|
The adults think the food is delivered by a caterin servie or cooked by professionals, my team members regularly asked me if I am a trained cook.
No catering, no professionals, no trained cooks. We're just "teached" (this is another Taizéism!) permanents. And that's why things do no always work out perfectly in Big Kitchen. It teaches not only kitchen management (this job is not so much about cooking...) but also patience, compassion, self-confidence, courage, and decisiveness. Despite all the disagreements and difficulties we encounter this work is a parable of many who are one body, as different oart all joined to one another (Rm 12:5).
Big Kitchen is a place of life (and not only of yucky drains and disgusting grease). I liked to light the bain-marie 4. It has the sound of comfortable warmth during winter time.
Unfortunately we only lit them during summer and transformed our kitchen into a steam sauna - with long pants, saturated with sweat, and of cours our super monastic aprons.
In big Kitchen you are involved in team leading and team stopping. You commit yourself to something that is greater than yourself. Something so tough, so powerful, that unless you join together you won't accomplish it.
Cooking in Big Kitchen is not just a job - it's an adventure. But it's not only an adventure about food but also about hygiene - of course!
For this reason there is a special training course for cooks and food preparers that teaches us everything about hygiene and cleaning.
The big problem is that human food is an excellent culture medium where bacteria find their own food and multiply. But all bacteria don’t multiply at the same temperature. Certain ranges of temperature are dangerous because the risk of rapid multiplication reaches its maximum (specially the range from +20°C to +45°C).
And since working cloth protects food efficiently from contamination we were put in dandy aprons, hats and shoes.
We learned to respect the products. But sometimes we didn’t really know how to interpret the texts and graphics.
Food handling: Food handling requires a specific care to avoid mistakes (see graph).
We were taught the hygiene = health – of products, workers, and material. Applied hygiene means hygiene of surface. Cleaning is defined as elimination of dirt adhering to a surface with a detergent. The choice of a detergent is supposed to be made with common sense (see also “Deep Cleaning”). The chapter methodology advises a five steps procedure:
pre-cleaning -> cleaning -> first rinsing -> disinfection -> final rinsing.
During a cleaning/disinfection process, the following points are specially important:
- stopping the production
– preparation of the cleaning/disinfection
– cleaning and disinfection
– preparation of the production
– checking.
Not to forget – the more food is transformed, the more the impact of cleaning/disinfection is important.
Once all the cleaning and preparing is done it comes to the actual cooking. And dispite arguments with brother Arthur, lazy kitchen coordinators, graviation, water, electricity, the Association for Chili-Free Cooking, the Department of Compatibility with Italian Cooking Principals, and strange team members this job is one of the most exciting, challenging, and fullfilling I ever did in Taizé.
|
