Sausage and Chicken Wings!

Finally, we got to EAT!

While we finished production and cleaned up, Chef Allen cooked up all the chicken wings (drummies and flats, some frenched) that we've collected in the last couple of days. Half of them were buffalo style (mild and extra-spicy), half crunchy, without sauce. Yum. And I brought my coffee, also. A big improvement.

After a group demo on beef tenderloin, pork shoulder (buttress, to the in-crowd), and duck (same as chicken, only different), we got to work. I was on the sausage team today, and we stuffed about 25 pounds of pork meat into hog casings. It was ground and seasoned as sweet Italian yesterday by another team. It's a fun process that I've done at home using my KitchenAid mixer (I'll tell you the lobster sausage story sometime: one of my truly disasterous "company dinner" experiences). I twisted links while Ronaldo ran the stuffer (which is essentially a big press with a hand crank and a spigot at the bottom where you attach the stuffing tube.)

Elsewhere, people were skinning and fileting more salmon as well as striped bass; trimming beef tenderloins (we receive them "ASIS" which means that about 60% of the total weight is fat, and needs to be cut off); and cutting apart ducks. Some of the sausage team also turned pork shoulder halves into a tied roast + cut up stew meat, but I was sausage girl all morning. Once the links were finished, I made a brine by combining a pound of brown sugar, a pound of salt, spices (I used pepper, pickling spices and bay leaf); then added 1/2 gallon of water and brought the mixture to a boil. That was poured into a container and cooled with 1/2 gallon of ice. Once the brine reached room temperature, we added about 10 pounds of sausage links, weighted them down with plates, and refrigerated them. Tomorrow, they'll be smoked. We hung the rest of the links on long thick metal skewers in the walk in, where they'll dry out a bit and cure.

(When Chef Allen gave me verbal directions for the brine, he said, "Mix two pounds of brown sugar, one pound of salt, and seasonings...." When I asked what kind, he said, "Your decision!" When I asked how much, he said, "As my aunt Bootsie used to say, 'Why bother putting it in if you can't taste it?'" Seriously. Aunt Bootsie.)

Then I was part of the MultiVac team, and we packaged 6 pair of salmon sides, skinned and boned; 20 pounds of cubed pork for stew; 8 beef tenderloins; 40 duck legs & thighs; a pound of duck fat; a bag of tenderloin chain (a long piece of fatty meat that gets removed when you trim the tenderloin); 20 chicken breasts, airline style, and a small package of duck tenders. It's a very efficient machine, and makes me want to explore a consumer version.

At the start of our lecture, Chef Allen asked, "Who reads the label on chicken in the grocery store?" Apparently mine was the only raised hand. "I think we'll have a few more hands raised, after today's lecture," he said. We talked about UDSA grading and inspections ("I don't think much of the government in general, but I have complete confidence in the safety of our meat."), and about chicken sizing and relative pricing. Chef defined terms: "free range" means that the chicken has access to at least 2 feet of outdoor space, "though chickens are stupid and huddle together in a corner." "Natural" means minimal processing, no artificial additives, no antibiotics, and no animal byproducts as feed. "Organic" means natural and free range, and the grower must be able to certify that for at least three years, they've used at least 51% organic feed. Some of my classmates were amazed to learn the kinds of things poultry (and other livestock) are fed. (But the reason they're not reading the labels, really, is that they're not shopping in supermarkets. They don't cook for themselves, most of them.)

We ended class with a short video showing a chicken processing plant. Suffice it to say that the film began with a crateload of chickens being dumped out of their individual cages onto a conveyor. It's all very efficient. Can't get too squeamish about it, though, because man, those wings were good.