Scott McMillen

Kitchen Innovation: iPads at ICE

ohoadmin — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 22:36:14 +0000

Kitchen Innovation: iPads at ICE ohoadmin Wed, 03/05/2014 - 17:36 /sites/default/files/styles/width_1400/public/content/blog-article/header-image/Kitchen%20Innovation-%20iPads%20at%20ICE_1400x680.jpg.webp?itok=aDgGui_N March 5, 2014

By Scott McMillen

Our culinary and pastry students are faced with a number of challenges on a daily basis. First and foremost, they're asked to learn recipes and techniques with foreign names and to reinforce that learning after class with homework and library assignments. While striving to produce professional quality work, they must also uphold the highest standard of efficiency and cleanliness. And as their lessons progress, students are expected to do additional fieldwork outside of ICE, which includes trailing (short-term stints in commercial kitchens) to plan and prepare for their externships.

Chef Scott using iPads in class with students

For a program that is relatively short in duration—a mere twelve weeks to nine months of in-class work—this is a rigorous course load. So the last thing our students needed to juggle on top of it is a stack of textbooks. That's why ICE is proud to provide each of our professional students with their own iPad, preloaded with their course curriculum and textbooks. This technology offers our students and faculty a powerful tool that can help organize notes, record lectures and demonstrations and photograph dishes at every stage of preparation.

The iPad allows students to keep a living record of their day-to-day work at ICE, providing them the clear advantage of documenting their education in real time. It also helps encourage collaboration in the kitchen, enabling students to share documents and notes instantly—or even to submit homework and assignments to their instructor for instant feedback. Not to mention that sharing the day’s accomplishments with friends and family through apps like Instagram and Twitter helps keep our students motivated and proud. ICE is the only school of its kind to roll out tablet technology to such a wide extent.

The process to identify apps and programs that aid our instruction was not without its own challenges, but the benefits have proven to justify the investment. Most recently, instructors have been able to add interactive and multimedia elements—such as quick quizzes and slideshows—to presentations that are streamed to overhead Apple TVs in our teaching kitchens or directly onto the students’ own iPads.

Streaming content from Apple TV

The nature of technology is to evolve. With that in mind, ICE is committed to continuing to find new ways to use technology to enhance students' learning experience. It is our goal to continue blending modern technological concepts with traditional, hands-on instruction in the culinary setting, making us an innovative leader among culinary institutions.

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Bread Alchemy

ohoadmin — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:20:44 +0000

Bread Alchemy ohoadmin Sat, 04/20/2013 - 01:20 April 20, 2013

By Scott McMillen

Whisk yeast into water, add flour and salt, then mix until smooth. That's bread dough. Humble ingredients that—once combined, nurtured and baked—amount to much more than the sum of their parts.

Launching ICE's new Techniques & Art of Professional Bread Baking program this spring, Chef Sim Cass explained to his students that creating bread is alchemy: the seemingly miraculous transformation of one thing into something better, like lead into gold or humble ingredients into crackling loaves.

Yeast is the transformational ingredient in bread making. A living organism that requires food, moisture, comfort and time in order to thrive. The job of the baker/alchemist is to provide yeast with those conditions. In return, he or she will be rewarded with complexly flavored, wonderfully textured bread.

Each day Chef Sim, in his uniquely charming way, guides his students through the deceptively simple process of mixing dough. Temperature, as it turns out, is king. Water must be cooler than the 100°F that many baking books have been preaching for decades. The dough should be left to rise at a cool temperature as well, so that the yeast can develop slowly, creating a potent mixture of carbon dioxide and organic acids that allow the dough to rise and develop flavor.

Throughout this process—known by its scientific name as "fermentation"—the students were shown how to fold the living dough into itself and turn it over several times. This gentle action evens out the dough's temperature, strengthens its gluten structure and gives the students a sense of how the dough is developing. A baker can tell a lot about dough through the simple act of touching it. "Your body is your thermometer," Chef Sim extols. If a dough feels too warm, he won't hesitate to put it in a refrigerator for a half hour to get it right.

Hands identify more than temperature. As a dough ferments, there are subtle changes occurring in its textures well. As it rises, its surface grows tense, the starches in the flour continue to absorb moisture, and that too changes the texture. No book or blog post can give credit to the tangible methods that the expert chef shows his students through looking, feeling and assessing. A baker/alchemist needs to experience these transformations in order to guide them.

There are, of course, different techniques of mixing and maintaining dough, many of which Chef Sim will delve into as the program progresses. Students will use pre-ferments to further extend the yeast's fermentation time, and they will learn how to create a natural ferment (or "sour starter") in which no commercial yeast is used at all. But even when the bread making techniques become more challenging, it always comes back to four humble ingredients miraculously changing into something better: artisanal bread.

Bread Baking Bread