7 posts tagged “culinary school”

I just realized that I never posted about class last week.  The end of the week was weird.  I had an annual awards ceremony lunch at work on Thursday, then I took a comp day off on Friday to make up for the Saturday I'd worked the weekend before.

Wednesday night's class was a continuation (and conclusion) of our vegetable preparation unit.  We made Ratatouille, Peas and Carrots, Cauliflower Gratin, and Glazed Root Vegetables.  I found out what a parsnip and a rutabega were and, more importantly, I learned what they taste like and how to prepare them.  To that point, I can't begin to tell you how valuable these classes have been.  I don't think I ever knew what most herbs looked like fresh.  I only knew the faded, dried, crushed versions that McCormick offers them in.  Chef brought us a couple of trays of fresh herbs one day, passed each around, and asked us to write what each was on a piece of paper.  This made me conclude that I need to grow an herb garden this year.

Wow, I kind of got off the subject.  For time and perhaps interest's sake, I'll talk about the Ratatouille.  As many of you may know, it's a pretty simple dish.  I kept calling it "French stir-fry" in class, because that's what it reminds me of.  Chef used this as mainly a way for us to practice our knife cuts.  He made us dice the vegetables into a small (1/4") dice.  Of course, they don't need to be small dice, but it would be very helpful for texture purposes for the veggies to all be the same size.  We diced carrots, green and red bell pepper, onion, zucchini, squash, and eggplant. 

To cook, you just throw in each veggie in order of hardness.  So, heat some olive oil in a sauté pan, and throw in the carrots - the hardest vegetable - to cook first.  After that has gotten a head start, add the bell peppers.  Then the onion, then last the zucchini, squash, and eggplant.  After those ingredients are in, you've got to move quickly, or else these soft veggies will turn to mush.  Add some tomato paste and brown, then add some chicken stock and heat through.  The whole dish should be saucy enough to have a stew-like consistency.  We seasoned with salt and pepper.  I finished the dish off with some chiffonade-cut (very, very fine ribbons) parsley and a little basil oil that we had hanging around.  I couldn't get OVER how good this was.  So unbelievably flavorful, and not mushy at all.  Yum, yum, yum!  Not to toot my own horn, too much, but chef gave me a "perfect, best in the class."  :D

Saturday morning, I made my husband and I Eggs Benedict.  I was mad at how poorly my Hollandaise sauce had turned out in class, and I wanted a chance to practice.  I made up some easy roasted rosemary fingerling potatoes to go along with, but I think it was overkill.  Eggs Benedict, if you have two each like we did, doesn't need anything.  You've got the English muffin, the ham, the egg, and the sauce.  Pretty hearty meal if you ask me.  I don't have anything special to poach eggs in, so I just got two small saucepans of water going on the stovetop simultaneously.  I was happy with how everything turned out, except I got a little overzealous with the lemon juice in the Hollandaise.  My husband claims that it was the best Eggs Benedict he's ever had, so I guess that makes him a very smart man.  He then asked me, "What do you think?"  I said, "I don't know.  I like it, but I've never had Eggs Benedict before."  He responded with no words, just a slightly slack jaw.  So yeah, I guess it was the best Eggs Benedict I'd ever had too.  

Of the three recipes we made last night, I'll gloss over two.  While I'm glad to know how to 'make' vinaigrette, it can be purchased pretty much anywhere.  But if I get stuck in a situation where I simply have vinegar and oil, then I know the ratio.  :)  Vinaigrette is simply this:

Vinaigrette:

1 part vinegar

3 parts oil

Sure you don't need to write that down?  All we did was add vinegar to a stainless bowl and add whatever flavorings (like herbs and spices) we wanted (including salt, which shouldn't be optional).  Whisk the flavorings into the vinegar, then whip in the oil, little by little.  You can use any vinegar or acid, and you can use any oil.  Pretty ho hum if you ask me.  Moving on.

Mayonnaise.  Again, I'm kinda meh about this, because Hellman's actually makes a very decent mayo, but I see more of a point to making this yourself.  I have to brag about my mayonnaise, because somehow it came out perfect.  And I mean perfect.  Smooth, thick, and creamy.  Plus, it had a good balance of acid, salt, and pepper.  But boy, it still takes a lot of arm strumpf to whisk all that together.  Not as bad as Hollandaise though.

