Buffet v6.5 (Intro to Sandwiches)

It was a pretty light day today in Catering and Buffet thanks to a mix of lecture and prep for the upcoming week. We still had time, however, to make ourselves something tasty to munch on before calling it a Friday.

The homemade chips were all very good. The russets were your standard potato chips, and honestly I feel they were overshadowed by the beet and sweet potato chips. I'm a sucker for anything involving sweet potatoes, and the beet chips had a really good flavor to them. I was actually kind of surprised about that.

Since we are doing soups and sandwiches on Monday, we touched lightly on sandwiches today. Our group made the chicken burgers. They were *very* good. You mix ground chicken with some bread crumbs and minced, sauteed mushrooms. Topped with provolone cheese and bacon...yowza...you can't go wrong with that.

We also had fried fish sandwiches for those currently shunning meat on Fridays. The Chef is going to get us the beer batter recipe, and I'm glad-- it's very good. For some reason the beer of choice to beer batter at school is Keystone original. Wrap your brain around that one while I laugh a very hearty, "Har-de-har-har."

This is my Chocolate Genoise, which we worked on for pretty much all of Breads kitchen today. If you can't gather it from the name, it's a French way of doing cake, and it's also the subject of our next practical which will begin Tuesday next week.

This is a boring photo, I know, but I will post a new pic Monday when we supposedly frost this bad boy. We will also frost the previously mentioned cupcakes that day (sorry to fail you on providing pics of those today, there was a change of plans due to a change of chefs for the day...bear with me).

I use the term "cake" kind of loosely here. A Genoise is more in the style of a sponge cake, and I can only equate sponge cake to the kind of cake that has probably lured you in previously only to severely disappoint you. It's not that it tastes bad...it just tastes bland. We are going to layer these cakes with frosting and some kind of fruit filling Monday, which will probably make it very tasty, but in its current form pictured above you'd probably be let down by the flavor. It's just not sweet or chocolaty enough.

Another side note-- "French style of doing something" translates by me, the lowly culinary student, to "making something overly complicated for the sake of making it complicated." There are multiple steps where things like the temperature of the beaten eggs, consistency of aforementioned heated eggs and sugar whipped in a mixer, and how you fold the whipped egg/sugar mixture into the flour/cocoa powder can *REALLY* screw you up.

That's what it's a practical item though. You just have to bring your smarts. This isn't insta-cake out of a box, for sure...