Fish Fabrication / Training

Today was an odd day. Chef Ted came in and basically fabricated a large variety of fish in front of our eyes -- round and flat fish, a salmon, 2 lobsters, shellfish, bivalves and a squid -- things that we took several weeks to work through in culinary arts, here we were shown in 3 hours. The point was to illustrate how in the end, a whole fish is only 45 to 50% usable, and the rest is garbage. Makes one appreciate how valuable fresh proteins are. Chef also lectured a bit about how expensive some species are today that were considered garbage fish 30 to 40 years ago: skate, yellow fin tuna, cod. Back in the day, it was just salmon and Dove Sole. 99% of all shrimp in the U.S. is both farm raised and imported.

The last hour of the class was the finishing of a topic that I missed on Monday, due to the James Beard Awards. It seemed pretty self evident, but Richard presented a flowchart of sorts for job training. Determine the duties, show the duties, let the employee practice the duties, evaluate and go from there. Have written descriptions of responsibilities, blah blah blah. All very nice in an ideal world, but in the real world, you hope your staff knows what's up, and try not to give them too much rope to hang themselves with. The staff a manager hires is a reflection on how good the manager is -- it will never be better than the manager who assembles and directs them. I understand that; still, it grates on me a bit whenRichard presents this stuff like it's a formula. Real life seems so much more complicated and compromised.