It's been over a week since I've given an update on my classes. As you may recall, I have been in Principles of Beverage Service. Or perhaps I should say that I was in Principles of Beverage Service. I completed the class yesterday and was not sad to say my goodbyes. I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but here's an interesting fact about Johnson and Wales: the campus is a dry; however, alcohol consumption is allowed in certain Johnson and Wales classrooms by law in the state of Rhode Island. This means not only is the classroom the only place where drinking is allowed, but it's also legal for the 17-year olds in my class to drink.
We devoted one class period to coffee, one to white wine, one to red wine, and the last class day before our practical focused on beer. After sitting through a lecture for several hours on the production of the aforementioned beverage, we set up our tables to begin tasting. As you can see above, we had a few cheeses, crackers and fruits to sample with our beverages so that we could learn how to pair food with wine. For each varietal, we had to describe it's clarity, aroma, and taste in great detail. Although I don't care for really sweet wines, it was interesting to see how well the sweetness of a riesling paired with the creaminess of goat cheese or the intensity of bleu cheese.
Now I'm sure that sitting around sipping on wine doesn't sound stressful, and of course it was far from that. The nerve-racking portion of the class took place on our practical day. Each of us was required to make 12 drinks randomly selected drinks in 12 minutes from memory. For an experienced bar tender, that's a joke. But for us it was fairly taxing. Our instructor watched and took notes if a martini was shaken instead of stirred. After finishing the drinks, each of us was called individually to our bar station for questioning. The instructor came around and asked "What are the ingredients in your Mai Tai?", "What's the procedure for preparing a Brandy Alexander?" I hate being put on the spot, so I was impatiently waiting for it to end. Next on the practical agenda was wine service. We were called into the beverage lab in pairs to serve wine to an empty table. I thought that I had performed well, but apparently when I presented the bottle to my invisible host, the bottle was higher than his invisible head. I think I would have done better had there been people at the table.
Yesterday was my first day of what I think will be my favorite class, Nutrition and Sensory Analysis. Here we will be primarily poaching and steaming, but more importantly, the instructor wants us to focus on developing complex flavors without adding fat or salt. How do you do that? "Taste everything. Even your ingredients." That sounds simple enough, right? Then he through us a slight curve ball. He asked, "How many of you know what pink peppercorns taste like? Or better yet, how many of you have eaten a plain pink peppercorn?" Not surprisingly, no hands were raised. He passed around the container of peppercorns, and as a class, we each ate plain pink peppercorns. They were surprisingly sweeter than I thought they would be which is exactly the point he was trying to make. Just because you've tasted an ingredient mixed with other ingredients does not mean that you know what it tastes like.
For our first day of production, we split up into groups, and he assigned each group one ingredient and a dish to prepare, but we were give no recipes. Our group had black beans so we made a black bean dip. I wish that I had written down amounts of ingredients so I could recreate it because it was delicious, and our instructor agreed. And as I said before, we weren't allowed to use salt. So at the end of production, we tasted each of the dishes with and without salt. Unpredictaly, nearly all of the dishes tasted better without salt because the salt masked some of the other flavors. My new mission is to prepare all of my food this way. I will only add salt as a last resort when the flavor cannot be improved any further.
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