tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45392520084081714112024-02-06T21:45:38.496-05:00Yes Chef, No ChefA Detour Through Culinary SchoolGreghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-47504962797633830322008-11-29T00:09:00.005-05:002008-11-29T00:16:41.292-05:00Frenching a Rib RackAfter several months away, I have quite a backlog of things that I wish I'd had the time and inclination to put up here. For anyone still keeping score at home, culinary school is over: I passed, though not easily, and, especially on the final exam, without clearing the bar by all that much.<br /><br />I've been hesitant to resume writing here because I've felt like I owe it to anyone who still bothers to check in to see if I'm still here to do some reportage of what the last half of culinary school was like. But I just haven't been in a frame of mind to do that yet. So, without regard for or further acknowledgement or explanation of the lengthy pause in the appearance of entries here, I'm just going to jump right in and start with whatever I want to throw out there.<br /><br />At the moment, what I want to throw out there is a little instructional piece that I suspect interests me a lot more than it interests you: a "how to" showing the process of frenching a rack of rib meat and cutting it into chops. For most readers, this process will fall into the category of trivial knowledge, in that it's not something they are ever likely to do. But this is what cooking is all about to me: it is about knowing as much as you can about your ingredients and how to handle them, how to make the most you can from them, how to take charge of all of the details of a piece of food that you want to put on someone's plate and make it as good as you can make it.<br /><br />The example used here is a pork rib roast, but you can go through the same process to prepare a beef rib roast or steaks (beef cut into steaks this way is sometimes called a "tomahawk chop"), or a frenched rack of lamb or cut lamb chops. I always trim my own pork racks now because I enjoy it: once you become comfortable with the process, it's a relaxing thing to do while you think about what you're going to do with the meat or what you will serve with it. You will also usually get a better result than if you just buy finished chops, even from a good butcher, and in addition you can use most of what you trim off to make a sauce.<br /><br />So let's get started. I'm working with 8 ribs of a pork rib roast. Unless you know your butcher really well and know how he'll cut your meat, you should probably ask for at least one more rib than you need, because when the rack is cut using a butcher's bandsaw, at least one and maybe both of the ribs at the ends will be unusable as chops. (This is because the ribs don't run through the meat squarely, but are on a diagonal, so when the butcher cuts through them on a bandsaw, although he starts out neatly between two ribs, he'll often end up cutting through one of them, leaving an unusable end.) Three ribs is probably the smallest chunk of meat it would be reasonable to work with -- anything less will be unstable enough on your board that at some point in the process you'll either cut yourself or knock the whole thing onto the floor.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjugZWBK2zz6VHv3BuMZ9ol7MCjLZ1-Dj2r0UbD9NlzafGt_CNhTOOHjrjdA8gmruu91Kxldw-whDMXXfgMX-jJTQcjrYqVjiZ0nMLt_cmdTmFeXraJOlPIvgl67PKCaWkPbleNNPc8IyIM/s1600-h/IMG_2644-FirstCut.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjugZWBK2zz6VHv3BuMZ9ol7MCjLZ1-Dj2r0UbD9NlzafGt_CNhTOOHjrjdA8gmruu91Kxldw-whDMXXfgMX-jJTQcjrYqVjiZ0nMLt_cmdTmFeXraJOlPIvgl67PKCaWkPbleNNPc8IyIM/s320/IMG_2644-FirstCut.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273942755139644370" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The line of the first cut to remove the meat above the rib bones. The cut is made by marking the back end of the eye of the meat at each end of the roast, then cutting a line between those marks.</i></div><br /><br />The first and easiest step is to cut away the meat on top of the ribs with a slicing or boning knife. There are a couple of things to watch for as you do this. First, the size of the "eye" of the meat, the big round neat chunk you can see on each end of the roat, can be much different from one end to the other. Before you make the cut, use your knife to make a small cut on each end to mark the meat above the ribs just behind where the eye ends. In the picture below, you can see from where I've made the first cut that the eye on the near end is smaller than the eye on the far end, and the meat to be removed is larger on the near end.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiILRJoBy6yiclWLzwq0LBjncM-zxOYYh7JBViyrW26MxMj56VNwKHr5Vsj5yejBsz-3XTMpWUjm-jk_ObeKRw3Xo3yKRAOB2Tg7tJKCF7X_9t2gimm-xGt-0I869KwjpEbgMN7u9WBUuRD/s1600-h/IMG_2649-FirstTrim.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiILRJoBy6yiclWLzwq0LBjncM-zxOYYh7JBViyrW26MxMj56VNwKHr5Vsj5yejBsz-3XTMpWUjm-jk_ObeKRw3Xo3yKRAOB2Tg7tJKCF7X_9t2gimm-xGt-0I869KwjpEbgMN7u9WBUuRD/s320/IMG_2649-FirstTrim.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273942757214895442" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>First cut completed. In a restaurant, the removed meat would be further trimmed of visible fat to make a sauce for the finished dish.</i></div><br /><br />Once you've marked the ends of the line you're going to cut, the other thing to pay attention to is the angle of your cut down through the meat. It's a very natural motion to cut straight downward, and it seems to make sense because it would leave equal portions of meat on the top and bottom of that side of the eye of the roast. But if you look at how much of the meat you want to serve would be left in contact with the rib bone, you'll see that at one end of the roast you'll very nearly end up cutting the rib bones all the way off. So make your cut at a slight angle away from the main chunk of the roast all the way down the line. This will look a bit incongruous when you first make the cut, but the chops will take on a nice shape when we tie them at the end of the process.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfRGdDvlveQQZHg1H7ymwJnUf5pkCDHBd8OvKKBmD4QYzGncoOOQtPq43Cqd9-Cplt8Tk2xbQimW7nMr3aJhBcda7jy8BJ0vKgaHXkRsmn2YRx8xOdSJPicMPkXFBmqbg0n_aok1xjkHEG/s1600-h/IMG_2653-ScoreAcross.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfRGdDvlveQQZHg1H7ymwJnUf5pkCDHBd8OvKKBmD4QYzGncoOOQtPq43Cqd9-Cplt8Tk2xbQimW7nMr3aJhBcda7jy8BJ0vKgaHXkRsmn2YRx8xOdSJPicMPkXFBmqbg0n_aok1xjkHEG/s320/IMG_2653-ScoreAcross.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273942760264527954" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Scoring across the ribs on the underside to cut through the membrane.</i></div><br /><br />The next step is to score the membrane on the underside of the ribs. Using the knife tip, cut a line across all of the ribs, so that you cut completely through the membrane all the way to the bone -- you want to cut the membrane, not just mark it. Make this cut right below the line of the first cut where you removed the meat on top of the ribs. Then cut through the membrane right in the middle of the bottom of each rib, from the line you scored across all the ribs to the end of each one. Poke a sharp paring knife through the meat between the ribs right on the line scored across them. I do this a couple of times, once with the knife each direction (once with the blade against each of the two ribs surrounding the cut), and work the knife around a bit with the blade against the rib to cut the meat all the way down to the bone.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXa0ng5iuph7cEYBCu5vw_EZruk2kzqRSgSfVUx_RBTCQFks1dB4WYkn2QOdrtPnDLOF4XaDMMx_NZGeJwQLJ6ChQ3Wtgu6d8H-ByShKlPhEJlCNbJIvVf_w3FMVbL05Dy6I36WxVUB9XU/s1600-h/IMG_2655-ScoreParallel.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXa0ng5iuph7cEYBCu5vw_EZruk2kzqRSgSfVUx_RBTCQFks1dB4WYkn2QOdrtPnDLOF4XaDMMx_NZGeJwQLJ6ChQ3Wtgu6d8H-ByShKlPhEJlCNbJIvVf_w3FMVbL05Dy6I36WxVUB9XU/s320/IMG_2655-ScoreParallel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273942766472545170" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Scoring along the length of the ribs.</i></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrbwmcw0JGLKzmPw5_nTtcC4rpbEcRXbdXTDzt10F32Jz0WUj9CdhPe6qj94co9NjfwGBZKK0hJnroCR9E_AGRhfcznRgSXgzaV0zRyFejZnQZwNqxFTYbJJ3gjlV5VwpeuNBOM2aqEV5l/s1600-h/IMG_2660-BetweenRibs.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrbwmcw0JGLKzmPw5_nTtcC4rpbEcRXbdXTDzt10F32Jz0WUj9CdhPe6qj94co9NjfwGBZKK0hJnroCR9E_AGRhfcznRgSXgzaV0zRyFejZnQZwNqxFTYbJJ3gjlV5VwpeuNBOM2aqEV5l/s320/IMG_2660-BetweenRibs.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273942766787005874" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Cutting between the ribs.</i></div><br /><br />Now, instead of cutting, we want to clean the bones on three sides (the bottom side, where we cut through the membrane, and the two sides of the ribs) by scraping away the meat with a paring knife. Be careful throughout this process not to tear or cut through the membrane between the meat and bones -- you want to separate the membrane from the bones by scraping sideways with the paring knife, never moving the knife forward or backward in a slicing motion, but only scraping sideways. By doing this, you can get the bones completely clean almost all the way down to the top of the bones resting on your board. You don't want to cut all the way through the meat to the board though -- remember that you never want to cut through the membrane anywhere. The intact membrane is what will make it possible to cleanly remove all of the meat from the ribs.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-FFkls1jexRLXPTpT5J8Ff-7XSSZ-F_yRpzeAhbpIl_sdXG_YGQpsMArw4vNXXTku9JLLjAyvUeCeUZCvgkXFKh0ZMBaRnu5Spzg5yM1LA_3D5kJOz42JungPOIvEWUeZvOk9j8ocEFM/s1600-h/IMG_2667-Scraping.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-FFkls1jexRLXPTpT5J8Ff-7XSSZ-F_yRpzeAhbpIl_sdXG_YGQpsMArw4vNXXTku9JLLjAyvUeCeUZCvgkXFKh0ZMBaRnu5Spzg5yM1LA_3D5kJOz42JungPOIvEWUeZvOk9j8ocEFM/s320/IMG_2667-Scraping.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943021326624882" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Scraping the membrane and meat from the ribs. Be careful not to tear or cut the membrane, including not cutting through it as you work your way down and get near the cutting board. Scrape only sideways; never move the knife forward or backward in a slicing motion.</i></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7GEr8BzavRceoYc_n-nYomEVCVUrz-sUT-yvqTPj7aW1x5U26hZ-DfjCcY7zV6-ltkkyLCmjn8EwlkM9d5ak1DhzNtsSuKMAgLI70UGjj4hxtpGGl6cPSEOQ8zIeToCImniKncthfZeiw/s1600-h/IMG_2670-ScrapedRack.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7GEr8BzavRceoYc_n-nYomEVCVUrz-sUT-yvqTPj7aW1x5U26hZ-DfjCcY7zV6-ltkkyLCmjn8EwlkM9d5ak1DhzNtsSuKMAgLI70UGjj4hxtpGGl6cPSEOQ8zIeToCImniKncthfZeiw/s320/IMG_2670-ScrapedRack.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943024087465458" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The membrane completely scraped free from the bones.</i></div><br /><br />To finish frenching the rack, stand the rack up so that the rib bones are pointed up in the air. Carefully and firmly pry and pull the meat away from the top of each rib. The meat will be slippery, so it helps to use a kitchen towel or paper towel to get a firm grasp on it. If the membrane is in good shape, not torn or cut too much in the prior step, you'll be able to get the meat off nearly in once piece. It won't come off without a bit of force, you won't be able to just tear the whole thing away in a couple seconds with one hand, but if you work one or two bones at a time the meat should be free with just a minute or so of work. After the meat comes off, finish cleaning the ribs by scraping your paring knife lengthwise along each of the bones. Any tiny bits of meat, fat, or membrane can become charred and blackened when you cook the meat, and will spoil all of the work you just did to get nice clean-looking bones and chops.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPhMpMpv5MESZbAeqoy-5Hdm5DBLQkGLUZLlh4rbeMLyUyfDK-4nqxjkG3wj7ob-EgvI-KCwxxAJ-GOUKI48xDoEjH0bYUHnJSlmoZ5BrXuHsJ8nnfz1-flutCSQAulFuyeq-ij389sYLM/s1600-h/IMG_2672-FrenchedRack.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPhMpMpv5MESZbAeqoy-5Hdm5DBLQkGLUZLlh4rbeMLyUyfDK-4nqxjkG3wj7ob-EgvI-KCwxxAJ-GOUKI48xDoEjH0bYUHnJSlmoZ5BrXuHsJ8nnfz1-flutCSQAulFuyeq-ij389sYLM/s320/IMG_2672-FrenchedRack.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943025172392082" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The frenched rack. The removed meat can be used to make a sauce.</i></div><br /><br />This next bit can be tedious, and you might skip it if it drives you nuts. Next to the meaty ends of each of the ribs, you will often find the tip of another bone left in the meat. These are parts of the chine bone, which the pig's backbone, most of which the butcher cut away with a bandsaw when preparing the rib rack for you. I dig them out with the tip of a sharp paring knife or boning knife, using the fingers of my opposite hand to work them free as I cut. (I also sometimes find little splinters of the chine bone by running my fingers over the surface of the meat near these bone tips, in the same way that I would check a fish fillet for pin bones.) Leaving these chine bone tips in will not affect how the meat cooks, but it will make the finished chop a little more difficult and confusing for the diner to cut on the plate, since these little bones buried in the meat and lying off the line of the rib will come as a surprise. Most people will be perplexed enough by this to leave a fair amount of the meat behind on the plate, still attached to the bones, so I prefer to remove them before cooking.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinEVdizqo8DzRoJtTjGjzlbPCnkYYR1EMR2oHY_Wu_adGbawL3fWbS5Kv-oYgIB-xefkYYKubwFv5OQuiOxF06mSmBs4-YJeguROxoahHo2qRIUsqzKU0xyOg7m9paxrz_Rn9v9bvzLk0L/s1600-h/IMG_2680-ChineBoneTips.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinEVdizqo8DzRoJtTjGjzlbPCnkYYR1EMR2oHY_Wu_adGbawL3fWbS5Kv-oYgIB-xefkYYKubwFv5OQuiOxF06mSmBs4-YJeguROxoahHo2qRIUsqzKU0xyOg7m9paxrz_Rn9v9bvzLk0L/s320/IMG_2680-ChineBoneTips.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943027978988834" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The chine bone tips left in the meat -- there is a bone tip right at the end of each of my fingers here.</i></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWy0jx9yjc1BBaKRHnukAgT__lCGsG2xSVJbVDxhqjyTiyiECfnyf_CBnoaJZ0nZfTc6r9Vy1c_U2Zm8bSpwC9JjA_8Afq9I53oPu8NqTyifld5Z4whVFIN-sZnnBVloNmkdLEXajKFEcA/s1600-h/IMG_2681-ChineTipsRemoved.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWy0jx9yjc1BBaKRHnukAgT__lCGsG2xSVJbVDxhqjyTiyiECfnyf_CBnoaJZ0nZfTc6r9Vy1c_U2Zm8bSpwC9JjA_8Afq9I53oPu8NqTyifld5Z4whVFIN-sZnnBVloNmkdLEXajKFEcA/s320/IMG_2681-ChineTipsRemoved.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943030139685426" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The chine bone tips removed. You can see the holes left in the meat by their removal. The removed meat and bones can be used in a sauce for the finished dish.</i></div><br /><br />At this point, you could cook the whole trimmed rack as a roast in the oven, but instead we'll keep going and cut it into chops. Many chefs trim away excess fat from the top surface of the meat at this point, but I find that often results in tearing up the edge more than I would like, so I prefer to trim the fat after cutting the chops. Place the rack on your cutting board, and pretend for a moment that the rib bones don't exist. Look at how you would cut the meat into chops if the bones weren't there, by cutting squarely across the large cylinder of meat. Now consider the rib bones, and notice that those bones do not run squarely through the meat, but are on an angle so that they run a little diagonally through the roast. We want to cut the chops between the ribs but using cuts that run squarely across the meat rather than parallel to the bones -- those cuts will yield nice chops of uniform thickness. To finish the preparation of the chops, trim away any excess fat or loose bits of meat around the edge of each chop. Then use a piece of cotton string to tie up each chop to give it a nice even and round shape.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDmZrxotRk09q2_5Bj4hsGFfPRUGF3CT999onmpwFShd43wCHHhVLE3BmjtEo6u4z3aHExAskhCzhOV3JMSNVD-T8M9ojVucIWOtxvy-v67UBI9OOZeKp-mUXGpgQFnNXIn9ifTc9qhV0/s1600-h/IMG_2688-FirstChop.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDmZrxotRk09q2_5Bj4hsGFfPRUGF3CT999onmpwFShd43wCHHhVLE3BmjtEo6u4z3aHExAskhCzhOV3JMSNVD-T8M9ojVucIWOtxvy-v67UBI9OOZeKp-mUXGpgQFnNXIn9ifTc9qhV0/s320/IMG_2688-FirstChop.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943169276337570" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The first chop about to be cut. Notice that the rib bones run diagonally through the meat: the end of the bone that points upward to the right of the knife blade is the near end of the rib whose far end is right behind the tip of the knife.</i></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJUHDto5kZ5wyzyP35MJ0LYYEWDQgzjZkcmpfeb99QHrS9NBSaEmaIUKTssMKkhozghqyPxarGqqLvhGQeBxNrtvnqR303sIS4BesV_sWgbFZNP8FgvQZ8n0zcLhQeSJm5tgMC_msKYdxk/s1600-h/IMG_2701-TiedChops.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJUHDto5kZ5wyzyP35MJ0LYYEWDQgzjZkcmpfeb99QHrS9NBSaEmaIUKTssMKkhozghqyPxarGqqLvhGQeBxNrtvnqR303sIS4BesV_sWgbFZNP8FgvQZ8n0zcLhQeSJm5tgMC_msKYdxk/s320/IMG_2701-TiedChops.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273943173239726082" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Two tied finished chops, and one ready for tying. You can see from the color of the meat how the tied chops had the same little "tail" of meat hanging awkwardly off the rib, but tying the chops pulls the main part of the meat back toward the rib.</i></div><br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-14813693306020357862008-07-30T01:17:00.001-04:002008-07-30T01:21:17.987-04:00Logistics on the LineI am way behind on posting things here for the last few weeks. There's been a lot that I would like to write about, but I've just been too buried in work. My class has moved on to Level 5 now, where we are half of the staff for a pretty nice restaurant operated by the school, <a href="http://www.frenchculinary.com/lecole.htm">L'Ecole</a>. I highly recommend it as a great bargain in New York: you get a five course meal (well, four "real" courses, plus a salad) for just $42 in a city where the going rate for a good three course meal is $90. <a href="http://www.frenchculinary.com/pdf/MWF%20Dinner%20070908.pdf">The menu</a> often has a lot of great choices. Usually the food is excellent, but the risk you run is that often if the food is not good, it is very much not good. You see, among the students, there is a small percentage that doesn't really care about the quality of the work they do, and they aren't interested in any of the details. The rest of us often wonder why they are there at all, but for whatever reason, they are there and they cook in the restaurant when they reach Level 5. The customer reviews I see of the restaurant online seem to me to reflect this reality. About 80%-90% of them say that it is an outstanding restaurant with terrific food at an unheard of price in Manhattan. The other 10%-20% say that the food is awful.<br /><br />Most people are a bit nervous when they first begin cooking in the restaurant kitchen. (And just like my other line of work, software development, a lot of the people who aren't nervous are the ones taht you don't really want cooking your food.) You feel like you don't know what you are doing and you are in everyone's way. One of the nice things about the way the school has arranged our transition to the restaurant is that our first day cooking there is technically the last day of Level 4 rather than the first day of Level 5. That means that we get to work under the chef we are very familiar with from the last 3 months, in our case Chef Phil. It's much easier to handle your first day in restaurant service with a chef that knows you and isn't going to form his first impression of you from a question you ask about something you're not certain of in the new environment.<br /><br />That said, the day before we began cooking for customers, Chef Phil gave us a bit of a stern lecture or maybe pep talk about bringing our best game into the restaurant service. In most restaurant kichens, there is a chef called the "expediter" who shouts out orders to the line cooks who are preparing the plates to go out. The idea is that when the expediter shouts out to "fire" the order, you want to have the plate "in the window" (under the heat lamps just behind the doors to the dining room and next to the expediter) in a couple of minutes. Chef Phil in his pep talk told us that when an order first comes in, we should take whatever the main ingredient is (usually a piece of fish or meat) out of wherever it is being stored (for example, in a refrigerated drawer under the stove for fish) and put it on a sheet pan on the counter. That way, you always know that all of the food still stored is available for orders that have not yet come in, and when things start moving very fast, you know whether you are about to run out or not. For example, when it gets busy, you might have 15 uncooked fish fillets on your station, but maybe 8 of those have already been ordered so you really only have 7. If you've removed the 8 from the pile waiting in storage, you'll know that you don't have that many left.<br /><br />Chef Phil really wanted to emphasize this point to us. He said: "If you do only one thing right during your shift in the restaurant, make sure you get this right. I mean, do NOT fuck this up. If you ever have to tell your chef that you don't have the product to cook an order that has been taken, the first thing you feel is gonna be his foot up your ass. And if you do that to me the first night we're in the restaurant, I will beat you in the head with a stick, and when you come to the first thing you feel will be my foot up your ass."<br /><br />So far we have done fine with this. The restaurant service is very short because it is scheduled around the fact that dinner is being cooked by students who are only required to be in class from about 6pm until 10:45pm. So reservations for that service are only available between 8pm and 9pm. That makes the dinner hour in the kitchen so short that it kind of rolls through the kitchen like a wave: first the canape station is busy, then the garde manger (appetizers), then the fish station, then meats, and finally desserts. The chef instructors can sort of babysit one station at a time. Later in the service, everyone will at least have some orders being worked on, but because the dinner hour is only an hour, only one station at a time is at risk of getting overwhelmed and being "in the weeds."<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-83447436104852208262008-07-05T13:34:00.002-04:002008-07-05T13:40:07.811-04:00New York PizzaIn reading about the New Haven pizza places in the days before I went there to see what they were all about, I came across an old New York Times article that gave a history, or really more of a genealogy, of the pizzerias in New York that make the style of pizza that is my favorite in the city. The story can be a little confusing, especially regarding the pizza places called "Patsy's" -- Patsy's was some of the best and most famous pizza in New York for several generations, and there is more than one Patsy's pizza restaurant in the city today, but it is often unclear what relationship the current Patsy's has to the original, if any. At one extreme, you sometimes hear that it is still family owned, and at the other extreme you often hear that the name was bought out by a corporation that now keeps the restaurants going. The truth is a little of both.<br /><br />The article had <a href="http://www.sliceny.com/images/2004_04_30_PizzaFamilyTree.php">this nice "family tree"</a> of New York pizzas, available online courtesy of the folks at <a href="http://slice.seriouseats.com/">Slice</a>, the pizza blog. My favorite New York pizza, <a href="http://www.angelospizzany.com/">Angelo's</a>, appears at the top of the tree, second from the left. Angelo Angelis opened a pizza restaurant in Brooklyn in the 1960s called Pizza Chef, and the current Angelo's in Manhattan was started by Angelo's nephews who had been trained by Angelo's son Nick of <a href="http://www.nicksnyc.com/">Nick's Pizza</a>, which was run by Nick and another son of Angelo, John.