Garlic Confit

Garlic Confit:

This is a fun recipe with endless uses and possibilities. 3 heads of garlic, a few sprigs of Thyme, and enough good Extra Virgin Olive Oil to cover the garlic is all you need to get started.

I’n a deep heavy bottomed sauce pan bring the oil up to a simmer for 10-15 minutes and turn off the heat when the cloves begin to soften. The carry over heat will finish cooking the garlic the rest of the way so let the oil cool down on it’s own. Transfer to a glass jar and refrigerate…

The oil on it’s own for dipping purposes is fantastic, but can also be used to make a nice vinaigrette. The garlic itself can be mashed into a paste and used as a marinade or just spread it onto some toast and enjoy.

Day13: Additional Methods of Cooking Fish

I haven’t looked forward to my weekends in a very long time and I’m definitely enjoying the extra sleep on Saturday mornings.

Last Fridays lesson was an addition to thursdays fish lesson with the introduction of flat fish. Flounder was the fish of the day and we learned how to filet it and cook it using two different techniques. The first was Paner A’lAnglaise which means to bread and fry. First step is two slice the flounder filet into goujonettes (small strips) dip them in flour, then into the seasoned egg mixture and then the bread crumb. After they are all breaded and our deep frying oil is set to 350 we fry them off. We served them up with two different sauces, one was a red pepper coulis and the other was some kind of tartar sauce variation.

Next we served up a braised variation of the flounder with shallots, white wine, mushrooms, and a double cream reduction called filet de limande bonne femme. An extremely heavy dish in my opinion, that poor flounder was completely over shined by the sauce.

Tomorrow we have shellfish, and for the first time in my life SNAILS!

Day11:The Potato

A day full of potatoes and French words! Pont Neuf, Dauphinois, Darphin, Frites and Gaufrettes just to name a few. I started off in the weeds today with our substitute chef whose pace was a little more upbeat than what we’ve been used to for the past couple of weeks, but as the day went on I found my groove and the rest of the lesson was cake. My Pommes Darphin were perfect golden-brown-potato-disc-cakes and my Gratin Dauphinois (scalloped potatoes) were really creamy and really good.

Studying the rest of the night…our second test; on lessons 8-11. Also tomorrow “Introduction to Fish & Principles of Cooking”!

Day10: Salads and Vinaigrettes

Simple Salads, Mixed Salads, and Composed Salads all salads fall under one of these categories. A simple salad is a salad with one main ingredient and dressed plainly. A mixed salad is a mixture of several ingredients combined and seasoned together. This one we put together today- a Cooked Vegetable Macédoine Salad.

And a Composed Salad is a mixture of several ingredients seasoned separately and presented together on the same plate similar to what they have in italy known as antipasta. Well the salad known as the Nicoise is basically the same concept.

A good productive day all in all and ended nicely by getting a 94% on my first class evaluation and a live demo from Master Chef Andre Soltner. This was one of the dishes he made:
Pumpkin Soup.

Tomorrow tune in for a whole day of POTATOES!

Day8: Soups and Consommé

We spent the whole day making soups and clarifying our consommés but the highlight of the day was definitely my test results, a Perfect 100%! I was a little nervous this morning until I saw the test and realized that all the info actually sunk in.

First we demoed the consommé and the split pea soup and the importance of good stock was highlighted again today. We used the Marmite for the consommé and the onion soup, the veggie stock for the farmers soup, and the chicken stock for the split pea.

I didn’t even know what a consommé was before yesterday, and understand why I never really see it in any restaurants. It’s time consuming and very temperamental. Consommé is a richly flavored clarified stock and the clarification is why it’s such a delicate process. First you grab a little ground beef, some egg whites, carrots, celery and leeks. You mix it all up together add it into the stock and bring it to a simmer while mixing and scraping the pot frequently. All the impurities and fat rise to the top, once that happens you stop stirring and turn the heat down to very low. Those impurities and fat particles are called a “raft”. You let the soup cook for about 40 minutes and the raft becomes very thick. The raft is delicate and if it sinks your Consommé is garbage and you gave to start all over again.

The clear stock underneath gets gently ladled and run through a china cap lined with a cheese cloth, and then skimmed with paper towels to remove any remaining fat. The end result is a very tasty, perfectly clear broth that can be garnished a few different ways. When you change the garnish, it also changes the name of the consommé.

