Culinary Incubator Moving

The Colton Studios experiment is over as of July 30th.

The rebuilding of the Kitchen at Colton was an incredible example of individuals and organizations working to build a kitchen for local Recovery School District students for them to work with local cooks and chefs, but now it is basically over before it had a chance to start (at the Colton location).

We are moving on and hope to be up and running in our new location by the new year (and this time we will have a 2 year lease!). There is more to come on that front, with a new blog to be launched soon.

I'm dedicating the rest of the Colton Kitchen blog to the incredible volunteers that came and donated their time and energy to get New Orlean's 1st culinary incubator up and running.

To all those volunteers who gave their time, to all the companies who donated equipment, to the Krewe De Foodre members who worked week after week to make this happen, your work is an investment in the future of this program.

We all proved that we could build a kitchen and feed hundreds of people during the Jazz Fest afterparty at Colton.
Even though our time was not enough to work with the students, we will be working with local high school students in the future and continuing the program that inspired us all to do what we did with the Colton Kitchen.

Stripped Kitchen

The building of the kitchen has been a roller coaster of inspiration, mixed with dissolution the last three months. I haven't blogged because building a kitchen with no money is a methodical march with few milestones (except the brilliant volunteer experiences).

School kitchens have been systematically stripped of any bit of equipment that would make them useful for anything but reheating food from the hub kitchen. At the beginning of this project I assumed they did this in a passive capacity, but there is so much that has been taken from this kitchen that i have to assume that their goal was to make all school kitchens completely useless for cooking.
I don't know if the transition happened over years, of if someone just came by one day and took all of the cooking tools out of the place, but I can't cook in there. here's a list of what the kitchen had to cook with when I walked in:
4 blodgett convection ovens, 1 huge steam kettle, a steamer... that's it.
what had been there was a commercial dishwasher (the hookups are there), a hobart mixer (they left the attachments), and I'd have to assume, at one time, a stove and refrigeration.
Even the bare concrete floors make the place illegal to cook in.
and there is no fire suppression system which = no open flames.
Our public schools don't have kitchens, they have reheating stations. Which makes it almost impossible to turn them into working kitchens unless one has what we have, a closed school and alot of time.
The experiment continues...

Thanks to Viking Range Corporation!!!

Inferno Studios (down the street from Colton) offered us a free Viking Range, if we could move it out - and we did - and it was ours. Susan Spicer called up Viking to see if they could help us get it up and running. They sent their tech guy out, who said is was beyond repair. Then Viking called us up and said they'd be sending us a new one to replace it!!!

Thanks Viking Range, for helping out the Colton kitchen!

The video is of us moving the beast over from Inferno.

Alot Has Happened...

since the last post!

Yes, I am an irresponsible blogger.

The kitchen has had 2 groups of amazing volunteers. First off it was the National Restaurant Association, 150 of them helping throughout the school and about 15 in the kitchen. They did a great job and caught us up on the scraping before the big paint (that will happen in a couple of days). The other group was from Tulane. Again, great job, alota help.

Glen was the foreman both days and did a great job of lineing everyone up. Joe, Eric, Nat, and I rounded out the crew. A couple more service folk are on board the Krewe De Foodre, Coy LeBeau and Cerulleal Satrinine. Coy is a chef and Cerulleal has been reading up on her native poultry breeds (fresh eggs from out back anyone?).