We continue our weekly visit to the Karen Blixen Hospitality School in the Masai Mara Kenya. This school was set up by the Karen Blixen Camp to help local youngsters in training and education so that they can find work in the tourism industry. This is especially important in the Masai Mara where there are few jobs opportunities and we at Real Africa are proud to be supporting them.
Consolidation of Techniques
The students have now completed their first 10 weeks in the cooking school. They have been through all the main cooking methods and techniques and learned the rules that apply to each method and when to use them. The last ten weeks have focused on first learning the basic cooking skills before progressing onto learning all about fruit and vegetables which is a large area to learn. The students then moved onto meat which was also a huge topic for the students to tackle. The students were rather confused at first with the vast array of different cuts on a cow. The students slowly worked through them and discussed the reasons behind the different cuts. They also had to make some short presentations to the other students about applicable cooking methods and the difference of soft and tough meat. Chef Rune was very insistent that the students learned how important temperature control is for cooking meat properly. If a guest want his or hers steak rare or medium, it is of great importance that the chef knows how this feels on the steak. Rune feels that the students do understand these differences in the meat, but that they also need to get as much experience as they can.
This week was focused on repeating the tuition of the whole module. Every recipe and topic were quickly looked at and discussed once more. The students cooked recipes from the past weeks, but this week the significant change has been that they have had no help from Head Chef Rune and have had to do it all by themselves.
Another Bush Dinner
Head Chef Rune reports that he is really impressed that the students have come far since they started. This week there was once again a bush dinner which the students cooked from the Hospitality School. And like last time they had to prepare and cook an 8 course menu with every student having their own responsibility for a particular dish. However this time the students were much more involved in deciding the menu amongst themselves. They chose a menu with 3 snacks, 2 starters, a main dish, a dessert and petit fours with coffee at the end. The students were then rotated to a new position, so that everybody got to be involved in creating the main dish. The student’s responsibility starts when they are creating the menu all the way through to making sure their dish contains all the tastes and textures that it should. They are completely and independently responsible for preparing their dish without any help from Rune at this stage in the course. Rune instead is using his time to go around and talk with the students about their dish so that they can see how it is built and how the elements in the dish work together. When everything is finished, they always try out a test dinner, where all the students are part of the presentation of the dishes. Placement of the food is discussed and when everything is correct, the individual student has to present their dish to the Head Chef. This is because Rune really wanted to concentrate on encouraging the students to talk more to the guests about their food and to feel comfortable and confident in doing so. The students are required to present the dish by talking about it. The important lesson here is learning what you can and can’t say! It can be tricky learning what guests do and don’t want to hear as its not necessarily what you might think. This whole interaction with a guest is a new and daunting experience for the students but Rune was immensely proud of them as they all presented their dishes to him that week. The students are finally overcoming their nerves and their shyness!
Moving into the professional kitchen
The students are one by one moving into the professional camp’s own kitchen every evening. From Monday to Friday, one of the students is now working on proper kitchen duty. This is always after school so it is a long day but the experience of working in a proper kitchen is essential to their education. The idea is that they will all become much more secure in their knowledge about how a real kitchen works. This in turn should give Rune more time to teach the students more about ingredients and dishes rather than techniques in the kitchen. And this approach seems to be working well already. The students already have a good knowledge base which they are continuously building on and their basics are now pretty well established. Rune now spends far less time on correcting work and more time teaching new things. A wonderful and much needed change.
Posted by Ruth Bolton
