#32 - Midterms already...

We had our midterm tutorials with our chef mentors last week.  Yes, it was only our 4th week.  We are also almost (but not quite) half way through.  The meetings are supposed to review where we are with our class marks so far and to go over any areas which we want to discuss with our chefs.

Patisserie seems to be going ok - we all seemed to get slightly different information in relation to our own personal marks and the class average, some people bein told the average, some not.  Different stories all around, as can be expected.

Cuisine - well, let's just say that my mentor was expecting better marks than what he saw on the computer screen.  My entire class got a small talk at the beginning of our Friday morning practical last week - rather encouraging to be told that our marks would most likely improve.  Of course, this was preceded by the comment that generally, they had nowhere to go but up.

As usual, if two previous occasions can be called "usual", everyone buckled down and really focused in class after our meetings.  There has been a lot less tolerance of unrelated chatting in demonstrations, for which I am very grateful.  Somehow we are already starting to get tired - I don't think it helps that the ranks of the Grand Diplomes has been reduced to...16, I think.  We saw the schedules for those only doing Cuisine or Patisserie diplomas - they have so much more free time on paper - much less in reality for some, as they have taken jobs.  Apparently it helps them in class as they get to consolidate at work some of the basics they learn in class.

Breakfast has become no more than a memory on the days when we are cooking at 8am - there is more and more butchery (more on that later) and there is only enough time to gulp down some coffee in an attempt to get our minds sufficiently awake so that we don't end up with cuts caused by clumsiness.  Not always successfully - and with the exception of the more recent cuts/burns (or the most scarred) it's now hard to remember which class/dish caused which scar on our hands and arms.

But back to the last two weeks...

Patisserie
We have now had our three demonstrations of our possible exam dishes, two of which we have made  and the last of which we are scheduled to make at 6pm on Monday:

the Fraisier which has the reputation of being the easiest (but which requires careful piping) 

the Opera - the highest incidences of failure and considered to be the most technically challenging because they can see every little mistake and

the Sabrina which is, despite the components not incorporating new technique, the most time consuming and takes the longest - so requires complete organization and time management (which we did on Monday night this past week).

The Tea Party

Superior Patisserie students hold a tea party at the Mandeville Hotel as part of their course.  I was lucky enough to be invited by one of the students - a preview of what's in store for us...and for the Superior Patisserie students, a practice run for their 6-hour final practical exam.

Dinner party
Then on Thursday night last week - the preview for our Superior dinner event.  There were 16 students and 1 supervising chef cooking for 40 of us - 3 different canapes, an amuse bouche, a starter, main, cheese, dessert and petits fours with our coffee as well as 2 different types of bread and a wine pairing with each course.  The cost for those of us attending:  £15.
The students are not allowed to use recipes from their course but must design their own. They are given certain ingredients which they must use. And of course we critique the dishes, not because we are being obnoxious, but because we are graded on the same criteria when we present our dishes to our chefs in the kitchens and for our final practical exams. I learned from one of the girls at my table that if the plate for hot food is too hot, the sauce will dry on the plate and leave marks at the edges where it was poured, which I hadn't known before.

Cuisine
This is where we apparently have a hard time. Unsurprisingly, no one was elated with their current class mark - but it appears to have been the kick we all needed to really get going in class. Thursday started relatively relaxed - foie gras (duck, not goose) and confit of duck (which we had marinated the week before) each with a different sauce. It ended with a bang as one of the students finally told the chef that it wasn't good enough that the cooktop wasn't working - and it wasn't the one that gave me grief last week in the same kitchen. Long story short, her duck was f***ed - although truthfully, I prefer my duck that way, if I have duck at all.

Evidently it worked because the following day, our kitchen chef (different one) went around to the various cooktops and marked the ones where the temperature gauges weren't working - as in, setting it to 1 was acting similarly to the next one which was set to 8 (0 being off and 12 being the hottest setting).

