Organic vs. All Natural

In the past couple of years we have all experienced the rise in demand for organic foods. At the grocery store, every shelf in every aisle seems to have an organic offering for our favorite foods. From frozen burritos to chocolate milk, I know I am constantly having the internal argument that 50¢ more is totally worth the extra healthy goodness that organic provides.

There is no argument that organic products contain more nutrients than their counterparts, but are we getting our full money's worth of organic product in that box? Well it depends.  I learned last week in Nutrition class that even though there are certain USDA standards a company must meet until they can label their product "organic," there are different levels of organic.

Surprising, right? You thought organic meant organic right? Well so did I, so I took a little field trip to Whole Foods to do some investigative journalism. Let's start off at the top and work our way down:

100% Organic

These products are rare to come by and it took me quite a while to actually find one in Whole Foods, but I finally came across this 100% Raw Organic Honey. These products must only contain organic ingredients, with the exception of water and salt.

Organic

Only 95% of the ingredients in a product labeled as "Organic" must be organically produced.

Made with Organic...

Now it starts to get a little tricky. Take a look at the box and notice that it says, "Made with Organic Grains."  Now if I were to pass this in the grocery store and I saw the term organic, I wouldn't think twice about it. I mean organic means organic right? Well not really, a product like this is only required to have 70% of their ingredients be organic.

All Natural

What about food labeled as "All Natural?" That means it is better than organic foods, right? I don't know about you, but when I hear the term "All Natural," I think of chickens grazing on the country side and bushes of berries found on accident during a nature hike.

Well you see that isn't exactly true. The truth of the matter is that it is very expensive to meet the USDA qualifications and call your product organic.  To save a couple of $$$, some suit in a boardroom coined the term "All Natural" and slapped it on the label.  Now I am not saying these products aren't "healthy," I mean this cereal is clearly better for you than Fruity Pebbles (Not nearly as tasty), but it is good to be aware and know the difference. To sum it up, there are no regulations when it comes to All Natural products and any company is allowed to use it.

Touché Corporate America, I'm starting to catch on.  Between cost, availability and now marketing, I am finding it harder and harder to actually eat healthy. A good way that you can ensure you are buying a truly organic product is to look for this symbol on the label.  This shows that the product contains at least 95% organic content.

Blanching

I have always been under the impression that blanching something, like a vegetable (or sometimes fruit) is done to bring out the brighter natural color of food. It seems like more of a luxury than a necessity, reserved only for those who are looking to impress their dinner-party guests. I mean, I was brought up with the assumption that vegetables can go straight from the pot to the serving dish, as long as there is a pad of butter sitting on top.

But I admittedly missed the mark a little bit on this one.  While blanching vegetables does in fact enhance the color of the food, it is a technique that is found in almost all restaurant kitchens.

To give a little background, blanching is the process of boiling a vegetable in salted water to the point right before desired tenderness. It is then immediately taken out and dunked in a bath of ice water to stop the vegetable from cooking further.

The key piece of the puzzle that I have been missing for all of these years is that the vegetable can then be finished off at a later time and this is exactly what restaurants do!  Before a restaurant opens for the day, the prep-staff will cook vegetables, like broccoli or asparagus, almost to the point of completion and then store them for later after blanching them in ice water. Then, when you sit down and order the Cedar Plank Salmon w/ Asparagus, the cooks in the back will throw a little olive oil and garlic in a pan before quickly sautéing the asparagus. The extra time in the pan takes the vegetable to the exact tenderness the cooks intended (see why the prep-staff didn't cook it all of the way?).

Makes total sense right? I mean the cooks can't be expected to boil a fresh pot of vegetables everytime an order is placed.

I did however learn the downside to this in my Food Sanitation class this week, which is that blanched vegetables are more susceptible to bacteria and other biological hazards.  I'm not sure how long blanched food is allowed to be in the refrigerator before it is deemed unsafe, but I will definitely ask in week 2. In the meantime, if anyone has experience in the matter and knows how long the food can safely be kept, feel free to post in the comments. I will make sure to do the same when I find an answer.

Getting a Little Antsy

So week one of culinary school is done with and in the history books.  I am only signed up for two classes this quarter, Nutrition and Food Sanitation and Safety, and neither of these are of the "hands-on, in the kitchen" variety.  I was told by my adviser that these are both pre-reqs to my future classes, but I think that he is just trying to hold me back from taking this school by storm.  After one week, I can definitely say that I am antsy to get in the kitchen to learn some new skills.

Fortunately my first class, Food Sanitation and Safety was less boring than I thought it would be.  We spent the first half of class sharing sanitation and safety horror stories.  While a majority of the class told second-hand stories about people they know who dealt with all sorts of insects and bandage apparatuses in their food, I decided to treat everyone with a tale from my 2006 spring break cruise.

The last night of any cruise is marked with a fancy farewell dinner.  My friends and I all dressed (to the nines) and set out to enjoy one more night on board the ship.  After everyone finished their entrees, the entire wait staff came out and marched around a fancy dessert to everyone's tables.  The dessert was a Baked Alaska, which is pretty much an ice cream cake coated with liquor and lit on fire.  Sounds great right?  Well it is, until someone on the wait staff drops it on you....

Luckily this didn't happen to me, but thankfully I was close enough to the person that it did happen to.  Needless to say he wasn't tickled pink over the situation, but at least the lucky stiff was able to get free drycleaning out of it.

Now, the universe is a fickle place.  For every ying there is a yang, for every heads there is a tails and for every Food Sanitation class, there is a Nutrition class.  Now I know I am only one week in, but let's just say that expectations have yet to be met.  I'll keep it brief, but I will say that after experiencing the first two minutes of the class, I expected to see Michelle Pfeiffer walk through the door as our teacher (if you catch my drift), there was an infestation of ants in the southwest corner of the room and I think New York from VH1 is in my class.  Hopefully things pick up in week 2...