<br /><br />At the bottom of the tree you'll find the original New York pizza place (thought by many to be the first pizzeria in the United States), <a href="http://www.firstpizza.com/">Lombardi's</a>. I had heard of Lombardi's, but I didn't realize until looking into it over this past week that it is only a couple of blocks from school, and it is open until midnight on Saturdays, late enough to get there after we leave class. So on Saturday, I headed right there after we got out of the kitchen and back into our street clothes. Based on that one pizza, it looks like Lombardi's might have eclipsed Angelo's as my favorite pizza in the city.<br /><br />The two places make a similar style of pizza, as do most of the places in the family tree from that New York Times article. They use a very light tomato sauce, usually made with crushed San Marzano canned tomatoes from Italy, and little or no herbs or spices in the sauce. The cheese is fresh mozzarella, which is too soft and wet to be grated, and is instead cut into round slices and placed on top of the pizza. Unlike most pizzas found across the United States, these pizzas do not have a solid covering of cheese; instead, the sliced rounds of cheese, about two or three inches in diameter, are placed on top of the sauce so that they cover about two-thirds of the surface area, leaving the sauce exposed on the rest. Many of the first pizza joints to open didn't call their product "pizza" in their name, but instead used the term "tomato pie," so instead of "Jack's Pizzeria," in the 1920s the place would be named "Jack's Tomato Pies." And tomato pie is exactly what I'm looking for -- I'm not in the majority when it comes to how I evaluate a pizza, but the most important thing to me is that it taste in some way like good tomatoes. (In fact, the thing I dislike about most Chicago pizza is not that it's thick or greasy or cheesey or bready, but that it arrives covered in a tomato sauce on top and yet somehow they've managed to cook all of the taste out of the sauce -- it is truly a red sauce, in the sense that all it gives the pizza is a red finish, and very little or no flavor of tomatoes. It is, to me, a bad joke.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1WqMj5pTRFUBPfwdjKeFGgkNRdfdbyg1prrPsNqD092EPLt3KaBvDAVS53OkgF7yaBRy46Dgt2qsBBfm4kKeJy03tra5bL0c38e26y-RpuYjkIFFYje7iO7ZAtgh16oVDuZWBj9dThGy2/s1600-h/IMG_2469-LombardisPizza.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1WqMj5pTRFUBPfwdjKeFGgkNRdfdbyg1prrPsNqD092EPLt3KaBvDAVS53OkgF7yaBRy46Dgt2qsBBfm4kKeJy03tra5bL0c38e26y-RpuYjkIFFYje7iO7ZAtgh16oVDuZWBj9dThGy2/s320/IMG_2469-LombardisPizza.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5219585063142487922" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Lombardi's pizza. You can see here how the melted rounds<br />of fresh mozzarella don't completely cover the pizza.<br />Most New York pizza uses slightly less cheese than this,<br />leaving even more exposed areas of just tomato sauce.</i></div><br /><br />In addition to the light tomato sauce and splotches of fresh mozzarella, another characteristic of that style of New York pizza is that it is baked in an impossibly hot oven, usually at 900F or more. The classic pizzas are made in coal-burning ovens, which are hotter than wood ovens, which in turn are hotter than gas ovens. The floor of the oven is made of smooth brick, and the pizza is placed directly on the brick floor, which has been thoroughly heated by the coal burning in the oven all day. The result is that the pizza goes from completely raw to completely cooked in just a few minutes. Often less than ten minutes elapses from the time you order a full pizza until the time it arrives at your table, because they can make it in two or three minutes and then bake it in only four minutes or so. The result of the hot oven and the superheated brick floor is that the thin crust gets slightly charred on the bottom, with a bit of grilled flavor to it, but is still soft on the top, and overall it is not at all brittle like a cracker even though it is crunchy underneath. The cheese just barely melts all the way in the short time it takes to cook the pizza, so that even though it arrives steaming hot, you can eat it immediately without getting burned because the heat has not really built up throughout the thickness of the pizza.<br /><br />This is the pizza that Gennaro Lombardi made when he opened in the very early 1900s, and he passed his tradition on to some new pizza places opened by people who had worked for him, and those places are still around today: <a href="http://www.totonnos.com/">Totonno's</a>, opened near Coney Island in 1924 and in recent years at another location in Manhattan; <a href="http://www.johnspizzerianyc.com/">John's of Bleecker Street</a>, opened in 1929, also with additional locations in the last few years (their web site now promotes the Times Square location, which probably generates the most money); and possibly Patsy's, opened in East Harlem by Patsy Lancieri in 1933 (it is uncertain whether he ever worked for Lombardi's), ultimately becoming the most ambiguous brand name on the New York pizza scene.<br /><br />The name "Patsy's" first gets muddled with the opening of <a href="http://www.grimaldis.com/brooklyn.htm">Patsy Grimaldi's pizzeria</a> under the Brooklyn Bridge. Patsy Grimaldi is a newphew of the original Patsy Lancieri. I've read various accounts of the opening of Grimaldi's restaurant, and so far can't really find one that looks authoritative. Some say he called the place "Patsy's," and others say "Patsy Grimaldi's." Some say the name later changed because of a legal dispute about the right to use the name "Patsy's," and others say that he either sold the name or simply changed it. In any event, the restaurant was renamed "Grimaldi's," and remains under the bridge in Brooklyn today. A couple of additional locations have opened in New Jersey and on Long Island, owned and operated by relatives of Patsy Grimaldi.<br /><br />Meanwhile, a couple of the original Patsy's employees bought the Patsy's pizzeria in East Harlem, presumably from Patsy or his heirs. Not long after that, they licensed the Patsy's name to the daugher and son-in-law of Angelo Angelis, the namesake (though never owner or operator) of my favorite pizza place for the past couple of years, Angelo's. The licensees opened <a href="http://www.patsyspizzeriany.com/">several additional Patsy's</a>, but although the bought the right to use the name, they apparently did not buy the original restaurant, which remains a separate business from the newer ones opened under the license. (You might notice that the original restaurant is not listed on the Patsy's website, which is run by the licensees.) So none of the Patsy's pizzerias today is owned or run by the Patsy Lancieri family, but the original location in East Harlem can still claim a pretty direct descent from the business as it originally existed in 1933.<br /><br />One obstacle to opening a new pizza restaurant in New York making the original Lombardi's style of pizza is that it is now illegal to build a new coal-burning oven in Manhattan. That is probably why Patsy Grimaldi chose to open in Brooklyn, just across the bridge. More recently, Angelo's was opened in the 1990s by newphews of Angelo Angelis, who happened to find a vacant location near Carnegie Hall on 57th Street that already had a coal furnace installed.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-44534253090933352432008-07-02T23:14:00.005-04:002008-07-03T08:31:03.366-04:00Hollandaise: A Simple Procedure, A Complicated ProcessLike many skills in cooking, making a classic Hollandaise is simple after you do it a few times or have good luck, but frustratingly difficult if it goes wrong and you don't know why. One of the dishes we made many times in the last week or so of our Level 3 class at school was topped with Hollandaise, and for some reason our class had a much higher than normal rate of failed Hollandaise sauces. We made Hollandaise a few times in our Level 1 and Level 2 classes, and it was something that at first I got lucky with, and then later I began to struggle with it. Then our assistant chef was watching me make it one night, and walked over and said, "You're just whisking. You don't ever just whisk a Hollandaise." Once I figured out what he meant, I understood the process of Hollandaise, and I've not had much difficulty with it since. But before I get to that, let's look at what a Hollandaise sauce is.<br /><br /><b>Emulsions</b><br />Hollandaise is an "emulsion," which is a smooth and homogeneous mixture of two liquids that normally cannot be mixed, like oil and water, or in the case of a salad dressing, oil and vinegar. If you whisk oil and vinegar together into a smooth, creamy, cloudy emulsion, and then leave the mixture on the counter, it will usually separate pretty quickly, often in just a minute or two, and nearly always within twenty or thirty minutes. Some substances will help stabilize an emulsion when they are added to the mix, and they are called "emulsifiers." Generally they are long molecules that have a fat-soluble structure on one end, and a water-soluble structure at the other end. (Soap is an example of such a substance, and that's why water can remove grease when you add some soap to it.) Mustard and honey are moderately effective emulsifiers -- adding them to your salad dressing mix will make it hold together longer. But the strongest emulsifier we commonly use in food preparation is egg yolks.<br /><br />When we make emulsions from egg yolks, we usually begin by whisking the egg yolks with a little bit of liquid for a few minutes before beginning to add any oil. Whisking the yolks causes the protein molecules to "unwind" from the curled-up ball shape they often have in a liquid into long straight strands which both exposes their fat- and water-soluble components and allows them to better coat the droplets of oil when we begin introducing it. In the case of Hollandaise, the sauce is cooked because it is a warm sauce, but also because heating helps to more permanently unwind the proteins and keep them from winding back up like little round springs. But we don't want to get it too hot, or the eggs will scramble (the fancy way to say this is that the proteins "coagulate").<br /><br /><b>Classic Hollandaise</b><br />The classic way to make Hollandaise is this: In a bowl over a hot water bath, whisk egg yolks and a couple tablespoons of water until they have a consistency like a cake batter. Then begin adding clarified butter, at first just a few drops at a time, whisking each addition until it is completely smooth and emulsified, with no sign (such as a thread-like dark streak where you whisk) of unemulsified oil. You can add just over a half cup of clarified butter per egg yolk. When finished, the sauce is seasoned with lemon juice, salt, and maybe a bit of cayenne pepper.<br /><br />The challenge to Hollandaise is that you must keep it in a fairly narrow temperature range as you make it: below about 100F, the sauce will separate because the butter will start to solidify; a little above 150F, the egg yolks will begin to coagulate and can no longer coat the oil droplets. Fifty degrees sounds like a fair amount of leeway, but if you think about how your home stove probably keeps water simmering at about 200F even on its lowest setting, you'll realize that warming something to such a low temperature on the stove and holding it there while you work with it for ten minutes or so is not always easy. (Mayonnaise is basically the same sauce, made at room temperature using oil instead of butter, which gives it a less rich flavor, but makes it much easier to make.)<br /><br /><b>Chef Matthew and Just Whisking</b><br />One night a few months ago, as we were making Hollandaise, our assistant Chef Matthew walked up to me, and in his typically inscrutable manner demanded of me, "What are you doing?" I knew that in some sense I was busted, but I really didn't know what for, so I stood there looking at him for a moment, still whisking, with a deer-in-the-headlights look, waiting for him to throw me a hint about what kitchen crime I had committed this time. Then he said, "You're just whisking." I stood there even more unsure what he meant, still whisking but now a little more slowly since my chef seemed to be indicating that wasn't such a grand idea, and thinking to myself, "It's Hollandaise, of course I'm whisking!"<br /><br />Eventually, after a bit of discussion, I finally understood what he was trying to tell me. During most of the time you spend making Hollandaise (after the initial heating of the eggs, and before the final flavoring with lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper), you should be always be doing at least one of these three things to the sauce: adding more butter, heating it because it has gotten too cold (most easily done by stirring in a spoonful of hot water from the water bath), or cooling it because it has gotten too hot (again most easily by adding a spoon of cold water). If you aren't doing any of those, then you can stop whisking (but don't leave your sauce over the heat if you stop), and take a moment to figure out which of those you ought to be doing. Most of us are so uncertain about whether the sauce is about to "break" that we keep whisking and whisking as though if we stop the whole thing will fall apart. But the point of using the egg as an emulsifier is that as long as the sauce is not too cold or too hot, and does not have more fat in it than the egg yolks can handle, it is really quite stable, at least enough that you can leave it sitting still in a warm place for ten minutes at a time.<br /><br />When many people in our class were fighting with their Hollandaise in Level 3, someone asked our assistant chef, Chef Ryan, whether he noticed why our sauces breaking (whether we were usually getting them too hot or too cold or adding fat too fast). He said that he really hadn't seen what led to the sauces falling apart, and then added, "By the time I come over, usually you're just standing there whisking and hoping that whisking hard enough will magically fix it." No amount of whisking will bring a broken sauce back together. But his remark underscored for me the lesson that Chef Matthew taught me several months ago: Hollandaise is not about whisking, it's about controlling temperature while you incorporate more fat into the emulsion. Whisking happens to be the way you do both of those things.<br /><br /><b>Chef Hervé's Simple Hollandaise</b><br />One night when our Level 3 chef, Chef Phil, was absent, we had a substitute, Chef Hervé. He saw how many people were having problems with the Hollandaise, and at the end of the night he demonstrated a very simple way to make a Hollandaise in just three or four minutes. He whisked some eggs briefly directly on a burner with a very low flame, then added all of the butter at once, but very cold, directly out of the refrigerator. Then he raised the heat just a bit, and whisked madly for about three minutes, at the end of which he had a beautifully smooth and stable sauce. People were so impressed with the simplicity of his method that at the beginning of our next class, they asked our Chef Phil if they could make the sauce that way. He said that as far as he was concerned, any method that gave us a good Hollandaise was fine with him, but that we should know how to make it in the classic way because if we were ever asked by a chef considering us for a position in a restaurant to make a Hollandaise we would most likely be expected to make it the "right" way. He also warned us that just because Chef Hervé made his way look easy, we shouldn't expect that it would magically work for us any better than the classic method. Several people subsequently learned how true that is.<br /><br />Ultimately, no matter how you make the sauce, the process will be the same: you must form an emulsion by mixing a very small amount of melted butter into egg yolks, and then slowly incorporate the rest of the butter into the sauce. Chef Hervé's method does not change this fundamental process: even though it looks like you're whisking all of the butter in at once, in reality you are only whisking in a little bit at a time, in the form of the part of the butter that has melted at any given moment while you whisk. In a way, Chef Hervé's way of making the sauce requires more skill, because where the classic way allows you to work on adding butter or control temperature separately from each other, Chef Hervé's simpler approach forces you to constantly add butter as it melts, it constantly cools your sauce as the cold butter melts into it, and it forces you to constantly heat the sauce to counteract that cooling. On the other hand, once you master the technique, his quick Hollandaise technique gives you an easy way to monitor and control the variable that most often derails you, which is the temperature of the sauce. The temperature is easily observed by simply watching how fast your butter is melting.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-22796814973149105442008-06-29T19:51:00.005-04:002008-06-29T22:08:04.628-04:00In Some Hot WaterA large working kitchen, like many workplaces devoted to the fabrication of a physical product, is often a dangerous place. At school earlier this week, about an hour before the end of class on Tuesday night, one of my friends was seriously burned in an accident and went to the hospital, and will have to stay in the burn center for awhile, probably two to four weeks. Many of the things we work with inspire a healthy fear of injury that makes us careful when we are around them: large knives (especially cleavers), large pots with several gallons of screaming hot oil for deep frying that we sometimes move around the kitchen, meat grinders, stand mixers that you could fit an adult person inside if you wanted to, four-hundred-degree commercial convection ovens. But my friend was hurt by something we so commonly work with in the kitchen that I think we forget how dangerous it can be. A ten gallon container of chicken stock that was sitting near the floor fell over a couple of feet or so behind him, and the hot stock, which had just been strained from where it had been cooking all evening, poured down the back of both of his legs and soaked into his socks and shoes.<br /><br />At first, no one realized how serious the injury was. We knew he was burned and hurting, and a lot of people ran to get ice and water. He ended up in a storeroom because it is cool and out of the way of traffic constantly moving through the kitchens we work in just behind the restaurant kitchens, and a chef there called 911. My friend who was hurt said, "We don't need to call 911, I'll just get a cab to the hospital." Fortunately, everyone ignored him and got an ambulance anyway, and by the time he reached the hospital, he was pounding the walls of the ambulance in reaction to the pain and he'd been given a lot of morphine. Both of his feet and legs are now bandaged from about halfway below the knee to somewhere in the middle or toward the front of his foot, and he and the doctors will determine this week whether he needs skin grafts around his ankles and feet.<br /><br />I've seen him a couple of times in the hospital in the last few days, and he is always glad to see visitors and carries on normal conversation, and doesn't seem either worn out or beaten down. But if you know how he usually looks, you can see now that his facial muscles are always slightly tense in what looks like an involuntary response to the constant pain he is in from the burns. I can also tell that he loses track of a conversation easily as the topic changes, which I assume is because of the pain medication he is on at all times now. He says that when his feet are washed or the bandages are changed, the feeling is almost unbearable, the kind of pain that can make someone become unconscious in response. From the little half-inch blister burns I've gotten on my hands at school, I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to have that all around both ankles and under my heels, let alone having someone come in a scrub it once or twice a day. He is handling himself amazingly well.<br /><br />We talk often about when he might be ready to come back to school to finish the program. Unfortunately for us, we are losing him as part of our team -- there is no way he'll heal fast enough to rejoin our class, or even the next class behind us (a new one starts about every 7 weeks), so he's hoping to get into the group that will start Level 4 (the one we are in now) on Tuesday September 9. It would be nice if he could make it into that group, because our class will be in Level 6 (the last one) cooking in the restaurant kitchen on the same floor where he will be in Level 4, and we would get to work together again a bit before we all leave the school.<br /><br />I wonder how he'll feel about large pots of boiling water when he steps into the kitchen again. The pots we use to make stock are enormous -- they are about three feet tall (about as tall as most kitchen counters) and around two feet in diameter, and probably hold something like 40 gallons. They have spigots near the bottom, because it would be very difficult if not impossible to either lower them from the stove when they're full or get anything out of them from the top when they're hot. The recipe for the veal stock we make in them starts with a hundred pounds of veal bones and 15 gallons of water. Since the accident last Tuesday, I don't feel any fear working around them, but I have more of an awareness of when they're hot and full and what's going on with them, especially the ones right behind where I work since I've taken up my friend's spot next to them since he left. The first morning when he was in the hospital, the people bringing food to the rooms asked him if he would like some chicken broth, and he responded dryly but with his usual good humor that the ten gallons he'd just had was enough for awhile. I hope I and the rest of our group can be there to welcome him back into the kitchen when he's ready to return.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-75549584999029292492008-06-28T08:10:00.001-04:002008-06-28T08:10:32.530-04:00New Haven Pizza: Pepe's and Sally'sOver this past weekend, I visited New Haven, Connecticut, about a two hour train ride from New York, on a mission to eat two pizzas. Among afficionados, "New Haven-style pizza" is an accepted part of the lexicon that describes the pizza universe, and there are two old and widely-known purveyors of New Haven-style pizza separated by a little more than one block on Wooster Street, tucked away in a small neighborhood between the railroad tracks and interstate highways just southeast of the Yale University campus. <a href="http://pepespizzeria.com/">Frank Pepe's</a>, at 157 Wooster Street, is the original New Haven pizza place, opened in 1925, and still owned and operated by Frank's family. About the same time that Pepe's expanded its operation by buying the building next door to its original location, <a href="http://sallysapizza.net/">Sally's Apizza</a> was opened by Sal Consiglio at 237 Wooster Street in 1938, and it too is still owned and operated by Sal's family.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPdGW90yHcKwVZA5UeltbTicgvBf1RKMJf60C2tjFdVmRsixdGKq8dwk842FVOXcdMVqC4qPeJLA7TDeDYipKDm9QjZAGXiiniZC_svLYJI04-C9kWfHufjGfPafUTDF8aqL5mjlU9eaeb/s1600-h/IMG_2439_PepesOven.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPdGW90yHcKwVZA5UeltbTicgvBf1RKMJf60C2tjFdVmRsixdGKq8dwk842FVOXcdMVqC4qPeJLA7TDeDYipKDm9QjZAGXiiniZC_svLYJI04-C9kWfHufjGfPafUTDF8aqL5mjlU9eaeb/s320/IMG_2439_PepesOven.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216778823349917666" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The pizza oven at Pepe's. Below you can see the top of<br />the coal-burning chamber that fires the oven.