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.