Uncooked salads
The first few things we did this week included an unstable emulsion (aka oil and vinegar vinaigrette), tomato and basil salad, julienned carrot salad and seasonal salad.
What didn't go right...
My vinaigrette kept splitting - I'm not sure why, since I've been making them at home for ages. I want to blame the vegetable oil but I'm afraid it's user error.
The julienned carrots are still uneven. For the record, I have a different idea of what centimeters and millimeters are from what the chefs say they are. I will have to learn their distances because frankly, it's a lot easier for me to learn inches. I know we are learning French cooking but I was hoping to catch a break since we are in England. Apparently not, which is also the reason why we don't use olive oil in our dressings (extra virgin is too flavored and I suppose it would be just as quel horreur to suggest extra light olive oil, which would also draw approbation from the Italians. Did I use the right word? I am so tired...)
What did go right...
Well, I can blanch a tomato. The proper word is monder, although I've seen several spellings of it and will need to check the cook book I bought from the bookstore. Basically you drop the tomato into boiling water for a few seconds (just long enough for the skin to split) and then drop it into ice water so that it doesn't cook. That just loosens the skin enough so that you can peel it - better for presentation and also because the skin is acidic and indigestible.
Cooked salads and stable emulsions (aka mayonnaise)
So - I can boil an egg. I got the comment, "They really are starting you right at the beginning aren't they?" Well yes. We have a couple of people in my class who have pretty much never cooked before. Also, there has always been several ways to hard boil an egg. Now I have one which will result in perfect eggs as long as something doesn't happen to the stove (like it not being hot!).
Making mayonnaise by hand (no garlic, otherwise it's an aioli and we are learning French cooking!) - so, there is a lot of oil in mayonnaise. We were all kind of grossed out by how much there is (one egg yolk to 250ml/2 cups?) of oil. And you have to beat it all by hand so you can't have wrist, elbow, shoulder or muscle problems in your dominant hand. If you can beat the egg sufficiently with your weaker hand or you are ambidextrous, then I am jealous.
More tomates mondes (?) - yippee. More vegetable cuts (my cubes are still not cubes and I can't tell how big 5mm are) - blanched carrots and turnips. I am really starting to dislike carrots. At the beginning of the week, it was mild distaste. Yesterday it turned into actual dislike. Of course carrots are on my shopping list for the market on Sunday morning!
Salads were fine but my mayonnaise was too thick for the potato salad and didn't coat it evenly. I can tell I'm super hungry by how many things I would normally not eat all of a sudden become appealing. Our Italian vegetable salad had salami as one of its ingredients. Tonight I can't believe I actually ate it, but it was delicious yesterday, right after we made it. Especially with a small piece of hard boiled egg. Sounds totally disgusting to me now.
On the agenda for tomorrow
Demonstration of decorating the creme brulee and creme caramel which were demonstrated today. Chef M even showed us how to make scrambled eggs out of the creme Anglaise (which you don't want) and then how to rescue it. I hope I got the rescue correct in my notes!
In any case, the custard desserts looked pretty simple, but we will see. Everything (especially the slicing, dicing and cutting!) looks so easy when the chefs do it, only to turn into a complete hash when we try it.
Eggy custards
One of the objections my sister and I have about ordering custard-y desserts at restaurants is that it's such a hit or miss proposition. Sometimes they come to you and all you can taste is egg. I finally found out today - it's because the restaurant cheated! Adding more egg makes the dessert set more quickly, so the ones I didn't like were actually bad custards. Good to know, next time I can send it back with no guilt and get a totally different dessert. Like it's going to be a better custard if I just ask for another one - they cheated on one, they likely cheated on a whole batch (if not all of them).
Anyway, some of my classmates and I have been discussing going to someone's house on successive weekends to practice our recipes (but unfortunately not the brulee because no one is quite game enough to buy the blowtorch, although I am so very tempted...) On the other hand, I'm quite sure that burning the apartment building down is bad form. The school is on very good terms with the local fire station, which should be indicative of the number of alarms which go off. I hope no alarms go off when I experiment with searing the meat and flambeing things with brandy (hm, is that something that has to wait until Superior Cuisine???) which was described the other day.
For the moment, must think of uses for all those brunoised and macedoined carrots. That's fancyspeak for super small dice (cubes) and bigger dice (cubes - actual size of playing dice - must remember that, but they said those cubes were too big...so confused with cm/mm!!!) for those who couldn't care less what the technical name is for the cuts.
Just so you know, I have no idea how a straight knife blade can turn out a carrot that is wavy in the middle and all skewed. They say that it is affected by how we hold the knives and what our pinky fingers are doing. I will worry about what my pinky is doing once I am more confident that I won't cut another finger while I'm checking it out.
For the moment, more veggies...but I hear that once we go to meats, it will be crazy (and yummy?). Must stock up on tupperware and bottles (for coulis). Thanks for the tips, Intermediate and Superior students!
Until next time...
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