Consommé aux Brunoises

Consomme with vegetable brunoise

Simple simple simple. Sometimes it's good.

This is a consommé with tiny chopped up vegetables in it. Carrots, french (mini) green beans, radish/turnip, and celery.
The trick here was to get the bouillon (meat soup) that we started with from being a cloudy / murky soup to being a crystaline beauty. See the pic; it can be done. It involves stirring in a ground meat & egg whites mixture with some minced vegetables and letting the mess glom together at the bottom and then float to the top - taking the impurities with it. A basic culinary technique - and it's fun to see the transformation happen from cloudy to clear.

Chef's comments on my consommé were 1) perfect (beautifully clear and properly seasoned) and 2) the brunoise was wrong. It was unequal between the different vegetables :-( . That is, each veggie is supposed to be cut into little 1-2mm cubes - the same size; as mine in fact were. But my carrot cubes, although equal sized amongst the carrots (for example) were not the same size as my turnip cubes! Nor were the bean cubes the same size as (e.g) as the celery. Major error - apparently. Perfect symmetry is part of the charm of this soup (I guess).

It's an tradiational recipe of the Escoffier era so there's only one right way to do it.

No biggy anyway. I got good points for flavor; good clarification; just messed up on technique. Better luck next time.

Now it's two consecutive days off; Sunday and the national holiday on Monday (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary); just in time to study for the written exam on Tuesday. Speaking of next week... we go from doing 5 1/2-6 hour afternoons to doing 10 hour days (8:30 - 18:30). Ought to be fun. The "intensive" part of the title of this course has finally kicked in.