Day 2

So today on the way to school, being my usual graceful self, I totally tripped over the curb and scraped up my hand and knee on the sidewalk....yep.

After a very flustered and embarrassing start to the day, we got underway with our lecture time on safety and sanitation and went over the homework from yesterday.  Once our two hours there were up we went into the kitchen for some knife demos.  

Chef Haldeman showed us how to use our chef's knife to make different types of cuts and dices.

We learned how to peel an orange with a knife so that none of the pith or membrane shows...SO COOL!

Once that was over and we had our break, we spent most of the night scaling ingredients (weighing them out) for various recipes.  We made the pizza dough for the pizza we're making tomorrow while we practice our knife skills.  

In a commercial kitchen, you don't measure ingredients like you do at home.  You use a scale and weigh out what you need.  This is done for a couple of reasons, the biggest being that weighing is much more accurate.  It also makes it easier when you are doing conversions to scale the yield of your product either up or down and it's also much faster and simpler to weigh out 3 pounds of flour than to measure however many cups that is (um...6, I think).  

When we were finished with that, it was time to feed the sourdough starter...

This starter is apparently somewhere between 7 and 15 years old (the stories vary)

Chef Wild scaled out the water and part of the starter into a mixing bowl

After that, more bread flour gets added.  That's how you keep a starter going, you just keep adding flour and water every day to give it new moisture and enzymes and the yeast keeps growing.

When everything is mixed together, you knead the starter dough a bit to get everything really mixed in and all the enzymes and yeast working.  After that, it goes back into a container and left at room temperature to rise overnight until it's fed again the next day.

Since you don't use all the starter when you're feeding it, there is always some left.  We will get to take turns taking it home and having our very own sourdough starter!!

This is my class.  Here we see our token male, Adam.

There are 12 of us in the class, I'm still learning names.

Everyone ranges in age from 18 to 40 and up!

So far everything is really awesome!  I can't wait for the tasty pizza we will make tomorrow.