Sharpening my knife and my mind for final exams

Fabricating a chicken -- that is, cutting it up for cooking -- to meet American Culinary Federation standards is required to pass Culinary Foundations III. The test will be on Wednesday, and we will have a maximum of 15 minutes to complete it.

(My latest practice effort took 7 minutes, but there was no pressure.)

The ACF certification requires cutting the bird into 10 parts:

* The wishbone. This is the collarbone, and it is removed first, to make it easier to cut the breasts from the bone. Not all chefs or butchers remove it first, but it is required for ACF certification.
* 2 legs and thighs, with "oyster" intact. The oyster is a small lump of dark meat on the back of the thigh, prized by many as the most tender and flavorful part of the bird.
* 2 breasts, both boneless, one skinless.
* 2 tenderloins. The tenderloin is an oblong piece of white meat attached to the breast by a thin piece of membrane. It can be pulled off or is easily cut off.
* 2 wings, including one with the meat pulled down off the bone "lollipop" style.
* The remaining carcass. This is inspected to ensure that as much usable meat as possible has been cut from it.

Martin Yan of "Yan Can Cook" fame fabricates a chicken with a cleaver in under 20 seconds, as seen on this YouTube video. Included is Yan's heartfelt lesson to the students about the need to entertain restaurant guests.

Getting to the meat of it: 'The Jungle' revisited?

'The Jungle,' Upton Sinclair's game-changing look at the meat-packing industry in early 20th century America, paved the way for creation of sanitation safeguards and other improvements in the field.

We've been getting our own version of it in culinary school, where the syllabus for the Culinary Foundations III cooking class includes lectures, demonstrations and discussions covering a wide range of proteins used in restaurant service, and in the home, to, for that matter.

Not that conditions now -- at school, in restaurants or in the industry at large -- are anything like they were 100 years ago. But the basics are the same: Raise animals, fatten them, take them to market and, eventually, turn them into edible bits.

We are learning just enough butchery to understand the primal and subprimal cuts of beef and pork and how they are broken down. We also have begun learning how to cut meat, or as it's known in restaurant kitchens, fabricate proteins for the range of cooking techniques we have undertaken.

For example, we have twice practiced in class the fabrication of a whole chicken. That is, cutting it into 10 pieces for cooking. Doing so in 15 minutes and in a specified manner, keeping intact the most meat possible, is required to gain American Culinary Federation certification, something we will be tested on the last week of class. More about this in a future blog.

For now, suffice it to say that beef comes from cows, pork from pigs and chicken from, well, chickens. And hot dogs? Don't ask.