other hand, the menu was chosen by Chef and there was a recipe; there might be more anxiety if the food was one’s own personal creation. One of the stations is to produce the daily special, so I may find out.

Then after service and cleanup, we switched to Meat Fab class. Unfortunately it is not practical for the school to get whole sides of beef anymore, so we started with cryovaced primal cuts, such as the entire chuck section, the entire round, etc. My group worked on taking down the chuck; I removed and cleaned up a nice chuck roast and several smaller muscle sections.

On waffle station tonight.