Friday Soups

We've done so much this week, I need to begin with the most recent class and just work backward until my memory totally fails me.  Last night was our first soup night.  We've done sauces and stocks and knife cuts up til then, but last night was soups.  Three soups, caldo verde, French onion soup, and consomme.  Earlier on this week Chef Paul said he'd rather see us execute one recipe correctly instead of crash and burn on five recipes - so I decided I would completely engage in this consomme process and then catch up on my partner's work with the other two soups.

I've regarded consomme as one of those odd, almost alchemical food productions, and was looking forward to learning it hands on.  (The following excerpt from this blog is a good how-to on making consomme:)

You put the mirepoix of onion/carrot/celery, plus a little tomato, a couple of egg whites, a few ounces of “clearmeat” (ground chicken breast in this case) in a saucepot, and stir this mess to combine. Throw in a  bay leaf, a few cracked peppercorns, and a parsley sprig for flavor. Add a quart of chicken stock. Put it on the stove and let it simmer. The solids gather and form a “raft” on the surface of the stock, with the proteins in the egg whites and clearmeat and acid in the tomato attracting impurities in the stock. You keep an eye on the raft while it forms, using a spoon to gently create a vent, or “chimney,” in the center. The raft looks disgusting, like the worst frittata you ever saw.

God forbid your raft should sink, or you’ll need to take emergency measures to rescue the consomme. Our textbook devotes pages to saving doomed consomme.

Once the raft has done its dirty job of capturing impurities, it’s time to reveal the beautiful consomme below. You set a chinois (fine-mesh strainer) over a very clean saucepot (you don’t want your consomme to pick up new impurities, after all). Place a coffee filter inside the chinois.

Then carefully ladle the consomme into the chinois. It’s not a bad idea to repeat this process–and blot the surface of the soup with a piece of parchment paper–to eliminate any lingering impurities. Put your consomme back on the stove to get piping hot, and add salt to taste.

When finished, consomme looks like gasoline or chardonnay.  Some upscale restaurants serve it in wine glasses for the effect.  We had to brunoise carrots and celery for garnish, but according to Chef Gary my brunoise looks like boxcars.  I told him I'd practice over the break, because he's right, they do look like boxcars.  But my consomme turned out very good, he said "Make no mistake, this is a real consomme."  That to me is total validation, man.  Not bad at all for my first time ever.  It was awesome watching the raft develop and the broth beneath getting clearer and clearer.

The French onion soup required onion carmelization for a long, long time.  The onions were actually the first thing the chefs wanted us to get going.  Onions for that soup, the raft setup for consomme, and we weren't even supposed to thing about caldo verde until the other two were almost wrapped.  The chefs said the onion soup could've been caramelized further to develop even more color and flavor, but hell it was still pretty good.  (And I redeemed myself today by making some for Jen; it was darker and yummier.)

Caldo verde is very delicious.  Render cured chorizo, then throw in onions and garlic, sweat them, throw in chicken stock and peeled diced potato, cook until tater is 2/3 tender, then throw in kale for 5-10 minutes, let the stock tighten some from potatoes that have disintegrated, and serve em up serve em up man!    

The chefs were cool about giving us all some time to eat and enjoy our creations.  They are very much in tune with us wanting to eat and learn more about the food we make by getting sustenance and fullness from it, as well as wanting to know the tastes.  Since we all eat together in some form each night -- be it a stolen apple pie, some cookies someone brought, a stew from the next class over, some clams from the proteins class, or our own soups -- we have a brief window of leisure time each night, after grading is complete, where we can eat up and laugh and relax a bit before we have so clean the kitchen from top to bottom.

A and I did well, she's a fun partner.  We now have a full week off, unheard of, ad I'll use the time to work on my brunoise, because I can't have boxcars in my consomme.  If the price of carrots spikes in the near future, it's because I've bought so many for knife cuts practice that I've created a scarcity.

I'll write about sauces shortly.