Clothes Off My Back

I’ve been told that women love a man in uniform and heard rumors that they also love a man who can cook.  It’s no wonder then that women swoon over guys in chef’s uniforms like guys in chef’s uniforms swoon over the likes of one Ms. Paula Deen. Ok, maybe there was some slight exaggeration in that last statement, but seriously, how is it that the Village People can have someone dressed up as an Indian Chief, but not a Chef? I guess he was seventh guy out and just missed the cut.

One thing that I have quickly learned in my short stint at culinary school is the importance and significance of a chef’s uniform. A traditional outfit consists of a chef’s coat, stylish black and white pants, a neckerchief (which is apparently a word) and of course the hat. If for whatever reason you have a hard time picturing this, just think back to the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.

Believe it or not, these articles of clothing aren’t just designed to be pieces of flair used to impress the ladies, in fact they were each designed nearly 200 years ago for helping chefs with specific functions in the kitchen.  For instance, the chef’s coat is made of thick cotton to protect wearers from the heat in the kitchen and also from boiling liquids that happen to spill on you.  And everyone knows that wearing cotton uniforms is an advantage, unless of course you are the New York Yankees.  The coats are also double-breasted, meaning if you impress the aforementioned ladies with your cooking skills, but have a nasty stain on your coat, you simply reverse the buttoning of the coat and hide the stains.  In your face Tide to-go pens…
Side-note: I got sized for chef coat earlier in the week and apparently a 6’2” 180 lb man wears a size Small chef coat.  Who knew?

Now, let me take a step back and offer up my opinion on chef pants. They seriously look like something designed by the first person eliminated on Project Runway for trying to be too avant-garde with their design.  The pants are usually black and white and have some kind of pattern reminiscent of a design found in a 3-D Magic Eye book.  Apparently they work very well at hiding stains, but I am guessing that’s because whoever is looking at your pants is too busy suffering from a seizure to ever notice. 

As for the neckerchief….yes I said neckerchief, this article of clothing is worn for the sole purpose of striking fear in anyone who dares cross the wearer.  Not quite, it just catches neck-sweat from falling into your fettucine alfredo at the Olive Garden.

And that leaves us with the ever-popular chef hat.  In the food world, your rank is visible to all by the style of your chef hat.  For example, simple line-cooks wear short and squatty hats, pastry chefs wear baker’s caps, the French wear berets and could care less what anyone thinks of it and the celebrity chefs wear the super tall hats.

I’ve also learned that it is common for these hats to have 100 pleats, which signify the number of different ways a chef can cook an egg. I haven’t picked up my culinary uniform yet from school, but I am guessing that my hat will have three pleats in it. Four if you count sunny side-up and over easy as two different types of eggs.

The pinnacle of celebrity chef status.

Chasing a Passion

My memory certainly isn’t my best trait, but one thing I do vividly remember is my first day of school. I was six years old and dressed to the nines in my dinosaur shoes and red backpack. I lived right around the corner from my elementary school, so my Mom walked me past our neighbor’s house (the Vance’s) alongside their overgrown, ivy-laden chainlink fence to Mrs. Jettie’s kindergarten class.

Nearly twenty years have gone by, but here I am again gathering my things for the first day of school. Instead of shoes that left a T-Rex footprint in the dirt and a boxy red backpack, I am suiting up with a pair of black pinstripe pants and a knife case filled with my Henckels. My school supply list now features things like meat thermometers and fish spatulas instead of protractors and trapper-keepers.

Before this blog goes on too much further, let me give you a little introduction to myself. For starters, I’m a guy who is not much different than any other guy. I’m certain that the story of my life shares a couple of shades of similarity with your own. The only reason that I decided to write a blog about it and the reason why I think you will read it (and hopefully enjoy it), is because I am chasing after something that a lot of us dismiss as something that we don’t have time for anymore, a passion.

After I finished college in 2006, I went back to set some roots in South Florida, started a career in the IT industry, and married the girl I sat next to on the first day of college Spanish class. I have been living that life for a while now and I am thrilled my life has played out the way it has. The city is beautiful, the work is challenging/enjoyable and my wife brings out the best version of myself. The only thing that is missing is that feeling of going after something in your life that you love to do. That thing for me is cooking and starting next week, I am going to culinary school!

Now it should be noted that I am not going to school for a career change. In fact, I don’t even care if I finish the program. I made it clear to everyone involved that the only reason I am doing this is to have fun and if the moment comes that I am not finding pleasure in this adventure, then I am packing up my knives and heading home.

A couple of years ago, I made the bold move of labeling myself as a foodie. I noticed that my TV habits were transitioning from MTV to the Food Network and my bookshelf was filling up with cookbooks instead of old unread Men’s Health magazines. It has only expanded from there as I now have a Wednesday night tradition of watching Top Chef with my wife. I find myself wanting to replicate the dishes after each episode, but not knowing how.

Over the years I have compiled a long list of questions that I am dying to ask someone in a chef’s coat, like what the hell a confit is and how to cook it? And what is so impressive about tartare (a trendy dish, which is simply thin-sliced raw beef)?
That is kind of the point of this blog. I want this to be a soundboard for anyone who loves food, anyone who wants to track my progress during this journey and anyone who hopes to live vicariously through this adventure.

I can’t wait for next week, as I’ve already convinced myself to treat each day there as if it were an episode of Top Chef. It's my competitive drive to show these folks that even though I am here for fun, I am going to set the bar pretty high. Granted, my first class is Food Sanitation, so I am not sure how I will go about that. Let's just say that those other students better watch out, because I am certain they will be giving themselves food poisoning before I do :)

 Ready to take on the world