A Four Hour Tour

So much happened today! In Chef Lipford's class we went on two field trips out on Landover, MD. First was Metropolitan Meats, they are a distributor of meats and whatnot, but also break down meats into further cuts as their customer desires. We went into all their warehouses and processing facilities, which were cold and empty, respectively. Two primary lessons that I learned lobsters can be stored in hibernation mode, and crabs have to be used within 12 hours of catching them. Crabs do not last.
That's the enormously unsexy lobster tank.

We also got to see their dry aging room. Dry aged meat is must more expensive than wet aged meat because of the longer aging time and the loss of moisture reduces the poundage of the meat. The temperature, humidity and ozone (?) levels are critical to the aging of meat and they actually had alarms go off if the meat dropped below the required limits. Did I mention that it was COLD? I thought I was going to freeze to death.
That was a couple slabs of meat slowly decaying on a rack.

After we finished up at Metro, we moved on to the Whole Foods Kitchen. This was their commissary (main kitchen for the mid-Atlantic area. They told us that they actually employee chefs to work in their store and in their commissary as an R&D chef (music to my ears)! The facility was like home-cooking on an industrial scale.