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BTC students create masterpieces under the gun for culinary challenge

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Photo by Bill Olmsted

BTC culinary student Rob Phelps prepared this appetizer consisting of a sea scallop and sea bass sausage. Pehlps is part of a student team headed to Milwaukee for a culinary arts competition.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

BTC culinary arts student Jim Bade uses a pair of tweezers to peel a quail egg that went into a salad he was creating on 03-03-10. Bade and four of his fellow students were rehearsing for a pressure-packed, culinary arts competition next week in Milwaukee.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

BTC culinary arts student Rebecca Riese inserts a tiny piece of mint into a chocolate covered blueberry that has been crusted with pistachio pieces. Riese also injected the berry with a small mount of an orange flavored liquor to help create what instructor Joe Wollinger calls 'layers of flavor'.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

BTC culinary arts students Rob Phelps, Kristina Starnes, and Rebecca Riese wait anxiously while instructor Joe Wollinger samples the dishes the student's team of five prepared as practice for a competition in Milwaukee.

JANESVILLE — One blueberry.

One blueberry covered with chocolate, rolled in pistachio nuts, injected with Cointreau and then placed very carefully on a spoon.

It tasted like rapture, like the splendor of the universe, like ...

Nevermind, you weren’t there. You couldn’t know what it was like to have this blueberry resituating your taste buds while you stood in the cafeteria—the cafeteria!—of Blackhawk Technical College with students and faculty wandering around you, completely oblivious to the potential of that one blueberry.

Monday, a team of students from Blackhawk Technical College will compete in the College Culinary Arts Competition at the Wisconsin Restaurant Expo in Milwaukee.

The team consists of Rob Phelps, Jim Bade, Corey Kilbreath, Rebecca Riese and Kristina Starnes. Blackhawk Technical College instructor Chef Joe Wollinger is serving as coach..

Here is how the contest works: Teams of four plus an alternative are given two proteins and asked to design a menu. This year, the proteins are veal and chuck and the menu consists of:

-- Appetizer: Poached sea scallop and sea bass sausage chermoula (Phelps).

-- Salad: Portrait of beet and potato (Bade).

-- Entrée: Prosciutto stuffed veal breast with apricot pecan couscous (Kilbreath).

-- Dessert: Bavarian, blueberry and panna cotta (Riese).

Nothing can be cooked or prepared in advance. Students have two burners, a warming oven, a large wheeled cart for supplies and two, 6-foot long tables set at 90 degrees to each other to work on.

Inside the tiny square created by the tables, the cart and the wall, they’ll have 90 minutes to create the meal. More specifically, they have 75 minutes for the appetizer, 80 minutes for the salad, 85 minutes for the dessert and 90 minutes for the entrée, and they need to be as close to those times as possible.

Outside the tables, it’s Starnes job to mark time.

The goal, of course, is to create a masterful meal in as close to the correct time as possible. But in doing so, students have to show the judges how much they know.

“We want them to show as many of their skills as they can,” said Wollinger during Wednesday’s practice.

Everything from knife skills to sanitation to trussing veal to filling a delicate lamb casing are on display.

Phelps had the unenviable task of creating the sea bass sausage. The bass was mixed with fennel, shallots, thyme and a variety of other ingredients and then placed in a pastry bag. Then, a section of delicate lamb casing-intestine-is tied at one end and the other end is slipped over the end of the pastry bag.

Phelps’ hands looked like they’d be at home with a pipe wrench, and the pastry bag, with its dangling casing, looked absurdly small in them. With delicate pressure and a look of fixed determination on his face, Phelps slowly filled the casing and tied it off.

Meanwhile, Bade was peeling cooked beets, removing their tiny imperfections with tweezers. Later, he would have to peel tiny quail eggs without marring their surface.

Kilbreath’s veal, with its perfectly spaced trussing, was about to be seared in hot oil. Riese was working on one of the two sauces that would go with her dessert.

Outside the tables, Starnes continued to keep time.

Sixty minutes in. Seventy-two minutes in.

At the end of practice, the team brought in each course on time with a minimum of crisises.

Past teams have returned home with gold medals, so the pressure’s on. But team members, who have one more practice before the show, believe they’re ready for their moment in the spotlight.

And those who sampled Wednesday’s offerings took home a memory of divinity: A slice of sea bass sausage, a bite of chuck with a touch of dressing, the blend of apricot, pecans and couscous and that one, small, blueberry.

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BTC students off to Knowledge Bowl

You know that orange powder you mix with a half a stick of margarine and milk?

That’s not one of the grand sauces, despite what the people at Kraft think.

The grand sauces are, not in any particular order, espagnole, veloute, béchamel, tomato and hollandaise.

That is one of approximately 3 trillion facts a group of Blackhawk Technical College students are trying to learn for the Culinary Knowledge Bowl on March 26 at the 2010 American Culinary Federation regional conference in Indianapolis.

The team consists of captain Jay Mason, Kristina Pins, Afton Mann, Rebecca Fernandez and alternate Amanda Schlagel. BTC instructor Chef Katie Thomas is the team’s coach.

Students study from prescribed textbooks including “On Cooking,” and “On Baking,” and others having to do with the business side of restaurant life.

They also study from the mother of all culinary textbooks, Escoffier’s “Le Guide Culinaire.”

“Well, we only have to study four chapters of Escoffier,” said Pins.

That’s like saying you only have to know four chapters from “Moby Dick” and those four are the ones that go on and on and on about whales without advancing the plot at all.

Sure, both Melville and Escoffier were geniuses, but some of their stuff is as impenetrable as two-decade old-fruitcake.

What else do they have to know?

-- Julienne is a 1/8- by- 1/8- by-2-inch cut.

Ha! And you thought julienne just meant thin strips.

- Tourne’ is a seven-sided cut with a blunt end that looks a little bit like a football.

The cut is for presentation’s sake, when you want something to look nice, Mason explained. So don’t bother trying to transform your Tater Tots.

Students have 10 seconds to answer each Jeopardy-style question, which is about the same amount of time it takes a middle-aged person to gather her thoughts.

Mason believes his team is ready for the big time. Members have been working for about a year, they’ve participated in scrimmages and they’re all committed to the art and science of cooking.

Let’s hope they remember to answer in the form of a question.