Mayonnaise:

1 oz egg yolks (we used pasteurized)

1 tsp. white wine vinegar

1 tsp water

1/2 tsp dry mustard

8 oz. canola oil

salt

pepper

lemon juice

Whip yolks together with dry mustard, vinegar, and water using a whisk.  Whip oil into egg mixture, little by little.  Add lemon juice, salt, and pepper at the end.

Chef mentioned that, nowadays, you'd just use the whisk attachment on the Kitchenaid or other stand mixer to make mayo.  But it's good to know it by hand too.  Maybe you need to make mayo during a power outage someday.  If you'd never learned the technique, then where would you be?

Sabayon.  I've saved the best for last.  This is a dessert custard/syrup type deal.  I don't know if I've ever had it, but I WILL be making this in the future.  Here's the recipe:

Sabayon:

4 oz marsala wine (sherry or other will work)

2 oz  sugar

3 egg yolks

Start a saucepan of water simmering on the stove.  Break yolks into a stainless bowl, add sugar and wine.  Whisk together until slightly thickened.  Put bowl over saucepan, adjust down heat until water is just steaming.  Whisk, whisk, whisk.  Whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk.  Mixture will become lighter in color, will grow in volume, and will become glossy.  Whisk until the mixture is thickened to the point where thick ribbons are formed from the whisk.

The whisking is the tricky part, as is keeping the heat at at proper level.  If the heat is too low, you'll whisk for an hour.  If the heat is too high, the egg mixture will cook and start forming a meringue-like film on the bowl.  Whisking basically serves two functions: incorporating air and stirring the mixture to expose different parts of your mixture to the surface of the bowl.  

You have two serving options with sabayon - hot or cold.  Once the mixture is thickened, you can drizzle it warm over fruit like berries or oranges.  If you want to serve it cold, take the bowl off the heat and place it in a bowl of ice and continue to whisk until further thickened.  Whip up some heavy cream separately (you can use a Kitchenaid for this) and fold that in to the cold sabayon.  Then you can pretty much serve the sabayon in scoops - it looks a lot like ice cream - with your berries.  It is delectable either way.  Mine came out perfect, but I forgot my take home container, so I had to be happy just eating a few spoonfuls before I sent it down the drain.  Like I said, it WILL be making an appearance in my kitchen again.  This was too good to ignore. 

We had our midterm yesterday, so we only had time to make one complicated dish.  Clam chowder.  I shouldn't even really say complicated, but certainly involved enough that I can't remember it off the top of my head.

First, here's the recipe:

10 oz water

6 clams

8 oz milk

3 oz heavy cream

3 oz peeled, diced potatoes

1/4 piece bacon, chopped

1 oz salt pork, finely chopped

1 oz celery, minced

1 oz onion, minced

1 oz flour

Salt, pepper, tabasco to taste

Rinse clams.  Bring 10 oz water to a boil, throw in clams and steam until clams are cracked open.  Remove clams immediately, set aside.  (If you remove clams immediately, they will be tender, but if you leave them too long, they'll get tough and rubbery.)  Strain water (now clam broth) through a chinois (really fine strainer) or through several layers of cheesecloth.  Add clam broth back to the pot, and add diced potatoes.  Simmer all until potatoes are tender.

Meanwhile, in a different pot, render salt pork and bacon over heat.  Add onion and celery and sauté until clear.  Do not brown.  Add flour to pot to make a roux.  Add milk, little by little until all liquids are combined smoothly.  Add clam broth/potatoes to milk/roux pot.  Bring to a simmer.  Shell clams and add clam meat (whole or cut up, depending on size) to pot.  Season with salt (preferably sea salt), pepper, and a couple of sprays of tabasco to taste.

If soup is too thick, thin with water or fish stock.

I could tell class was going to be different from the second I stepped in the doors of the kitchen.  I arrived about 15 minutes early, and Chef was buzzing around the place already.  There were two other students there early also, and they were buzzing around the kitchen too.  "FISCH!" Chef shouted across the kitchen, "Great!  You can help me.  We're making sausages today."  I walked back into the kitchen and noticed trays and trays of vegetables sitting on the countertops.  Chef walked to the fridge, pulled out a very small metal pan, handed it to me and said, "Casings." 

Now, I think I was being tested here.  It is assumed that girls will freak out when having to deal with the gross stuff - such as the pig intestines I was now holding.  Little did he know, that I used to work in the meat processing facility at school.  For the two years of completing my Master's degree, I had to live by that famous mantra, "We use everything but the oink."  Sausages?  Please.  This wasn't gross; this was nostalgic.

