Chef-in-Training: Herbs & Spices & Amish Cheese, Oh My!, Recipe Chef-in-Training: Herbs & Spices & Amish Cheese, Oh My!

Chef-in-Training: Herbs & Spices & Amish Cheese, Oh My!

Posted the 27/11/2008 02:24:00 By Food Lovers Like Me (Visit website)

So did you hear the one about the Amish farmer who went to culinary school with a few wild turkeys, raw milk and some cheeses? Sounds like I'm about to tell a salty joke, right? Well, actually this is exactly what happened at school on Tuesday night. Apparently an Amish farmer makes the occasional trek into Manhattan to sell his wares at the Natural Gourmet Institute. This time around he brought some fresh wild turkeys, assorted cheeses, brown eggs, grass-fed ground beef, and a number of other farm-fresh treats. It was all in these huge coolers. I wish I'd had a camera, 'cause dude looked like he was straight out of that Harrison Ford "Witness" movie. I wound up buying some smoked cheddar--very strong, earthy flavor, almost a little overwhelming. Just having the opportunity to see fresh wild turkeys--they were HUGE--it was definitely the highlight of the night.

Tuesday night's class, which focused on identifying herb and spices, was, for the most part, fine. But after two hours of passing around herbs like fresh chervil, cilantro and thyme, and sniffing spices such as star anise, smoked paprika and fennel seed, I was on sweet and savory overload. Still, I did have fun during our Top Chef moment: Chef Barbara placed 12 unidentified spices in ramekins and gave us a taste test to see if we knew which was which. We paired off and Team Erika/Vanessa got 10 out of 12 right (we confused chili powder with cayenne pepper and mistook mixed up rosemary and caraway seeds--rookie mistakes for sure:)

Chef Barbara basically told us which things we need to be able to identify for our i.d. quiz: Rosemary, thyme, bay leaves, ground cumin, caraway seeds, curry, black peppercorns, chili powder, whole nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, mustard and fennel seeds. Since I have all of these spices in my spice cabinet (I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing:), I'll have plenty to practice with.

Some other cool things we learned:
--Keep spices no longer than 6 months, max.
--Chef Barbara thinks Kalustians at 28th and Lex in NYC is the best spice store in the city
--I found out about a spice I'd never heard of before: FENUGREEK (it's used in chutneys, curries, pickling)
--Saffron is way expensive because it comes from the crocus flower and has to be hand-picked. If you want saffron to color your rice properly, first you have to bloom it--meaning you crumble it into liquid, like a stock, and then add that liquid to the rice. It gives you a more even distribution of color.
--The difference between black and white peppercorns? White peppercorns are black peppercorns with the outer shell removed. They also tend to taste stronger, so you don't have to use as much.
--Mace is actually the webbing/blades that surround the outer shell of whole nutmeg

One last thing: we also got some recipes for how to make some different spice mixtures. Here's one recipe I think is so easy and will make your braised meats really sing:

QUATRE EPICES (Four Spices)

Ingredients
1 teaspoon peppercorns
2 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon nutmeg

Instructions
Combine in a coffee grinder and use the resulting mixture as a rub on slow-cooked meats.

We got a reprieve for the holiday--no class on Sunday! But I think I'll spend at least one of those days practicing my knife skills. I'm still really slow and shaky on sizing up the various types of cuts, and those knife skills will be a significant portion of our grade. I'm getting flop sweat just thinking about it--how unappetizing:)

I did have a moment this week where I felt like, I'm just too old for this--I was exhausted from studying for a sanitation test that we also took on Tuesday night, dealing with some stuff at my son's school, trying to hustle up freelance work, trying to get my Christmas shopping for the kids done early as well as losing my ATM card and trying not to freak out about that. But truly, I am enjoying this too much to even study that for long. I'm in this to win.