</i></div><br /><br />Around 1pm, I met a couple of friends who live in Connecticut, and we headed for Pepe's, which is open all afternoon (Sally's doesn't open until 5pm). Although it was about 2:30pm before we got there, and we were visiting on a Sunday afternoon at a time of year when most of the Yale students are gone, there was quite a line formed outside on the sidewalk waiting to get in. While we were waiting, a pleasantly rotund man came out of the restaurant wearing a Frank Pepe's white T-shirt and introduced himself to everyone in line as Steve, the manager of the restaurant. He thanked everyone for coming and said he hoped that upon trying one of his pizzas we would feel like it was worth standing in line for. One of the things both Pepe's and New Haven are famous for is clam pizzas, and Steve told us that although some clam beds had been closed because of bacteria found in the water, he had practically cornered the market in fresh local clams for this weekend and the clam pizzas were very good that day.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPSaCwbOEOztNy7KXan0lTlt-jVw4-dFUT017tv7aWUiCZ6lXOPyQs8aMfRq1vbUV3rRJfMGBjIM_XZxOjbNBqKGNdLDfOMzRxuKMZAvWe3wbjUuz8_PKWUpCCMVnB3ZsPTDB_oXWIxcrc/s1600-h/IMG_2440_PepesKitchen.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPSaCwbOEOztNy7KXan0lTlt-jVw4-dFUT017tv7aWUiCZ6lXOPyQs8aMfRq1vbUV3rRJfMGBjIM_XZxOjbNBqKGNdLDfOMzRxuKMZAvWe3wbjUuz8_PKWUpCCMVnB3ZsPTDB_oXWIxcrc/s320/IMG_2440_PepesKitchen.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216778845194813266" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Pepe's kitchen. Note the very long handled<br />pizza peels, for moving pizzas around the oven which goes<br />about five or six pizzas deep behind the opening.</i></div><br /><br />When we got inside, we ordered two pizzas: one with just sauce and cheese, and one with clams on half and sausage on the other. One of the peculiarities of New Haven pizza is that the sauce and cheese pizza is not considered a "plain" pizza -- a plain pizza in these parts does not have any cheese, but only a crust, sauce, and a few herbs on top. If you want mozzarella cheese, you order a "mozz" pizza, with "mozz" is pronounced like "mootz" where the "oo" is like "book" or "football." So the waiter repeated our order: "One medium mootz, one small mootz half clam half sausage." The pizza arrived, and it was everything I wanted it to be: a thin crust, maybe only an eighth of an inch thick, that was slightly charred and crispy on the bottom, but still soft enough to have some chewiness and taste; a fresh-tasting tomato sauce that was only lightly flavored with herbs; and a solid covering of cheese cooked until it was just beginning to brown and reaching to within a quarter inch of the edge all around. My friend who ordered the clam pizza remarked on how good it was and that the clams were very fresh. Pepe's pizzas didn't strike me as unusual in any particular way, except for maybe tasting a bit salty (but not unpleasantly so) from what I think was a little salt applied to the bottom of the crust. They were simply very good pizzas that had good flavor in the crust, sauce, and cheese, and I would eat them all the time if I had them nearby.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6df03j7K3Fe2qr_MKOli0eXyGlsg3sn0HMIPdGCaX6p1PdWBwEQaES99BwHji7-2RulW2WQWBGJP-OCSzuuINikizc8qXWVy9kLomcvGG71NmV4CQ4HnIZb39FRofxS1bC2MX3MnaBqFY/s1600-h/IMG_2448_SallysLine.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6df03j7K3Fe2qr_MKOli0eXyGlsg3sn0HMIPdGCaX6p1PdWBwEQaES99BwHji7-2RulW2WQWBGJP-OCSzuuINikizc8qXWVy9kLomcvGG71NmV4CQ4HnIZb39FRofxS1bC2MX3MnaBqFY/s320/IMG_2448_SallysLine.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216778844106351042" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The line ahead of us at Sally's before opening.</i></div><br /><br />Later that day, we got in the pre-opening line at Sally's just after 5pm, the scheduled opening time, although they didn't open until almost twenty minutes after the hour. If you're in line before a place opens, and you don't make it into the first seating, you're probably facing a pretty long wait until the next round of tables starts to open up. That's exactly what happened to us, and I am grateful to my friends for sticking it out and staying there to try yet more pizza with me, even though they'd already gotten enough mootz for one day. We finally made it into the restaurant around 6:30pm, and ordered just one plain (well, not plain, but mootz) pizza.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjlxuKu6J9q1fANNoJgjYCRJsdUNOjmatvTluY9Dr9rsY8xpf54bEquPmfPjEGfugRq1nJlABsSFRdM3UKR7y5VDWh_So2XnRunBfYhTxaJearAlQ_Ws-ozB1hTtS0nLcuXPL9ieCGZiO9/s1600-h/IMG_2455_SallysPizza.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjlxuKu6J9q1fANNoJgjYCRJsdUNOjmatvTluY9Dr9rsY8xpf54bEquPmfPjEGfugRq1nJlABsSFRdM3UKR7y5VDWh_So2XnRunBfYhTxaJearAlQ_Ws-ozB1hTtS0nLcuXPL9ieCGZiO9/s320/IMG_2455_SallysPizza.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216778857692084514" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Our pizza at Sally's, before we finished it off.</i></div><br /><br />As expected, a Sally's pizza is in the same general style as a Pepe's pizza: a thin crust charred on the bottom and soft on top, a flavorful tomato sauce, and a solid covering of mozzarella cheese. But the two pizzas have a different character, and having both within a few hours of each other really brought out the differences in them for me. A Sally's pizza is like a Pepe's pizza that has been pushed a bit further to some of its limits. First and most obviously, the Sally's pizza is cooked more than a Pepe's pizza. The top edge of the crust at Sally's was so charred in most places that we didn't eat it, and the cheese was more browned, with dark spots peppering the entire top of the pie every half inch or so. As it happens, I'm a big fan of browned pizza cheese, so I like this a lot. The sauce was flavored with a heavier hand, so that where the Pepe's sauce tasted mostly of fresh tomatoes, the Sally's sauce felt more substantial with more of an herb flavor or maybe just a cooked and concentrated flavor. Although I would regularly go to either place if it were convenient, I clearly preferred the Sally's pizza, which is a bit surprising since the thing I most highly value in a pizza is the tomato flavor of the sauce and Sally's seasoned their sauce a little more. I guess the browned cheese and the overall interesting toasty flavor of the whole thing was enough to carry the day.<br /><br />In addition to the pizzas having slightly different flavor profiles, the restaurants themselves feel different from each other. Pepe's feels a little touristy. They understand that people who study pizza and pizza history (and with the internet nowadays, we can all study the history of just about anything that strikes our fancy) come from all over the country to try their pizza, and they have a "get 'em in and get 'em out" approach to the business in some ways. It is the only restaurant I've ever been in where when you finally get to the front of the line for a table, the host simply says to you something like, "Table 25," and you go into the restaurant and the tables are all clearly numbered and you seat yourself at your assigned table. The service was efficient but unremarkable, and we left only about an hour after we had first gotten in the line outside.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYjIejgNTLASe0Lp5TiuBO5UFd2bf4pIY-q1phbDHABAkylZb5ZQ9Uiickk29ZdyRKWHOkCshlvN2NmS09zW9VzQ19zSKTxYRrpU_SzVoxU5BjomAKs8lNXwfRfONTkHZpGgv2NNGrkQyy/s1600-h/IMG_2458_SallysInside.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYjIejgNTLASe0Lp5TiuBO5UFd2bf4pIY-q1phbDHABAkylZb5ZQ9Uiickk29ZdyRKWHOkCshlvN2NmS09zW9VzQ19zSKTxYRrpU_SzVoxU5BjomAKs8lNXwfRfONTkHZpGgv2NNGrkQyy/s320/IMG_2458_SallysInside.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216778857376697522" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The scene inside Sally's Apizza.</i></div><br /><br />Sally's, on the other hand, felt a lot more like a neighborhood hang out for New Haven locals. There were very few servers, and they were not in any hurry to turn the tables over and get people in and out of the place. Where Pepe's had Steve the manager, hired to run the restaurant, many of the guests at Sally's were seated by Flo, Sal's widow who still owns the business. Most tables we saw were getting an outrageous amount of pizza, as though the regular customers come there to spend an evening together drinking, talking, laughing, and eating whatever new pizza arrived at the table every half hour or so. A larger table of about 7 people that sat down after we had ordered our one little plain mootz pizza must have gotten 5 or so large pizzas delivered to it while we still waiting for ours. One of my friends commented that the thing to do at Sally's was order three pizzas, eat two of them, and take one home, because that's what most of the tables of two people around us seemed to be doing. While both Pepe's and Sally's had what amounted to cheap diner booths with old fake wood paneling all around, Pepe's felt more open and Sally's more dark and confined, again making Sally's feel like more of a neighborhood pizza joint compared to Pepe's slightly touristy appeal.<br /><br />Now that I've had genuine New Haven pizza, I can comment on the similarity and difference between that pizza and the old style of New York pizza that traces its roots back to the turn of the twentieth century. The main difference between the two is in the cheese: an old school classic New York Pizza Margherita uses only fresh mozzarella cheese, which is almost pure white unlike the slightly yellowed or beige color of what most of us think of as mozzarella cheese, and is so soft that it cannot be grated and is instead used in quarter-inch-thick rounds that are sliced from the ball of cheese that is usually about three or four inches in diameter. (If you live in the Midwest, you might never have seen fresh mozzarella cheese on a pizza or anywhere else, unless you've had a caprese salad at a good Italian restaurant.) On a New York pizza, the fresh mozzarella round slices are applied over the top of the pizza a bit like a topping in the sense that there is not a solid covering of cheese but instead there are just splotches of cheese every so often on top of the sauce. A New Haven mootz pizza has the more usual American solid coating of grated beige mozzarella cheese. The other difference is in the sauce. New York pizzas have a very light and very fresh-tasting tomato sauce, with almost no flavoring (sometimes literally no flavoring) to it other than the tomatoes. New York pizzas require very good tomatoes -- you can't just break open a can of Hunt's or Heinz tomatoes for your pizza, or the result will be almost inedible. Generally New York pizzas are made using canned San Marzano tomatoes brought over from Italy. In New Haven, they also make their pizza with high-quality tomatoes, but they flavor the sauce a bit more with a few herbs and spices in a traditional American way.<br /><br /><br /><i><a href="http://pepespizzeria.com/">Pepe's website</a><br /><a href="http://sallysapizza.net/">Sally's website</a><br /><br /><a href="http://slice.seriouseats.com/">Slice</a> entry: <a href="http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2004/08/new_haven_pizza_1.php">New Haven Pizza, Part One: Frank Pepe's</a><br /><a href="http://slice.seriouseats.com/">Slice</a> entry: <a href="http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2004/09/new_haven_pizza_2.html">New Haven Pizza, Part Two: Sally's Apizza</a></i><br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-36729878716819670082008-06-15T22:42:00.000-04:002008-06-15T22:43:16.600-04:00The MidtermA little over a week ago, I passed the midterm exam that marks the halfway point of the culinary program I'm in at the FCI. My score wasn't great, but it was good enough, probably about average in our class. Everyone says that the midterm is the most difficult exam that we'll take in the school. The final exam, at the end of the program (in late October for my class), is very similar to the midterm, but when you take it you have a lot more experience with precise cooking and formal plating, and I've heard that the two dishes that you have to cook for the final are drawn from only four possible choices whereas for the midterm your two dishes are drawn from sixteen possibilities that you need to be ready to make.<br /><br />The Level 3 curriculum consists of sixteen dishes that the class makes over and over again. There are four appetizers (soups or vegetable salads), four fish dishes, for main course meats, and four desserts. For the first half of Level 3, as a class we make eight of those sixteen dishes each night, and in the last half we make four of them each night along with a canapé (a single-bite appetizer assembled so that it can be picked up with hands not using utensils) of our own devising prepared from ingredients that the chef would bring into class each day. For the exam, the chef picks one dish from each of the categories -- one appetizer, one fish, one meat, and one dessert. Then you draw out of a hat to see which two of those four dishes you will make for your exam. You either get an appetizer and a meat, or a fish and a dessert. Whatever dishes you draw, you prepare four plates of those dishes to present to the judging panel. When your plates go to the judges, one of the first things they look at is whether your four plates look identical, because one of the purposes of Level 3 is to develop consistency in cooking, portioning, and presenting food, and no one likes to have two examples of the same dish go out to two different diners in a restaurant with noticeable differences that will make one of the diners think he got the short end of the stick in some way. While you cook for the exam, other chefs from the school who have not been instructors for your class serve as proctors, and walk around the room making notes on how you go about your work, looking at things like whether you are efficient with time and the product and equipment you take, and whether you are organized and your station is kept clean while you are working.<br /><br />Going into the exam, many people have certain dishes that they hope not to draw as their exam assignment. My own preference was to make an appetizer and a main course meat, as opposed to the fish course and a dessert. I don't like to make the dessert dishes, and in particular there was one dish on our list that I knew I couldn't make one part of correctly at all: the Crème Renversée, which is a baked and chilled vanilla custard with caramel on top, and includes rolled tuille cookies, which are very thin sugar cookies rolled up while they are still hot into cigarette shapes, and I had never been able to make decent tuilles in all of my attempts. I spent several hours making about 30 of them at home one night before the exam, and not a single one would have been acceptable for real restaurant service. So of course when we got to the exam and I drew out of the hat the little paper that gave me my dishes and serving times, wouldn't you know that I got the Filet de Limande Marguery (an elegant white flounder dish) and the Crème Renversée. To make up for it, at least I got lucky with late serving times, drawing the fifth time out of six possibilities.<br /><br />The flounder is one of my favorite dishes in the Level 3 curriculum. Our chef prescribes an especially formal plating for the dish, and really it is the only dish of all of our meats and fish for Level 3 that is more elegant than rustic. Since all of the parts of it cook so quickly, and I had made it a couple of times very successfully earlier in class, I let myself think that it was easier for me to make than it really is. In a nutshell, here's what you do: filet the flounder and make a stock from the bones with some aromatics; cut and turn potatoes into little football shapes called <i>cocotte</i> and cook them in simmering salted water; steam mussels using some white wine in a pan in which you first sweat some shallots and shrimp shells; fold or roll the fish fillets so they are an inch or so thick and cook them along with some shrimp that you had peeled earlier in a skillet with shallots, fish stock and white wine; make a white sauce by reducing the cooking liquid after removing the fish and then reducing cream into it. Really that should be easy, but like everything we do, it always takes me longer than I think it will. To plate it, we reheat everything, and plate the rolled fish fillet in the middle of the plate, surrounded by mussels on the half shell alternated with the <i>cocotte</i> potatoes pointing away from the fish at six even points on the plate, so that the mussels are oriented as though they lie along clock hands pointing to twelve, four, and eight o'clock, and the potatoes similarly pointing at two, six, and ten o'clock. The fish is then completely covered in the white sauce made by reducing cream into the stock and wine from cooking the fish, and then it is topped with one or two (depending on their size) shrimp.<br /><br />Before I began working on the flounder, though, I made my Crème Renversée, which is a custard that must be baked and then chilled for serving, so I wanted to make sure that I got it out of the oven in time to get it chilled all the way through before its 9:55pm serving time. To begin, I melted sugar with a bit of water in a pan and heated it until it began to darken and turn into caramel. This is always a dicey operation for me, because I can't really tell dark red from brown or black, so there's no visible difference to me between good caramel and sugar that has been cooked so bitter as to be inedible. I used gentler heat than most people do in caramelizing sugar so I could watch it darken slowly, and taking my best guess about when it was done I threw a bit of ice in the pan to stop it from overheating and poured it into the ramekins I had ready for the custards. In making the custard, for which you basically whisk sugar into eggs, boil milk with vanilla, and then mix the two together, when I tempered the egg mixture, for the first time ever in making a custard, some of my eggs scrambled. I cooled the mix a bit by stirring it and then got everything combined together and strained it, and I ended up with about one or two teaspoons of scrambled egg in the strainer. At that point, I had to decide whether to start over or press on hoping there was still enough egg in the mix to set the custards. I decided to keep going, but then I was worried for the rest of the night about whether my custards had really set in the middle. (They had.)<br /><br />After serving my flounder (due at 9:13pm), I still hadn't made tuilles for the dessert. They don't take long to make, and I was otherwise all set with my custards, but I had never made them successfully. In the end, I got lucky again, because for the exam I made the only decent tuilles I've ever made (but I think I learned that previously I had never spread the batter thin enough), and my dish went out the door to the judges on time and they were happy with it.<br /><br />Now we are on to Level 4, a much different environment in which for the first time we are cooking food meant to be eaten by people not in our class. Up to now, everything we've made has really been an exercise, to be evaluated by our instructors and then either eaten by us or thrown away. (By the end of Level 3, everyone is so tired of having those dishes that nearly everything gets thrown away.) Now we are preparing food for the rest of the school to eat on their meal breaks, and some of us also do "production" for the restaurant and the rest of the school, which means cleaning, trimming, and breaking down large cuts of meat or fish into the portions to be cooked in the restaurant or in classes, and also making the stocks used throughout the school. Perhaps I'll share more on this and other things later; for now I'm glad to have gotten through what everyone says is the hardest part of the program.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-58117909269821493262008-05-16T02:08:00.001-04:002008-05-16T02:13:20.075-04:00It's Not Fun<i>This entry is still a draft, because it's 2am and time to go to sleep. I might revise it later, and fix typographical errors or instances of the same word in ten sentences in a row. But I wanted to put it out there, so those of you that I don't ever have time to talk to anymore know what this cooking school is like when there's work to do. The times I give below are all approximate, and there's even more going on than I bother to describe, so don't get too analytical and figure out that somewhere as I describe it there were fifteen minutes in which all I did was peel one potato or something.</i><br /><br />Tonight was our "mock midterm," where we go through the process that we will experience for our exam coming up in three weeks. A lot of people that I've described this to have said, "That sounds like fun." And I guess it would be, if you were any good at it. At least two people I know of in our class had fun tonight, because they work really fast, which is, as you will soon see, the key. Most of the rest of us got tortured, as usual.<br /><br />The way our exam works is that you randomly draw a number from a hat, and your number corresponds to two dishes (either a soup or warm vegetable salad along with a main course meat, or a fish dish along with a dessert) and assigned serving times for your dishes. I drew the third serving time, which meant that I had an extra 14 minutes to work with, and for where I am at the moment as far as speed and skill (mainly speed), it was a good thing. Had it been the real exam and I'd drawn the first time, I'd probably have ample free time for myself in the next few weeks because I don't think I'd still be in the school.<br /><br />The two dishes that I made were a simple rustic vegetable soup (probably the easiest dish in the whole Level 3 program) and a whole roasted chicken with very brown (caramelized) garnishes. We began cooking at 6pm, and my serving times were 8:59pm for the soup and 9:48pm for the chicken. You're probably already thinking, "You had 3 hours just to make a vegetable soup! How can that be hard?" I wonder the same thing every night as I drag my sore and tired self to the train to go home. The truth of the matter is just that I work too slowly, and let simple things bring me to a halt. Some of my difficulty is that there is a contingent within our class that behaves like little kids, turning their back on every mess they make, so tonight as an example there was one sink that I unclogged 3 times in the first 90 minutes of the exam. But that's more of an annoyance and a distraction than a drain on time. Mostly I struggle with getting things (ingredients, containers, pots and pans) quickly and efficiently enough.<br /><br />For example, one of the tasks for making the soup is that you need to cook some green beans in boiling salted water, then cool them in an ice batch when they are done, and finally drain them and hold them until a few minutes before you serve the soup. That takes a pot for the cooking, a bowl for the ice bath, and a small hotel pan or sizzle platter to keep them on after they've been cooled off. I'm not very good at getting all of those things in one trip, so I end up wasting a lot of time moving around the kitchen. And by the way, in addition to wasting my time, that's also bad citizenship on my part, because the more people you have moving around, the harder it is for everyone to do their work. So why do I end up doing it this way? As the three year old who just hit his sister says when asked why he did it: "I don't know." A lot of it is simply not knowing the recipes or the process well enough, so instead of being in control of it, I'm just reacting to it. In the example of the beans that need the pot, bowl, and platter, I'm not setting out at the start of that process to cook green beans from beginning to end, because you can't devote all of your attention to that one task. So there's no moment where I think to myself, "Self, let's cook some green beans. OK, we need something to cook them in and then someplace to put them later." Instead, the mental process is more like this: "OK, I've got my base vegetables sweating to make stock for the soup, and now I should truss up my chicken. But wait, what could I have going while I'm working on the chicken? I know, I'll put some water on so it'll be ready to cook something when I'm done prepping the chicken." So off I go and get a pan and some water and salt, and put that on the flattop (because the stock is on the only burner I have) and forget about it (because it's going to take about 20 minutes to boil on that dumbass flattop) and start on my chicken.