nuts about knots

Today was our first official day in the kitchen. I was a nervous wreck last night but somehow calmed down enough to get a few hours of sleep. Class started at 6:30am! With my knives sharp, and having read over my assignments multiple times, I headed out to learn about meat ID & fabrication. 

The topic of today's class was general meat overview and we started getting into fabricating some cuts of beef. Chef Schneller, a butcher by profession, insures that we learn all the different cuts of meat and which cooking methods are best suited for each. We have 7 days to learn about beef, veal, pork, lamb, chicken, and sausages, what cuts of meat come from which portion of the carcass and how best to cook them. It seems easy now, but I can tell the cuts are going to look the same and get confusing as the days go on. We learned how to properly sharpen our knives & getting consistent, even, and lined up butcher's knots on a roast.

Here is part of the meat room...

We have to sharpen our knives daily, here Chef Schneller shows us how:

This top round of beef was the first cut we fabricated. This is how it looks As Purchased (AP):
Then he demo'd how to trim the fat off so we could cut and tie roasts later:

We each have our own station and this was later on when we got a beef shank to debone:

This is Chef Schneller deboning his shank is about 2 minutes, then it took us a good 10 minutes to do our own..