The Profane Chef

Today:

Les roux – blac, blond, brun (white, sandy, and brown roux)

Buerre manié (butter and flour paste)

Sauce béchamel

Sauce crème

Sauce persillée (parsley sauce)

Sauce velouté

Sauce espagnole

and for presentation: Blanquette de veau a l’ancienne et riz pilaf (traditional white veal stew and braised rice!)

For the veal, we trimmed and cut it and then cooked it in chicken stock with mirepoix, crushed white peppercorns, garlic, a bouquet garni, and mushroom trimmings, then drained the veal in order to create the sauce made from a sandy roux, the veal stock, and then enriched with cream (on the heat) and egg yolks (off the heat).  Make sure to season your sauce properly while it’s still on the heat so that the salt will be dissolved.  Once you take it off the heat to add the egg yolks (too much heat=scrambled eggs=worst sauce ever), it’s too late to season your sauce!

Our garnishes were glazed pearl onions, sautéed button mushrooms, and rice pilaf.  For the pilaf, sautée onion and shallots in butter and then add the rice.  You want to hear the rice cracking on the heat!  Add a bouquet garni and 1.5 times the volume of rice in chicken stock, throw a cartouche (parchment paper cut to the shape and size of your pan) on top of the rice, cover with aluminum foil, and the just toss the rice into the oven for 15-20 minutes!  When the rice has cooked thoroughly, dot the rice with some butter and gently stir the butter into the rice (a meat fork works wonders so that you don’t break the grains of rice) and you end up with some very tasty, beautifully shiny rice!  (Don’t forget to remove the bouquet garni!)

My sauce was good!  My sauce was good enough that Chef took an entire tablespoon full of straight sauce from my pan when it came time to taste my dish!  After that, the fact that I overcooked my veal a little no longer mattered to me at all.  Keep an eye on your veal!  After you’ve trimmed the fat and tendons from the meat, it cooks in no time!

Hallelujah!  Stock day!

We made the beginnings of Fond brun de veau (brown veal stock) and we made fond blanc de volaille: poulet poché (white chicken stock with poached chicken).  We also got to make Riz nature!  For those of you following along at home:  that’s right!  We made poached chicken and plain boiled rice!  Hospital food all the way!

I’m thrilled that we’ve learned a couple of stocks!  Brown stock involves roasting the bones of the animal, white stock absolutely not.  For the mirepoix on the white stock, we also left out the carrots, leaving only the onions and celery.

I got to truss and carve a chicken!  I can honestly say that I’ve never used a trussing needle before!  I spoke with another friend of mine, and she guaranteed that I would never be using one again.  I enjoyed it!  If I happen to go on a rampage or a spree of some sort, this little beauty will most definitely be my weapon of choice!  Ahhhh, my knife kit.  Truly a thing of beauty.

I digress…

I did learn on incredibly handy little trick today!  If you remove the wishbone (think collarbone) from the chicken before cooking it, carving the breasts becomes the easiest thing in the world!  I had absolutely no problem carving my chicken today!  Finding the joints was incredibly easy (wiggle the appendages, cut carefully where they move.  No cutting through bones necessary!).  Two legs, two thighs, two wings, two breasts cut into two pieces each, and two oysters!  I was seriously concerned for my sanity, knowing that I would be trussing and carving a chicken after only one demonstration, but everything went incredibly smoothly!  Chef actually thanked me for a good presentation!

Well, at least I know one thing for sure.  Next time somebody needs poached chicken and plain boiled rice, I’m your man!

I am officially in love with a cheese guru.  He wore a bow tie!

There is only one word for our first cheese lecture.  Inspiring.  The man knows his stuff!

We worked our way through Greek Yoghurt, Vulscome, Selles Sur Cher, Fromage Frais, Buffalo Mozzarella, Somerset Camembert, Emmental, Stilton Cropwell Bishop, Reggiano, Ricotta, a little Quicke’s Farmhouse Cheddar, Gjetost, and Munster working from the  mild cheeses to the strongest in order to retain the palate.