So I got everything all set up and we made sausage.  During this, Chef had an entire prep table set up for salad greens sorting, washing, and mixing - which was taken on by another set of students.  Another table was set with all kinds of different vegetables and mushrooms.  He finally explained that his produce supplier (for the restaurant downtown that he manages during the day) gave him a ton of free veggies that day.  So he threw out the lesson plan, and we cooked for ourselves.  Partially using the free veggies and partially using the meats left over from the morning advanced class. 

Chef put me in charge of the Aquafresca.  I'm not sure if I've described it here before, but it's pretty simple to make.  You need oranges, lemons, and limes.  The volume of lemons and limes has to be about equal to that of the oranges - or in other words 50% oranges, 25% lemons, and 25% limes.  If you ever can't make that ratio, go heavier on the orange than on the other two.  I used about 5-6 oranges, 4 lemons and 2 limes.  I, of course, did not adhere to the aforementioned ratio (because, well, I was told to use up whatever we had left) and the product was just ever-so-bitter - very slight but discernible.  Peel the rind from the oranges, and peel the rind from about half to two-thirds of the lemons.  Leave the limes intact, but make sure to wash all the fruit with the rinds left on them.  Cut up the limes and the lemons with the peels on into managable pieces.  Blend all the fruit together with a stick blender.  I'm thinking that you could probably use a regular blender too, but the rinds make this tricky.  In either case, the blender will have to be powerful.  You should blend until there is a puree with almost no discernable parts of the fruit left.  Strain throught a chinois or a few layers of cheese cloth.  This is about the BEST smelling thing in the world.  Dissolve sugar in some water.  I want to say that I dissolved about 2 cups sugar in 2 cups water over heat, then I put that directly into the strained puree and cooled it.  I probably added another full quart of water, and I think I should've added more.  The point is to not make it really sweet like lemonade, but more watery and refreshing.  However, it really all comes down to personal taste, doesn't it?  So I guess do whatever the heck you want!

So this is what it feels like to work in a kitchen.  I had my own project, but other students were cooperatively working together to get one bigger project done.  Chef was busy, busy, busy but mostly walking around the kitchen, answering questions, giving pointers, and throwing instructions hither and yon.  We were all moving, moving, moving.  Getting things in and out of the oven, stirring things on the stove, grabbing ingredients, grabbing dishes, throwing a load of dishes into the dishwasher here and there.  It was phenomenal.

After the bulk of the heavy lifting was done, we started our assignments.  The first was to make a Velouté, or chicken based mother sauce.  Very basic, and very like the Béchamel.  Make a blonde roux - or a roux that is cooked until just slightly golden.  Add in chicken stock (again, using a 1 part roux to 10 parts stock ratio), simmer and reduce until thickened slightly.  Salt slightly.  Voila!  The chicken-based mother sauce.  This is starting to get easy.

The other assignment was carrot soup.  When I first heard this, I thought, "Who in their right mind eats carrot soup?!"  Well, heh, you've got to give this a shot.  It is yummy.  Here's the ingredients:

10 oz. carrots, peeled and chopped coarsely

1 oz. onion or leek

1 oz. celery

20 oz. chicken stock

8 oz. Béchamel (aka white sauce)

Put a little clarified butter in a saucepan, and throw in the carrots, onion, and celery.  Cook all the vegetables down until soft but not mushy.  Add stock.  Simmer 20 minutes.  To puree vegetables, you can either run the entire pot through a food mill, or you can use a blender.  If using a blender, scoop the vegetables from the saucepan into the blender using a slotted spoon.  Add just a little liquid.  Puree until completely smooth.  Continue adding the liquid from the saucepan, a little at a time, blending all together until all is pureed smooth.  Add Béchamel sauce, blend to combine.  Pour back into saucepan, and sit over heat until warmed over.  Add salt and pepper to taste. 

That's it!  See, I realize now that we're at the point where you say, "Yeah, I don't keep chicken stock around the house, dingbat."  I don't either.  But guess what is a good replacement?  Reduced sodium chicken broth.  Especially for a soup that you're pretty much going to salt the heck out of anyway.  This is phenomenal.  I asked Chef why we didn't put anything in it like thyme or parsley, then I slapped my forehead... because we'd already added them.  In the stock.  Plus, you use all aromatic veggies in this soup: carrots, onion, and celery.  The same three components in mirepoix.  This is genius.  I expected this to be unbelievably bland.  It was anything but.