<br /><br />It is certainly possible to do all of this in a lot less time than I spend. One guy in our class is usually by far the fastest cook in the room, and often likes to do extra stuff. Early tonight, when I crossed paths with him in the kitchen at one point, I said to him, teasing, "So what are you going to make us for family meal in the middle of your exam tonight?" About a half hour later, when I bumped into him again as I was on my way to get something, he said, "I left something on your board for you." It turned out that in his spare time during the exam he had made a separate dish for me to eat that is in our Level 3 book but was not part of the exam tonight: a <i>macedoine</i> (small 5mm dice) of cooked vegetables, plated in a ring mold, with a poached egg on top of them and a warm egg yolk emulsion sauce over the top, with a decorating garnish of a few strips of peeled and julienned plum tomato placed on top of the whole thing. He was making the same dishes for the exam that I was making, with earlier serving times, and while I struggled to come within 5 minutes of my assigned time, he cranked out an extra dish because I teased him and because he could. I never had time to eat it.<br /><br />Here is roughly the process I went through this evening:<br /><br />For the first 10-15 minutes, I was simply rounding things up: carrots, turnips, celery, leeks, onion, potatoes, cabbage, bacon, mushrooms, pearl onions, fresh green beans, frozen peas, veal stock, white wine, oil, butter, salt. All of this needs to be put in bowls or other containers, washed where necessary, and carried back to the station. The vegetables then need to be peeled, and the potatoes once peeled need to be kept on your station in water.<br /><br />Next, after peeling them, I squared off my carrots (so that I could later cut them into "<i>paysanne</i>," or confetti-like squares about 6-7mm on a side, and 2mm thick) and then roughly cut up those trimmings, along with the leek greens and a bay leaf and other trimmings as I made them, and put them into a small pan with a bit of fat and put them over low heat to "sweat" for ten minutes or so (that is, to soften them and bring out their flavor without browning them at all, because this should be a light and bright-colored soup). At this point, it was already about 6:45.<br /><br />Then, because I hadn't sorted myself out enough yet to know what it was important to do, and having at least learned in the past few weeks not to just stand there and think about it, I peeled potatoes and started cutting a couple of them into "cocotte," or little football-like shapes, because I would need 12 of those later to go with the chicken. In the middle of that, I poured the water over my sweating vegetables to start the vegetable stock.<br /><br />I finished my footballs a little after 7:00. (I had a good night at tournage -- sometimes that can take a half hour if I screw up a bunch of them.) My water was boiling for beans by now, so I threw those in. At that point, I started to get worried about not having started the chicken yet, and I fetched my chicken from the refrigerator. I cut away the excess fat around the back end, removed the wishbone at the front, trimmed off the ends of the wings, and cleaned up the ends of the wing and leg bones so they'd look nice on the finished plate later (sort of like frenching rib bones, but on poultry they call this <i>manchonner</i> instead of frenching). I had about a five minute delay in this process because Chef Phil stopped by and was chatting about nothing in particular while I was working on my chicken, and as I was taking the wishbone out and glancing up at him in conversation now and then, I cut the index finger on my left hand and had to run off and wash it up, stop the bleeding, and bandage it. (It was a very small cut, not to worry.) Finally I seasoned the chicken inside, trussed it up, seasoned it outside, stuck it in a bowl, covered it with plastic, wrote my name on it with the Sharpie I always carry in my pocket now, and put it in the fridge for later.<br /><br />It's now getting near 7:30.<br /><br />My green beans are done now, so I take them out, realize I've never gotten ice in a bowl yet and run off to do that to cool them, and throw the peas into the hot salty water to thaw out for a few minutes. Then I remember that I ought to get some water on because the first step in cooking the footballed potatoes is to blanch them in (unsalted) water. So I fetch another pan (which I should have gotten at the same time as the ice for the beans, along with a sizzle platter that I probably didn't get but I don't recall for sure), put the footballs in it with just enough water to cover them, pull the vegetable stock off my one burner and put the potatoes over the high flame. I strain the vegetable stock into another pan.<br /><br />Now it's about 7:45, and I realize that I haven't really started cutting my vegetables into <i>paysanne</i> (confetti squares), and we're getting to where the soup is up in not much more than an hour. So I cut my carrots and turnips into confetti squares, and thinly slice the celery and leeks. In the meantime, the potatoes have come to a boil, and as soon as they do, I pull them out and set them on a towel to air dry. (More on the potatoes later.) I get my vegetables into a pot with a bit of fat, and put them over low heat to sweat.<br /><br />Eight o'clock, and I begin worrying that I haven't really started the chicken yet at all, other than getting it trussed. But my one burner is busy making the soup that is due up any minute. So I start doing the only things I feel like I can do on the chicken, which are throw some bacon lardons (that I had cut earlier from a whole slab bacon) in a small pan on the flattop, and start peeling pearl onions, which is about the worst thing in the world to have to do if the clock is not your friend. Eventually, the vegetables have sweated enough that they are soft, and I throw the vegetable stock on them (which I had degreased in a spare moment), add potatoes that I've cut into <i>paysanne</i> (their starch will thicken the soup a bit), and heat it up to a simmer and move it from the burner to the flattop so that I can cook my pearl onions in a small pan on the main burner. The bacon cooks up while this is going on, and I set it aside and toss some quartered mushrooms into the bacon grease to cook. The onions and mushrooms finish about the same time, and I toss the pearl onions, bacon, and mushrooms, all nicely browned, into a small hotel pan and set them aside for later.<br /><br />It's about 8:20, and finally I get the chicken on, just in time. The chicken has to be browned in hot oil for about 4 minutes on each of 4-6 surfaces, which takes about 15-20 minutes. While that's going on, I finish off my soup by throwing a bit of cabbage in it that I had earlier cut in chiffonade (thin ribbons, which I trimmed short in this case to match the texture of the <i>paysanne</i> vegetables) along with the beans that I had cooked earlier (and subsequently diced in a spare minute) and the peas.<br /><br />8:45, and at last the chicken is browned on all sides and can go in the oven, which frees up the burner to heat the soup up to boiling just before serving. There's a chance now I might even get the soup out on time! But wait, I forgot to make croutons with cheese! Fortunately I had grated the cheese earlier, so I slice up some bread, hit it with cheese, throw it in the oven on a sizzle platter, and run for a plate to get warm to serve it on alongside the soup in bowls (which have been warming on a shelf made from rods above the stove and flattop).<br /><br />8:55, I begin plating the soup in my warm bowls. Just as I get one ladle into the second bowl, I realize I haven't seasoned the soup. Doh! So I salt it, taste it and see that it's not enough, and then in my haste I basically have a salt spill and the soup is now pretty much inedible except that I've got two bowls partly plated that might be salvageable. (We must present four plates of each dish, all identically prepared.) At this point, it is what it is, I finish plating it, get my cheesey bread out of the oven and arrange it in a pinwheel on a separate warm plate, and carry it all up to the front, about one minute late. Chef tastes the soup and says it is excellent. The assistant chef tastes a different bowl, and it is so salty that it cannot be eaten at all. They look at each other puzzled for a moment, and I explain, which I'd rather not do because I've got work to do yet on the chicken.<br /><br />It's 9:10, and I've dumped my bowls of soup (because there is no surface anywhere on which to keep them, and they're so salty they can't be eaten anyhow) through a strainer and put the vegetables from them into the compost. Now I start the next step of my football potatoes, which is to saute them in oil until they are nicely browned all around. 9:20. Then I take the chicken out of the oven, set the chicken aside on a sizzle platter, pour off the excess fat from the pan, deglaze it with white wine, and add veal stock to the mirepoix (chopped onions and carrots) left in it to make a sauce for the chicken. 9:25. While that cooks for a bit, I cut the cooked chicken into quarters, and set it aside again on its sizzle platter. 9:30. Then I strain the sauce into another pan, skim it to get the grease and crud off the surface, and heat it up to reduce it some. 9:35. While it reduces, I go back to the chicken and cut each quarter in half, removing the thigh bone from the leg quarters (so now there are eight pieces, four with a bone -- two breast parts with one trimmed wing bone, and two leg parts with a leg bone -- and four boneless pieces. I pop those into the oven, along with a container holding the pearl onions, mushrooms, and bacon cooked earlier, and the potatoes in their skillet where I sauteed them earlier.<br /><br />All of this has taken quite a bit of time, and it's after 9:40 now, the dish due up in under 10 minutes. I clean up my board because otherwise I'll have no clean surface on which to set up my four plates. I set my warm plates out on the board, spoon a bunch of the sauce (which is still too runny -- it hasn't reduced enough) onto each plate, get the chicken out of the oven and arrange two pieces on each plate so that each plate has one white and one dark piece, and one with a bone and one without. I spoon the browned pearl onion, mushroom, and bacon garnish around one side of the plated chicken, and nestle three browned and roasted football potatoes to one side of the garnish up against the chicken pieces. I take it up at 9:51, three minutes late.<br /><br />Chef says, "OK, tell me what's wrong with this plate." I say, "The sauce is too loose. The skin on some of the chicken pieces is torn." Chef says, "The sauce is a little bitter -- you burned your mirepoix again. The mushrooms are too brown. The chicken is really pretty good."<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-35245148259862523362008-05-11T17:29:00.002-04:002008-05-11T17:32:31.649-04:00PerspectiveImmersing yourself for months in a new activity eventually changes the way you think about a lot of things. The other day, I was talking to a friend at school after we had been trimming up and frenching the bones on a rack of pork chops. While washing my hands, I was still thinking about butchering and preparing meats for cooking, and for no particular reason I thought of and said, "Man, can you imagine having to bone out a hand? That would be really hard." "Oh my gosh, that would be an awful job."<br /><br />About a minute later, it struck me how strange it was for two people to share that thought just as a simple observation, an objective statement of fact. It's the kind of thing that anyone might think of and say, but before having gone to chef school for awhile, I would certainly have said it as a wisecrack or joke, or maybe a far-fetched exaggeration or satire. But now, it is only an observation about the relative difficulty of preparing and presenting different ingredients. It really would be quite a chore to bone out a human hand and keep it in any kind of shape for cooking and presentation on a plate. Probably a lot harder than, say, a quail, which I've also never yet prepared. You'd have to practice it a lot to become any good at it. If you drew that as your assignment for an exam, you'd be screwed.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-153265761405038022008-04-27T23:10:00.004-04:002008-04-27T23:27:25.111-04:00School: Level 3 BeginsEarlier this week at school, my classmates and I began Level 3 of the culinary arts program. Level 3 is all about consistency and timing in both preparation and presentation. It concludes the first half of the program, during which we only cook for ourselves and our instructors. In Levels 4-6, we begin cooking for the public, at first in Level 4 for the other students, faculty and staff at the school, and then in Levels 5 and 6 when we go work in the school's <a href="http://www.frenchculinary.com/lecole.htm">restaurant</a>.<br /><br />In Level 3, each of us has one or two dishes to make every night, and an assigned time to present them to the chef. You make four servings of your dish, plate them all identically, and carry them up to the chef for evaluation at your assigned presentation time. For the first couple of classes, chef was fairly lenient and allowed people to show their dishes up to ten minutes or so late, but last night (our third class) he finally enforced at least one hard deadline, yelling over the room, "If you don't have those eggs up here in two minutes, you can just throw them in the compost." ("Those eggs" in this case were an appetizer or warm salad consisting of several vegetables cut in a small dice, cooked separately, then combined and plated with a ring mold, and topped with a poached egg which was covered in hollandaise sauce.)<br /><br />As a group, we make the same dishes over and over again. There are four stations in the kitchen, and there are four recipes used throughout Level 3 at each of the stations, for a total of 16 different dishes. The stations in the kitchen are: garde manger (soups and salads), poissonier (fish), saucier (meats), and patissier (desserts). The recipes emphasize very basic classical preparation and cooking techniques, rather than interesting or fresh or modern tastes, and the idea behind them is that these are the things you need to be able to do properly even if you're having a bad day. You want to get to where everything is perfectly cooked, seasoned, and plated, and then served before it begins to suffer in quality from waiting around if you finish before the assigned service time.<br /><br />Level 3 has a much more regular routine to each class, and although we work at a station with one partner, we prepare all of the dishes on our own. When it makes sense, partners can share some of the prep work, such as cutting up vegetables, but usually it's easier just to do your own thing and not try to coordinate with someone else. If you get in a jam, especially as you approach your plating and presentation time, if your partner has a moment to spare, you might be able to ask for help for a minute. Otherwise, everything about your dish is up to you.<br /><br />The routine for the class begins with the usual gathering of ingredients that precedes the official start time of 5:45pm. From 5:45 until about 6:15, the chef instructor will lecture or demonstrate something new or something that he's noticed people having trouble with. Then for the next two or three hours, we're off on our own to prepare our dishes. Right now, everything is served between 8:30pm and 9:30pm, though chef might plan to move this schedule up in the coming weeks:<br /><br />8:30: First garde manger dish<br />8:37: First fish<br />8:42: First meat<br />8:49: First dessert<br />8:56: Second garde manger<br />9:03: Second fish<br />9:10: Second meat<br />9:17: Second dessert<br /><br />Once presentations are done, we clean the kitchen until about 9:35, and then have a half-hour break. After the break, chef will talk or do more demonstrations, and then we usually finish early around 10:35 or so. While it would seem to make sense to skip the break and leave for the night a half hour early, I think the school has a rule for the instructors that they need to keep everyone in class until at least 10:30, and given that it is nice to have a few minutes to wind down from cooking before we have a bit of post-game lecture and discussion.<br /><br />For the first couple of classes, each of us had only a single dish to make, which allowed a lot of time to learn our way around the new kitchen we are in for this level. For last night's class, the third one, the garde manger and dessert stations were told that each person should make both of their dishes for the night. You'll soon realize this adds up to an awful lot of food we are making and can't possibly eat, even if we weren't sick of eating the same things class after class. There are four people working each station, and if they both make both dishes, each person is producing eight finished plates, for a total of 32 servings from that one station, with only 20 people in the room to consume it (18 students and two chef instructors). So altogether we can end up with about 32 full four-course meals every night.<br /><br />The exam at the end of Level 3, which is the midterm exam for the program, is said to be the most difficult exam we will take. For the exam, the chef selects some of the dishes from the collection of Level 3 recipes, and then each of us will randomly draw an assignment to determine what we will make. Our assignment will either consist of a garde manger and a meat dish, or a fish dish and a dessert, along with our assigned serving times. The dishes are served to a panel of judges made up of recent graduates from the school. As our previous chef said, "They can be very tough. Since they finished at the school, they've been working in the trade for two or three months, and they think they know everything now." In addition to the finished product and meeting your assigned serving time, you are also graded by proctors who watch as you work in the kitchen, looking at everything from how clean and organized you are and whether your knives are sharp to whether you are preparing the recipes in a logical order and using proper techniques.<br /><br />For the exam, you cook the recipes without any notes, which means you need to have them memorized. Before we got to Level 3, I had heard from several people that we make the same things over and over again, so I was surprised to learn that some of these dishes we will only be scheduled to make a single time during the Level 3 classes. I've found that one of the most important reasons to be on time with your presentation is that you can be there to hear chef evaluate the other people who made the same dish, and learn from his observations on their plates. Even though you might make some of the dishes only once or twice, you can learn something about each of them every day by seeing the things that go well and go badly for others around you. In addition, our chef wants us to push ourselves to make as much as we can in every class, to get practice at organizing the production of multiple dishes as we will have to do for our midterm, so if ingredients are available and you organize your night well, you can give yourself another chance to make something you are having trouble getting right.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-31164202664565199202008-04-27T21:21:00.006-04:002008-04-27T23:32:02.300-04:00Cheese: Sprout Creek FarmIn late winter, I got to visit <a href="http://www.sproutcreekfarm.org/">Sprout Creek Farm</a>, a cheesemaking and educational dairy farm just over an hour's drive north of New York City. Sprout Creek raises cows, goats, and sheep, and makes cheese from all three types of milk. They practice sustainable farming and offer educational camps and other opportunities to learn about farming and food. We talked mainly with two people on the farm: one spoke with us about how they farm and raise their animals, and then we went into the cheesemaking facility and listened to their cheesemaker and tasted a variety of their cheeses. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR3OHGyW-bScEapDk_Bg19bjBB5NuPDPP5Ffr5Gi7xx_jGwGNQnGKSKITBKJ0PftkGWA7FPDYoKnXl-bQRW9U0XffQcnYovYQDjH5KWszTAVluMhzu3jdqI4rxHG1XVWHUNRVsnuxf2Zqs/s1600-h/IMG_2205.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR3OHGyW-bScEapDk_Bg19bjBB5NuPDPP5Ffr5Gi7xx_jGwGNQnGKSKITBKJ0PftkGWA7FPDYoKnXl-bQRW9U0XffQcnYovYQDjH5KWszTAVluMhzu3jdqI4rxHG1XVWHUNRVsnuxf2Zqs/s320/IMG_2205.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194100720945081682" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>Goats born the morning we visited Sprout Creek Farm.</i></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Ip9UM9xK8nutyGW0ZLEPojM3zYgFNUYgJ2I8UtZFJOwlGV1skNKo-W4KWqQRNtc4anHpawpQkDV_hbIvXy4-C2mUSgHHybbPUbI6mCdiKS6e2U68dB3QC2g-i-qgyqjcPY0UuNo41CFP/s1600-h/IMG_2208.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Ip9UM9xK8nutyGW0ZLEPojM3zYgFNUYgJ2I8UtZFJOwlGV1skNKo-W4KWqQRNtc4anHpawpQkDV_hbIvXy4-C2mUSgHHybbPUbI6mCdiKS6e2U68dB3QC2g-i-qgyqjcPY0UuNo41CFP/s320/IMG_2208.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194100725240048994" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>Baby goats, one day old.</i></div><br />As it happened, we were visiting just before the start of goat cheese season. To make goat cheese, you need goat's milk, and a by-product, as it were, of goat's milk is an awful lot of baby goats. The day before we visited, they'd had about forty baby goats born during the day, and when we arrived around 1pm on a Sunday they'd had twenty-six more so far that day. Goats, I learned, are very playful -- watching small groups of baby goats jump around and occasionally poke at each other is a lot like watching little puppies, except that the goats are surprisingly well-coordinated and able to control their movements and walk normally even at an age of just a day or two old.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJZOh3QvM8STqni-RB6CVd5wPafo_K7M10MLosY2Lbrm92tVa9zmJn4wGM19e0zDeivMoT5uwKCLO6PnbzKuxZJ2LYNy2N6-fZ3wD5d1yXhqchGd__FH7V0tOPxXtKEFUdGYql061DdrHW/s1600-h/IMG_2229.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJZOh3QvM8STqni-RB6CVd5wPafo_K7M10MLosY2Lbrm92tVa9zmJn4wGM19e0zDeivMoT5uwKCLO6PnbzKuxZJ2LYNy2N6-fZ3wD5d1yXhqchGd__FH7V0tOPxXtKEFUdGYql061DdrHW/s320/IMG_2229.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194100729535016306" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>The cheeseboard we sampled at the end of our visit.</i></div><br />Sprout Creek names all of their animals, and the people working on the farm have an emotional attachment to the animals that shows. Nevertheless, they also slaughter the animals for food at the end of their lives. One of the farmers talked about this as we were standing in a barn full of both adult and baby goats. She said that it is always difficult to slaughter an animal whose personality you have come to know over several years, but that on their farm they felt like they handle the ends of the animals lives better than many of the more common ways that they might otherwise end, either in the wild or in a commercial feedlot and slaughterhouse. They care for and love the animals, they appreciate what the animals contribute to the farm and to our lives, and they take on the responsibility of making sure that the animals lives end peacefully on the farm among people that are grateful for everything they give us.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR_7tBuvX-ZOvT9fDQg0dPGhcaiTvmgQOITsljbwWGCGLdGHTFB3w063g2u5lQ_iXKboAYfBN_jhIpUHBBALRjJq8ugw6bdk1UJs45r9IqVzLQUpFn5Ar-Mi3U2hECwsnQbM02Sl0m_uom/s1600-h/IMG_2228.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR_7tBuvX-ZOvT9fDQg0dPGhcaiTvmgQOITsljbwWGCGLdGHTFB3w063g2u5lQ_iXKboAYfBN_jhIpUHBBALRjJq8ugw6bdk1UJs45r9IqVzLQUpFn5Ar-Mi3U2hECwsnQbM02Sl0m_uom/s320/IMG_2228.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194100733829983634" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>Colin, the cheesemaker, holding forth next to<br />some new cheeses being salted by brining.