What do you get when you bring carpenters and cooks together?

Bar-q-terie!

The second annual Bar-q-terie was a meaty collaboration between UFV culinary students, who planned and prepared the menu, and carpentry students, who designed custom ‘bar-q-terie’ boards based on the cook’s menu plan.

Bar-q-terie is a term used to describe a charcuterie-like board utilizing grilled and roasted meats and vegetables rather than cured ones.

“This event combines food, pleasant conversation and the excitement of youth,” says carpentry instructor Patrick Watchorn, who planned the event in collaboration with culinary professor Sian Hurley.

The collaboration was a formal assignment for the culinary students and a fun optional extra for the carpentry students.

“This event came soon after my students’ meat unit,” Hurley explained. “In this unit, they get to experience commercial butchery.”

This year with the help of Teresa Carlson of the Research Office, who is liaising with Stó:lō food providers, the students partnered with a hunter who had a moose to butcher. They visited the family of the hunter and assisted in the process.

As a follow-up to the moose butchery, the culinary program brought in primal cuts for a side of beef to the classroom.

“The students were given a lesson in the structure of the animal, which directly links to the ‘whys’ of the cooking methods needed to best cook the meat,” notes Hurley. “For the assignment, the culinary class was given free rein to assess the properties of their chosen products and design a ‘bar-q-terie’ display using several methods they had learned. We partnered with the foundation-level carpentry students for this aspect. They were instructed to pair up with the culinary students to match their designs to the menus planned.”

The event culminated in a lunch-time event where the culinary students displayed their food on charcuterie boards custom-designed by carpentry students for the event.

Participants and guests had the chance to sample each station, and to vote on best tasting food and best-looking cutting board.

The event also created an opportunity for students from different disciplines to mix and mingle with faculty and staff from the Faculty of Applied and Technical Studies.

“The skills that a Red Seal Chef has includes more than just creating delicious food. What a great meal really offers is an opportunity for people to intentionally gather at the dinner table, to build connections, relationships, and community,” noted Jennifer Lau, department assistant for the Faculty of Applied and Technical Studies, who attended the event.

Bar-Q-Terie Project assignment

A collaborative project between carpentry and culinary.

Objective:

For apprentices of different industries to work together on a like-minded project with both industries having an equal effect on the outcome.

The students in the Carpentry program and the Culinary program will be put in design groups. The culinary students will describe to the carpentry students their style of cooking, their preferred flavour profiles and hypothetical menu ideas. The carpentry students will take that information and create a 15×9 cutting board to suit the ideas discussed in the design groups.

This project will be concluded on the November 10 culinary lab day. The culinary students will prepare their bar-q-terie menu and the carpentry student will join the class to assess. All groups will try each menu. The classes will anonymously vote on their favourite menu and their favourite boards. A prize for top menu and top board will be awarded. Note: the winning boards and menus may not necessarily be from the same team.