At the end of class, we ate the feast we'd so diligently prepared earlier.  Mixed greens salad with Caesar dressing, raisin salad, mushroom risotto, vegetable tempura with asparagus and scallions, corn and red potatoes, herbed potatoes, sausages with sauteed squash and zucchini, and of course a fabulous Aquafresca.

Last night was a stellar class from one simple standpoint - I was walking out of the classroom at 10:00 pm.  On the button.  After a full day of work, going to class from 6 to 10 pm is quite an undertaking anyway.  Our classes were consistently running over to 10:30, sometimes 10:45.  That is - in a word - exhausting.

There were two in-class assignments yesterday, Béchamel and French Onion Soup.  Béchamel is a fancy name for "white sauce".  (Kinda like Espagnole is a fancy name for "brown sauce".)  It's the base for quite a lot of things, including macaroni and cheese.  [I seem to remember from back in 7th grade home ec that chipped beef on toast is based from white sauce too.]  It's also pretty darn easy.   You make a roux by melting butter in a saucepan.  Throw some minced onions into the butter and saute them, then throw in your flour and combine to make the roux.  Then, however much roux you've made (we made 4 oz), add about 10x that in milk (so, we added 40 oz milk).  Simmer.  Throw in a bay leaf and some cloves.  Simmer and occasionally skim the surface for about 30-45 minutes until you get a melted ice cream consistency.  Then strain the whole pot through cheese cloth.

We also made French Onion Soup.  Very like when I made the Vichyssoise, I was amazed at how easy soup is.  Throw some butter in a saucepan and get the pan screaming hot.  Throw in some sliced onions.  You need those puppies to brown, brown, brown, so don't toss the onions a lot.  Let them get up close and personal to the thin metal pan bottom separating them from the flame below.  Get them nice and carmelized, but not blackened.  Add an ounce of liquor.  Any liquor apparently.  We used a 50/50 blend of white wine and brandy.  For no other reason than we didn't have enough of either for the whole class.  Deglaze (aka use the liquor to dissolve and scrape up the stuff stuck to the bottom) the pan with the liquor.  Then add about a quart of white beef stock.  Simmer for 30 minutes or so, season with salt and pepper, and serve.  Easy squeezy. 

At this point, if someone asked me what the biggest difference was between how I used to cook and how we cook in class it would be this: the use of aromatics.  I don't make anything in class without cutting up an onion, shallot, or leek and sautéeing it in the fat that will be used in the recipe.  We use parsley stems, chives, bay leaves, thyme sprigs, and a multitude of other herbs.  At all times.  Any stock or base sauce has something aromatic simmered with it and strained out later.  There is no sauce that I've made to date that I haven't strained at some point.  And we use butter in lieu of pretty much any other fat.  Now this has obvious health complications.  You could use another heart healthy oil for these sauces (with perhaps the exception of olive oil because of its strong flavor) but it frankly won't taste as indulgent.  So aromatics and butter.  The difference in the flavor is nothing short of astounding. 

I'm tired.  I didn't leave class until 10:45 pm last night.  We made consomme, cleaned up the kitchen, then at 9:30 chef said, "I'm going to do a roux demo."  We asked if it was only a demo and he said, "No, you're all making them too."  So at 9:45, 15 minutes before class was supposed to let out, we were all dragging out pans.  Not a good sign.

Consomme is interesting.  It's basically clarified stock.  You know, those broths that are crystal clear?  For chicken consomme, you take mirepoix and some chicken and grind it coarsely together in a food processor.  Then you whip some egg whites until they are fluffy and almost stiff - just starting to look glossy.  Fold in the chicken/mirepoix mess along with some tomato sauce, and you drop that in the boiling chicken stock that you want to clarify.  You could do this with ground beef and beef stock or substitute any meat for the kind of stock you're trying to clarify.  You stir it to make sure that the mixture doesn't burn to the bottom.  Almost immediately, the proteins in the egg and chicken start to cook, and the mixture floats to the top, taking all the clouding stock proteins with it.  When the mixture floats to the top, you continuously scoop out the center and pile the muck on the sides.  That probably sounds confusing, but chef likened it to ice fishing.  Constantly scoop out the center so that the hole doesn't close up.  In the hole, you can see pure, clear broth.  After it's simmered for awhile, you drop in an onion brule - or a half an onion that has been partly browned/scorched on a grill or in a broiler.  Simmer that for awhile.  Then you strain the clear broth into a separate container.  My results.  "Hot, good clarity, good yield, needs more salt."  I'll take it.  :)

