Welcome back!
It’s getting down to the nitty gritty at KU -- Mallory and I
only have three weeks left of our internship!
Monday
I began my week working in The Studio and barista training
with Emily. All of the coffee shops on campus serve coffee from The Roasterie (based
out of Kansas City, MO), so Emily began my training by filling me in on the
Roasterie’s mission and values. Basically, as long as I remembered the catchy
phrase “Creating Exceptional Coffee Experience,” I was good to go. The phrase
perfectly sums up the expectations The Roasterie has for anyone serving their
products: prepare quality coffee and espresso drinks and offer exceptional
customer service.
After learning about my expectations as a barista, Emily
walked me through the process of making the different drinks offered at all of
The Roasterie locations on campus. Along with espresso drinks such as lattes,
cappuccinos, and frappes, KU diners can also purchase fruit smoothies at The
Roasterie locations. I began my practice of making drinks by learning how to
make smoothies. Though I felt like a smoothie master after blending a few,
Emily zipped through the smoothie preparation much faster than I, seeing as she
has all of the recipes memorized.
After I proved my ability to make smoothies, Emily taught me
how to pull espresso shots. I thought that was pretty simple -- the tricky part
began when I learned how to steam milk. It requires putting the steam wand into
the milk at just the right angle and depth for just the right amount of time. If
the milk gets too hot (above 160 degrees), you’ve burnt the milk and you have
to start all over (which happened to me A LOT). I probably tried steaming milk
around 20 times over the course of the entire day, and I was successful about 4
times. If I were a baseball player, my batting average would probably land me
on the bench….
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| 10th time's a charm! |
While I wasn’t too skilled at making hot espresso drinks, I
successfully made a few iced lattes and a frappe, and I passed the written
barista test with flying colors. As for the milk steaming, much more practice
will be needed!
Tuesday
On Tuesday, I headed to the Kansas Union building to work a
catering event under Robert Pierrelee’s supervision. I began my morning walking
around with Robert to discuss the different aspects of catering, including
staffing events, working with customers, piecing together event menus, and the scope
of events that KU catering executes. We also had some interesting side
conversations about the best KC barbeque (now I have to add KC Joe’s to my list
of restaurants to try).
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| NSO lunch |
After talking with Robert, I helped set up for and run the
serving line during the New Student Orientation lunch. It was pretty simple:
watch the food on the line, take the hotel pan off of the warmer when it gets
low, and replace it with a fresh one. Everything went smoothly, and the diners
seemed satisfied with their meal of spinach lasagna, spaghetti with meat sauce,
green beans, and salad. I ate some for lunch once the event
was finished, and I can’t blame them. Delicious!
Wednesday
Wednesday was another field trip day with David. He took us
to Kansas City, Missouri to tour The Roasterie factory. It was a nicely timed
field trip, since Mallory and I just completed our barista training this week.
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| The Roasterie |
The Roasterie has a really cool story. The founder, Danny
O’Neill, broke into the coffee roasting business with a small roasting machine
in his house. Now, he roasts coffee in the warehouse in Kansas City. His
roasting method, air roasting, is different from the traditional method, drum
roasting, in that it uses hot air to roast the beans from the bottom. This
apparently roasts the coffee beans more evenly (the drum roasting tumbles the
beans in a drum, which doesn’t always roast the entire batch as evenly). Though
I am a coffee lover, I never knew too much about the roasting process, so it
was cool to learn about!
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| So many coffee beans! |
After touring the roasting section of the factory, our tour
guide made us some coffee via the V60 brewing method. He very thoroughly
explained the difference between the different roasts of coffee (light, medium,
and dark) and the different types of brewing (automatic coffee maker, V60, and
French press) and how those factors affect the flavor of the coffee. My
personal preference is French press, but the coffee he brewed for us was
amazing, too!
