Edible art!

 

So some of the nicest looking food till this day has come out of the kitchen I worked in Germany. Everything was precise and detailed in that kitchen. All the things I was taught in school finally became useful. Before I left to Germany for a good 2 months I attended ICC training which, is just competition training for competing against other cooks. One of the techniques we had to practice was tourneing potatoes. I literally thought this skill was useless and the first day in the kitchen in Germany they asked me to tourne potatoes. I remember thinking to myself "Whoa I dodged a bullet their". Needless to say the quality of the food in this kitchen was top notch we prepped everything from scratch everyday and just only used the best ingredient possible and the work could be seen in the food.

 

Out and About

So obviously while in germany I didnt spend everyday working. Most of the time I had two days off, sunday  and monday. These two days were a blessing as we worked usually 65 hours in the 5 days we worked. At first I was really lazy but I eventually had to force my self to go explore germany by myself or I would miss out on seeing an amazing country. The nice part of where I was located was that I was in the country side in a little town where everyone knew each other and that I could literally walk to everything in town without needing a car. My first couple of days I spent seeing the town center which was quite nice. It was quite funny however as everyone knew I was a foreigner and I stood out as a sore thumb. In the end it worked out for the better as I trully enjoyed the peace and alone time.

Molecular gastronomy!

 

Yeah yeah I know my blog is about food not about my relationships, but in all honesty if it hadn’t been for that break up I would be in a completely different point in my life. I wouldn’t be pursuing the perfection of food or landing jobs in big name kitchens. So back to my story. Back in Germany things finally started getting better for me as the days went by I started being more talkative and the cooks started being friendlier to me. 1 month in and I was finally moved into the Michelin star kitchen. Something that I had been dying to get into. For those of you who don’t know, having a Michelin star for a chef is like winning the Oscar’s for best actor. So needless to say eating at that restaurant was $125 Euros and with the wine pairing costing $75 Euros it came out to being $200 Euros in total and when you do the conversion rate it comes out to something like 250 US dollars. So if you’re reading this, yes people paid 250 US dollars to eat here. However I was here solely on the purpose of learning molecular gastronomy. Working with gelee, foams, espuma, spherefication, and sous vide cooking. All very cool and imaginative food that will be coming in future posts but I will leave you all with a teaser photo enjoy!

Bell pepper soup!

Silence in the kitchen

So working in Germany was an awesome experience simple as that. I was really expecting to see some tall Germans when I got there, blonde hair blue eyes you know typical stereotype. So my first day was quite the shocker most of the cooks in the kitchen were kids my age one or 2 years older. I did however see a typical German who went by the name of ronie. Had blonde hair, green eyes and was the epitome of what a German looked like in a war movie. Great analogy right? Needless to say the first couple of weeks were rough. I was working 60 hour weeks, which was a normal thing over there, so my body ached from the long days of work. Having just broken up with my girlfriend at the time I was still depressed and heartbroken. I really didn’t talk much since I didn’t know the language to well. The only form of communication that I received was through the movies I watched on my computers. Needless to say I had a lot of time to think. Lucky for me things eventually started to get better

 

Call it fate!!!

So at the end of our sophomore year in culinary school we have to do a mandatory internship where we work in a kitchen. I had planned to do it somewhere near my girlfriend at the time, literally 5 minutes from her. Till this day I call what happened next divine intervention because literally right before everything was about to be finalized for me to go work at the kitchen where she lived by she opened up a can of worms on me. She told me some not so good news, she left me crushed. More importantly despite my broken heart I was happy to say the least, I at least had the chance to change where I wanted to go, it would have been extremely awkward if I had gone to my internship and then she would have told me the bad news. Especially because the main reason I was going, was to be by her, yes I know I was stupid. To my luck I remember one of my friends talking about going to Germany to work in a Michelin star kitchen. I quickly talked to the chef in charge of internships and to my luck there was a spot still open. When March finally came around for me to start my internship, I quit my job at cheesecake and I was on a flight to Germany. Flying to a country I had never really thought about seeing, not knowing a lick of German, and more importantly I had finally left my home for the first time. I was finally spreading my wings. Little did I know going to Germany would be one of the greatest things that could have ever happened to me in my life. Till this day I know god was watching out for me, how I can’t explain, but by how everything happened. I clearly got the feeling that god wanted me to go to Germany instead.

 

The master fry cook!!!

So after being hired at the cheesecake factory, I was stationed on the fryer. Making french fries and deep fried items. The station pretty much required pure speed as most items cooked in 5 minutes and the snack menu items cooked in 1-3 minutes. The station was a two man station, one person cooking and the other one plating the food. Working was a game of cat and mouse, because you would always try and put the other person in the weeds. The weeds refer to having so many tickets that your backed up for days...  So when breaded items would come, the cook making the food would get into the weeds but when the snack menu came the person plating would get into the weeds. Breading food was time consuming for the cook and plating was time consuming for the person plating. It was a never ending game and it would only get more stressful when we would get slammed with tickets. 3o tickets in the window, expiditor yelling wheres this item, is this item dropped yet. Luckily for me I was trained by one of the best fry cooks in the kitchen. He went by the name of luis a cook in his mid 40's from honduras, mainly spoke in spanish but boy could he work the fryers like a pro. His ultimate quote line was whenever a food expoditer would ask him for something he would reply " I cant help you talk to a manager."  His last famous quote would be whenever an order would come in he would say "calamaria" it would be his way of protesting mixing ave maria with calamari. It was thanks to him that I mastered the fryer and could later call myself a master fry cook.

A place called cheesecake factory

After quitting my first job, the place that I was hired at was called "The Cheesecake Factory". This kitchen in comparison was huge and put my last job to shame. In order to run the kitchen at cheesecake each night there would be at least 15 cooks on the line compared to just the one we needed. Cheesecake had 8 stations my last job had 2. When I started training I was required to memorize over 25 dishes and their ingredients. My last job only required like 15 but I didn’t have to take a test, at the cheesecake factory we did. The sheer volume we did in that kitchen was ridiculous. After working there I was always a little more patient when food was running slow and I was eating at a restaurant.