I'm getting the distinct feeling that the other kids in class - I say kids because most are fresh out of high school - don't like me.  I've apparently already lost the ability to relate.  You know what I think it is?  All the mumbling.  The aside comments that these teenagers want everyone else to hear except the person they were just talking to.  I instinctively ask, "What?" and then they roll their eyes.  "Nothing."  Hehehe.  I asked a team to stop what they were doing, per chef's orders, and go wash dishes.  They whined that they had done it two weeks in a row.  Which was true.  So, instead of telling them what I would've told any of my coworkers ("Good, so this week you should be really good at it") I said, "Fair enough, I'll have Team 2 do them."  I started to walk off and one girl said, "You're so fair and perky."  Except she drolled it like it was an accusation.  ::shrug::  It's kind of funny, because I actually try really hard to be nice.  But not so much that I don't let others in class pull their weight, so maybe that's it.  Eh well.

I'm starting to come down with a cold.  I feel the scratchies starting to invade my throat.  I have a plant test run early tomorrow morning, class tomorrow night, and my parents are coming to town on Friday.  I need to shake this, so I guess it's time to pick up the Zicam. 

I've rounded out the first week of working a full time job and concurrently taking evening culinary classes.  I brilliantly scheduled a couple of test runs for work in one of our plants this week, which has left me burning the candle from both ends.  Monday morning, I left the house at 5:30 am headed to the plant with the following items in the backseat of my car: a briefcase with my laptop and a binder full of data sheets for the test run, an insulated lunch box with two turkey sandwiches (one for lunch and one for dinner), a pair of safety glasses, a backpack with my chef's uniform (painstakingly complete with undershirt, pants, socks, shoes, neckerchief, and beanie), my chef's coat - hung up, my humongous textbook, a bag with my aprons and sidetowels, and a black canvas roll bag that contained all my knives and other miscellaneous cooking tools.  At the end of the day, I took my backpack and ducked into a bathroom stall at the plant.  I went in wearing khakis, a polo shirt, and steel-toed boots, and I emerged looking like a chef.  This left me feeling a little like Superman, except lamer.  So what if I'm saving the world from bland food one shallot at a time?

My culinary classes are held at a local high school.  Please don't get me wrong - this is no ordinary high school.  Or maybe it is.  I'm getting the impression that schools like this are par for the course here in north Texas.  It's not exactly the high school I grew up with though.  (You should see the looks I get when I tell people that none of the public schools in my hometown had air conditioning.)   I'm taking these courses through the local community college, because - well - frankly I don't want to afford quitting my job to go to culinary school full time.  So I won't metriculate from a prestigious institution, and I probably wouldn't be wasting my time except I have several co-workers who swear by this program up and down.

We've got a great instructor, who is dead set on the dogma that this art is learned best by getting your hands dirty.  Our first day of class, beside the usual introduction rigamarole, we were all dicing carrots, onions, and celery for mirepoix - a combination of coarsely cut aromatic vegetables used for making stocks.  Wednesday, we used the pounds and pounds of mirepoix for making chicken stock, fish stock - which was oh so yummy smelling (no, seriously), and a brown (or cooked) chicken stock.  For fun, he also had us make a Mexican fruit water which was simply made my blending up peeled oranges and whole limes and lemons.  We strained that through cheesecloth and got the most beautiful looking and smelling citrus puree, which we then added to water with a little sugar and served over ice.  I also learned how to mince shallots, onions, and parsely with my knives, and it is truly astounding how perfect and tiny I was making my cuts with just a little bit of instruction.  We each clarified a pound of butter, and we learned how to peel a tomato by using boiling water and a bucket of ice.  Class is, in a word, fascinating.  I couldn't honestly think of a better way to be spending my free time.

We don't stop there, though.  Culinary classes aren't just about making food, it's about learning how to run a kitchen.  We are chefs in training.  Therefore we set up the kitchen, cook, and clean up everything as well.  I had mop duty last night.  It brought back nights of cleaning up the poolside Snack Shack when I worked at the country club one summer during high school.  It was like riding a bike.  When 16 people are actively, and I mean ACTIVELY cleaning a kitchen, it doesn't take long to get done.  Time still got away from us and we ended up staying an hour after, and these are four hour classes anyway.  So by the time I got home, I had a meager five hours of sleep last night before I got up and headed to the plant this morning.  I'm missing the downtime, and I'm tired for sure, but thus far this has been worth it.  We'll see if this feeling continues.