A Day In The Life

Ballymaloe Week 1

It’s hard to believe that 10 days ago I was under water somewhere off the coast of Thailand. Things come pretty fast and furious at Ballymaloe and it doesn’t take long for routine to set in. Even after just a week, life before school is a distant memory.

Our welcome breakfast

Darina in the lecture room.

Touring the grounds.

Tim Allen, talking us through various plating techniques

A typical day at Ballymaloe starts at 8:30 in the morning, weighing up ingredients and picking herbs for your morning recipes. From 9 to noon (or later, we’ve been finishing around 1PM since we’re all still moving a bit slow), we’re in the kitchens working away, trying not to sever or burn our fingers too badly. There are 4 kitchens here for the 64 students. We get split into teams of two, and you stay with your partner for a week at a time. Each partner duo gets assigned a section in one of the kitchens (this week I was grey, kitchen 2, for example), and an instructor will oversee two or three sections each morning.

This is my lettuce.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.

A two-person team will be assigned five or six different recipes (a starter, main, vegetable side, and two desserts for example), and a few days a week you will have to make a bread or some biscuits as well. It’s up to you and your partner to divide up the work between yourselves. Techniques are repeated throughout the week so that you and your partner both get a chance to make pastry, bread, dice veg, and all that good stuff (at the end of the course we have to hand in a checklist of all the techniques learned, to ensure that each student has done everything there is to do). Once we’re done with our work order for the morning, each student plates up a single serving of each of his or her dishes, and presents them to their instructor. Taste, technique, and presentation are scored on a tasting sheet, and assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, we all bring our dishes into the dining rooms to share for lunch.

Sample work order, for a pretty easy morning.

Presumably, this will all be full in a few months time.

Afternoons we all get together in the lecture room for demo, where we are shown how to prepare everything on the menu that we’ll be responsible for the next morning. Demo usually runs for about 4 hours, after which we all do a little tasting of the demo dishes to get an idea of what we’re aiming for in the kitchen.

Wednesdays give us a break from cooking duties. Instead we get lectures on wine, cheese, food safety, and whatever else may be relevant to our interests.

A week's chores.

In addition to cooking, all of us students are giving a rotating chore list. Throughout the week you may find yourself out early in the morning picking salad greens, feeding the hens, polishing cutlery and formally setting the table after lunch, or serving other students after the afternoon demo. There are extracurriculars to volunteer for, too. This week I went out to the dairy one morning to watch them milk the cows and separate their cream, and in a couple weeks I’ll be going to the Ballymaloe House kitchen to experience a commercial operation in full swing. There will be extra butchery, sourdough, organic gardening, and who knows what other classes coming throughout the course.

So that, more or less, is the daily grind as it is here. It’s all still a bit overwhelming but I’m loving it. Sure, sometimes the afternoon demos drag on. It’s dark when we arrive in the morning and darker when we leave at night. But the energy in the kitchen with everyone running around in various states of panic is infectious. There’s so much to learn and do, at such a high standard, that (so far!) I’m excited and a little anxious to hone my knives and get started every morning.

Goats cheese rocket and honey salad, scone with loganberry jam and cream. Plated and ready for tasting.

Some of my first weeks work includes carrot soup, brown soda bread, Gruyere and dill tart, fork biscuits, scones, jam, and three or four different salads.

Outside the kitchens, my housemates and I are getting along well. We are one of the more “adult” houses, I think I may be the youngest of the bunch. That suites me fine, though. We’re a pretty quiet group, usually just come home in the evenings, light a fire in the fireplace in our siting room, and unwind with a cup of tea while we talk about what we all did that morning and file away our recipes. Fortunately, a few people here have their cars with them so we can get back into the real world on the weekends. Midleton is the closest town, and yesterday four of us went there in the morning to check out the local farmer’s market. Ballymaloe runs a stand at the market, and one of the extracurricular jobs you can volunteer for is to help run the stand on Saturday. I’d like to give that a shot in a few weeks once I’m a little more settled in. They sell some of the student’s work at the stand (this week they were selling some of our jam and chocolate hazelnut tarts). Sadly, we don’t get any commission J. After the market, we drove into Cork for lunch and a look around. Today I think we’re all taking some R&R, tonight we’re roasting a chicken from the market and making ourselves a little feast.

So far so good.