</i></div><br />The cheesemaker, Colin McGrath, produces something like thirty thousand pounds of cheese a year from the milk of this one farm in just two small rooms, each about the size of an average residential bedroom. He came to cheesemaking after making beer in his earlier years and then going to culinary school. Colin says that he has always been destined to end up fermenting something, whether it's beer or cheese or soybeans or something else. When he took over the cheesemaking operation a few years ago, Sprout Creek was making only 3 or 4 cheeses; today he makes more than a dozen, and is always working on something new. We got to try one of his newer efforts, a blue cheese that he was not yet satisfied with, though it was very good -- his main criticism of it was that its texture was a bit dry and it crumbled apart into very small bits easily.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrxQUxoaZcYdvBk-5pqnm8hEE2FFrNL84OkGXJN2dvUpUqL77-fSF2BfKI-InJQdyDp9jCuGg6-L1MjaVDhyP6y3lMy4NWn0Zb76OQwsgHBiGO-2IHFkdvdlPcSe19yRBhXTfqqYWnP52a/s1600-h/IMG_2230.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrxQUxoaZcYdvBk-5pqnm8hEE2FFrNL84OkGXJN2dvUpUqL77-fSF2BfKI-InJQdyDp9jCuGg6-L1MjaVDhyP6y3lMy4NWn0Zb76OQwsgHBiGO-2IHFkdvdlPcSe19yRBhXTfqqYWnP52a/s320/IMG_2230.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194101116082072994" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>The same cheese at a couple of stages: fresh curds resting to form<br />rounds on the left, and then drying to the right.</i></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEila1CLM-17OyzvtlDpRahIWSUvypMxAEoO_jUkQ2CKTrlgfPA9QvH2HJpL06PSKblBPf1MoDXp_4wlyxQqW8Uyd5TBVLRe_Kqq3ko4YfsTAvrMoqlSK8JXYkoNfidczaNF2mwGsWqbWV-0/s1600-h/IMG_2239.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEila1CLM-17OyzvtlDpRahIWSUvypMxAEoO_jUkQ2CKTrlgfPA9QvH2HJpL06PSKblBPf1MoDXp_4wlyxQqW8Uyd5TBVLRe_Kqq3ko4YfsTAvrMoqlSK8JXYkoNfidczaNF2mwGsWqbWV-0/s320/IMG_2239.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194101120377040306" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>Forming larger wheels of cheese.</i></div><br />Listening to the people at Sprout Creek talk about the farm and the food it produces, you get a great sense of the direct connection between what we eat and the land around us. One of the farmers talked a bit about the "eat local" trend, and that you can take that too far and affect your health negatively. As an example, she said that the soils for miles around the farm did not have any selenium in the soil, and consequently the grasses and plants grown there did not have any, and the animals that ate those plants also do not have any in their meats. Selenium is an essential nutrient for us ("essential nutrient" means that we require it for good health, but our bodies do not manufacture it, so we must get it directly in our diet). If you were to eat only the meats and plants produced on a farm from that area, your health would eventually suffer. (While we didn't go on to talk about this, I assume that this problem was avoided before the days of large-scale transportation by hunting and fishing for food that ranged over a wider area.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3C_IqSPuDLo-LwxC9peXrp18Tr_J4A4gkWOStZWLMSy0_OO8dCrO-rd7R_peMJbraOIeCF7uKeKbCISPuzKIX_eCLV7SaTcacc1kHx2B1OJiNMOz4_MisazM_mMIDkaMZ4R9TMLShY_CX/s1600-h/IMG_2232.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3C_IqSPuDLo-LwxC9peXrp18Tr_J4A4gkWOStZWLMSy0_OO8dCrO-rd7R_peMJbraOIeCF7uKeKbCISPuzKIX_eCLV7SaTcacc1kHx2B1OJiNMOz4_MisazM_mMIDkaMZ4R9TMLShY_CX/s320/IMG_2232.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194101124672007618" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>Cheeses on drying racks.</i></div><br />They also talked about the effects of the farming operation on their most widely-consumed end product, cheese. The farmers keep detailed notes on what was going on with each of their groups of animals throughout the seasons. When Colin tastes something interesting in his cheese, he'll go ask the farmers what they were doing with the animals around the time that the milk for the cheese was produced. Recently, he'd had a bunch of cheeses "blow up" because they produced so much gas as they began to age that they blew their rinds off. When he checked with the farmers, he learned that they had just brought the herds in for winter and begun to feed them from the large bales of hay you often see in fields in the late summer and fall. Those hay bales begin to ferment in the middle, and the fermented hay in the cows' diet was what caused the cheeses to explode.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE0SqQQttlwpq-_O5C2iIkEoOAOwoutmoXbrpsZmnfwsmWDaizH0Ygqt75gvh9MIpJvae-4m-BjIBLWQVEIfGSYIUF7SMPIdqWDDvOgvTBHfVu_yXEoZ3QuDHfE3vc2typp0yTqc0SuDJO/s1600-h/IMG_2226.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE0SqQQttlwpq-_O5C2iIkEoOAOwoutmoXbrpsZmnfwsmWDaizH0Ygqt75gvh9MIpJvae-4m-BjIBLWQVEIfGSYIUF7SMPIdqWDDvOgvTBHfVu_yXEoZ3QuDHfE3vc2typp0yTqc0SuDJO/s320/IMG_2226.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194100729535016322" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>Fresh rounds of <a href="http://www.sproutcreekfarm.org/market/MARKETcheese.html#barat">Barat</a> cheese, one of which<br />was cut for us to taste the mild and milky cheese before aging begins.</i></div><br />The cheesemaking environment also introduces some variation in the flavor of the cheese. Colin remarked that the cheesemaker's job is mostly that of a janitor, constantly hosing down and washing everything in the room. While he keeps the room clean, he doesn't completely sanitize the workspace or equipment. Cheese is the result of naturally-occurring bacteria acting on milk, and if everything is sanitized then bacteria will need to be re-introduced to make cheese. Allowing whatever bacteria happen to be present to act on the cheese can give it distinctive local character, and sometimes yields surprising results. Since Sprout Creek is an educational farm that conducts tours, the constant parade of foreign living organisms (which is to say, people, and all of the living micro-organisms that accompany them) through the facility can alter the resulting cheeses. Colin mentioned that recently some maintenance people had been in the room to work on some of the equipment, and about a week afterward he saw a lot of different and unusual surface molds showing up on his cheeses.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhphzzJkRWUBPdljtG-GVcWALQ0edYPx1rar5fRwh367Pt-4V7ql0rwF7ggo-9tv-SrwvKlUsA2CoMJZCAFHijgVg07QngXgTRKAA33zXeyTFIIULquhuimRohQ2NZVlPkOREpG7yDWwmX2/s1600-h/IMG_2238.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhphzzJkRWUBPdljtG-GVcWALQ0edYPx1rar5fRwh367Pt-4V7ql0rwF7ggo-9tv-SrwvKlUsA2CoMJZCAFHijgVg07QngXgTRKAA33zXeyTFIIULquhuimRohQ2NZVlPkOREpG7yDWwmX2/s320/IMG_2238.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194101128966974930" /></a><div style="text-align:center"><i>The ripening rooms. Each wheel of cheese in these rooms is turned every day.</i></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuWzQvK5WEt_aq0zt1W83tC2sBDsuftxxP5Rx6Y_f0QOqG2Al4zDFjSnuI9mCT78Jd5psMOXfWFs7Unnk53RTvxc2sytparK3iSF1nQMxZcMrS_bfEwHVAfBRiJ8LZoOPJ6vjAQsOT4CG/s1600-h/IMG_2235.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuWzQvK5WEt_aq0zt1W83tC2sBDsuftxxP5Rx6Y_f0QOqG2Al4zDFjSnuI9mCT78Jd5psMOXfWFs7Unnk53RTvxc2sytparK3iSF1nQMxZcMrS_bfEwHVAfBRiJ8LZoOPJ6vjAQsOT4CG/s320/IMG_2235.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194101133261942242" /></a><br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-42287486961932009632008-04-08T06:34:00.006-04:002008-04-27T21:34:51.321-04:00Restaurant: Di Fara PizzaA little over a week ago, I at last visited <a href="http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/difara_pizza/">Di Fara Pizza</a>, hidden away in an <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&geocode=&q=Di+Fara+Pizza&near=Brooklyn,+NY&ie=UTF8&ll=40.704587,-73.990173&spn=0.212378,0.466919&z=11&iwloc=A">off-the-beaten-track neighborhood in Brooklyn</a>. Di Fara is a place you often hear about if you spend any time looking around for "best of" sorts of food experiences in New York. While high-class restaurants come into and go out of fashion all the time, and people debate the merits of various wood or coal oven New York pizza icons like Grimaldi's or Totonno's whose popularity is continuously maintained by a platoon of people in the kitchen cranking out pizzas for hundreds of groups of customers every day, Domenico DeMarco keeps turning out one pizza at a time from his tiny kitchen at Di Fara Pizza, and whether you agree or not that it's one of the best pizzas you've ever had, if you try it you at least have to acknowledge that there isn't another pizza experience like it. I was finally persuaded that I needed to make the trek out to Avenue J when I heard someone ask the sweet, gentle, quiet, and opinionated <a href="http://www.leserbet.com/">Becky Wasserman</a>, who lives in Burgundy, France, where she made it a point to eat when she had a couple of days in New York, and she answered that of course she loved to go to <a href="http://www.danielnyc.com/">Daniel Boulud</a>'s restaurants with every visit to the city, but also had to get to Di Fara for a pizza. To say that I was surprised to hear that from a quiet old English lady known as an expert on some of the best wines in France would be an understatement.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcrIVYLT3jhMZVbe086TwlVgen_EEf0FCNyGfaenR2zzaFPeZGj-UPBF1JIJH9Dk0M22fZ96MetiKkf0Gqwpr1W6kUhHdeE1rgQRPa7OTAH-kF0twP6_N5kg5VS4IVwC6H1n6Cv9KaiL2c/s1600-h/IMG_2359.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcrIVYLT3jhMZVbe086TwlVgen_EEf0FCNyGfaenR2zzaFPeZGj-UPBF1JIJH9Dk0M22fZ96MetiKkf0Gqwpr1W6kUhHdeE1rgQRPa7OTAH-kF0twP6_N5kg5VS4IVwC6H1n6Cv9KaiL2c/s320/IMG_2359.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186821583446844626" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Dom's workspace, where he makes one pizza at a time.</i></div><br />For over forty years, Dom has been making pizzas his way. This is the only place I've ever been where pizza is truly "artisanal" -- it is made by an artisan, slowly, one pie at a time, and at Di Fara the pizza is never made by anyone else. Until it is delivered to the customer, no one handles a pizza at Di Fara other than Dom. He takes five to ten minutes to make a pizza, and between pizzas he spends a few minutes shuffling the one or two pizzas he has in the oven at any given moment, or finishing (detail on what this means follows below) and cutting a pizza that has just come out, which means that he produces something like 8 pizzas in an hour. Between a third and half of those get sold by the slice, so if you want a whole pizza unto yourself, and you're fourth in a line of people waiting on whole pizzas, you'll wait about 45 minutes to an hour once you place your order.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX3i4O1NpmxDg3VU1GkLU2E1_OMMF-JSWg6e0qrMfjLTkib7Pv2Vcy794FIZmcftCrgd7ITVmFYaxx9oNtVT9lhgYmT1STRUxEPuRUA-THRgkaBbXB-Kkxq9w9An0_tUqjDBgzLqxWtvt8/s1600-h/IMG_2361.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX3i4O1NpmxDg3VU1GkLU2E1_OMMF-JSWg6e0qrMfjLTkib7Pv2Vcy794FIZmcftCrgd7ITVmFYaxx9oNtVT9lhgYmT1STRUxEPuRUA-THRgkaBbXB-Kkxq9w9An0_tUqjDBgzLqxWtvt8/s320/IMG_2361.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186821587741811938" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The start of a pizza.</i></div><br />When I visited, Dom had one assistant working with him. The assistant never touched a pizza in any way, whether as it was being made or after it came out of the oven for a customer. He had two missions: first, he kept a list of names and pizza orders in a stenographer's notebook. Dom makes one pizza at a time, and he always concentrates exclusively on the one or two pizzas in the oven and the next one he is making; he has no awareness of how many or what kinds of pizzas are coming up next on the assistant's list. When he gets a pizza into the oven, he simply asks the assistant what to make next, and then begins working on it. The second job the assistant has is to keep Dom supplied with things from a small storage area behind the little pizza assembly workspace. He'll carry out buckets of sauce, or portions of dough, or various toppings, and put them on the counter where Dom works. But the assistant never has a hand in making a pizza. Conversely, Dom has no interaction with the line of waiting customers or the money, other than to indicate that a pizza is ready by looking up and saying, "OK," or, "There you go," and immediately turning his back to move on to the next pizza.<br /><br />I wanted to get some pictures of Dom making pizzas, but it's hard to do so unobtrusively since you're only about 10 feet away from Dom. I asked a friend, "Do you think they care if you take their picture?" and he said, "I don't think he cares about anything except making a pizza." Along with not being concerned about having his picture taken, at Di Fara they also don't seem to be too worried about collecting your money. We didn't pay when we ordered; we didn't pay when we got the pizza; no one asked about money when we carried the empty pan back up to the counter. At last we got the assistant's attention and told him what we ordered and that we needed to pay for it. Having to stop to handle the commercial part of the transaction almost seemed to be the only thing they considered a distraction from their work. I don't think they care about anything except making a pizza. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0sCHz57zRNTQw7W3O8tRusSjd-KYOJjcH-dchyphenhyphendwSJaWbWaI_0ie-1oZYDVPiHOUP0SYrK6dp3VXjGoE9CSIwfa6in8_Or5Bv7ApRtB7JRgmP6ezJQF4q8-KuSsTb3mCcIF1Zjp8QhQEf/s1600-h/IMG_2368.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0sCHz57zRNTQw7W3O8tRusSjd-KYOJjcH-dchyphenhyphendwSJaWbWaI_0ie-1oZYDVPiHOUP0SYrK6dp3VXjGoE9CSIwfa6in8_Or5Bv7ApRtB7JRgmP6ezJQF4q8-KuSsTb3mCcIF1Zjp8QhQEf/s320/IMG_2368.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186821587741811954" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Our raw pizza on the counter ready for baking<br />as Dom works in the oven.</i></div><br />Watching Dom methodically construct a pie before it goes into the oven can be very relaxing. There is something about watching him slowly stretch out his dough and spread out his base of sauce, cut solid little thin squares of cheese onto it using the flat slicing side of a box grater, and then drizzle it with olive oil, all without any concern for the crowd of people all watching and waiting for him just a few feet away, that makes you wonder why you ever let yourself feel the pressure of all of the chores you haven't gotten to. He slides raw pizzas from his long wooden pizza peel onto the floor of the oven, but once they are in he simply uses his hands to move them around. You are struck dumb the first time you see him reach into the oven and remove a hot pizza by dragging it to the front of the oven by hooking his fingertips over the edge of the crust, and then lift it out by sliding it onto his bare hands and carrying it over in no hurry to a pizza pan waiting on the counter a few feet away.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-THb0c7UqteQ8nzGfY07IZR8rAM-XLuNyUQXD2kgZT1TfCdo_UUve6FKtLqaHVtye8hy6KpdxrZ81-bWXgwZ-nypcb_83zlZXr5F-bYiYMXFq03VPTdsNml7KXVwUph9Y2TQ_BO_EtLFo/s1600-h/IMG_2360.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-THb0c7UqteQ8nzGfY07IZR8rAM-XLuNyUQXD2kgZT1TfCdo_UUve6FKtLqaHVtye8hy6KpdxrZ81-bWXgwZ-nypcb_83zlZXr5F-bYiYMXFq03VPTdsNml7KXVwUph9Y2TQ_BO_EtLFo/s320/IMG_2360.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186821592036779266" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Applying the final touch of olive oil.</i></div><br />While watching him prepare and bake a pizza is soothing, watching what he does with a pizza after it comes out of the oven is inspiring. Usually the customer that ordered a pizza can tell when his pizza is the one being worked on, and when it is finished baking, the customer is standing at the counter where Dom places the hot pizza on a pan right in front of him. But the pizza isn't quite done: there are still at least three steps left in its preparation before it is ready to be cut and eaten. First, Dom grates more cheese onto the top of it, probably parmesan but the ceremony seems so much more important than the ingredient that I neglected to pay attention -- it might have been mozzarella or even cheddar. Then he drizzles it with more of the nice fruity olive oil from his brass oil can. Finally he'll add some herbs, by cutting or tearing off leaves from a bunch of basil, or holding a big bouquet of oregano over the pizza as he snips away at it like he's giving it a haircut with a pair of scissors. At last he takes his small pizza cutting wheel and makes four slices across the pie to cut it into eight pieces, and only then does he look up at the customer for only a second or two, and with just a hint of a smile, which seemed to me not to be as much an interaction with the customer as simply an indication that he was pleased with his creation, he turns the pizza over to its new owner and then heads back to his counter to start stretching out his next ball of dough.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJyslEretm2M_zdcjuQnn-b4q2ONMuqb5PbH9UnYBk8k0jVar0phQjqt6RwLAgY3aqjfZi2YzgbN1EUklOxLxnDqkoPmSbwbGPVExHprGqO3-9mAW83dAOQO3xghHJEl1De2KBr4Irt_Uh/s1600-h/IMG_2380.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJyslEretm2M_zdcjuQnn-b4q2ONMuqb5PbH9UnYBk8k0jVar0phQjqt6RwLAgY3aqjfZi2YzgbN1EUklOxLxnDqkoPmSbwbGPVExHprGqO3-9mAW83dAOQO3xghHJEl1De2KBr4Irt_Uh/s320/IMG_2380.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186821592036779282" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Our finished pizza, plain cheese on the right half,<br />with pepperoni on the left.</i></div><br />When you get the pizza, both its appearance and its flavor confirm what you already knew from watching it being made: there are a lot of carefully crafted layers of taste and texture. Many of the ingredients on the pizza have been applied more than once, so that you get two different effects from everything on the pie: cheese forms the base but is also used as soon as it comes out of the oven; likewise olive oil went onto the pizza both before and after baking; half of our pizza had pepperoni, and some of it was nestled below the cheese while a lot had been placed on top of the pizza when it was already in the oven and about halfway done. And perhaps this is what separates Dom's pizza from every other version I've ever had: Dom is cooking pizza, not just making pizza. His process isn't simply assemble and then bake -- he's handling each of the elements of the pizza like a chef handles his raw materials, adding each one to the dish when the time remaining in the process is just enough to bring it to perfection just as it arrives in front of the diner.<br /><br /><i>Here are a few other blog entries I found on Di Fara Pizza:<br /><a href="http://orangette.blogspot.com/2005/09/di-fara-pizza-and-exaggeration-that.html">Orangette</a><br /><a href="http://thislittlepiglet.blogspot.com/2006/11/di-fara-pizza-thats-worth-wait.html">This Little Piglet</a><br /><a href="http://offthebroiler.wordpress.com/2006/05/31/nyc-dining-difara-pizza/">Off The Broiler</a><br /><br />The Slice entry about Di Fara:<br /><a href="http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2004/01/di_fara.html">Slice on Di Fara</a><br /><br></i>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-80434798089527056472008-03-25T00:55:00.004-04:002008-03-25T01:25:05.420-04:00Chef Profiles: Ducasse and ChangI've come across a couple of good in-depth profiles of well-known chefs that are worth reading if you're interested in the personalities behind the big-time restaurant scene.<br /><br />First, <a href="http://www.nymag.com/">New York Magazine</a> had <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/42588/">this article</a> about Alain Ducasse. Ducasse is one of the most famous chefs in the world, but he has never managed to open a successful restaurant in New York. Somehow his restaurants have so far always failed to match the current moods and trends in fine dining. He has just opened <a href="http://www.adour-stregis.com/">Adour</a> in Manhattan in the St. Regis hotel near the upscale shopping epicenter at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 57th Street. The anecdote in the article about the prim and proper Ducasse's encounter with <i>carpe diem</i> personified in the larger-than-life-in-every-way form of Mario Batali is priceless. (Batali saunters right up to the quiet and reserved Ducasse, who is formally dressed in a nice suit, smothers him in a bear hug, and says enthusiastically to anyone within ear shot, "This guy is fucking awesome!")<br /><br />Second, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/">The New Yorker</a>, in its issue dated March 24, has a profile of David Chang, who has become all the rage in the last few years after opening, of all things to launch a career as a star top chef, a noodle bar, <a href="http://www.momofuku.com/">Momofuku</a> (which literally translated means "lucky peach", but also happens to be the name of the inventor, or at least the popularizer or commercializer, of Ramen noodles). He has since expanded to a couple more restaurants, each a bit different in its concept and food, and this profile is written as the third of his restaurants is set to open. <a href="http://www.momofuku.com/ko/default.asp">Momofuku Ko</a> is an ambitious restaurant in a style I first heard about in Chicago when <a href="http://www.schwarestaurant.com/">Schwa</a> became famous: it is a very small restaurant that makes the style of food with the kind of ingredients that you find at the best fine dining establishments around, with only a handful of seats and no waitstaff because everything is served by the chefs and cooks who prepare it. The New Yorker article is not available online, but Ed Levine wrote a worthwhile summary and commentary on it <a href="http://edlevineeats.seriouseats.com/2008/03/david-chang-as-he-opens-momofuku-ko.html">here</a>.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-87669864704697221642008-03-23T19:49:00.000-04:002008-03-23T19:50:00.411-04:00Heat, Chemistry, PastryWe are in the middle of two weeks of pastry classes at school right now. Like most cooking schools, the FCI has a full program just for pastry training, but everyone in the culinary program goes through some of the basics of pastries. Many pastry preparations can be used to make savory (non-dessert) dishes, and in addition any chef who aspires to run a kitchen or other food service operation needs to have some understanding of pastries to better work with his pastry chef and to fill in when the pastry chef is not at work.<br /><br />Most elementary pastry preparations that underlie any finished product are involve more chemistry and science than the usual off-the-cuff throwing together of interesting ingredients that you see on something like Top Chef. Where we taste and adjust dishes as we go in cooking, when preparing pastries we measure precisely and follow directions carefully. In addition to measuring ingredients to the right proportions to get the desired chemical and structural transformations take place, I'm learning that the precise application of heat is often even more important to many recipes.<br /><br />The process of tempering chocolate is one of the more interesting examples of how varying heat within a small temperature range changes the properties of one of the most common ingredients used in sweets. Chocolate has a structure that consists of a couple of different kinds of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal">crystals</a>. One of the crystals, the "unstable" one, melts near room temperature, at anywhere from 59F to 82F; the "stable" crystals melt at 89F-93F. In addition to the desirable "melts in your hands, but not in your room" property of the more stable crystals, they also have a glossier appearance and a less gummy texture than the unstable crystals. If you melt chocolate, to use as a frosting for example, if it cools rapidly (as it will if spread in a thin layer, like a frosting) there will not be enough stable crystals formed before it cools below 82F and unstable crystals take over and determine the crystalline structure of the solid chocolate. To "temper" chocolate, which makes it look and feel nicer on things, the cook melts solid chocolate and then cools it to the point where crystals form but it can still be stirred, and then gently heats it to a temperature above the melting point of unstable crystals but below the melting point of stable crystals (about 88F) to eliminate any unstable crystals that formed. It is held at that temperature to allow enough stable crystals to develop that when it is further cooled there will be enough of them to establish the structure of all of the solid chocolate. This is something I've only read about and never done, and in the basic pastry training that the culinary students get at the FCI we will not be doing it. I've heard (but never seen with my own eyes) that one of my friends who is a trained pastry chef can go through this process just by feel, without using a thermometer. She can also always recognize that most chocolate-covered desserts, even in many upscale bakeries and fine restaurants, have had some wax added to the chocolate to make it more shiny and stable and look like properly tempered chocolate.