Garde manger getting good

We've started the forcemeats in full swing now.  This was one of the reasons I wanted to go to culinary school in the first place, so I'm stoked.  Last night's production: Rabbit rillette, chicken liver pate, country style pork.

Rabbit rillette: fabricate a rabbit and poach its legs, ribs, and backbone in mirepoix and spices for two hours.  (Learned last night why you should always buy rabbit from reputable sources: skinned, the rabbit body looks just like a cat's.  Meow.)  Remove rabbit parts and shred all meat from the legs.  Pitch bones and mirepoix, reduce stock.  In small ramekin, add shredded rabbit and reduced stock.  Top off ramekin with warm duck fat and refrigerate.

Chicken liver pate: (is good!  I am now a liver convert -- when properly prepared...)  Process aromatics, livers, cream, spices, brandy, other yums, and pour into a lined rectangular terrine pot.  Cook, then remove and press down on top of pate with a lined board - to maintain the precise rectangular shape.  Refrigerate.

Country style:  Mix pork, chopped livers, aromatics, with a panada (mix of cream, flour, eggs, brandy, spices) and develop semi-thick, slightly tacky texture.  Scoop into plastic bag and refrigerate.  (This is for tonight's production - we also made a pate dough that we'll roll out, mold into another kind of rectangular pot, and then we'll fill the dough with the country style and cook that bad boy.

The whole notion behind forcemeats is if you're a chef, and your kitchen only has, say 7 whole portions of a certain protein, and you need to stretch those 7 portions into 20 or 30 portions for a dinner service.  So you get creative, use your remaining protein along with big flavors and effective binding agents, then you have enough covers to run a special that night (rabbit pate instead of the roast rabbit you had originally intended, for instance).  And since it's fancy and requires a certain amount of labor and knowhow, you can charge a premium, possibly even more than you would have with just the roast protein.   

Last night's stage

Last night will be my last stage for a while, I think Jen and Marcel are going to key my car if I'm away from home any more on these weekend nights.  Works out fine, because I have my externship set up there, so the effort's paid off. 

The specials last night were crazy good - 'retarded good' as the sous chef put it.  A watermelon and feta salad, topped with wild arugula and a pink peppercorn vinaigrette.  That was seriously retarded good.  And batonnet cut chickpea fries, also retarded good.

The chef de cuisine prepared me a small order of the pork belly crostini, topped with green apples and microgreens.  I also tried the bacon wrapped, chorizo stuffed dates.  THOSE are good.  The food is insane and the flavors are huge.  Also new desserts last night: goat cheese cheesecake.  And bitter chocolate semifreddo.  The food is retarded good, and I'm going to get retarded fat during my externship.

Fruit and veg carving

One of the coolest nights in culinary school so far.  We did fancy carving into fruits and veggies.  First we watched a video demo by a woman from Singapore who is one of the world's best decorative carvers.  Then chef demoed an ornate floral pattern across the side of a whole watermelon.  Then we each got a turnip, peeled the white half of the turnip, and mimicked a part of his design on our turnips.  Chef was cool, very supportive, emphasizing the therapeutic quality of fruit carving.  We were cracking jokes, asking him if next Friday we could do basketweaving.

After we practiced the flower on the turnip, we did it again on a honeydew melon.  The larger surface lent itself to larger petals and the space to do cool leaves.  After honeydew, we got two roma tomatoes.  The first one, we peeled in one long strip (nailed it my first try!), then rolled the peel up to look like a rose bloom.  The second tomato, we cut in half the long way, then took one half and finely sliced into many small pieces.  Then, we spread the pieces out into one fine, long line of tomato slices, then curled it into itself over and over, making yet another tomato rose.

After tomatoes we cut swans out of granny smith apples.  Parallel patterns for the wings, spread them out far, then popped in a little head. 

He also let me practice more on a cantaloupe but I was getting tired so I just diced it and ate it instead.  I also ate a couple tomatoes, some honeydew, and my friend P's amputee apple swan.  That's more fruit than I've had all week; I need to wear a Depends this weekend.

Jen took the kids to Likkity's last night

Holla

Great news - today I met with chef Jason and he's going to let me do my externship at Fino.  This is huge for me, I feel like I now have clarity on what the rest of the program looks like for me.  I'm happy!

Thursday already?

Criminy, where's this week gone?

Last night was duck night in garde manger.  We smoked duck breasts that had been cured overnight, then browned them in the oven.  Then pan seared the skin to get it crisp, then sliced it extremely thin (chef: "one duck breast should give you at least 27 pieces") and arranged over an Asian slaw.  The slaw dressing turned out nice, but I only managed about 14 pieces of our breast, and my cuts were jagged.  Not my best knife work.