We returned to campus around noon, so Mallory and I grabbed
some lunch and then headed up to North College Café to begin filming for our
videos. Since I am making my video about the vegan food options on campus, I
recorded a voiceover of Jim Schilling speaking about the Nature’s Finest
concept. This is a line of vegan recipes that will be debuting in the
residential dining halls in the fall. It’s cool because the concept was one of
the projects the NACUFS interns worked on last summer, and now I am featuring
it in a video for my project – full circle!
In addition to recording the voiceover, one of the NCC
chefs, Tommy, plated some vegan dishes for me, and I snapped a few shots to add
to my video. Jim also gave me a list of the vegan recipes that will be on the
menu rotation in the fall. I wish I cold stick around to test them all because
they sound delicious!!
Thursday
Thursday began bright and early with Cheryl Wiley, one of
the dietitians on staff. Mallory and I spent our morning in the banquet room of
Mrs. E’s with her learning about the nutrition education she does throughout
the school year, along with the training she completes with new employees.
Cheryl had a lot of materials to show us, and it was very impressive -- some of
the education materials even won her a NACUFS award!
After talking to us about nutrition education, Cheryl showed
us some training PowerPoint presentations. The training includes not only
customer service, food safety, and KU Dining employee policies, but also food
allergy training.
Once Cheryl wrapped up the last of her training PowerPoints,
Mallory and I headed to the office of Mark Maranell, the general manager of
Mrs. E’s. We showed him our theme dinner materials, which included our menu,
decorations, and ideas for interactive features. He was very impressed and
happy to offer us help with our concerns. Having Mark’s approval made
everything seem more final, and I’m super excited to see how everything works
out!
After finishing up with Mark, Mallory and I met with Mindy
and Travis to discuss sourcing our ingredients for our theme dinner. Since we
are trying to get a lot of ingredients locally, we had some questions for Mindy
about where some of the produce is from. Unfortunately, some bad weather in May
is interfering with us getting some of the produce locally, but there are still
a good amount of ingredients that will be from local producers.
Our last task of the day was to finish recipe testing. Our
final recipe was a bison black bean burger. We didn’t have any bison to test it
with, though, so we used ground beef instead.
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| Bison Black Bean Burgers |
The first time around was a little tricky. We only mashed up
half of the black beans before mixing them with the ground beef, and the recipe
also called for chopped tomatoes. The black beans and tomatoes kept falling out
of the burgers when we were cooking them on the grill. Despite the burgers
crumbling a bit, the flavor was on point.
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| (Almost) Everything's better with cheese! |
Next time around, we mashed all of the black beans, which
worked out a lot better! The tomatoes were still a problem, though, so we will
omit them from the burgers completely and instead have a salsa on the side.
Talia and Mallory: 14. Recipe Fails: 2. (I think it’s safe
to say that Mallory and I dominated over the recipe fails.)
Friday
Friday was another planning day, so Mallory and I headed to
a local coffee shop, Alchemy, to get our caffeine kick and work on our
projects. Being a coffee shop lover, Alchemy was the perfect way to end the
week. They really do coffee right there because they use freshly ground coffee
beans and V60 brewers to perfectly brew each individual cup of coffee. The
personalized brewing really made a difference in the flavor!
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| Don't let your eyes deceive you -- that's coffee! |
In addition to the hot coffee, they also cold brew coffee
with a really cool set up of cold drip brewers on one of the walls. They use
the cold coffee for the chilled drinks and the draft coffee; the draft coffee
is simply the cold brewed coffee in a keg and is pumped out with nitrogen,
making it fizzy. I’ve never heard of serving draft coffee before, so I though
that was amazing! Not only was it pretty, it was also DELICIOUS. Alchemy
completely changed how I view coffee. I’m converting back to my French press when
I return home. J
Saturday
Saturday, Mallory and I headed into KC, MO to check out the
Riverfest, which was a celebration for the 4th of July, complete
with food and live music. Chilling along the Missouri River was a beautiful way
to spend the evening.
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| Missouri River |
With only three weeks left to go, all of the hard work
Mallory and I have been doing is really beginning to come together. I’m excited
to see where week six will take us!
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