<br /><br />We've been through a couple of simpler careful heating processes in the past week during our pastry classes at school. The first was to make Génoise cakes, a very light sponge cake that rises and becomes airy through creating and cooking egg foam, without any chemical or other leavening agents (such as baking powder or yeasts). The first step in making Génoise is to whisk together eggs and sugar into something like a sabayon (which normally includes only egg yolks, not the whole eggs used in Génoise). As the eggs are whipped, they will increase in volume as air is incorporated into them, but the foam is not stable enough to survive the amount of heat and time it takes to bake the cake. To make them more stable, you heat the eggs and sugar as they are whisked. The heat causes the tightly-wound proteins in the eggs to lengthen into strands that can bond with each other and form a more stable network in which air can be trapped for a longer period of time. In many pastry sauces and creams, eggs can be heated as the binder in a liquid all the way to boiling and will not curdle (scramble) if they are handled properly and stirred constantly. But for Génoise, we want to heat the eggs just to the point that they can hold a foam structure long enough to last through the baking process. If they are heated beyond that, the cake will become tough and chewy as the network of proteins gets more solid. To achieve the result we want, the eggs must come to a temperature of at least 110F, and we usually heat them to a minimum of 115F for the best results, but if at any point they go over 120F, we'll throw the mixture away and start over. When the cake is baked (after adding a little bit of flour to make a batter out of the whipped eggs and sugar), the foam is just stable enough to last through the baking process, and in fact if you remove the cake from the oven and it is not baked all the way through, the uncooked batter will quickly deflate and you'll have what Chef Marc derisively calls "a flat tire." There is no recovery if this happens -- you just have to start over.<br /><br />The second preparation we made that involved achieving a narrow temperature range was classic buttercream frosting. As our assistant instructor Chef Matthew (who worked for awhile as a pastry chef) told us, a colleague once told him that the only real purpose of Génoise is to serve as a platform for the delivery of buttercream. The frosting is made from only 3 basic ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and butter. The frosting is not cooked and there is no liquid in which to dissolve the sugar, but we want the sugar to be soft and not grainy when the finished preparation is at or below room temperature. The solution is to heat the sugar to a stage where its crystal structure will be permanently changed and it would cool into a soft and pliable solid if left on its own and not mixed into our frosting. We'll get this result by heating the sugar to what is called the "soft ball" stage, between 234F and 240F. When it is in that temperature range, a bit of the sugar cooled in ice water can be rolled between your fingers into a soft but cohesive ball. If heated to just below that range, the sugar upon cooling will tend to spin fine threads rather than forming a solid lump or ball; if heated above that range, it will form crunchier and eventually rock-hard solids when it is cooled (this is how hard candies are made). To make buttercream, you beat egg yolks and then mix hot sugar brought to the soft ball stage into the eggs, then cool the mix enough that it will not melt butter, and whip a whole lot of butter into it to form a frosting.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-69904417119237564232008-03-23T19:48:00.002-04:002008-03-23T19:49:21.218-04:00Recipe: Génoise (Whole Egg Sponge Cake)A good Génoise cake is going to rise a lot in baking, enough that you can make two or three layers by slicing a single cake. It will be 3 or 4 inches tall. This means that you need a pretty deep cake pan to make it, like the deep aluminum pans you'll find in kitchen supply stores that have the sorts of heavy but inexpensive equipment used in restaurant kitchens. You also need a thermometer that you are confident is both accurate to within 2 or 3 degrees and that you can read that precisely.<br /><br /><div style="text-align:center;"><table><tr><td></td><td>6-Inch Cake</td><td>8-Inch Cake</td></tr><tr><td>Eggs</td><td>3</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Sugar</td><td>1/3 cup (75 grams)</td><td>1/2 cup (125 g)</td></tr><tr><td>Cake flour, sifted</td><td>1/2 cup (75 grams)</td><td>7/8 cup (125 grams)</td></tr></table></div><br /><br />Prepare one cake pan (choose a deep pan, at least 2" tall) by buttering and flouring it, line the bottom with parchment paper, and put it in the refrigerator to cool. Preheat the oven to 350F.<br /><br />It is better to weigh your ingredients if possible, especially the flour, but since many home cooks do not have a scale, I've approximated the equivalent volume measurements.<br /><br />Get a double-boiler ready by fitting a large bowl (large enough to be able to vigorously whisk the eggs until they triple in volume) over a hot water bath. Do not let the water touch the bottom of the bowl. Once you've checked that the bowl fits over your pan and that the water does not come to the bottom of the bowl, set the bowl aside (it must not be hot when you add the raw eggs to it) and heat the water to a simmer.<br /><br />Put the eggs and sugar into your bowl and begin whisking them with a large balloon whisk. After they come together (about a minute), continue whisking over the hot water bath. Whisk until the eggs are tripled in volume, which will take about 10 minutes (or more like 30 minutes if you are stirring and not whisking, something that as simple as it sounds I did not really understand until Chef Marc yelled at me about 10 times over the course of 20 minutes on the night we first made Hollandaise sauce -- to whisk, you have to rapidly lift the whisk completely out of the egg mixture with each stroke so that you pick up a lot of air). While you whisk, periodically check the temperature of the mix. If you reach 115F, take it off the heat. You must get to at least 110F, 115F is ideal, and if at any point the eggs go over 120F you should throw them away and start over. When you take the temperature, tip the bowl up on its side and lay the thermometer in it along the side of the bowl so that you have a couple inches of the thermometer in the eggs. If you reach the proper temperature before the eggs have been whisked until light and foamy and 3 or 4 times their original volume, take the bowl off the heat to finish whisking.<br /><br />Fold in the sifted flour with a spatula, trying not to stir too much and deflate the batter. Pour the batter into the buttered and floured cake pan. Spin the pan around quickly one time and bang it firmly on the countertop one time to even out the batter. Place it in the oven and bake until the cake does not keep an indentation you make in its top with your finger. Wait at least 20 minutes before you open the oven door to check it for the first time. The cake will get quite brown before it is finished. My cakes have all taken 35-40 minutes to bake. If the cake is not completely baked, it will collapse when removed from the oven.<br /><br />When it is finished, remove it from the pan immediately and let it cool on a cooling rack, covered with a damp towel to keep it from drying out. Once it dries, the cake is usually sliced in half (into layers) and middle of the cake is brushed with a simple syrup (a mix of equal parts sugar and water, heated to dissolve the sugar, which you can also flavor with things like whole cloves or cinnamon sticks that you remove before you use the syrup). The cake can absorb a lot of syrup without getting soggy -- I used about 1/2 cup of syrup on one 6-inch cake. You can frost between the layers or not, as you like.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-67839296536019583442008-03-23T19:48:00.001-04:002008-03-23T19:48:27.804-04:00Recipe: Buttercream1 1/3 cups (300 grams) sugar<br />1/3 cup water<br />6 egg yolks<br />5 sticks (1 1/4 lbs) butter, warmed to room temperature, but not melted<br /><br />Separate the eggs and put the yolks in a mixing bowl. Discard or reserve the whites for another use.<br /><br />Have a pastry brush and a bowl of ice water next to the stove before you begin to heat the sugar. Sugar is very hot and can be dangerous, a lot like a pot of hot oil for deep frying, so be careful not to splash yourself; this is an operation for which you might not want any children in the room. Place the sugar and water in a heavy-bottomed pan on the stove over high heat. Do not stir the sugar or shake the pan as it heats, or the sugar may crystalize and you will have to start over. As the sugar and water come to a boil, quickly and repeatedly brush ice water all around the sides of the pan just above the sugar (don't get your brush in the hot sugar) to wash any sugar crystals that form on the sides of the pan down into the rest of the sugar -- you use very cold water so that it will not completely boil away before it can run down the side of the pan into the sugar. When the sugar reaches the soft ball stage (234F-240F), take it off the heat immediately. (<a href="http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/sugar-stages.html">Here</a> is a page with good descriptions of the stages of sugar as it is heated.)<br /><br />As soon as the sugar is off heat, start whipping the egg yolks using a wire whip on a mixer. When they have become a bit pale, start adding the warm sugar while beating the eggs with the wire whip by pouring the sugar down the side of the mixing bowl. Your goal is for the sugar to get down to the eggs without it touching the wire whip, or the whip will fling it against the sides of the bowl and it won't get incorporated into the eggs.<br /><br />Once all the sugar has been added to the eggs, continue mixing it to cool it until it is no longer hot enough to melt butter. Then, while still mixing with the whip, add the butter until it is completely incorporated. The buttercream is then ready to use. You can flavor or color it however you like, with food coloring dyes, liqueurs, or extracts like vanilla, almond or coffee.<br /><br />Buttercream will keep in the refrigerator for about a week, or you can freeze it for several months. Bring it to near room temperature to work with it.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-59686849567778272752008-03-22T02:33:00.001-04:002008-03-22T02:42:28.803-04:00Controlling Heat and Goal-Oriented CookingOne of the fundamental skills for a cook to develop is the control and use of heat. Heat is such a basic part of cooking that those of us who control it well take it for granted that everyone knows or should know how to use heat in the kitchen; those of us who don't control it at all probably don't even recognize the application of heat to food as a significant skill in and of itself. Chefs bristle and sometimes even grow angry when asked, "How long should I cook it?" It's an exasperating question to ask a cook, because there is no correct short answer to the question. Often you'll hear the flippant answer, "Until it's done." The chef who gives that answer knows that it isn't helpful to the person who asked, and yet he intends it in a helpful way: he wants to prod the questioner to think about the problem in a different way.<br /><br />In an analogy that I thought was brilliant, an essay that I read a few months ago said that to tell someone to cook something for five minutes made as much sense as telling them that to get to your house they should drive for five minutes and then turn right. Anyone who drives knows that while the approximate time it will take to get somewhere can be known in advance, you don't use a timer to tell you when to take the next action (like turning right) as you drive. Instead, you look for landmarks or roadsigns. In the same way, a chef assumes that anyone who cooks will know that while the approximate cooking time of something can be known in advance, you can't use time to tell you when to take the next action (like adding the next ingredient, or deglazing your pan, or serving the finished dish) as you cook something. Instead you need to learn what signs to look for that the food being cooked has reached the state where it is time for the next step.<br /><br />Most cookbooks encourage the idea that elapsed time is how to tell when something is cooked. Every step of a recipe that tells you to cook something also tells you how long to cook it. I've read that there are often battles between chefs and cookbook editors about whether to include timings in recipes or not. The editors and publishers always win the argument, and they are probably right to think that they will have a difficult time selling a cookbook that doesn't say anything about how long you should cook your onions before you add your tomatoes. Yet the fact remains that for many recipes, if you "cook over medium heat for five minutes" as instructed, whether the food you make comes out well or not is mostly a matter of luck (or your skill at knowing from the context and dish whether the author meant for you to saute or sweat the food), and not related to the quality of the dish or the recipe.<br /><br />The more I cook, and the more I write about cooking and try to describe recipes to friends either in writing or while I'm talking to them, the more I believe that most of what you do in cooking, especially when you apply heat to something, is "goal-oriented." What I mean is that in every step of a recipe, the author has in mind some state that the food will be in at the end of that step. Usually the goal (the state in which the food should be) is not explicitly stated. Instead of telling you what the goal is, recipes generally give you an action to carry out, such as our earlier example, "cook over medium heat for five minutes." It's not only the "five minutes" part of that instruction that might or might not work out as intended; the "medium heat" bit leaves even more room for error. The cook would be better off if he were told, "Cook over medium heat until softened but still with some bite, and pale white or yellow in color, which might take about five minutes." Depending on your skill, how many other things you have going on in the kitchen at the same time, what kind of pan you use, how much heat you apply and how much you stir or shake the pan, that step might take anywhere from 3 minutes to 20 minutes. But if you focus on the goal -- soft texture and pale color -- you'll get the step right no matter how much time is involved.<br /><br />It's difficult to write a goal-oriented cookbook that can be used by a general audience. One common approach is to include an introductory chapter or two in the book, before the chapters of recipes, with general information and instructions. But reality is that most people aren't ever going to read that stuff (though for me it is the most-read parts of the cookbooks I own). Another approach I've seen is to describe the goals of each step right in the recipe. One of the cookbooks that is among the handful of important books in my own development as a cook is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rick-Baylesss-Mexican-Kitchen-World-Class/dp/B00025G3E0">Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen</a>, and in it Bayless often takes a fairly long paragraph to describe each step. Since so many of the techniques are common to a lot of the recipes, he repeats the same description of a step several times throughout the book, so that when you go to make anything, you have everything you need to know right there in the recipe in front of you. As a result, many of his recipes take 3 pages or more of text, which can deter people from reading or attempting them. But it was a transformative book for me, because it started me along the road to thinking of every step in cooking a dish as having a desired outcome, and not just as a direction to be followed in the hope that everything would turn out well at the end of all of the steps.<br /><br />Whenever you apply heat to food, you should know what your goal is. For example, when you cook anything in oil in a pan, you should at least know whether you want it to get browned or not, and in addition you might want to know whether you're trying to drive out none, some or most of its moisture. Recipes often don't specify these things, although they do sometimes throw you a hint about the color ("golden brown") you want to achieve, which can be helpful. In writing and describing recipes, I'm starting to think that describing at the beginning of the recipe the important intermediate goals to keep in mind as you cook is the way I like to tackle the issue. The "Cooking Objectives" section of the <a href="http://yeschefnochef.blogspot.com/2008/02/potage-parisienne-potato-leek-soup.html">Potato Leek Soup</a> recipe I posted here awhile ago is an example.<br /><br />Once you know what your goals are, you can depart from the directions of your recipes and use your own methods to achieve them. Recently I read an article by Eric Ripert, the chef at <a href="http://www.le-bernardin.com/">Le Bernardin</a>, regarded as the best restaurant in New York by many people (and where I ate the best piece of cooked salmon I've ever had), in which he outlined the most important aspects of the way he cooks a fish fillet. A couple of them were to heat the oil until it's smoking before you put in the fillet, and then put the fillet in skin-side down and press down on it firmly with a spatula to prevent the skin from curling. Not long after I read that, I saw an interview with Tom Colicchio, the founding executive chef (he has since moved on) of <a href="http://www.gramercytavern.com/">Gramercy Tavern</a>, the restaurant where I had the best cooked striped bass (my "go-to" fish) dish I ever ate. He said in a nutshell, "You don't have to get your oil that hot, and pressing it down with a spatula like many chefs do is unnecessary." Who is right? Well, both are -- they can both produce perfectly-cooked fish, with crispy skin, using different techniques. Their goals are the same, their methods are different. But the lesson here is not that the technique doesn't matter, because you can't mix-and-match your favorite parts of each way of doing it: if you use very hot oil, you need to press with the spatula, or the fish will curl away from the pan and it won't cook correctly at all. I've used both methods successfully, and I don't really have a favorite, although based on how good the results have been a few times, if I needed to make a perfect fish fillet for a special plate, I'd go with the smoking oil and spatula. But again, to use that method, you need to know your goals and keep them in mind. You don't want to burn the fish, and when you use high heat often it's the fat (oil) that burns before the food does, and since the oil will move around in the pan and coat the food, burned oil will make the fish taste acrid and bitter even if you don't overheat its surface. The solution is to use a pan of the right size, that will just accommodate the fish you want to cook (with a half inch or a bit more between the pieces), but not any larger, because what burns your oil is having a large surface area of your pan over the burner without any food in contact with it to absorb the heat.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-12248662489308527712008-03-17T07:06:00.007-04:002008-03-17T21:56:47.874-04:00Jean-Luc's Favorite WinesLast week, I went to a great wine tasting event at <a href="http://www.leduwines.com/">Le Du's</a> wine shop, a store hidden (but well-known) in an out-of-the-way corner of the Meat Packing District. The event was called "Jean-Luc's Favorite Wines," and it was basically a good excuse for the owner of the store to get a bunch of us to pay for him to get to open and drink some of his best wines. But I think most people there would gladly pay for him to do that any chance they get -- he is an entertaining speaker and chooses terrific wines.<br /><br />Jean-Luc Le Du was the wine director for <a href="http://www.danielnyc.com/">Daniel Boulud</a> for 10 years before he left to open his own wine shop. I think of that job as the wine analog of being manager of the New York Yankees: if you wanted to be in the wine profession in the United States in some capacity other than a winemaker and you could pick from any job, that would have to be in your top handful of choices. He was born in France and hails from Brittany (where, as he says, they don't make any wine, but they produce a lot of very nice pigs), but didn't discover wine until he came to the United States in the mid-eighties. A friend opened his eyes to outstanding wines with a bottle of 1964 Château Cheval Blanc, a well-known Bordeaux from Saint-Emilion. As Jean-Luc tells it, "I didn't know anything about wine. I thought you could just go to a liquor store with five dollars and ask for a sixty-four Château Cheval Blanc." (Current bottlings are around $300 now.) But he fell in love with wine and became determined to learn about it, and began buying $100 worth of wine every week, which must have gone quite a long way in the United States in the eighties, before this country really discovered wine and our demand pushed prices up.<br /><br />We had eight wines (about a half glass of each) over the course of two hours at the tasting, with Jean-Luc speaking extemporaneously about each one for fifteen minutes or more. At times, people remarked that they didn't like something as much, or didn't taste in the wine what Jean-Luc did, and a couple of times in response he made people laugh by pointing at the top of the sheet that listed the wines and had as its title, "My Favorite Wines," and saying, "If you look to the top of your sheet, you'll see it is called <i>MY</i> favorite wines; your favorite wines might be something else," but he said it in a light-hearted way, not at all defensively or dismissively. The lineup featured one champagne, one white wine, four red wines, and two dessert wines:<br /><i><ul><li>Vintage Champagne: Egly Ouriet 2000</li><li>Old White Burgundy: Puligny Montrachet "Les Combettes" 1er Cru, Nicolas Potel 1990</li><li>Northern Rhone Syrah: Cornas, Auguste Clape 2005</li><li>Priorat Blend: Clos Mogador 2005</li><li>Old Bordeaux: Château Grand Puy Lacoste 1982</li><li>Old Barolo: Barolo, Giacomo Conterno 1971</li><li>Dessert Wine, Late Harvest Loire Valley Chenin Blanc: Vouvray Moelleux, Domaine Foreau 2005</li><li>Dessert Wine: Banyuls, Dr. Parce 1961</li></ul></i><h3>Egly Ouriet 2000</h3>The champagne was the first that I've ever had that I would say had a distinct character and the body of a "real" wine. I drink a fair amount of sparkling wine nowadays, often with cheeses instead of desserts in restaurants, and most of it tastes to me like good nondescript dry white wine with a bit of apple flavor to it that I like. This champagne was made of chardonnay grapes, and had the butteriness and heft of a chardonnay, and the toastiness of a bit of age. It had been oaked a bit, but not so much that it was obtrusive. During Jean-Luc's remarks, I picked up some very basic sparkling wine knowledge that is pretty obvious when you stop and think about it for a moment, but was new to me nevertheless: "blanc de blanc" means the wine was made with chardonnay grapes, and "blanc de noir" means the wine was made with pinot noir grapes. (Dark grapes are often used to make white wines: the color in red wines comes from leaving the skins on during the processing of the grapes; if you remove the skins early, the flesh of the grape is light and you get a white wine.)