Class 27: Filets de daurade poêlés au fenouil
By mishmosh.
Okay folks, now here's a photo worth looking at! My colleague Mishmosh has talent to burn when it comes to food pictures. Compare to my version for a laugh.
Click on the pic and then browse through her beautiful collection of pictures from Le Cordon Bleu Paris demo classes.
Last night was the first attempt at an LCB recipe at home without the professional kitchen set-up at the school. It worked pretty well - despite the changes that I made.
No photo. I forgot; I'll try to be better about that.
In fact, it looked something like this (from a previous time).
I cooked it a little too far through (or the meat ought to have been a little thicker). I didn't get much of the pinkish center that I was looking for.
Charcutiére sauce is made with mustard & pickles (yes pickles, really; stuck me as odd the first time I heard it).
| 120 gr (5x) | Pork loin fillets | thick (should have been even thicker - maybe 180 gr) |
| salt & pepper | ||
| Trim the fillets nicely & reserve the trimmings to cook with the fillets and help make the sauce. | ||
| Season lightly | ||
| oil | Heat some oil in a frying pan (large enough for all meat in 1 layer) | |
| butter | Add a generous glob of butter. When sizzling hot add meat - shaking pan (to avoid sticking) | |
| Once it's a little golden on side 1 add the trimmings | ||
| Lift meat occasionally to sluice juices underneath | ||
| Turn them when beads of 'blood' start to appear on top of the meat | ||
| Cook side 2 until 'done' (still good & pink in the middle) - remove and stash in a warmish place (you'll reheat in the sauce later) | ||
| Sauce | ||
| Pour fat out of cooking pan <== important | ||
| 30 gr | Shallots | Was supposed to be onions |
| Into the pan to start deglazing - heat through | ||
| 100 ml | Dry White Wine | Add. Stir, shale, deglaze. Reduce about 90% (to almost dry) |
| 250 ml | Veal Stock | Add (or chicken stock or water). Reduce to saucy thickness (coat back of a spoon) |
| Strain. Don't press the solids too much. | ||
| salt & pepper | Check Seasoning | |
| | | |
| 2 T | Dijon Mustard | A strong type |
| 20 gr | Butter | Very soft. Mix together with mustard |
| Whisk in a little of the cooking sauce to 'temper' the mixture & melt the butter. Then whisk this tempered mix back into the saucepan. | ||
| Add juices from the resting meat. Reduce to saucy thickness | ||
| | | |
| 30 gr | Gherkin pickles | julienned. Add to sauce. Bring to slight boil |
| 1 T | Curly parsley | very finely chopped. Add to sauce at last moment. (Could also use Chervil) |
| | | |
| Add meat back into sauce to just warm the meat (don't boil or cook it in this step - just warm it up) | ||
| Plate it. |
Médaillons de Porc Charcutiére
Last night was the first attempt at an LCB recipe at home without the professional kitchen set-up at the school. It worked pretty well - despite the changes that I made.
No photo. I forgot; I'll try to be better about that.
There's been no cooking for the last couple of days; and none on the horizon. Although I've been defrosting and reheating what was in the freezer.
I know that I miss the people I met there. I think I'm going to miss going to class. The latter is sort of unexpected.
Before heading home I've got a couple of last days here in Paris. I'll probably go shopping for kitchen wares.
Once home my plan is to systematically reproduce (maybe consecutively) all the recipes I learned at LCB; but at home, with its radically different kitchen infrastructure. I won't have 4 big powerful burners and a big wide oven, no empty cooler for stashing things while doing prep, nor an endless supply of pots and pans (nor will they be miraculously washed clean by someone else - as they were at Le Cordon Bleu Paris). Rats.The LCB Basic Cuisine course had 30 sessions (each session was one demo and one practical) - about 6 each week; totaling 90 or so individual recipes. I figure about 3-4 months to go through the whole lot of them again. I'll need some serious freezer capacity to stash the results because there's no way to eat it all as we go along.
Wish me luck.
Duck Margret avec Sauce Orange
Originally uploaded by willsong.
I haven't actually cooked this one yet. But tomorrow is the exam and I won't be posting anything - too busy studying.
This is duck in an orange sauce. I'll be taking it home; love duck.
Tomorrow is:
8:30 Make this duck dish
11:30 break / lunch / study / panic
12:30 Exam
3:30 Demo / who cares / gala
Poulet Farce
Originally uploaded by willsong.
I under browned this one. I also sort of thought it peculiar that it was taking so damn long to cook the thing in the oven (this disk is, as many are, browned in the pan and 'finished' in the oven). Turns out that my oven blew a fuse.
None the less... my jus (sauce) was - - perfecto. Non plus ultra.
¡Ding! One point for me.
Those turned veggies are, by the way, apples.
This one might be on the practical exam so it was important to pay attention - which most of us had trouble doing today. The class was kind of 'dozey' for some reason. One guy popped onut 3 times to get a cup of coffee from the machine.
It's 2 filets of Sea Bream (Dorada) sandwiching a filling of julienned and very slow cooked fennel. The fennel and fish trimmings are used to make the sauce (I particularly like it when the 'waste' from cleaning the food products becomes something useful).
The tricks were: 1) cut a little 'X' through the skin side if the fillets to prevent curling; 2) use a non-stick pan (cast iron in our case); 3) skin side goes into the pan first; 4) cook the fish very very lightly ('just' colored on the skin side [30 secs]; maybe 2 min on the flesh side)
Wednesday's the last full day. Thursday's the exam. Gotta go study.
