Introduction
Real Africa is very proud to be financially supporting the Karen Blixen Hospitality School based at one of our favourite safari destinations in Kenya, the Karen Blixen Camp. The Hospitality School is a new venture set up last year in 2012 so that the camp can help fund local community projects in an area where youth unemployment is extremely high. Local youngsters are often forced to leave home at an early age to seek work elsewhere. The new hospitality school is somewhere the young Masai can learn various skills to work in the hospitality industry (one of Kenya’s key growth areas). Last week we followed the students as they learned all about the basics of kitchen hygiene and knife skills under the watchful eye of their head teacher, the Danish ChefRune Eriksen. This week it is more basics but this time some more knife skills were followed by lessons in the importance of seasoning and tasting.
Week 2 – Fundamental Skills in the Kitchen
This week Rune continued the introduction to a professional kitchen with some more non-cooking lectures. These lectures were focused on getting the very basics right before moving onto proper cooking. Rune firmly believes that the basics are the foundation on which every chef’s skills are based and that you cannot cook properly without them. Once again he emphasised the vital importance of good kitchen hygiene before going on to discuss further the careful use of kitchen knifes in various functions. Then the lessons finally moved on to cooking itself with talking about the importance of both seasoning and presentation.
The 3 hour Rule
Head Chef Rune made the students pay extra attention to this by testing them every now and again about the subjects they had learned over the past two weeks before then going on to explain the next rule. This way the learning was being done in a logical order and the students can see from the next stage why the basics are so very important. In particular he was keen to emphasis the 3 hour rule which is the maximum time allowed for food to go from cooled to cook or cooked to cool. The eager students were taught to incorporate this rule in their work, especially when they are cooking more than one dish. Once they have mastered hygiene and accept that it is half the work in a kitchen they are then ready to move on.
Knife Skills
Rune was very pleased with the students this week and could see clear progress with their way of handling and using a knife. They have been learned how to check the sharpness of their knives and how to use a sharpening steel if the knife is not sharp. Rune showed them how easy it was to use a sharp knife and also told them what accidents can occur if they should use a blunt knife.
Seasoning
The students also kept on working with seasoning. Rune explained more about salt itself and that it can also be used in the sweet kitchen to emphasis flavours. And every day, while they had been cooking together, they often stopped to talk about seasoning for each of the particular dishes that were being prepared that day. For instance, if the salt should be added before or after cooking and what the advantages and disadvantages would be.
Presentation
The presentation of the food has also been a major part of the schedule this week. Head Chef and Head Teacher Rune started teaching the students to think about the presentation of their dish in their head before they even start to prepare the food or cook it. This creates the advantage that, whilst cooking, they will already know what size or texture the different elements are going to need to be. Anyone who has watched Masterchef recently will have seen the competitors do exactly the same thing – even drawing sketches of the plate of food right at the very beginning of the process.
Vegetables and Fruit
The week continued with the introduction to the vegetables and fruit in the French kitchen and which of these are available in Kenya. The students were taught all about pumpkin, tomatoes, beans, spinach, cabbage, lettuce, pasta and asparagus just to mention a few. Rune places great importance on the students examining the days fresh supplies so they learn to see, feel, taste and smell the new item. They have been doing this for the past two weeks on a daily basis and now he lets everyone try to discuss as much as they can about the item before he starts talking. Getting the students to talk about ingredients is the best way for students to learn and remember them.
Herbs and Spices
Along with the vegetables, the team in the kitchen had started discussing herbs and spices and how these are used in the kitchen. Some herbs are merely decoration for a dish but most are used to add flavour to a dish. The same was covered with how spices are used, how strong they are compared to each other, what the powders look like, what they look like when they are whole and unprocessed and of course how they taste.
Tasting
The students have started to taste every new item before proceeding, so they can learn the taste of everything from vinegar and oils to the spices that they use. This can lead to some fun! The day the students tasted mustard for the first time they were all horrified and disgusted. The students couldn’t believe anyone would eat that for pleasure! That happened to be the very same day that they were also introduced to that other European favourite – pasta. Before Rune could warn them, all the students had opened the pack of pasta and were chewing on tough old pieces of dried pasta…… Rune had forgotten that almost everything is so completely new to these students!
All in all it was another good week, with a great improvement on the non-cooking skills in the school kitchen.
Posted by Ruth Bolton