<br /><br />Most champagnes are made to taste sort of nondescript, because the producer's goal with nonvintage champagnes and sparkling wines (probably most readers of this have only ever had nonvintage sparkling wine) is for them to taste pretty much the same from year to year so that the consumer will know what he's getting in the bottle. Like most food products where your goal is to be able to duplicate the same flavor over and over without variation, nonvintage champagnes are made by blending together raw ingredients from a wide variety of sources: wine from a lot of different grapes (the same variety, but harvested from different sites) grown in a lot of different years is combined to drive out the distinguishing characteristics of any one of them, leaving the producer with a wine that is more a reflection of how it was made than what it was made from. This is not a bad thing, because often you want something simple and good that will be exactly what you expect, a wine clearly in the style of some well-known producer, but if you only ever try nonvintage sparkling wines, you're guaranteed to miss the best and most interesting champagnes. After tasting this wine, I will look for vintage sparkling wines more in restaurants.<br /><br /><h3>Puligny Montrachet "Les Combettes" 1er Cru, Nicolas Potel 1990</h3>The white Burgundy that we tasted from 1990 was probably the standout wine of the tasting for me (although its hard to say that, because nearly every wine there was the standout the moment I first tried it). It is the first time I've ever had a white wine where I understood why someone might pay a lot of money for a white wine. This wine showed a lot of depth and many layers of flavor. A lot of the acidity had gone away with age, allowing everything else about the wine to come forward. Both this and the vintage champagne we had were a very deep golden color, pretty to look at, although later in the tasting in response to a comment someone made, Jean-Luc said that in his experience shades or depth of color tell you nothing at all about the quality of a wine or how it will taste.<br /><br /><h3>Cornas, Auguste Clape 2005</h3>The first red we had was a syrah from Cornas, in the northern Rhone. Jean-Luc said, "To me, this is syrah," and by saying that he was drawing a contrast with the style of shiraz from Australia, often big red wines with a lot of alcohol. This wine tasted a bit chalky to me, maybe what you might more politely call a mineral flavor. I thought it also had the distinct and strong smell of the Elmer's glue paste we used when we were five years old, but a friend that I shared that observation with thought it was more like rubber cement. Despite these descriptions, it was a very good wine, maybe the wine I would be most likely to buy among the reds we tried. We had the 2005 bottling, and it was a little rough and will be better with age. Jean-Luc said that he had just gotten in the 2001 of the same wine, and thought that morning about serving it instead of the 2005, but he had already sent out the list of wines to everyone attending, and didn't want to get in an argument with any of his paying customers about a change in the list of promised wines.<br /><br /><h3>Priorat Blend: Clos Mogador 2005</h3>The next red was from Priorat, in northeastern Spain just down the coast from France and Barcelona. This might have been my favorite red of the night, though not as interesting to me as the Cornas. It was a blend of Grenache and other grapes, much like what you find in southern Rhone wines (the most well-known being Chateauneuf du Pape). Jean-Luc talked about a conversation he'd had with a maker of southern Rhone blends who said that it is no mystery why wines from that region have been made from blends of a lot of grapes for hundreds of years: none of the grapes alone makes a great wine. Spanish wines are to me the easiest to identify from their taste. Most of the Spanish wine I've had seems to taste and smell a little bit like a tapas restaurant (perhaps it's really the other way around). This wine tasted like a southern Rhone wine that had been decanted and left to absorb tastes out of the air in a tapas restaurant. That remark doesn't begin to do it justice, though -- it was a lot more interesting than that. I liked this wine a lot.<br /><br /><h3>Château Grand Puy Lacoste 1982</h3>The next two red wines were really the deciding factor in my decision to spend the money to go to this tasting: a 1982 Bordeaux and a 1971 Barolo. The chance to taste one of those kinds of wines, let alone two of them, without spending hundreds of dollars doesn't come along all that often, at least not so far in my short wine life. They were both offered for sale at the tasting, for between $300 and $400 a bottle. Surprisingly (to me, at least), they were my least favorite wines of the night. But I am still very glad to have gotten to try both of them.<br /><br />Both red Bordeaux and Barolo wines are very tannic, and can generally benefit from aging. Tannin, found in the skins of dark grapes, gives a red wine roughness and bitterness, but it is also what usually allows a wine to be aged. To give you some idea of the kind of edge it gives to a wine, tannic acid has a similar quality to and is the main taste in (unsweetened, obviously, and un-lemoned) iced tea. Tannins give a wine what is often called "structure," the layers of taste that you pick up in different parts of your mouth in different sequences as you taste a wine by holding it in your mouth for several seconds (or, for some wines, several minutes). The '82 Bordeaux had lost nearly all of its tannic taste, and therefore all of its "structure," and Jean-Luc remarked that it was on the verge of "falling apart." In addition it had lost nearly all of the taste of the original fruit. In fact, until I tasted this wine, I'm not sure that I really understood what it meant for a red wine to taste "fruity" other than in a very obvious way. When all of the fruit has aged away, it really hits you how fruity every other red wine is, even those that are so tannic and bitter that they aren't ready to drink. In some sense it was a very pure expression of Bordeaux, and aside from the obvious novelty aspect of getting to try an old wine, that is why I am glad to have tasted it. Take away the tannic bitterness and the regular old grape fruitiness, and what you're left with is the concentrated essence of the land that the wine came from, the minerals and nutrients and organisms in the soil, the taste and smell of the air that gave life to the vines. I thought of it like a consomme of Bordeaux. Someone remarked that it had the quality of a perfume, which I think is a good way to describe it: a light but very distinctive and powerful aroma and flavor.<br /><br /><h3>Barolo, Giacomo Conterno 1971</h3>This was my least favorite of the wines we had, though again I am glad to have tried it. Good Barolos are among my favorite wines, and one of the things I enjoy about eating in restaurants in New York is that you can often find them available by the glass because there's enough of a market here that a restaurant can go through several bottles a night of a good wine even if they have to charge $30 a glass, and they won't end up wasting most of a bottle because only one glass is sold. Barolo and Barbaresco wines from northern Italy are made from a grape called nebbiolo, which might be the most tannic grape of any used to make wines. The wines can be very rough and assertive when young, and they benefit more than other wines from being decanted well in advance of drinking -- leaving them in the glass for at least a couple of hours before you drink them is a good idea. This wine, like the Bordeaux, had lost most of the fruit in its taste. But unlike the Bordeaux, it still had a tannic edge to it. Jean-Luc said that no matter how long you age a wine made from nebbiolo grapes, it will still show tannins: he's never had one that completely lost its tannic bite. For my taste, at least at this point in my novice wine appreciation career, some of the fruit is necessary if the wine is still going to have its tannic edge. As Jean-Luc kept reminding us by pointing to the "My" in the "My Favorite Wines" title on the sheet he had passed out at the beginning of the night, each of us likes different things in food and wine (and anything else), and some friends that were also at the tasting liked this wine so much that they bought the only bottle available for sale in the store.<br /><br /><h3>Vouvray Moelleux, Domaine Foreau 2005</h3>The first of our dessert wines was a chenin blanc from the Loire valley. I haven't had many dessert wines, but I used to have a friend that liked Tokaji (pronounced "toh-kie," rhyming with "eye") dessert wines from Hungary quite a bit, and I've tasted a few of those. They taste to me like a minerally honey. This reminded me of those Tokajis, but with much more of an emphasis on the honey and not so much mineral edge. It was very sweet, but still with interesting complexity to its flavor, and not just like drinking a syrup. If price were no object, of the wines we had, this one would be second on my list to buy so I could try it again and share it with others (the first, if price were no object, would be the 1990 white Burgundy).<br /><br /><h3>Banyuls, Dr. Parce 1961</h3>Jean-Luc said this was the wine he had been most looking forward to for the evening. I believe Banyuls is a wine made in southern France just north of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone says it is something like Port wine, although I haven't liked the Ports I've had that were said to be very good ones, and I've liked Banyuls every time I've had it. It is amber in color, not the deep, dark red or purple of port. I didn't find anything remarkable about it, though that is mostly because I haven't had enough examples of it to identify anything that distinguishes one from another. Jean-Luc said it is a real "wine geek" wine, in that it is a wine that is nearly impossible to find. He said that almost any famous wine you want you can get if you simply have enough money -- if you want a bottle of '47 Petrus or '61 Lafite, there is one available at nearly every big wine auction, and just by bringing enough money to the table you can get hold of them. But a nearly 50-year-old Banyuls is a real rarity, and you could see the enjoyment on Jean-Luc's face as he tasted the wine.<br /><br /><br />All in all, I'm glad I got to try all of those wines. One of my friends who was at the tasting asked Jean-Luc near the end, since he had been repeatedly and humorously making the point that these were his favorite wines, when he was going to have a tasting of his second-favorite wines. I hope he does so before too long -- I'll be there.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-49105256099991024682008-03-14T03:12:00.004-04:002008-03-14T03:38:51.655-04:00Recipe: Chimay Style Stuffed EggsTonight was egg night at school. This is one of the dishes we made: eggs stuffed with mushrooms and egg yolks. I was very pleasantly surprised by how good this was.<br /><br />Ingredients (for six small servings):<br />3 eggs, hard boiled<br />For duxelles:<br /> 1 shallot, finely chopped<br /> 4 white button mushrooms, finely chopped<br /> Juice of 1/2 lemon<br /> 1-2 Tbsp butter<br />For Sauce Mornay:<br /> 1 Tbsp butter<br /> 1 Tbsp flour<br /> 1 cup milk<br /> Salt and pepper<br /> 4 Tbsp Gruyere cheese, grated<br /> 1 egg yolk<br /> Cayenne pepper<br /> Nutmeg<br /><br />First, hard boil the eggs. There are a few ways to do this so that the yolks don't turn green on their surface. At school the official procedure is to place eggs in a pot with enough cold water to cover them and then about an inch more because some will evaporate when you start to heat it. Bring the water (with the eggs in it) to a boil, and once it is boiling, lower your heat to a simmer and cook the eggs for 11 minutes. Take them out of the hot water and put them into ice water to cool them off. After a few minutes, tap the shell so that it cracks, and put them into cold water with their shell cracked. The water will seep in between the shell and the egg white and make it easier to peel the hard boiled eggs.<br /><br />Next, prepare a mushroom duxelles. Chop your white mushrooms and shallot finely, so they are in pieces about 1/8" or 3/16" -- 1/4" is too large. When the mushrooms are chopped, put them in a bowl and squeeze the lemon juice into them and toss them. Melt the butter in a small pan, add the shallots, and cook over low to medium-low heat -- what you want is for the shallots to begin to soften, but not brown at all. (This is called "sweating" the shallots.) When the shallots have begun to turn a bit translucent, after about 3-4 minutes, add the mushrooms to the pan, and salt them. Cook over low heat until the mushrooms release their water into the pan and then the water evaporates and the mushrooms are soft. Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside.<br /><br />At this point, preheat your oven. It doesn't really matter much what temperature -- 350 or so is fine.<br /><br />Now, prepare your eggs. Peel them (remove the shells) if you haven't already, and cut them in half lengthwise. Remove the yolks, and set the egg white halves aside -- those are what you will be stuffing soon. Crush the yolks with a fork so that they end up in smaller pieces than your shallot and mushrooms, and add stir them into the shallot-mushroom mixture.<br /><br />Then it's time to do your sauce. Start by getting one egg yolk ready in a small bowl. Next, melt the butter in a small saucepan, then stir the flour into it, and once it is smooth cook that mixture over low heat for about 3 minutes. Don't let it get too warm, or it'll start to brown. It should just barely have some foaming bubbles to it, and you'll need to stir it every minute or so to keep it from browning. This is a "white roux," perhaps the most standard of classical sauce thickeners. Now, with a whisk ready to go in one hand, and the milk already measured and sitting next to your stove, raise the heat on your roux to high, and while whisking (start whisking the roux by itself before you start to pour), pour in about a quarter of the milk, and whisk it to try to break up lumps that form. Then, still whisking (but not as urgently), add the rest of the milk. Bring it all the way to a boil, and then reduce the heat so that it doesn't foam up and overflow your pan (but it should still gently boil), and whisk it for about 30 seconds to a minute. It should thicken up into a saucelike consistency. At this point, you have one of the five classic "mother sauces" (these are a few basic sauces that serve as the starting point for almost any sauce in a western dish) called "Béchamel." (If you followed the same process but used a light stock, like chicken, vegetable, or fish stock, instead of the milk, you'd have another of the mother sauces, Velouté.)<br /><br />Take a couple of spoons of the sauce and stir them into your mushroom and egg yolk mixture. You can do this to taste -- this mixture is going to be the stuffing for your eggs, so you want it solid enough that you can mound it up on top of the egg white halves and it won't run at all. Otherwise, how much sauce to stir into it is only a matter of what kind of texture you think you'll like.<br /><br />Now start to transform your Béchamel sauce into Sauce Mornay. Stir about half of the cheese into the sauce. (At this point, if you were serious about your sauce, you would strain it, but for home cooking if you don't feel like it, you can skip straining. The price of skipping it is that your sauce will be a little bit pasty in texture, and may have small floury lumps in it.) In a separate small bowl, stir up the egg yolk, and then add one small spoon of your white sauce to the egg yolk and stir them together. This is called "tempering" the egg, and its purpose is to prevent the egg from curdling (scrambling) when you add it to the sauce, which you're about to do. Remove the white sauce from the heat.<br /><br />While the white sauce cools a bit before you stir the egg into it, use a fork or spoon to stuff the mushroom and egg yolk mix into your egg white halves. Mound it up on the eggs so there is plenty of stuffing on top of each egg. Place the eggs onto something that can go in the oven -- a regular old dinner plate is fine.<br /><br />Finally, stir the tempered egg yolk into the white sauce. Season it with a pinch of cayenne pepper and nutmeg, and then taste it and add salt until it tastes like a nice sauce. Spoon the sauce over the stuffed eggs. Top each egg with a bit of the remaining Gruyere cheese. Place them in the oven to thoroughly warm the eggs, stuffing, and sauce, and melt the cheese, for about 4 minutes or so. If you want to brown up the tops a bit, you can put them under a broiler for a short time.<br /><br />Now that I've written this out, I realize that as usual, I've probably overestimated its simplicity in the view of the average home cook. I think of this as being a simple recipe, something you might throw together for friends on a whim. I guess that's why cooking school is not a bad place for me to be.<br /><br />When I describe a recipe for a general audience, it takes a lot of words. (Soon, I plan to write a piece about why this is, including an idea I've been considering for a bit of a new kind of cookbook someday.) If I were to write this recipe for myself or another cook, it would be much shorter, something like this:<br /><br />- Hard boil and peel 3 eggs.<br />- Prepare a mushroom duxelles using the mushrooms, shallot, and lemon.<br />- Halve the eggs lengthwise, set the whites aside, grate or mash the yolks, and add them to the duxelles.<br />- Make a Béchamel. Add a bit of Béchamel to the duxelles and yolks. Stir half the cheese into the Béchamel, and strain.<br />- Temper the egg yolk, and stir it into the sauce. Season the sauce with cayenne pepper, nutmeg and salt.<br />- Stuff the eggs with the duxelles and yolks, top with the sauce and remaining cheese, bake to heat through and melt the cheese.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-23972013925801953802008-03-09T23:47:00.007-04:002008-03-14T03:44:57.134-04:00Recipe: Pommes DarphinOne of my favorite potato side dishes that I've been introduced to in school is Pommes Darphin (rhymes with "pan"), which is like a thick potato pancake or latke that is made with nothing but potatoes, salt and pepper, and the oil and butter it is cooked in. While most potato cakes like this are held together by the addition of eggs or flour, this is only held together by its own starch.<br /><br />To make it, you need some way to quickly cut one or two whole potatoes into julienne, which means matchsticks about 2mm in thickness. A bit thinner than that is even better -- at school, we use a mandolin, and at home I use a Benriner slicer, which is a Japanese mandolin. Usually you can't vary the width of a julienne cut on a mandolin, but the thickness of slices can be adjusted any way you like. To make Pommes Darphin, I set it to slice just a bit thinner than the widths of the sticks it cuts, so they have a slightly rectangular (oblong) cross section. The cooked potatoes will look nicer and hold together better if the sticks are thin enough that they flop around easily before you cook them, rather than staying rigid like wooden matches.<br /><br />There are two things to keep in mind to make this: first, you want all of the starch in the potatoes, so you can't cut them ahead of time and soak them in water or you'll draw the starch out and get rid of it; second, you need to find the right level of medium heat that is high enough to brown the potatoes but not so high that they get burned before they are cooked through.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk742cjGc_8EL95cn7XgIhPoylgWSvMFgujcm_fYYgoc22u3S16z4yR_eAP7eUitnHylB0hYgbvKSuEZNkPIgspU-ljr7Kbkrz9wtVF3u9SBd1bTQimt06vjRy2OK-YDVLq9__eDRRSvmZ/s1600-h/IMG_2302-PommesDarphinInPan.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk742cjGc_8EL95cn7XgIhPoylgWSvMFgujcm_fYYgoc22u3S16z4yR_eAP7eUitnHylB0hYgbvKSuEZNkPIgspU-ljr7Kbkrz9wtVF3u9SBd1bTQimt06vjRy2OK-YDVLq9__eDRRSvmZ/s320/IMG_2302-PommesDarphinInPan.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175955052215620866" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Pommes Darphin in the pan; the cake is thicker<br />than it looks in this picture, or at least it should be.<br />Even though it looks very thin and flat, you can see that<br />it is thick enough that it still has a lot of unbrowned<br />potato below the surface.</i></div><br /><br />The process is simple: Have an 8-inch fry pan ready on the stove and a flavorless oil (like vegetable oil) at hand. Peel a potato, or two if they are small. Put your burner on low to begin heating your pan. Cut the potato into julienne (matchsticks about 1.5mm-2mm thick, and about 3 inches long, or as long as you can get them on whatever device you are using). As soon as the potato is cut, put oil in your pan (about 1/8" deep - a bit more than the film you'd normally use to sauté something, but not as much as you'd use to really fry). Salt and pepper the potatoes and toss them so they get seasoned throughout. Put the whole pile of potatoes into the pan (it should look like a little too many potatoes for the pan), adjust the heat so they are browning but not popping violently, and use a spatula to press them down and gather the sides up into a nice even circular shape. When the edges of the bottom are very browned (after about 4 minutes; the center will probably be less browned than the edges), the cake should hold together well enough that you can flip it over with a spatula. Once you've turned it, put about a half teaspoon of butter in each of four spots around the edge of the pan (so four teaspoons total, or a bit more than a tablespoon), like you're dotting the points of a compass. At this point, you can probably turn the heat down just a bit to cook it through without burning.<br /><br />When it's done (after another 4 minutes or so cooking the second side), you can drain it on a cooling rack or on paper towels, and hit it with more salt if you want. If it cools too much or you want to make more than one or make them ahead, you can reheat them in the oven later. The cake is usually cut into slices for serving, sort of like a pizza. If you were plating it as a side dish, you could use a quarter or sixth of the cake on each plate. But usually when I make it, I just eat the whole thing as soon as it's ready, sort of like a pizza.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-18590466992660398712008-03-08T13:06:00.001-05:002008-03-09T00:34:31.774-05:00The Oysters on a ChickenQuartering a chicken was one of the things that we were told we might be evaluated on at our first exam earlier this week. There are a couple things that chefs always do when cutting up a chicken that I had never done at home, beginning with removing the wishbone. The first thing that anyone at the FCI does when starting to work on a whole chicken is remove the wishbone. You can feel the bone right at the front of the breast meat, forming the familiar wishbone "V" with the point of the V on the breast side of the chicken and the neck above the wide end of the V. To remove it, you feel where it is with your fingers, and then use just the tip of your paring knife to cut the breast meat away from the sides of the wishbone, holding the side of the knife right against the bone so that you don't take any meat out with it. Once the sides of the bone are freed from the meat, you can work your fingers behind both sides of the bone and break it right out. The bone is removed because carving the breast meat off the whole bird is much easier without having that bone in the way and getting the heel of your knife caught on it.<br /><br />The other thing chefs do carefully when they cut up a chicken is make sure to get a bit of meat right at the end of the thigh bone where it joins the body called the "oyster." (If you have heard of "mountain oysters," have no fear, this is completely unrelated to that.) Chefs often say that the oysters are the best bits of meat in the chicken. I have yet to remember to pay attention as I eat the chicken to see if I can notice any difference: most of the chickens I've eaten since I learned about the oysters have been eaten in about 30 seconds, standing up with a plate in one hand and chunks of chicken held caveman-style in the other hand, with someone yelling at everyone to get working on the next thing or clean up the kitchen so we can go home.