We also had duck leg and thigh on the stove in a confit - poaching the duck in its own fat.  we let the duck confit go at 190 degrees for about three hours.  When done, the duck meat slid off the bone like a slow cooked bbq rib.  (I reserved most of the duck confit and made Marcel a duck sandwich for lunch, thought that would be pretty gangster.)

The night before last was slow, sauce building.  Nothing earth shattering.  Tonight will be cool though, getting in to forcemeats.  We're making three different kinds of sausage.

Also today, I have a meeting with chef J from Fino; I'm trying to secure a spot for externship beginning in August.

First night of garde manger

Our classes have recombined, so there's once more around 40 students under one classroom roof.  Some students hate this, thinking they won't be able to use all the pans, bowls, whisks - and they're right, there was tons of stuff unavailable tonight - but I'm in favor of the disarray, it more accurately reflects life in the professional kitchen.  Plus it's cool seeing old friends.

Tonight we pounded out mayonnaise, vichyssoise soup, and two red pepper sauces, all four chilled and served cold.  One red pepper sauce was spicy, prepared with fire roasted peppers - the other was sweet, with oven roasted red peppers as a base.  It was incredible to learn how red peppers can have two such different flavor profiles just from different roasting techniques. 

R and I paired, and he made the mayonnaise while I made the vichyssoise.  The soup was so delicious!  I made it a little too thick but the rich leek flavor was just wonderful.  My family is not too amped on potato soup; otherwise I'd love to make this for them.  Maybe my mother in law would like some vichyssoise.

The red pepper dishes were amazing.  Easy to make and super sexy and rich.  R and I were both stoked and amazed at the range of flavor coming from the same damn veggie.

Garde manger is all about the cold side - salads, cold sauces, terrine, forcemeats.  This class is the one I have been looking forward to since day one.  I want to master garde manger and apply its cold side sensibility to dishes in Ithaca. 

Last night’s stage

I got my ass handed to me during last night's stage.  We were so busy, insane busy, for a minute I thought it was going to be a slow night but I don't know the place well enough to know when their dinner rush hits.  We got hit and I got schooled hard.  We had to go from zero to 90 in seconds; those guys knew it was coming but I had no idea.  It was hardcore, humbling, and way educational.  I learned so much – the real life on the job education I get from staging is the perfect complement to the Le Cordon Bleu labs.  You can't teach insane urgency.  You have to go through it.  Seriously felt like an army cadet going from exercises and lessons to a severe wartime simulation. 

I've been in a busy kitchen before, and my time management on the line is rusty but I still have the instincts.  But the difference is, in my previous life on sauté and grill, we were making $6, $7, maybe $9 dollar dishes.  We didn't give two shits how it looked, whether it had been safely prepared, consistency, etc – we just wanted to sell the ticket and get the food the hell out.  Here we're selling $12 tapas, $15 desserts, $30 entrees.  This is one of the nicest restaurants in Austin, and the quality standards have to be impeccable.  Sure, I get all that in theory – who doesn't want to prepare quality products – but to execute the high quality under the pressure we were under last night, that is something you can't fake.  Can't get it in a classroom, won't even get it in Ventana, the restaurant at Le Cordon Bleu, when we 'work' there later on this year.  My early chef instructor Chef Edna said our goal needs to be "Get very good, then get very fast."  And last night L, the pantry cook, kept yelling at me "You need to work faster.  You need to work faster."  Speed will come from repetition, menu familiarity (the menu at my stage is seasonal, I showed up to a few dishes last night), knowing how to haul ass and get the job done well.  I'm still thinking about everything.  "Small plate or big plate?  Order of hummus…one scoop or two?  Hummus gets…sumac?...fried garbanzos?...shit."  As ten more tickets roll in, and I'm so caught up in the hummus thing I have nothing even in the frier, so no appetizers are even dropped yet, and I think SOS means sauce on side, but by now I'm too scared to ask because I've already asked that same question twice tonight, and we're out of the fried olives bowls, so what do you normally put the fried olives in when you're out of that one bowl, and how the hell do these Manchego cheese triangles sit perfectly on these salads because when I make one it flattens the whole damn salad, and no of course I didn't just dump a bunch of fried crispy things in the sink for no reason, what would make you think that…

Imagine about three hours of doing that in your head and that's pretty close to what my stage felt like last night.  But I'm not complaining at all.  Back when I was skateboarding my homey Kenny Grace said "Dude, you always have to skate with guys better than you are.  That's the only way to learn."  Staging is all about the Kenny Grace philosophy, makes perfect sense.  At 11:15 last night I cleaned the frier.  Drained the oil, scraped a bunch of detritus that can only be described as Disgusting Shit, and got a ton of sarcastic shit from the guys as I did.  Little grease, little hazing, it's all good.  I'm gonna get better and go back next week.  I'm gonna be a machine.         

