Beef, Day 1

I'm struggling to remember what we did. Oh, we had the round of beef. That's the butt. There's a huge layer of fat on top. Basically, we take that off, and cut apart where the muscles naturally fall. Then we clean off silverskin (fibers that connect muscle to muscle, or muscle to bone) and excess fat. Since we had split it in half (I was with Rico), we each had to cut the fat off of half part of the tenderloin. Then we trussed to make a Round Roast, and cut the rest for stew meat after we showed it to him. Rico had a whole bunch of fat; I had a ton of meat - which meant it took me forever to clean it. I felt really confused when it stopped becoming obvious where the muscles were, but Chef B told me I was doing just fine. If I had known everything but the tenderloin and roast were going to end up cut into cubes for stew meat, I never would have spent so much time cutting apart the muscles... Oh well, it's good practice.

Chef B has been better. I mean, he still clearly loves to hear himself talk and he still yells when we don't ever get to cooking, but he's actually become almost friendly - Irish jokes around with him a lot, because they both love dogs. And, when I asked him if I had missed him calling my name for attendance, he told me he didn't need to say it because "I'm unforgettable." Keep in mind he said that extremely sarcastically. But that's okay considering he has no idea who most people in the class are.

Lessons learned:

I tried to upload this, but here's what I learned for the quiz tomorrow: primal cuts of beef. And working with beef is for some reason a lot easier for me than poultry. I don't really get grossed out by it - in fact, yesterday I was kind of craving french fries as we cut up the round.