Hopefully these can be fixed by the final exams, but I wonder what will happen if not.  As our chef told us, the stoves are no longer made and the parts have to be machined by...someone - because they can't be bought.  Although it's possible that no kitchen will have perfectly functioning equipment, the fact is that we are required to try all the different stations in the 3 cuisine kitchens - so we don't really have the opportunity to get completely used to the idiosyncracies of a particular stove.

In the meantime, we had our Friday practical at 8am again - more chicken butchery - and a more advanced technique than taking it apart into 8 pieces as we did in basic.  Let's just say that my chicken had something like 6 tendons in each drumstick, rather than the two mentioned in the demo - and one was very stubborn so it took me a bit longer than I had counted on to finish the butchery.  Yes, you could skip one, but invariably that's the one you present to the chef...so rather than take any chances, I took the extra time.

Revelations
Finally, finally - the sauces are starting to come together.  A friend asked me about 3 weeks ago about the secret to sauces and I didn't have an answer.  Now I have the one that applies to me - don't overcook/roast the bones or the sauce gets bitter.  Oh - and don't burn the sauce either!  That one might be obvious but I frequently forget about the sauce on the stove behind me - so now I prep everything beforehand if possible, so that I can just watch the stove (and oven).  It might take longer to get things going, but the timing was similar and I could watch 4 pots and pans at once on the stove.  Talk about having to be organized.  One of the chefs (not one I've had in class) laughed when she overheard that I was working on my organization - I told her that I was following her advice to fake it until I make it and evidently the faking is very good - at least with notes.  The truth always outs by the amount of mess at one's station.  One of the chefs told me it was about time I started working tidy and organized again.  I wonder how long he's been thinking that...

Also - I finally got the salt/seasoning thing.  The sauce for the Basque style chicken tasted too sweet and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't taste the pepper powder in it even after adjusting with salt.  The critique was that it needed more salt (as usual) - so I tried it again.  One grind of sea salt didn't make any difference, but the second tiny one somehow made the pepper powder pop so that all of a sudden, you could taste the chili on top of the red, green and yellow peppers we had cooked and pureed into the sauce.  The trick now is to remember how to do that and not to add too much salt - they punish more for going over than under  with the seasoning.  As they say, it's easy to add more but almost impossible to take it out.

As for foie gras or liver in any form, is just not my thing. I try it when we cook it, but the policy of nothing on my plate which I have also seen on my dissecting table still holds. I couldn't quite bring myself to try the heart or kidneys from the rabbit in Friday's demo - the liver was enough.  The foie gras from duck confit day was only tolerable when it was completely crispy - the less crisp portions just tasted like liver.  Fortunately for my duck, it found a loving home with a friend in Superior Patisserie (not my hostess from the Afternoon Tea) - and who proposed marriage halfway through the duck leg.  Apparently it's legal in the UK.

And then we had this week.  There was the Sabrina on Monday night (see pictures above) and a traumatic Tuesday morning when we had to butcher a rabbit.  Let me just say 8am is early to be handling anything which bleeds - unless you are a doctor.

In which we murdered Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, Peter, Thumper and a bunch of their cousins
Our rabbit stew required rabbits.  The rabbits come in vacuum sealed plastic bags with their heads and tails still attached - the tailes are these tiny little stubs of a couple of vertebrae.  And the organs are still inside, which we needed to remove.

As bad as it was to have to reach in and remove the liver, kidneys, etc. it was a lot worse when I realized that I had to break the sac holding them in the belly cavity and reach up to get a hold of the heart and lungs.  Then the second worst part - having to bend joints and vertebrae in order to segment the rabbit - the neck felt so fragile and tiny and I had to manhandle it so that my knife could go between the joints because rabbit bones are too fragile to just chop with your butcher knife or cleaver - so they end up splintering.  And the worst part - the feeling of the meat.

