Cuisine Stage

by naikileo

3 weeks into my cuisine stage now! I am working in a 1-star Michelin restaurant called Ze Kitchen Galerie and so far it’s been a great experience. I’ve worked with quite a few ingredients I’ve never seen before (fresh almonds, whole pigs, etc.) and it’s been really interesting. Everyone I work with is young and passionate about the food they are creating – which is sadly not always the case in restaurants.

Generally I work in the prep kitchen in the basement and now let me work with the garde-manger station (making cold appetizers/ salads etc) for service. The garde-manger station is right next to the pastry chef so I help out plating some desserts as well! I LOVE working with the desserts. The restaurant is a fusion restaurant of Asian and French cuisines so the desserts are things like coconut soup or wasabi-white chocolate ice cream with condiments of miso-caramel and creme de noisettes. Delicious!

All the flavors used are super fresh; a lot of lemongrass, ginger, and galanga. We use a sous-vide machine for almost everything which makes it possible to do things like cook wagyu beef at a constant temperature of 60 degrees C (140 F) for 36 hours. I tasted a piece once and even though it was the most tender piece of meat I’ve ever eaten, I just kept chewing it because I wanted to keep the flavor in my mouth forever.

The plating is all incredibly artistic and delicate. It  was just about impossible for me to do in the beginning but I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m still much slower than the real chefs, I can do about 1 plate in the time it takes them to do 3… But I’ve had a couple of plates go out and the executive chef, Chef William told me “tres jolie!” Which felt pretty cool.

Here are some pictures!

Fresh Almonds!

The almond is gently cracked open with a knife or a rolling pin to release the inner meat.

That inner almond meat is then peeled and can be eaten raw! Delicious!

Bird’s eye chili peppers

One of my first successful “pretty” plates – Salmon “mi-fume” dressed with heirloom tomatoes, green beans, nectarine slices, pickled onions, fresh almonds, and various herbs.

Another plate – steak tartare with lotus root chips, eggplant chip, wasabina leaves, herbs and a trio of condiments: red pepper, chorizo, and wasabi.