Chef Pro III: Week 2: Recipe Development

At the Zest Fest with Lisa WrightI have spent the entire week working on recipe development. I volunteered to participate in the Pace Recipe Contest for this year's Zest Fest, held in Ft. Worth on the 11-13 of September. Every year the CSFTW and the Tarrant County College Culinary Arts Program compete against one another on the stage at the Zest Fest. Previous years it's been a salsa contest and the CSFTW has won both years. This year it was a contest to see who could create a recipe using Pace Salsa Verde. A few of us got together with Chef Kurima to brainstorm recipe ideas. I brought in Korean Barbeque with Salsa Verde Slaw served on a fried...

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Chef Pro III: Week 1

This is it--the final semester of culinary school. It's been one year since I wrote the first blog entry and I will continue posting until graduation. Week 1 was time for testing skills we learned in previous classes. We had knife skills--5 minutes to julienne a potato, brunoise a carrot, and small dice an onion. We had to make an omelet with no utensils and French onion soup within 40 minutes. Then we had the rest of the class to make eggs benedict (with Hollandaise sauce), chantilly cream (whipped cream by hand), pork with a pan sauce, and 1/2 cup of roux. My omelet was very good--but I have spent many messy times in my kitchen making Julia Child style omelets by shaking the eggs and turning them in the pan with no utensils. I also made good chantilly cream. The eggs benedict were...

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Pastry Pro I: Final Exam

The Pastry Pro I final was on August 19, 2009. I have been putting off entering this post for weeks. I had to leave for a week a couple days after class for business, then we had a week of vacation in Santa Fe. I'll make it short since I have now started the final semester and need to catch up on that one as well.The pastry class final was hard. We were given a list of items we could make for certain point values and we worked in teams. My partner was Tela, who is very skilled and low key, an easy person to work with. I decided to make pie crust, blitz puff pastry, stirred custard, chantilly cream, and then create a chocolate cream pie and some type of turnover with the blitz puff pastry. Tela made a cake, muffins, and a few other things. Over all everything I made was just OK. My...

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