All in all a very busy day. We have the next four days off and I’m looking forward to my thanksgiving feast and eating myself into a food comma. We go back on Monday and start with preservation techniques, should be pretty interesting.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Day4: Tournage

Today’s main focus was on a style of cutting which is referred to as “a variety of Taillage”. Tournage which is cutting the vegetable into a faceted oval shape with blunt ends ranging in sizes from Buquettiere which is 3 cm long, Cocottes are 5 cm, Vapeur 6 cm, Chateau 7.5 cm, and Fondant being the biggest at 8-9 cm.

This was a very intricate lesson and really took a lot of fumbling around with the pairing knife to get the hang of. The classic Tournage has 7 faceted sides but 5-6 is acceptable. This is mainly for decorative purposes. While I do appreciate the technique, there is no real practical use for it in a restaurant (maybe for that occasional special?).


Tomorrow were doing stocks!!
“Stocks are to cooking what foundations are to a house.”
-Auguste Escoffier

Day3: First Recipes

Day3: First Recipes

Today was my first day of uncertainty. Not any bit having to do with school or the actual cooking and everything but with waking up every morning at 6am and going onto a crowded train and then right on to an even more crowded subway. It started last night at around 10 pm and really wouldn’t let me fall asleep.

We had a pretty full day of cooking, tasting a bunch of vegetables. But the highlight of the day would have to be the first two recipes of the class. RATATOUILLE and a BEET and GOATCHEESE TIMBALE salad. Both recipes focused a lot on the cuts that we’ve been practicing the past couple of days. The Ratatouille was a fairly simple recipe conceptually but still required a bit of prep. The beets salad was really very good but had just a little too much richness with the layer of goatcheese. All of the ingredients combined together in a single bite, it really molded together well.

Tomorrow we have tournage which is a really difficult cutting technique. I’ll let you know how it goes…

First Day of School…

today was a pretty slow start overall_ arriving at the school at around 8:00 and running on about 4 hours of sleep thanks to a bit of anxiety last night. They gave us our ID cards and locker assignments and brought us to our level 1 kitchen, where we met our first chef instructors Jason and Karen. They will be my instructors for the first two months/levels.

First we started with a basic tour of the kitchen and a brief overview of some of the kitchenware. Sauteuse…a basic saute pan
Sautoir…a 3 inch deep saute pan

Then we checked over our new toolkits to make sure nothing was missing, and after that we got to the funner stuff…Cutting! Taillage-the practice of cutting vegetable into uniform shape and size. We started by peeling the turnip and carrot. Next we squared of our veggies which is called Parer. For the turnip we wanted what is called a Macedoine, basically a .5 cm x .5 cm dice…to get there first we needed to make .5 cm slices to the turnip (Tranches), then cut those into .5 cm thick x 5 cm sticks (Jardiniere). Finally the dice.

We repeated basically the same steps for the carrots but Julienned them instead. Thinner sticks then Jardiniere. 1-2 mm width and 6-7 cm long to be exact.

The last of our cuts was to Chiffonade a leaf of cabbage (very thin strips). This was easily done by rolling the leaf up really tightly and then slicing it as thin as possible.

The 2 reasons why taillage is important is first and foremost if the vegetables are all different sizes and thickness they won’t cook evenly. Secondly, they just look better.

Tomorrow…SERVESAFE, I’m gonna need a lot of coffee!

Breaking Down a Pumpkin: 10/28/10

The toughest part of the pumpkin pie filling by far is breaking down the pumpkin (especially if its a big pumpkin, which I was working with of course) Once I chopped the pieces down small enough to peel I started moving along a little faster, but still had trouble with the hard skin. Peeled and deseeded, I chopped the pumpkin into 1inch X 1inch cubes, spread them out onto a lightly oiled sheet pan and threw them into the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes until the pieces were cooked all the way through.

I let the pumpkin cool down a little and threw them into the food processor until I had a smooth pumpkin purée, this took about 2-3 minutes. Pretty shocking how much you get out of one big pumpkin! Looks like we’ll be eating a lot of pumpkin pies.

LOL…after writing this I googled breaking down a pumpkin and came across an article which advised to bake the pumpkin wedges skin on which allows the skin to peel off very easily. It was a good article anyway, here’s the link http://bit.ly/3tes4. Oh well at least I got some good practice in with the pairing knife.

Stuffed Peppers

One of my mothers recipes from Niko’s…I hope you enjoy!

-4 Large GREEN BELL PEPPERS

-.5 large Red Onion

-2 cloves of GARLIC thinly sliced

-chopped PARSLEY

-2 tbsp EVOO

-1 lb GROUND BEEF

-.5 cup Rice

-Salt & Pepper

-CUMIN

-ground Cinnamon

-2 cups Puréed Tomato

-1 cup WATER or Good Chicken Stock