Dying to cook...careful with that knife chef.

Sharp knives, hot stoves and near boiling vats of oil are just the short list of things that can go horribly wrong in the heat of a professional kitchen.  As Chef Dan likes to point out, “There are five ways ‘till Sunday we can kill you.”

It’s Week 3 now for the afternoon class in Culinary Arts 1, and the students are itching to get out of the classroom and into their chef whites. These first five weeks of theory are essential though, to ensure that minor cuts and burns (and a lot of misinformation) are the only casualties in our training.

Some students embrace the book learning. Others, not so much. The chef-instructors know that proper food handling, memory-taxing lists of food-borne pathogens and equipment safety measures are not for the feint of heart. To keep us all engaged, they serve up sides of stories from the front line to help us digest all the material we’re covering.

Chef Dan is animated in his hair-raising tales of skewering one cook with a meat fork (he survived), fishing another’s severed digits from a meat slicer, and rescuing a third colleague after his knife slipped across his wrist. Chef Bill Sharpe has his own style of story-telling with anecdotes from his many years in hotel kitchens and his own restaurants (Blowing the door off the stack oven has been the best so far.)  Their overall message? We are heading into a profession that requires teamwork to stay safe. “We can only have a good time in the kitchen,” says Chef Dan, “if you are communicating, paying attention and on your game every day.”

Spiders, scales and salamanders...

Whips, paddles, mandolines, spiders, scales and salamanders: the new Cook Basic 1 students are on tour. It’s not Amsterdam’s red light district though, nor an exotic pet shop. Chef-instructor Dan Notley is taking us on our first walk-about through the kitchen at Liaison.

The tools of the trade bear some resemblance to my home kitchen equipment, but are bigger, hotter, faster and sharper. Most home cooks have little need for wire whips and ladles in five different sizes, a broiler (salamander) that can sizzle ten steaks in a flash, or a five-gallon, spigotted stock pot.

To novices in this field, a spider is just another skimmer, a weigh scale is a scale is a scale. The difference between conical strainers (Is it a chinois or a China cap?), a slotted spoon and a perforated

one, or a spaetzle press and a grater are clearly obvious to a food-service pro, but to the newest round of students, the kitchen is a Wonderland of discovery.

As the lessons progress we will surely be seduced by the craft and nipped by the knives and the vegetable slicers (mandolines), but for now this tour is just a tease of the weeks of training to come.

Waiting to exhale

The mood was noticeably altered at Liaison last week, charging the afternoon ambiance with a tension that was almost tangible. After fifteen weeks of culinary classes, the students were put through the rigours of exams, in the kitchen and in the classroom.

Cook Basic students did all their prep work on Tuesday for their hands-on exam the following day. On a set schedule Wednesday afternoon, they turned out their dishes for the chef-instructors to mark on timing, presentation and taste. The tension subsided as one-by-one they learned how they fared, then headed home to cram for just a few more hours.

The ever-active kitchen was hauntingly silent on Thursday as the students bowed their heads over exam papers, challenged to remember the theory they learned more than ten weeks ago. Though they applied their book knowledge almost daily in the kitchen, they were reserved until after their papers were marked.

Waiting to exhale, three young men checked the job board, shifted and paced, their nervousness disguised in jocular humour. The women made notes, quick calls to family, or chatted in low tones about future plans.

That collective sigh, when it came, was worth the wait. Hugs, laughter, whoops of excitement: they’ll be back for an official graduation, but this was their crowning moment when the air cleared, the mood lifted and they prolonged their goodbyes for one more minute of camaraderie.

Of meat and milk: students tour veal barns in Cambridge

by Katrina Simmons

Ross Blaine guides students
through the calf barns. 

Students from Liaison Hamilton spent last Monday learning about the application of probiotics, iron supplements, B vitamins, computerized climate control and daylight-simulating LED lights. No, they weren’t at a resort spa. They visited the calf barns at Delft Blue farm in Cambridge, an innovative veal producer (part of Grober Group) that is striving to reshape the milk- and grain-fed veal industry.

This sector works hand-in-hand with dairy farmers: Milking cows give birth every 12 to 18 months to continue to produce milk. The female calves are added to the herd or sold to other milk producers, but modern dairy operations have no use for male (bull) calves. They are, instead, destined to be raised for meat.

Some calves need to be separated
until their health improves.

Murline Mallette, Liaison Hamilton’s executive director, started life on a dairy farm near Barrie, Ontario, and spent all her summers there even after the family moved to town. She knows well the sounds, the smells, and the realities of life on a farm – the hard work, the connection to the animals that provide meat and milk as well as nutrients for the soil. It is a connection, she says, that everyone should understand, especially those who work in the food sector.

The chef-instructors at Liaison encourage students to shop at the farmers markets, talk to the meat vendors and fruit and vegetable growers. Trips to abbatoirs and meat processors are a regular part of the curriculum.

At 17 weeks these calves
weigh almost 225 kg. 

This tour of Delft Blue was a chance for the current students to learn about where the veal calves come from and the recent innovations in the way that they are housed, fed and cared for before they are slaughtered at about 225 kg (about 18 weeks old).

Fresh from the farm:
Delft Blue veal on the plate at Liaison.

Once they left the barns, the group donned hairnets and lab coats for a tour of the meat packing facility, where the carcasses are hung to age, cut and packaged. Murline hopes that these future chefs brought home a deep respect for the life of the animals so they will strive for minimal waste, and will learn to cook not just the prime cuts, but every other bit possible, from off-cuts to offal.