This week we are catching up with the students at the Karen Blixen Hospitality School as they enter week 9 of their course. The KB Hospitality School was set up by the Karen Blixen Camp to provide training and education in the tourist industry for local Masai youngsters in an area with few job prospects outside of tourism. Real Africa is proud to be assisting this project and we are following the progress of the students with great interest each week.
The week was divided in fish and seafood to start with and then the second half of the week was all about making stock, more classic soups and various garnishes to serve with soups.
Prep Day
Rune, the Danish Head Chef and Teacher runs the school and as this is the first course he is moving things around and trying out various concepts as he goes along. This week he decided that it was a good idea to make Mondays at school a preparation day for the rest of the week. This means that the stocks would be made on a Monday rather than later in the week as planned. Other basic ingredients and components for the dishes being made that week would also be made on a Monday – for example croutons, bread crumbs, clarified butter and roux sauce bases. It is very important that the students all learn how to organize their weekly work in what will be very busy professional kitchens by preparing as much in advance as they possibly can. This will save time later on as all the necessary basic components will then be available throughout the week. They started this week with preparing beef, chicken and fish stock, which gave them a nicely filled freezer for the week. This is how kitchens used to work in the old days before ready made meals, microwaves and mass produces sauces etc This is also how a modern professional kitchen really should run as the use of fresh ingredients that week elevates the flavours and the standard of cooking to another level all together.
The third thing that Head Chef Rune is trying to teach the students with this way to work, is labour saving. If they have to use bread crumbs or roux more than once during the week they will not have to go through the rigmarole of making it more than once. If you are already making a batch it really doesnt add any more time or complication to the process if you are making one portion or two.
Fish
Tuesday was the day the students were introduced to fish for the first time.Chef Rune and the students started slowly discussing the differences between fish and snakes. This sounds a bit strange but it is fascinating because the Maasai think of fish and snakes as one and the same thing. Fish feel very strange to them as they are not used to eating or even handling them. The Masai are a pastoral tribe who herd and therefore eat cattle, goats and sometimes sheep and they never fish. The students and chef discussed what fish basically are and how they are so fundamentally different from beef and lamb in the kitchen. They were also taught how to prepare and cut a fish, the importance of quality control when handling a whole fish, how to use and store frozen fish and how to create simple fish fillets.
Rune was very pleased as he could feel that his students were becoming very comfortable eating fish. In fact they seem to quite like it as none of them will miss an opportunity to taste fish just one more time. Rune then finished his lectures talking about which fish they use in the traditional French kitchen and how that compared to the fish which is available to them in the Mara and in Kenya as a whole.
Soup
This week’s lessons on soup followed up on the classic soup types that have been discussed earlier. This week the students learned all about cold soups such as Gazpacho and Vichysoise and also how to make a puree soup with bread. They also talked more about how soup is probably the most basic meal you can get and has been pretty much since the beginning of time. They discussed how poor people, especially in Europe, used to only eat soup and bread as their dinner, which resulted in our word “supper” to describe the last big meal of the day. Rune’s focus has been on teaching thestudents to make an honest puree soup and bread, which he believe is an essential part of becoming a good chef.
A Bush Dinner
The students hosted and cooked another fantastic bush dinner again at the school. This time the bush dinner was located right outside the school. The students and Rune created a menu with eight servings and each student would be responsible for one. The meal started with three light snacks or amuse bouches, a starter, a palate cleanser, the main dish, a dessert followed by cookies and cake with coffee and tea. Prep and training for the bush supper actually started on Tuesday. Every dish was created at least once in advance to give the students a better understanding for how they should present the food on the actual day of the bush supper (Thursday). Each student was to create the dish themselves with Head Chef Rune just advising them throughout. The students made an order list and a mise en place to Thursday, so they could get the correct ingredients ordered and start preparing their dish. The bush supper went really well and they even managed to have a short break before the test dinner. The menu training and test dinner, which was served an hour before the guests arrived so they could all sample the food, helped the students to understand how the evening would go. They were very excited to have this responsibility and it proved a very successful lesson in how to work as a professional in the kitchen.
Posted by Ruth Bolton