Diary: Pictures!

[Malawry]

Folks have often requested pics of the school and of yours truly. I finally got around to snapping and uploading a few shots...

This is me, in my school-issued uniform. No necktie or apron; believe me, they add little to the overall effect. Note the sexy Rockport clogs.

If you visit L'academie, this is the entrance you will probably come through. It's rather unassuming; L'academie's professional campus is situated in an ordinary-looking office-industrial park.

I start my morning in the demo kitchen most days. I sit in the front row on the far left. Chef Somchet normally does her demos in front of me, while Chef Peter stands to the right behind the line. The refrigerator in there has a timed turn-off switch since its compressor is loud, so it is often too warm for food storage. We use the microwave to melt butter sometimes, but that's about it.

Here's the main kitchen, with a view of the line along the left. There's also a fish fridge on the left, and on the other side of that fridge is the spice table.

I think the spice table is pretty cool. We get most of our spices from Vann's, a Baltimore company. Among the salts we stock: Italian sea salt, Hawaiian sea salt, fleur de sel, Kosher salt, La Baleine, and Celtic sea salt.

Another view of the main kitchen. There are normally six tables arranged in the middle of this room, but some of them were removed for a special class when I snapped these shots. If you look at the far reaches of the room you will see the reach-in glass doors of the school walk-in.

Here's a peek inside the walk-in. The freezer is through the door at the back wall of the walk-in. Note the boxes of Plugra butter on the bottom shelf. (They're the white ones with the red bands.) Yes, that's Hellman's mayo on the shelf there.

We use rather ordinary pots and pans at L'academie. Believe it or not, we occasionally run out of items, but for the most part L'academie's potwasher Juan keeps everything turning over quickly. Dish storage and dish processing share the same long, narrow space.

Here's the pastry kitchen, with a view of the ovens at the back. The left counter is all reach-in refrigerators, with the upright reach-in at the back left. We do almost all pastry and bread work in this kitchen. It's also favored for pasta-making, as it's usually a little less humid than the main kitchen. This room is home for L'academie's pastry arts program, and use of this kitchen and the demo kitchen are carefully scheduled so we won't have to use the same rooms at the same time.

BTW: Many thanks to Rachel and Jason Perlow for all their image assistance.

[tommy]

now i'm officially jealous.

[spqr]

Where are the pictures? They're not loading for some reason.

[Basildog]

yeah, what she said

[Malawry]

I am sorry about the problems, which appear to be intermittent. I am looking for a way to resolve the issue and should hopefully have it fixed by tomorrow night.

[mb7o]

are you allowed to link to geocities pix from outside geocities? they load fine if you enter the URL by hand. put a page on your site with exactly the HTML from your post, or just an img link to the pictures, then put a link here to that. then you can follow the link from egullet and see the pictures. or move the pix to some other server.

[rslux]

If you need a free image dump, a friend runs this one: www.frutsel.org. Don't worry about the message about files moving, just click on the file dump link, create a directory, and go for it.

[Sandra Levine]

I don't have the images, either and the two helpful hints above are Greek to me.

[Malawry]

Thanks for the tips, which did make sense to me for the most part. Fat Guy has kindly helped me out, so all of the images except for the pastry kitchen picture should be showing at this point. I hope to get the pastry image up and running soon. Thanks again, and I'm so sorry about the problems.

Edit: Hats off to Hat Guy for saving my pastry kitchen picture, too.

[Rachel Perlow]

Yeah! You got the camera working!

Can we see pics of plated food soon?

[Jogafur]

Malawry, thanks for showing those photos. I would never have had the chance to see a professional teaching kitchen otherwise. I've been on a tour of the kitchens on a cruise ship, but it's kinda rushed (really fascinating, though). I'm enjoying your posts immensely.

[Kim WB]

Thanks for taking the time to figure it all out and get us these photos...it makes reading your diary easier to "picture" now. OK, VERY bad pun.

[sandra]

Malawry,

The sexy uniform is universal! I'm about to don mine again for patisserie which starts this week...

What are the black disks hanging from the ceilings in the main kitchen?

My LCB school is different in that we have 4 kitchens and the demo group gets broken up into 8-10 students in each kitchen and of course, each kitchen is much smaller - There is only one patisserie kitchen and one boulangerie - all of this in a very narrow, 4 floor townhouse-type building in the center of London.

I'm not quite sure how these compare to LCB Paris kitchens - maybe Loufood can fill this in...

Thanks for the photos!

Sandra

[Malawry]

Thanks for the feedback.

Due to various issues, these may well be the last images I manage to get up while I am a student, but if the situation changes I will look into photos of plated food, etc.

Jogafur, what's a cruise ship kitchen like? I've never seen one. There was a thread about eating on cruise ships, I think in the Pacific Northwest board, which talks about cruise ship kitchens and so on. Fascinating stuff. Meanwhile you can visit the kitchens of many professional schools even if you aren't a student, by stopping by an open house or by taking a fun recreational course taught in a professional teaching kitchen.

Kim WB, I'll forgive you one punny lapse.

Sandra, the black disks are retracting power cords. Normally the tables are lined up so there is one cord at each end of the six tables. We use them to power electric plates, Robot Coupe food processors, and the Vita-Prep and bar blenders. Some students are fond of working with the electric plates for soups and slow-simmering sauces, since they can get it going on the gas stove and then keep an eye on it over electric heat while working on other things at their table. I do this during tests but not much the rest of the time; I find the electric plates too annoying. There are drop-down power cords in the pastry kitchen, which you can probably make out in the image provided.

Professional kitchens vary greatly, and I appreciated your note about how yours differs from mine. I'd love to hear from other current and former students about the kitchens where they learn(ed).

[globglob]

Hi Malawry,

I'm currently at LCB-Scottdale, aka SCI. We have different kitchens for each block: Basics, Saucier, Stocks and Soups, etc. We also have two separate campuses as well. I'm currently in Basics. I am very jealous of your spice table. We just have spices in racks on the door of the equipment cage. Our main kitchen is just like yours, only with two more rows of ranges since there are about thirty students in the class. There's a small demo station in the corner of the kitchen where the chef does the demos. Since we're only in Basics, the Chef demos for about twenty minutes at the most. Our kitchen doesn't have any walk-ins, just reach-ins. I'm not sure what the other kitchens are like, but in Basics we all wash our own stuff after everything is done or as Chef would rather have us do "Wash as you go!"

[ChocoKitty]

Malawry, I just went from mildly jealous to positively green! Thanks for posting those pictures. Now I have to go back and read your diary entries with those pictures in my head.

[KateW]

Basics we all wash our own stuff after everything is done or as Chef would rather have us do "Wash as you go!"

This is exactly what our chefs say at JWU RI. Of course nobody washes as they go, so the 2 or 3 people assigned to dishes get stuck with it all at the end.

[stellabella]

you're every bit as cute i imagined you to be!

[Jogafur]

Malawry, I just remember the ship's kitchen as being HUGE. It seemed to have quite a few rooms. The ship I was on (Carnival Cruise lines) had a guest capacity of over 2000.

The main kitchen served two seatings per meal per day, in two main dining rooms. There were also other dining options, so I'm not sure that all the food was prepared in the main kitchen.

I'll be cruising again in mid-December, on Royal Caribbean. I'm definitely going to do another kitchen tour if it is offered.

Oh, and by the way, I was amazed at the wonderful food on the ship. I'd talked to another person before the trip and she told me that dining in the dining rooms was preferable to the little bistros and buffets in other areas of the ship. I'm so glad I took her advice, because the food and service were out of this world. We all loved the butter (Presidente) and asked for more at each meal