Dick Eats Things: Tournage, Stocks, Sauces, Soups & Salads

We had our 10th class last night, which means that we're halfway done with Level 1. It's crazy since we've learned so much in such a short period and it feels like we just started yesterday. I've been too lazy recently to update, so bear with me as I do a two week recap of what we've learned/made in class:

Day 4: Tournage

One of the most frustrating if not the most frustrating class to date. We learned how to tournage (turn) vegetables into faceted oval shapes. So we ended up practicing with carrots, turnips, and potatoes. I just couldn't get it down in class and two weeks later still struggling with it. Chef actually came up to me and told me to relax because I was getting super frustrated with trying to make these cuts. We apparently need to be able to make eight cocottes out of a potato in 20 minutes which I definitely have to practice in the next coming weeks. I kept thinking to myself how useless this skill is going to become after I leave school, but you never know. We cooked the potatoes using a method called rissoler, which is essentially the same as A'L'anglaise except that you're adding a touch of sugar at the beginning and you're letting the potatoes air dry after blanching them. One of the other things we did was take apart an artichoke with a paring knife, something we also need to do for our practical at the end of level 1. We just all our veg for something called Garniture Bouquetiere which is essentially a dish composed of various vegetables. Here's a picture of it below:

Day 5: Stocks

The foundation of many aspects of professional cooking, stocks take a while to cook, with the exception being fumet (fish stock) and vegetable stock which take 20 and 45 min respectively. You never add salt to a stock, always cook it uncovered, frequently skimming, and strained after cooking. We also learned about the Maillard reaction, which is when the sugar and protein molecules undergo a chemical reaction after they are heated above 250 degrees to create that delicious golden crust on your steak. All the stocks we made were saved and used for the following class.

Day 6: Classic Sauces

Today was a pretty good day. We made 3 different "mother" sauces in addition to a white wine sauce and a wine & mushroom sauce. Veloute, Espagnole, and Bechamel. We made a roux for all the sauces to act as a binding agent so that they would actually thicken. Chef was really impressed with all my sauces which made me feel really good since he said that being a good saucier is one of the keys to moving up in the kitchen ranks.

Day 7: Emulsified Sauces & Sabayons

We had a new chef today, and I must say that I honestly miss the old chef we had because he kept us on our toes all the time. An emulsified sauce is made with two liquids that don't normally mix, such as oil and vinegar. So we ended up making Mayonnaise (the first time I'd made mayo from scratch), Beurre Blanc, Hollandaise and Bearnaise. We also learned how to rescue broken sauces such as adding hot/cold water, or taking the sauce off the bain-marie (hot water bath). Overall the sauces I made were pretty good, the beurre blanc ended up breaking because the heat was too high, so I was kinda pissed about that.

Day 8: Soups and Consommes

Soup day was one of the toughest to date. You'd think that soups would be easy, throw the ingredients in and let them sit for however long, but the French have to go ahead and make everything more complicated than ever necessary. We learned about clear soups (consommes and broth based soups) as well as bound soups (bisques, shaped veg soups and pureed soups). With all the different soups we made, we got to practice our taillage for the 4 different soups. We had to do a bunch of different cuts for the Farmer Style Veg Soup (Cultivateur) as well as the Beef Consomme. The two soups took up so much time that the chef had to move split pea soup to the next lesson, and ended up doing the French Onion soup as a demo. I have to admit though that the potage cultivateur was one of the best soups I've ever had, and definitely the best I've ever made.

Day 9: Food Preservaton

When I was reading for this lesson, I kept wondering what we were actually going to make in class since most of the stuff needed to be kept overnight to develop the appropriate flavors. On the menu: Gravlax (super excited for this!), Duck confit, Pickled Jardiniere of Veg, Brandade, Preserved Lemons. We also needed to complete our split pea soup which actually came out to more of a puree than a soup for us. Chef lectured about the different methods of food preservations that were developed centuries ago such as: dehydration, pickling, fermentation, smoking, pasteurization, and even canning. We ended up making all five of the items, practicing taillage yet again for the jardinier of veg. Preserved lemons were pretty simple, just making the brine and slices the lemons into quarters. Gravlax ended up being a demo while we got our first taste of butchering with making several incisions on the duck legs for the confit. The confit ended up being a demo as well. However we did make the Brandade (cod & potatoes), which wasn't my favorite dish since it's supposed to taste dry and chalky after you make it. The structure of chef's class was so scattered that for the first time, I was really glad that class ended on time. I just couldn't take his monotone voice anymore.

Day 10: Salads

Going back to the soup lesson, who knew that salads would be so difficult to make. Leave it to the French to make life more complicated than it needs to be. We had a different Chef instructor yet again, and we were slated to make all of our salads individually: Niciose, Cooked Veg, Sweet & Bitter Greens. Seems simple right? Once you look at all the components of the 3 salads your head is swimming. For the Cooked Veg salad we had to make another mayonnaise from scratch, macedoine 4 different kinds of veg, and make a tomato fondue. This is the finished product:

I liked plating this dish a lot, although slicing the cucumbers and making the ring was pretty time consuming.

Nicoise Salad was not very fun, partly because I personally don't like eating the salad to begin with, so I knew off the bat that making it wouldn't be very enjoyable.

My plating for this salad was terribly ugly. I was having a pretty bad day already, so I just wanted to slug through class, and this salad was towards the end so I didn't really care so much.