Baking is dead, long live baking

On to the next one, baking's behind us now.  The written final consisted of 12 short essay questions, along the lines of: explain why the laminated dough process is important, outlining the steps.  And, how is a Swiss butter cream prepared, and so on.  Pretty hard, but I knew a good chunk of it, and I'm banking on partial credit for the ones I fudged.

The practical was: 4 eclairs, 4 cream puffs, 4 swans, all turned in at the same time.  They use the same pate a choux dough, but each has a different cream, and the eclairs also have a fondant glaze.  I did well, 95 on the eclairs and 90/90 for puffs/swans.  My cream puffs are always too small, a customer would feel so ripped off buying one of my lil puffs.  But I handled my biz, made this shit from memory, and it's a new class on Monday.

Garde manger next, then international.  Tonight, no school - seeing Conan OBrien with Jen.

Aloha

Here's last night's work.  A tempered chocolate box, inside there are two dozen truffles.  Again, last night C and I opted for the screw it let's just have some fun route with our chocolate box.  Tempered chocolate, with no thermometer use, is not my pleasure.  Too much room for error, and there's all kinds of side effects errors will create.  So we said aloha to all the fancy filigrees that she had out for us to use, and instead made a tree with hazlenut sand, coconuts, and leaves.  And we got another 20 - class consensus though was that she was handing out 20s just for breathing.  Anyhoo.

Production final tonight.  We're on the hook for eclairs, cream puffs, and these crazy cream puff swan things.  No tempered chocolate required, so shouldn't be too bad.

Taco night

Tonight: apple charlotte, a candied apple concoction so buttery, even by le cordon bleu standards, I felt that I was contributing to US child obesity just by making the damn thing.  Apple charlotte has huge potential as a recipe and technique to tweak and make a TX version of for use in Ithaca.  As is though, it's the Medusa of diabetes; anyone who so much as looks at it gets Type II.

Also, rice pudding, served in a tuile cookie.  Chef demoed a tuile cookie that was spread like a thin pancake, baked, then shaped over a ramekin until it had a bowl-like shape to it, kind of a pinch pot thing almost.  Garnished with caramel filigree that we cooked, then created and cooled.  Long story short, rather than the boring big bowl, C and I made rice pudding tacos.  Two smaller tuiles, shaped over whisk handles until tacoed out.  Rice pudding in the shell, cinnamon for color, diced kiwi and raspberry for the veggies, a spiral filigree acting as cheese.  The whole class was all up in our business; no lie, at one point there were 4 cameras on our tacos.  And chef loved them, we got 20s.  We were real proud of our tacos and paraded them around to other classrooms. 

Last week of bakery

I've been dragging ass for the past two weeks, largely due to the family getting spanked by strep.  On top of that though, I've learned bakery's not really where my tastes or ambitions lie.  So it's cool but not as cool as roasting techniques, sauces etc.

That said, chef knows we feel that way, so she's doing a great job clueing us in about how as chefs a modicum of bakery skills can really set us apart.  Expand our menus on the cheap, and become more marketable too.

Makes sense to me, because when I think about our future place, I definitely think of having empanadas, and some kind of bready sticks or flatbreads for dipping.

Last night C and I made tuile dough and florentine dough, which we'll use tonight making moldable cookies.  We got Friday's creme brulee's graded, and we did well, chef said they were delicious but our caramel crust was not thick enough.  Jen, who wants me to gain weight, will be happy to hear I ate a ton of creme brulee at 9:30.

We made creme Anglaise, also for use tonight.  I could bathe in that stuff, tastes awesome.  And we cooked, cooled, then piped out what will end up being truffles, milk chocolate Frangelico hazlenut, and dark chocolate powdery.

Last week's high point for me: C and I made souffles and we absolutely dominated on them.  The first week though, we blazed through some of the baking basics, only one night for baguettes, one night for danish and croissant.  Our croissant didn't have much time to proof and rise, so we cooked up some mini bull horns, looked like something you'd see hanging on a steakhouse wall.  I'd like to redo those, Marcel loves croissant.

Next week we start International, which we think is also 1/2 garde manger.  This Friday Jen and I are going to Conan OBrien, holla.