As I stepped off the subway today, I noticed someone in a business suit and sneakers carrying an awkwardly shaped bright orange toolbox and a knife kit slung over her shoulder. She walked up to the station agent and asked for directions to Broadway and Grand. It was then that I interjected and said to her she seemed like she was walking to the FCI and that she could follow me. Later on, in the locker room, I overheard chatter about taillage and tournage. Looks like there's a brand new crop of Level 1 students that just started. Though we're far from being veterans at the school, it's nice to feel like we're no longer the bottom rung of the ladder.
Day 3 of Level 2 went well. It was our third and last day on Saucier. Our mishaps in the last lesson were a blow to the ego, so I'm glad to be rotating out of it and into Patissier (Pastry) next. I thought we would be a full team, but we were only three members today. Our fourth still wasn't 100% so he decided to take another day off after his trip to the hospital last week, but everything ran smoothly nonetheless. For sure, it was a hell of a lot better than last Friday.
The first recipe we did was a repeat from Day 1: Poulet Saute a l'Estragon (Sauteed Chicken and Tarragon Sauce) and the second was Cote de Porc au Sauce Poivre Vert (Pork Chop and Green Peppercorn Sauce). As soon as we got to class, the three of us took inventory of our bins, collected everything we needed from the walk-in and the main kitchen, and started off the enriched stocks for the two sauces we would be doing that night since they were the most time-consuming steps.
It was our third day of substitute Chefs and we're still a little unsure of who our permanent Chef will be. Unlike the first two, our Chef today we'd had many times before and the class seems to have really warmed up to him and his Dali-esque moustache, which he told us he grooms with wax to get it to up-curl. Chef came up to us and asked us what our timelines for the night would look like; we told him we would be doing the sauces first, then working on the sides, and finishing each of the meats closer to the plating times since they took only about 20 minutes to cook. He gave us a thumbs up and we got to it.
We worked and communicated really well together, plus we're becoming more and more familiar with where everything is now. Our first dish was finished right about on time and most of the prep for our second dish was done before the dinner break. After dinner, we practically had nothing more that we could do before the plating so instead of just standing around doing nothing, we asked Chef if we could just plate early and he was fine with it.
For the most part, our plates were OK, Chef had a couple criticisms like how we put too much garnish on the chicken plates that it overshadowed the main ingredient. We loved the sauces that we made, one was a veal-based tarragon sauce and the other was a pork espagnole sauce. They were both full of flavor and richness and had nice viscosity. Our one bad screw-up was that we overlooked the thickness of one of the pork chops and it came out very underdone - a huge mistake in a production kitchen and something to keep wary of next time around.
Overall, the first week of Saucier was a little disappointing and definitely a learning experience. There's a lot of constructive criticisms to inherit for the next go round with the station five weeks from now, but for the time being I'm looking foward to the Patissier station for the next 3 classes.
As I mentioned before, the primary reason I created this blog is so that I can document my experience at culinary school. I've always wanted to go to culinary school, but it wasn't until I actually moved to New York and just a couple months ago that I started seriously thinking about it. I knew I wanted to go to a school in New York City and after a lot a reserach, it came down to either the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) and the French Culinary Institute (FCI). I took tours of both, but decided to apply to FCI because I really wanted to learn classic technique, but mostly because of their in-house restaurant, L'Ecole, which ICE did not have. So I applied and got accepted back in September. This past Monday, I went to an enrolled student happy hour and dinner at L'Ecole and met some other students, both in the pastry and culinary program, starting at various times from January until April. The dinner was fun and totally informal and I got to meet a lot of other people that shared the same interests as me - among other things the disdain for the Food Network show "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee" and the love of the lovely and big-haired Giada de Laurentiis. The student cooks (level 3 and 4), who prepared everything we ate, came out and fielded questions at the end of dinner. I had a great time, but I payed for it with a wine headache the next morning - ugh, too much wine is not a good thing.
While I was watching Thomas Keller the other day demoing a recipe for Mediterranean Sea Bass on Martha Stewart live, I reminded myself that I should try to learn more of the basics listed in the back of the Bouchon Cookbook to get a head start on culinary school. Today, I've decided to start my first in a series of posts on the basics of French Bistro fare: Onion Confit. I chose Onion Confit for 2 reasons: I have a surplus of humongous Spanish onions that I bought from Costco that I can't for the life of me use and because I like saying confit (kon-FEE)... confit, confit, confit. I can tell you from my Food Lover's Companion book that I got for my birthday that confit is a specialty of Gascone, France where meat is slowly cooked and salted in its own fat, most often duck or goose. Although confit is mainly done to duck, the Bouchon Cookbook has a lot of different varieties of confits - garlic, onion, tomayto, tomahto, potayto, potahto - OK I got carried away. Here's my recollection of the recipe from the book:
1 pound of Spanish onions (2 or 3 large ones)
8 tablespoons of butter
1/4 cup of water
1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt
1 bouquet garni
1 parchment cover
1. Half the onion lengthwise then cut into 1/4 inch thick slices (Note: the book goes in detail about cutting a v-shaped wedge at the bottom of both halves and removing any flat pieces of onion - presumably the older pieces that are going to sprout?? - just goes to show how meticulous Thomas Keller is with his ingredients)
2. In a medium skillet over low heat, warm the water and melt the butter, use a whisk to aid in the melting
3. Add the onions, salt, and bouquet garni to the liquid
4. Cover with the parchment paper
5. Stir every 20-30 minutes, more often the longer it has been cooking
6. The onions will take about 2 hours to cook and be very sweet and soft, but not fall apart
7. Remove the parchment cover and bouquet garni and let cool in its own liquid
8. Transfer the confit to a plastic container and pop it in the fridge
Onion confit is very versatile. The confit is used all over the Bouchon cookbook, but it can also be used simply as a topping on things like steak, flatbread pizzas and crackers. I decided to make Potatoes Lyonnaise, another recipe courtesy of the book, with my leftover potatoes from Thanksgiving. They were pretty much a fancified French version of country potatoes. In the words of Rachel Ray herself, they were "YUMMO."