The whole rabbit is covered in the silvery skin which apparently helps to keep the skin and fur on the animal.  When they skin it, they just peel off the fur and skin, but that leaves this layer you have to get through to cut the meat.  Worse, it feels sticky and as I worked, there were fine little...somethings which accumulated until it looked like fluff.  There was a horrified moment when I wondered where the fur was coming from, before it occurred to me that it might be from the silver skin which I hadn't finished trimming off the rabbit.
Hopefully the chef was entertained but I couldn't keep from making disgusted noises as I was trying to take the thing apart into the requisite amount and sized pieces.  And french trimming the rack?  It looks very pretty but it's tiny when you're finished - which makes sense but doesn't keep you from feeling like it's a lot of effort for a small result.  See the tiny rack on the right of this plate?  And it has a part of the trimmed liver, a kidney and the heart on this plate although you may not be able to see it very well.

Then the smell of cooking - there's nothing quite like it and if I hadn't already been so queasy, it probably would have smelled quite delicious.  At 9am however...when you cook the rabbit, the raw meat initially appears to be quite a dark pink - almost like red meat - but as it cooks, it gets lighter, like chicken.

Anyway, somehow we got through the practical and my rabbit sauce tasted like rabbit (according to the chef).  I told the chef I wouldn't know a rabbit taste in a taste line up.  Luckily I have a friend who gave a loving home to Thumper - I'm not sure if she and her friend ate the heart but I put it all in the same container.

In which the heat put a damper on our pastries
Yesterday afternoon was quite hot.  We also had a double practical -first up, Patisserie.  Just so you know, hot weather requires a working and cold refrigerator when you are working with mousses and glacage.  I think most people know what a mousse is, but you might want to know, what's a glacage?  Well, it's the shiny chocolate coating on a lot of cakes (i.e.  the Opera above).  Or on our chestnut mousse and sponge cake from yesterday.  So this is what it looks like when the refrigerator isn't cold and the chocolate doesn't set ====>

You should be able to see the layer of mousse under the chocolate layer and the sponge should be clean.  There shouldn't be any gap (but that's another story).

Dangerous fish
This was immediately followed by Bouillabaisse in the Cuisine kitchens.  Personally I think it should be called Dangerous Fish Soup - 4 of the fish we had to butcher had very sharp spines.  We were warned, we were gloved, people still got stabbed.  It took about an hour to butcher 2 fish - normally it doesn't take that long but we had to be extremely careful.  I didn't know my red snapper had spikes on its head behind the eye (or was the red something else?) which kept catching my gloves.
It was not one of our better efforts.  I knew it was trouble when the Chef F looked at me and asked, "do you like fish?"  I told him that I did.  "How do you like your fish cooked?"  was the next question.  Well done, Chef.  I didn't want to tell him the other alternative was raw.  Anyway - almost everyone's fish was overcooked and there were other problems. 

The soup broth was very nice - but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to cook this again unless the fishmonger actually fillets the fish for me and puts the bones in a separate bag for the broth.  It's too likely to cause injury and despite the use of gloves, I had to keep scrubbing my hands when I got home to get all the fish smell off.

There was also had an extremely garlicky accompaniment - rouille - which is basically some mashed potatoe and an egg yolk as a vehicle for lots of roasted garlic and other spices (harissa paste, saffron, etc. etc.)  I got the complaint that it was cold to which I protested.  I had asked the chef about the temperature of the rouille and he had said something about the room being 40C so the ambient temperature should be sufficient to keep it at the right temperature for service so I didn't need to do anything.  He remembered the conversation but I don't think either of us was happy with the result.

That brings us to today - no cooking...but we start bright and early tomorrow morning with a stuffed sea bass Nicoise style at 8am - where we remove the bones and guts from the fish but otherwise leave it whole so that we can stuff it with a lot of vegetables.  I would look forward to it more if it weren't so early in the morning - the smell of fishguts is enough to deter me from even contemplating breakfast and coffee is in serious doubt.  Then we will have another demo followed immediately by class:  seafood risotto.  I am looking forward to next week where we don't have any double practicals - it will be restful to be in the kitchen for only 2.5 hours.

To be fair, this may be the school's way of getting us ready for next term.  I have been warned by the current students in Superior that they have a lot of back to back practicals for the same class - 6 hours at a time for Patisserie or Cuisine classes.
So until next time - I wish you consistency.  It's a good thing when people don't change the goal posts.