Ye Old Kitchen

I work as a student cook in one of BYU's cafeterias. Last week, they moved out of their old facilities into a brand new building. Feeling slightly nostalgic, and like it should be documented, I brought my camera to work and took pictures between preparing the last ever meal served in the fifty-year-old Cannon Center.
There were four of these big walk-in lockers--one for dairy, eggs, and milk; one for fresh fruits and vegetables; one freezer; and one for leftovers, cheese, and meat.


I was excited to see all the crazy equipment in an industrial kitchen. To the far left are the steamer ovens (which scare me--stuff comes out not just hot but wet, too). One of my first days, I asked what the other things were called, and the woman just shrugged. "Pots," she said. I could fit inside them; they boil water really fast. People would get up on a stool to stir the thing to the right of the photo, and stir using this huge metal spatula-looking thing, making them look like a witch over a cauldron.


Baskets for serving bread and pass-through warmers for transferring the food to the serving lines.
A better view of a pot.

Spices. Today, in the new Cannon Commons, we were missing some ingredients (including parsley), and someone told me to go to the old building to see if I could find them there. I walked in--the lights were off, it smelled a little rotten. There was still a case of tomatoes on the floor, and some brown bananas. I went into the dry storage room--which felt a little like a scene from Wall-E. Things were mostly cleared out, but there were some bottles and jars of things left behind on the shelves. Alone in the big, empty building, I picked over the leftovers. I never did find parsley. Who runs out of parsley?

(When I got back to the new building and told one of the chefs that I couldn't find it, he said, "That's okay, parsley doesn't taste like anything anyway. Maybe like weeds. Wait--not like weed, I mean like weeds.")


The dish room.

A great big scale in the bakery. The new building doesn't have one--there will be a central BYU bakery instead.

Bakery.
Where I spent a lot of time making hashbrowns and scrambled eggs on the grills and bacon in the ovens (in the back of the picture, by the red garbage can). There's salt on the floor because it got greasy and slippery.