I love Munster.  Soft cheese; unpasteurised milk, coated in a neon orange blanket of bacteria.  Drool.

The best idea of the night had to be the idea to serve a cheese plate of, “Oh my God!  What the hell did I just eat???”  Serve a blue cheese plate!  Five kinds of blue cheese with a little drizzle of honey.  Serve a goat cheese plate!  Suggest with each plate only one kind of wine (“chef suggests…”) and if the customers argue with you, that’s a success!  Get people talking!

He had quite a lot to say about the safety and health benefits of eating cheese!  Despite the fact that over £1,200,000,000 worth of cheese is sold per year in the UK, only 2 cases of food poisoning have been attributed to cheese over a four year period.  Usually, the food poisoning has nothing to do with the cheese, but rather the handling of it or the contamination of it by other sources.  Hard cheese has a very low active water content (the moisture available to support bacteria) and it usually has high salt and acidity, which does not support bad bacterial growth.  Pregnant women are allowed to eat hard cheese!  I would like to say, though, that my guru believes that cottage cheese is an abomination and should be banned!  Soft cheeses are prone to problems, and the taking out and putting back into fridge of cottage cheese, as well as the contamination of the cheese by using multiple spoons is just a recipe for disaster.

Points to research:

Children with autism have been recommended to eat live yoghurt as a part of their diet and MS sufferers have been recommended a diet containing raw cheese.  Anybody out there have any more information on this?

I hate turning vegetables.  I’m not kidding.  HATE!

Today we made Légumes tournés et glacés (glazed and turned vegetables), Fonds d’artichauts cuits á blanc (artichoke bottoms cooked in a ‘blanc’), Concassé de tomates (cooked diced tomatoes), Duxelle séche classique (finely chopped mushrooms and shallots sautéed in butter) and focused on Présentation de bouquetère de légumes(presentation of cooked vegetables).

Let me tell you about turning vegetables.  Let’s say you have one courgette, one carrot, and one daikon radish.  You also have a small turning or paring knife.  Now let’s say you want them all to be the same size for cooking and presentation purposes.  Who wants a square or a rectangle?  Nobody.  Here’s a SUPER fun idea.  Let’s make football shapes!  Not just any football shape, but footballs with exactly five or seven even faces, all the same size!  You take your vegetable, cut 4cm length pieces, halve or quarter them, and then carefully shave pieces off the vegetable, curving and turning as you go.

Then you get to glaze the turned vegetables in water, sugar, and butter, reducing the liquid to create a glaze and praying that you used enough water to cook the vegetables to the precise point.

Turning the artichoke was a little better!  No need for a football.  What you do is break, not cut, the stem off (you need to wrench those little fibers right out of their happy little sockets), pull off the first few layers of tough leaves, and then start going around and around the artichoke with your turning knife, removing any green and all of the leaves.  You cut through the top at a 30 degree angle and leave the hairs intact.

You cook the artichoke in a blanc, flour, water, salt, and a bunch of lemon juice so that the artichoke doesn’t change to some sort of dreadful dark color.  The acidity of the lemon keeps color beautiful.

How do you know it’s done?  If you take it out of the water and pull a few hairs, the hairs should pull cleanly out!

Remove the hairs, and now you have a lovely little serving bowl for your duxelle and concassé!

For the concassé, core, score, blanch, refresh, skin, and deseed your tomatoes, dice them, and cook them with shallots, garlic, and butter and a bouquet garni.

My duxelle got compliments!  I’m definitely going to have to make that again.  The flavor of the mushrooms, shallots, and butter with the hint of acidity from the lemon (acid again.  You don’t want the mushrooms to lose color either!) made a pretty tasty little dish!

Going to have to practice turning, though.  Don’t like.  Don’t like one bit.

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I walked in at the end of a Superior Pastry demo.  Class was over, but the desserts were on the table.  Oh, how I wish I knew how to do this!