Things we learned today: how to cut a chicken into 8 pieces, adding tomatoes to the sauce and remembering to not strain them out, blanching tarragon to eliminate some of it's overpowering taste.
That Chef Didier's in a really good mood after returning from vacation, and that he's blazingly fast. He did the afternoon demo, normally 2 1/2 hours, in 1 1/2.
Pork Medallions in Mustard Sauce
Really interesting sauce on this one; the usual juices from coking the meat and trimmings; degalze: add onions, cook 'em a little; white wine, reduce by about 90%; add thickened veal stock, cook a bit; then strain. That's the regular part. Next mix 2T of Dijon mustard with 20 grams of butter; put a little of the sauce in it (tempering) and whisk/stir; then that mix goes back into the sauce; making mustardy sauce. Add julienned gherkin pickles; bring just to a boil; add chopped parsley & chervil. Done. That's Charcutiére sauce.
The pickle & mustard combination is really good.
And the potato Dauphine (balls) were made from mashed/milled potatoes mixed with a choux pastry & fried. The choux pastry is the hard part - getting the right anount of eggs into the mix. I think our fryer fat was a little too low temp because the result was a litle bit greasy.
The tricks for the park dish are to 1) temper the mustard/butter combo 2) cook the pork through enough - but not too much; and avoid drying it out
and 3) remembering not to strain the sauce after putting in the pickles.
We've been trained for 2-3 weeks to get all the lumpy stuff out of our sauces and reaching for the strainer has become quite automatic. But is to be avoided in this case.
Chef's comment on mine was: good work.
Kitchen session #2 today. We were all getting pretty tired after 4 days of 9 or 10 hours each. And the Chef was pushing us to get it done in record time (we did; the whole shebang in an hour and a half).
Obviously we're learning something because the dish seemed so darn easy. It's really quite similar to a couple of things we've done in the last 3 weeks but now we can do them without hesitation; sort of.
For example: the rice contains carrots, french (mini) green beans and zuchinni - cut in itty bitty burnoise (little square pieces). We all (most of us) used to spend 20 minutes agonizing over how to do a burnoise and now we just grab the veggies and authoratively hack away. Managing to produce a pretty reasonable result.
As with the duck earlier today I got a "very good" as the assessment.
Today we have 2 "practical" sessions (the actual cooking) and 1 demonstration. The first one's duck. Dead easy - except for trussing the thing so that it's nice and symetrical and with the trussing string not showing. This involves a great big needle and running it in a complicated diagonal pattern through the beast. Duck's a possible dish for the final exam so I'd better figure it out. Sunday's reserved for practicing on some chickens.
Tricks to remember: when resting the duck, after it's cooked, place it 1) on a rack [to not stew in its own juices] and 2) breast side down [to keep the breast meat moist].
Somehow, I was the first one finished; to present the dish to Chef for evaluation.
I was just rolling along, not flailing around at all, really efficient in the kitchen. I even beat the 2 pro & semi-pro chef types that usually are done 10-15 minutes ahead of the rest of us.
The only problem is that it might have been a one time thing and I don't know how to repeat it.
I believe we may have winner here. A real serious chunk of meat is involved. A veal rib section. Slow pan cooked. Lovely jus if you're lucky (nope, I wasn't); decent veggies.
This is a demo photo but my practical came out pretty much similar (and yes I know the photos are not top notch; if you want quality photography have a look at mishMosh's flickr stuff [link in upper right part of page]).
Anyway, I burnt the meat trimming's a little so the 'jus' had a carmelized taste - damn it. Otherwise the veal was great and the vegs teriffic. This one I took home for later.
It seems that the whole thing's getting easier as we go along (or, perhaps, I'm actually learning something?).
It's pretty good that we all managed to produce anything at all in practical session... because last night was the class dinner (at "Train Bleu" restaurant - a gorgeous joint in the Gare de Lyon); on the house from Le Cordon Bleu and the wine flowed readily. Today could have been a little hazy if one wasn't careful.
Can it be any easier?! Steak & fries. Okay, so you've got to make a bernaise sauce (3/9 failed on the 1st try). Then fry the oversized french fries in 2 steps (blanch them at 140c, drain and later fry them golden brown at 200c). Oh, and "turn" an artichoke to act as a cup to hold the bernaise. Also had to Grill then "Oven" the steak (also at 200c). The grilling is really only to hashmark the meat. But, by the standards of week 4 of the course this is a breeze.
Chef's comments were "perfect" (sauce) & very good (meat). That's satisfactory.
The meat I cooked 'rare' so I could take it home and successfully reheat it to something like 'medium'. The chef's dirty trick was that before jumping into his evaluation of today's dish he asked what degree of doneness I'd done the meat to - and then judged whether I had delivered the steak as stated. I was off by a bit. Rats.
By the way- it's a pic of my own food (not the demo's).
Today the "intensive" part of the course started; 3 sessions a day - either 2 demos and 1 practical or vice versa. Lots to keep track of.
The jumbo shrimps/gambas were pretty simple and looked nice (although this is, as usual, a 'demo' photo). And it was a good thing to have a simple day as the 1st of "intensive" since this was also the day we had the written exam.
Marinatred, battered, and deep fried. One good trick: cross-hatch 3-4 cuts on the belly side (cut shallow X's) to prevent them from curling up too too much.
We also had a soufflé in this practical (pic posted separately). It rose somewhat crooked but didn't collapse right away (which is good). Oh, and mine tasted okay too (sort of important).
Not to mention the Exam.
Not a lot of time to write - nor inspiration. Tired.
Give me a coupla minutes & let me get back to you. Right at this moment I need some sleep.
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.
