Angela M.
Yelp
This review is for the knife skills class that I attended in March.
Having worked in my church kitchen through high school, watched countless hours, and considered culinary school if I quit my day job, I thought it was time to take an official knife skills class. Turns out I already knew more than I gave myself credit for.
The class started at 6:30 in the demonstration space of the Ansley Mall store. There were 2 tables set up with 8 seats each, with utensils, plates, glasses, water pitchers, and some hummus with crackers. We talked and introduced ourselves as the other participants arrived, and I save 2 seats for Tanya and Rachel to join me. I was there early, and I wasn't watching the clock just yet, so I'm not sure what time we actually got started. A volunteer introduced himself and explained all the hand outs that we had a the table. The Chef introduced herself, and explained that this was more of a talking class, with all the demo and doing after presentation of the material. The hand out had plenty of information about the different parts of the knives, different types of knives, and different materials. Chef pretty much talked/read through all this information. They had pretty much every kind of knife available for the group to try out once we actually got started.
We split into the two islands, and then into smaller groups to work on deboning a chicken. With the chicken, they made stock and cooked the chicken for chicken salad. While the volunteers collected and cooked, we practiced on corn, onions, peppers, tomatoes, garlic, strawberries, oranges, and herbs. As I mentioned, most of this was what I'd already heard or seen from my previous culinary experiences, other than the deboning of the chicken. I would've appreciated more technique critique by the Chef and/or the volunteers, but considering others were in more need of attention, I didn't mind. At least I got to try out a large selection of chef and paring knives, and even a few bread knives.
My main complaint is that we didn't eat until 9pm (other than the hummus). Not sure if this is always the case with their classes, but if I'd known, I would've eaten before I went! We had the chicken salad that we'd deboned the chicken for, the tomato salad, the corn salad, and strawberry shortcake (for which we'd cut the strawberries). It was all A-OK food, but not really to my preference. I also would've appreciated actual recipes, as we all just kind of tossed chopped vegetables into the bowls based on verbal agreement at the table.
I'm looking forward to using the discount coupon I received on one of those fancy knives!