Week 9: Smashing Bacon & New Pork City
- Oct 30, 2017
- 5 min read
Day 1: Our prep day for Meat Madness really sneaked up on me but the day went by smoothly. We first began following the outline finalized in our preparation plan. Before we could be let loose to gather our ingredients, Chef warned us to focus on using our time wisely and not wasting it by standing around or wondering what’s next to be completed. Once he finished his instructions he told us to send one person from our group to the front to gather all our ingredients needed for the day. After we assigned somebody to go up we all split to go gather out kitchen equipment and utensils needed to prepare everything for the next class period.
My task for the day was simple in theory but needed exact precision to be perfect. It was slicing and preparing the bacon to be wrapped around our dish- stuffed jalapeno peppers. I went and grabbed our portion of the cured pork belly and then grabbed Chef to instructed me how to slice the meat and how to pound it so it was perfectly flat enough to wrap tightly around our peppers. He showed me how important it was to slice the bacon thinly in the first place so it wasn’t as hard to pound out to flatten. Then to flatten the bacon I was to grab a piece of saran wrap, place it on top of the sliced pieces and pound on the bacon with a kitchen mallet until it was the perfect consistency.
As Chef left to help other groups with their dishes I was left to slice and smash our delicious honey-cured bacon. The beginning of this process seemed almost too easy for me but as I kept slicing through the pork belly I realized how thick I was slicing the pieces! My first instinct was the fix my cutting method to reduce the size which worked for a couple tries but then I continued to cut the bacon thicker again. Once I was able to smash all the bacon I thought that it would help to smash the extra thick pieces to they’d be thin. Much to my surprise it only hoped a little bit and left the bacon still thicker than most.
There was no way I could change some of my mistakes with our dish so I smashed the bacon as thing as I could and then opted to help wrap our bacon around our jalapeno peppers so they’d be prepared for event day. This took up the rest of our allotted time for the class period. Once my group was finished juicing our oranges, stuffing and wrapper our peppers with bacon we labeled our items for event day and began helping clean up.
My biggest AHA moment from our prep day was that when I make a mistake I am able to take notice of that mistake and try everything in my power to fix it. This was represented by my task of preparing the bacon for our dish. Some of the slices I needed to prepare were absolutely perfect and some were not. While that may have held some others back I was able to keep going with my task and even help out others. Mistakes should not hold anybody back but rather encourage them to keep making themselves better.
Here's some pictures of my individual prep plan, our table before we began preparing for event day, Madison hand-juicing our oranges for our drink, the bacon slicing/smashing process & our jalapeños being wrapped!
Here's a video of Chef showing me how to properly prepare the bacon to wrapped around a pepper. By using saran wrap and a nifty kitchen tool I was able to flatten out some bacon slices!
Day 2: Holy bacon! It was our second event day. I and one of my team members, Rilee were able to come early to class in order to get ahead on our decorations (which were extravagant). Our theme for this event was an experience of “New Pork City” – which was tightly based around NYC. When we first began researching ideas for our theme we came upon an article that said New York City was the #1 city in the U.S. that eats the most bacon. So, we thought it would be an interesting take to spin off of.
Our decorations consisted of a NYC skyline backdrop, a Subway sign, a big taxi cab, a light up Times Square and our own personal street in front of our table. While decorating was going by smoothly, it was my task to put our bacon in the oven. I loaded our stuffed peppers onto a sheet pan and placed it in the conventional oven for about 30 minutes. As our bacon was cooking we were preparing our drink- our virgin tequila sunrise. Which was a tribute to the current Flagstaff tradition just last weekend as well as a way for our guests to cool their palette after eating a savory and spicy pepper.
Finally, the event began. As people came over to our table we turned on the charm and gave them our pitch of each of our menu items. My task was running my own “food cart” on the New Pork City streets where I served our bacon-wrapped peppers. Our concept took the common elements from NYC such as food carts that serve hot-dogs, pretzels or pizza, but in Pew Pork City we only serve bacon-wrapped anything!
While this concept was appreciated by some we did receive some critical feedback from people not understanding our connection to our dish and our drink. Which was understandable, while we were preparing for this event it did feel like a very rushed process. This caused our group to not plan out our “why” for each thing we did.
This realization led me to my AHA moment for the day. It is incredibly important to have a WHY for everything you do in a kitchen. Yes, our theme was fun to participate in and work with but if only we had an in-depth reason as to why we did each thing for our dish that we could relay to our guest maybe we wouldn’t have received the feedback we did. I’m going to make sure to know the reasoning for each thing I do for this next event- no doubt about that.
Here are some pictures of our decorations for our event day, our dish itself (which was delicious), a picture of us winning "Best Presentation" and a cute group photo of our tour-guide Kyle, our food vlogger (Rilee), our food cart vendor (me) and our drink cart vendor (Madison).
Here is a video that our food vlogger Rilee took of Chef coming by our table to experience New Pork City as well as give his opinion of our concept and our taste.
A Weekly Concept Integrated From Another Class Into This One...
A class that I'm in this semester is Spanish 101 which is entirely focused around communication and listening to the material begin taught. A concept that can be intertwined into this class is just that; communication. It is so important to listen to instructions from the professor and ask questions about the demonstrations in order to completely understand. It is equally as important to listen to your teammates and communicate with them to ensure that everyone is on the same page when other doing a demonstration or just working on a preparation plan.
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