Before 7am this morning, most of our class was at work on petrale sole. The student dining chef issued a challenge yesterday to Chef Allen (apparently along the lines of, "eh, your students are so slow") and Chef Allen of course wanted to show him 'what for', as they say. So we had about 50 pounds of petrale fillets to the student dining kitchen by 8:15am. So there.

A petrale is a flat fish and the boning technique is quite different from a roundfish like salmon or bass. (Or so I've heard; I've yet to pick up a knife against a roundfish in class.) Soles live on the ocean floor. Both eyes are one one side of the head and petrales have little tiny nasty teeth. The skin is dark greyish brown on the eye side, and creamy white on the other. You slit the fish down the middle, from the fin to the tail, then carefully cut along the bones to loosen the fillet. "Towards the bone, away from the money." One one side of the fish is are puffy lungs that you pull out -- they're actually almost cute, if you can say that about fish guts. Once you take off both fillets from the top side, you flip the fish over and remove the other two. (They're a little smaller.) Then you skin the fillets by making a little flap to hold on to, and sliding your knife along the skin, pitched slightly towards the table. "Towards the skin, away from the money." We cut off the heads, tails, and fins, and save the rest for fish fumet.

We had two fish-related competencies to complete: 1) fillet a fish and 2) skin fish fillets. I asked Chef Allen if I could use one of the soles I was trimming to attain my competency and he said sure. But he warned that the tolerances he would accept would be more strict on a sole than on a roundfish, since there's so little meat to "waste." I persevered, and fulfilled both competencies. (He runs his fingers up the spine and bones of the fish, to see if any meat flakes away. That would be wasted money.)

After we completed Chef's "back at ya" with the sole, we broke into our regular teams and began our "real" class work. I was on Hooves today. Chef demonstrated rack of lamb and semi-boned leg of lamb, and I was able to work on both. Silvia admitted that she thought that a lamb was a small cow. When the laughing subsided, Jordan said, "We love you anyway." And Chef said, "Hey, that's why you're in school. To learn stuff."

The main work in fabricating a rack of lamb is frenching the bones. First you remove a layer of fat from the bone side of the meat. Then you make a series of cuts where the bones adjoin the meat, in order to loosen the membrane that covers the bones. Then you further loosen the membrane along the length of each bone, and pull off the membrane and interbone meat. Then you clean up the bones. The more you loosen everything up, the easier the bones are to clean, and Chef is EXACTING when it comes to clean bones. As he explains it, any bit of membrane left on the bone will burn when you cook the chops. And that'll ruin everything.

A leg of lamb is at the opposite end of the finesse scale. What a beast. The objective here is to remove most of the fat, which is more than an inch thick in some places. You also have to remove the aitch bone, which is half of rump bone of the animal and which contains the socket where the femur rests. This is a major pain. The bone is vaguely shaped like the letter "H," about 10 inches long, and you can't see where you're going. There's slashing, and swearing, and digging around with the point of your knife. Andy helped me by showing me his technique for hanging part of the meat over the edge of the work table, so that the tension where meat meets bone is increased and more apparent. Once the bone is out, you remove any big chunks of fat and membrane, and french the shank end.

By the end of the morning, I'd completed my last two butchery competency requirements: frenched rack of lamb and semiboned leg of lamb. (I could have also fulfilled my "advanced hooves" competency by trimming a whole beef tenderloin, or a pork loin, but lamb was the word of the day.) The only remaining requirement in butchery, then, is the written test, which is scheduled for next Friday.

And we're still way behind in the lecture portion of our program. Today, we spent another hour on beef, discussing primal and sub-primal cuts and the further breakdown into parts, beginning (at the back) with the round and the loin. We still have the forequarters to discuss, not to mention pork, lamb, seafood, and charcuterie (according to the syllabus), all before the exam.

We ended class with a short video on beef processing. Granted, it was produced by the industry, but the process appeared to be efficient and clean, which impressed me. They even referred to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in the video, in a "See, we learned our lessons a hundred years ago, and thanks, Mr. Sinclair, for bringing that to our attention" sort of way. And really, they do use every part of the cow except for the moo.