<br /><br />To successfully get the oyster meat, you begin by marking the chicken so that once you begin to cut it up and lose its whole shape, you'll still be able to tell exactly where the oysters are. In the picture below, you can see the oysters as small bumps that I've marked with yellow arrows. They are toward the lower or rear part of the back (where the rear part of the back is toward the upper right in this picture). Using the line between the oysters (which is the line of the backbone), and another line right in front of the oysters (diagonally just below and to the left of the oysters in this picture) clearly visible as an indentation across the back perpendicular to the backbone, you can see an "X" on the back of the chicken, and the center of the X marks how far into the chicken you'll need to cut when removing the leg quarters to make sure you get the oysters. We mark that X by making two straight cuts through the skin of the chicken there before we begin to cut it up. (The chef in the Level 2 kitchen next door to us while we were in Level 1 was named Xavier, and he told his students to remember to make an "X for Xavier" in the back of the chicken.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZiqk0hG14mmfIJBrj4ENYH4_-rclOFHD14MyCYfJw4mLsD8z-H0nTuZDkOUB7WPF9i2dguPBdHO6vlwqaEKy7tbAo76MlGMVNMSJYs_182Uvg5qGlImlfvXowYuYlAB7C4T9QnL3sXeGR/s1600-h/IMG_2283-XMarksTheOysters.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZiqk0hG14mmfIJBrj4ENYH4_-rclOFHD14MyCYfJw4mLsD8z-H0nTuZDkOUB7WPF9i2dguPBdHO6vlwqaEKy7tbAo76MlGMVNMSJYs_182Uvg5qGlImlfvXowYuYlAB7C4T9QnL3sXeGR/s320/IMG_2283-XMarksTheOysters.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175441292522640578" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Location of the "oysters" near the "X" on the back.</i></div><br /><br />Chef Marc has demonstrated many times for us how to take the leg quarters off and make sure to get the oysters. He makes it look very easy, like he simply takes his knife and nonchalantly slices off the entire leg quarter by effortlessly cutting all the way from the side of the chicken to the center of the X, then rounding the corner and cutting down toward the back, and off comes the whole leg and thigh with no resistance, just as though he carved off a chunk of butter with a warm knife. I tried over and over to do this, but I kept failing at it, and I couldn't figure out why. It was frustrating because every time Chef Marc did it, the whole thing seemed to come right off with no problem, but every time I did it, I ran into a bunch of bone and couldn't get all the way to the middle of the X. At last, with the help of our assistant instructor Chef Matthew, I learned that the oyster sits in a little cup of bone, and that you can't just slice it right off with the middle of your knife. In retrospect, I know now that Chef Marc was lifting his knife all the way up so that as he rounded that corner at the middle of the X, he was only using the tip of the knife to scoop that bit of meat out of the cup of bone and keep it attached to the skin of the thigh. But he did it so quickly and smoothly that I never noticed he was doing it -- you only need to lift your knife for about a half or three-quarters of an inch along each line of the X as you round the corner, so if you do it deftly it looks like part of a natural slicing motion that varies its depth randomly.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc8maaBk4u1e-GP8-JjyT0fzjJy_arioSXWPAYLDE3eSquYGzHFtKoOJFVSRm6JmrYffndGk-XQy9aaqDdo82p2sUoxR2aoJbttF4LYx5UaCmfhfQLIQmtz0dQE6DKA-44WamcziQOa_L8/s1600-h/IMG_2287-OneLegOff.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc8maaBk4u1e-GP8-JjyT0fzjJy_arioSXWPAYLDE3eSquYGzHFtKoOJFVSRm6JmrYffndGk-XQy9aaqDdo82p2sUoxR2aoJbttF4LYx5UaCmfhfQLIQmtz0dQE6DKA-44WamcziQOa_L8/s320/IMG_2287-OneLegOff.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175441301112575186" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Here you can see the cup of bone that the oyster sits in.<br />It would be easier to see had I gotten the meat out more cleanly.<br />The cup and the other oyster are indicated by the arrows.</i></div><br /><br />The oyster is probably called an "oyster" because loosening it with your knife is a lot like loosening the meat of an oyster from the half shell it sits in: you hold your knife horizontally against the shell or bone, and run the tip of your knife between the meat and the surface of the bone or shell to separate the meat from the shell. In the picture below, the oyster meat is sitting on top of the blade of my knife, and the point of the knife is resting on the far edge of the cup of bone, so that the knife cannot be angled down any more vertically than it is, because the bone is in the way. This is why you can't get the oyster by just slicing with your knife vertically right around the corner.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7TslDFBD4X9tTTcu7zZs33-luHhz_FulMIiDkSOs_EVRY2UM6QpOY28YZZJm6STzjYvOVaAzVVu-9GginP85ZDiQrrgIvvCXX2fCTZIvBXcG4Vl7K5kWRuAnuPisw8NgKZuqzZRtoouW1/s1600-h/IMG_2290-OysterOnKnife.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7TslDFBD4X9tTTcu7zZs33-luHhz_FulMIiDkSOs_EVRY2UM6QpOY28YZZJm6STzjYvOVaAzVVu-9GginP85ZDiQrrgIvvCXX2fCTZIvBXcG4Vl7K5kWRuAnuPisw8NgKZuqzZRtoouW1/s320/IMG_2290-OysterOnKnife.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175441305407542498" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The oyster meat sitting on top of my knife.</i></div><br /><br />When you get the leg quarter off, if you've gotten the oyster, it is clearly visible as a separate bit of meat at the end of the thigh bone and sticking out from it slightly on the side of the thigh away from the end of the leg.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyV25Ge3c6nkPBp8S7vqm6OSV0vtVFRAnvXXRLJonYzZYii9gbFHoP9dtc_mRqTLI7_mt-KGFwOoWkvgw1vFcaiPNQ5RfcI3A2UuahIP87y5cO3cr32BVz4tUBesHpU-14mECcWHXWlfz/s1600-h/IMG_2293-MeatWithOyster.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyV25Ge3c6nkPBp8S7vqm6OSV0vtVFRAnvXXRLJonYzZYii9gbFHoP9dtc_mRqTLI7_mt-KGFwOoWkvgw1vFcaiPNQ5RfcI3A2UuahIP87y5cO3cr32BVz4tUBesHpU-14mECcWHXWlfz/s320/IMG_2293-MeatWithOyster.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175441309702509810" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The oyster meat on the removed leg quarter.</i></div><br /><br />Another trick that chefs have that I've found works pretty well is to make a cut with a paring knife through the thigh meat along the thigh bone into the top of the drumstick meat. This allows heat to better penetrate the joint between the thigh and the leg, and as a result, you can cook your breast meat properly and the thigh and leg will also be done at the same time. Without that cut, the leg and thigh take longer to cook all the way through that joint. The cut also allows you to easily debone the thigh after cooking right before serving.<br /><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-47829132710371758202008-03-07T23:55:00.001-05:002008-03-08T00:09:00.382-05:00First GradeOn Tuesday of this week, all of us in my class at the FCI passed our first "practical exam," at the end of Level 1 of the program, and we began Level 2 on Thursday. As I've told a few people, passing the Level 1 exam is a little like passing a spelling test at the end of first grade: it doesn't mean that you know how to spell, it just means you can spell enough first grade words that you won't be completely lost if you move on to second grade.<br /><br />The exam was pretty straightforward, consisting of simple (but small -- julienne and brunoise, about 1.5mm, and jardiniere and macedoine, about a half centimeter, or a bit under a quarter inch) vegetable cuts and very plainly cooked vegetables. Like everything else at cooking school, it was good that the actual activity involved in our first experience (in this case, our first exam) was very straightforward, because it gives you a chance to become familiar with a new working environment. The most notable and unexpected aspect of the exam for me was how crowded the room was. Each of us was assigned a position in front of a cutting board, and the boards were arranged on worktables with only about two or three inches of space between them. This meant that you were standing only about 18 inches away from your neighbor on either side. Some expected differences in the exam environment were that we were proctored during the exam by chefs other than our fearless leader, Chef Marc, and no questions were permitted about the instructions given for the exam.<br /><br />For our first class in Level 2, we made a couple of braised dishes, one a Navarin d'Agneau (leg of lamb in a brown sauce flavored and colored with some tomato), the other Coq Au Vin, chicken marinated and braised in red wine. Those dishes are essentially a continuation of what we'd been doing toward the end of Level 1 right before our exam, but again they served the purpose of introducing us to a new kitchen (Level 2 classes are held in a room with a slightly different arrangement) without having to simultaneously take on some new cooking process.<br /><br />But from this point on, Level 2 becomes quite different from Level 1. Where Level 1 surveyed each of the basic vegetables and meats and cooking techniques, Level 2 is more of a survey of some special preparations. We'll have classes on stuffings (forcemeats and purees to stuff vegetables or meats or make terrines or pâtés); eggs; tarts, crêpes and other pastries; custards and ice creams; nutrition; food control in a restaurant (ordering, receiving, storing, costing); cheese; rice and pasta.<br /><br />Looking ahead, Level 3 is said to be the most difficult part of the program. In Level 3, the class is broken into small teams each night, with each team responsible for some part of the kitchen, such as sauces and meat preparation, or <i>garde manger</i> (cold dishes), or pastries, and you make the same handful of dishes over and over again with the goal of being able to make all of them absolutely perfectly by the time you have your midterm at the end of Level 3. There is severe time pressure applied in Level 3, with the delivery time of dishes specified to the minute, and grading deductions for every minute you are late. As Chef Marc told us by way of previewing upcoming attractions, "If you are 20 minutes late with any dish, you can pack your knives and go home."<br /><br />If we survive that, Level 4 is then the most fun part of the program. In Level 4, the class cooks a meal for the entire school (all of the faculty, staff and students; day students prepare lunch for 300 people, and night students prepare dinner for a couple hundred). What makes it fun is that once you've got the basics covered -- a meat, a vegetable, and a starch -- you get to play around and make whatever else you can find around the kitchen and feel like experimenting with for a captive audience of people interested in what you can do with food. In addition some of the Level 4 students work on "production," which means turning whole animals into cuts of meat for use in cooking. The program ends with Levels 5 and 6, during which you are cooking for the public restaurant operated by the school, <a href="http://www.frenchculinary.com/lecole.htm">L'Ecole</a>.Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-1506866232948701302008-03-07T20:09:00.012-05:002008-03-24T22:50:43.808-04:00Brown Chicken StockOne of our first classes at the FCI is devoted to making stocks, the liquids that are the starting point for soups and sauces. A stock that you make yourself is a lot more versatile than the broths you can buy in stores, mainly because as it cooks and reduces, its flavor and body get deeper without losing freshness and subtlety. The simplest and one of the best sauces can be made simply by reducing a stock by about 4/5 (that is, boil five cups of it until so much of it evaporates that you have only one cup left) and then seasoning it with salt and a bit of pepper. For that to work, you need your stock to have two things that are missing in commercially prepared broths: first, you need the gelatin that comes out of bones when they are simmered for several hours, because that is what will give your reduced stock the thicker consistency of a sauce; second, you need the flavors in the stock to be deep and subtle enough that when you make them five times more concentrated than they were originally, you don't end up with something that tastes artificial or metallic or corn syrupy, all of which you might end up with if you concentrate a commercial broth.<br /><br />The most basic classification of stocks divides them into "white" and "brown" stocks, named both for their color as well as the way in which you prepare them. While a "white" stock is about the color you probably associate with chicken soup, or maybe a bit lighter or less orange, and a "brown" stock looks a lot like what you think of as a beef broth, most people don't know that the color of a stock or broth does not have to do with the meat used to prepare it. In particular, a chicken stock is not necessarily very much lighter in color than a beef stock. Most of us think of beef stocks as having a much darker color than chicken stocks, but that is primarily due to the coloring added to canned beef stocks, and sometimes also to a bit of tomato cooked into beef stock. Looking at the ingredients listed on a couple of different brands of canned beef stock that I happen to have on hand, both of them list "caramel color" on their labels. When a "real" stock is prepared, its color and the character of its flavor is mainly determined by how you handle the bones, meat, and vegetables that go into it. I've made many good beef stocks that you would be hard-pressed to identify as beef stocks by their color. To illustrate how a homemade brown stock gets its color, and also because a good brown stock can really be a revelation in your home kitchen if you learn some uses for it, I want to present here the process of making a brown chicken stock. (A brown beef stock, or veal stock or lamb stock or game stock, would be made in the same way.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfeNQJ-0DIAeAttNgeogQNc1RhpCGDjHsPfXf8hrrhZOvXKxHTw06D1G57rsCa0bOqjUI68snug9i2oT68k26hPNKUlj6RHGHC5N_gt9HCUivCfq8frvsuyuRWl-akKBaDRdeQ3EAv-O88/s1600-h/IMG_2242.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfeNQJ-0DIAeAttNgeogQNc1RhpCGDjHsPfXf8hrrhZOvXKxHTw06D1G57rsCa0bOqjUI68snug9i2oT68k26hPNKUlj6RHGHC5N_gt9HCUivCfq8frvsuyuRWl-akKBaDRdeQ3EAv-O88/s320/IMG_2242.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175208608374412178" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Chicken trimmed and ready for browning.</i></div><br /><br />Any meat-based stock starts with some bones and meat, and what are called "aromatic vegetables," including nearly always some onion, and for a brown stock carrots. In a white stock, leeks might also be used, and some chefs use celery in either kind of stock, although many do not because it adds some bitterness that they don't want. In a restaurant setting, both the meats and the vegetables commonly come from trimmings left after whole animals and vegetables are cut up for other uses. By "trimmings," we don't mean "garbage" -- bones and meat will be further trimmed to remove as much fat as possible and any other "yucky stuff" before they are used for a stock, and vegetable trimmings used will be peeled and trimmed of any wilted or discolored spots. For my stock, since I don't normally have enough trimmings around to get very far with, I've used fresh vegetables and a bunch of chicken wings and drumsticks that I bought.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvJoCOCeENstwqS34yCjLo-e41kUNR2YLJ9F1EmfYDSgJvclJq8hbfbTvW8LCi-sVrCJCJUVJxQ-Pzg07s5a5lcnt9kztT_2oWuCYpZI8f4CtLqhOxXqdU4uYyOWmfmIXlYzesAsO94bsb/s1600-h/IMG_2244.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvJoCOCeENstwqS34yCjLo-e41kUNR2YLJ9F1EmfYDSgJvclJq8hbfbTvW8LCi-sVrCJCJUVJxQ-Pzg07s5a5lcnt9kztT_2oWuCYpZI8f4CtLqhOxXqdU4uYyOWmfmIXlYzesAsO94bsb/s320/IMG_2244.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175209342813819810" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Vegetables cut and ready for browning.</i></div><br /><br />The vegetables should make up about 20% of what goes into your stock, and meat and bones to make up the other 80%. The vegetables are roughly cut into chunks all about the same size, and the size is determined by how long your stock is going to simmer. You don't want the vegetables to become so soft that they begin to disintegrate into the stock and cloud it, but you want them small enough that all of their flavor will be extracted in the time your stock cooks. I cut the vegetables for this stock to last for about a 4-6 hour simmer; for a fish stock, which only cooks 30 minutes, I'd have made them a lot smaller, while for a beef stock that cooks 12 hours I'd have made them 2 or 3 times as large, maybe simply quartering the onion and cutting whole carrots into about 3-inch sections.<br /><br />To prepare the chicken, I cut the wings into sections, because exposing the bones and cutting into the joints allows them to release more flavor and gelatin into the stock. I've also removed as much of the fat and skin as I have the patience to cut away, because those only add fat that clouds the stock's appearance, muddies its taste, and gives it an unpleasant oily texture on the palate.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijtnrCnn6c-nIJwbDLdWJRypdbxtbV5rv0jXggUIeBbfR1A9g4cNoVvT1rrtdbf1fy_L76TmzqWObbvC1W2MK92hBZm8qsIVKrb8oC6cPCq6tnF-YGIMv2jgrE1VZlG0t68gxieIAOGozD/s1600-h/IMG_2249.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijtnrCnn6c-nIJwbDLdWJRypdbxtbV5rv0jXggUIeBbfR1A9g4cNoVvT1rrtdbf1fy_L76TmzqWObbvC1W2MK92hBZm8qsIVKrb8oC6cPCq6tnF-YGIMv2jgrE1VZlG0t68gxieIAOGozD/s320/IMG_2249.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175209355698721730" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The chicken after browning for<br />an hour in a very hot oven.</i></div><br /><br />The first cooking step is to thoroughly brown both the meats and the vegetables. I do them separately because they brown in different amounts of time, and I want to get both as dark as I can without burning them. The meat and bones were tossed with a little oil and then roasted in an oven at 400F-450F for about an hour altogether, and turned over with tongs halfway through their roasting. The vegetables were cooked at pretty high heat in a bit of oil on the stove. For both meat and vegetables, you want to use a flavorless oil with a high smoke point, which in a home kitchen basically means any oil except olive oil, which has both flavor you don't want and a low smoke point that will make it difficult to brown things without burning the oil and introducing an acrid taste. Neither the meat nor the vegetables should be salted or seasoned while you make the stock, for two reasons: you don't want to salt your stock because if you later reduce it into a sauce, you might end up concentrating the salt too much, and salt will also draw the juices and moisture out of things, and you want those to go into your stock and release their flavor there, and not boil off as you brown things.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxTgZAMrKU2U2rdtvVTmryrfhgqI1i2Y0K_Zcbd2p7mM4g1-3Nmy5ygDlC2vBjGDOpEPtQyslwaIHoJj1qRhgeS8JGPdV15gOMEbAezCJk0zXThHzqOCPRlwVe3a0j-bboY89pXiPizU0N/s1600-h/IMG_2246.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxTgZAMrKU2U2rdtvVTmryrfhgqI1i2Y0K_Zcbd2p7mM4g1-3Nmy5ygDlC2vBjGDOpEPtQyslwaIHoJj1qRhgeS8JGPdV15gOMEbAezCJk0zXThHzqOCPRlwVe3a0j-bboY89pXiPizU0N/s320/IMG_2246.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175209347108787122" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The vegetables after browning.</i></div><br /><br />Once everything is nicely browned, you put it all into a stockpot. If you want the maximum flavor you can get in your stock, put a bit (a couple of tablespoons to a quarter cup) of water in each of the roasting or sauté pans you use for the browning while they are still hot, and stir it with a spoon scraping the bottom as it sizzles to get all of the browned bits off the bottom of the pan and into the water, and add that water to the stock pot. When everything is in the pot, add enough cold water to completely cover it and then some, because some of your water will evaporate as you simmer the stock. The reason for using cold water is that if you add hot water, bits of protein in the meat will very quickly cook and disperse into the water in very fine particles that become suspended and cloud the stock. When they come up to temperature slowly, those proteins coagulate into larger bits that will float to the surface and they can then be skimmed off the top. You can also add a bit of herbs at this point, but a tiny bit -- unless you know for certain that you're only making enough for a single use, you don't want to add any obtrusive flavors that will make your stock unusable if you were to reduce it a lot or use it to complement other ingredients later. The classic additions would be a "bouquet garni" made up of a bay leaf, and a tiny bit (a single sprig or less, if fresh) of thyme and parsley, and maybe with three to five whole peppercorns and a whole (peeled) clove of garlic.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPjqLr_ylUop1F5n2gI2hO9F7u5zIU9QZwUYHpoTSA-gUT81L7hRC5FlZcurN1AUL2uIoTvDcC5-HCImQtZ84o6mOlBsPM5Z5o4pi0YaGmNqsN2wZJTDBv5A7QJW8F0SxXuegA5Tziozp6/s1600-h/IMG_2256.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPjqLr_ylUop1F5n2gI2hO9F7u5zIU9QZwUYHpoTSA-gUT81L7hRC5FlZcurN1AUL2uIoTvDcC5-HCImQtZ84o6mOlBsPM5Z5o4pi0YaGmNqsN2wZJTDBv5A7QJW8F0SxXuegA5Tziozp6/s320/IMG_2256.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175209364288656354" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The stock pot right after adding cold water.<br />Notice the film of crud already on top that should be<br />skimmed immediately.</i></div><br /><br />The next step is to bring the stock to a simmer, but without ever letting it achieve a full boil. (If you only care about flavor and not the appearance of your stock, you can go ahead and make it at a full boil, forget all of the skimming, and ignore everything in this paragraph. You'll make a very nice stock, but one that wouldn't be good for clear soups or some very refined sauces, both of which many of us never make anyway.) Boiling will cause all of the impurities released by cooking the meats and vegetables to get broken up into fine particles and churned back into the liquid, clouding the stock. As soon as water is added to the pot, you'll see small particles swirling all around in it, and floating to the top. They should be skimmed off the top as often as possible. As the stock heats up, foam will rise to the top, and should be skimmed off. Skimming is a slow and tedious operation, usually done with a large spoon or a ladle. The easiest way to skim is to move the bottom of your spoon or ladle lightly in circles around the center of the pot and that will push the foam and particles to the edges of the pot, where they are easier to lift off with the edge of your spoon or ladle against the wall of the pot.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFXBPjunRkscR0Uk4TQ2btSmGn-lqQBKzf_915wpOLbHJG8QGJdhrn9XuM4f_tbNXqk-rzQaQKfDdZUbHBRuCrqTTf6s7SJDaGrj-NNFBtHrnv4E8hUg-oHQG2SLiziAHA6nwtrQufyvhu/s1600-h/IMG_2261.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFXBPjunRkscR0Uk4TQ2btSmGn-lqQBKzf_915wpOLbHJG8QGJdhrn9XuM4f_tbNXqk-rzQaQKfDdZUbHBRuCrqTTf6s7SJDaGrj-NNFBtHrnv4E8hUg-oHQG2SLiziAHA6nwtrQufyvhu/s320/IMG_2261.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175213646371050482" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>The stock with foam rising to the top.</i></div><br /><br />If you are diligent about not letting your stock boil and skimming it every 5-10 minutes or so (less often as time goes on) as it comes to a simmer and during the first hour that it cooks at temperature, you'll notice that after that first hour you don't have nearly as much gunk coming up to the top. At that point, you are home free -- just cook your stock at a very low simmer, so that it just barely has small bubbles in one or two spots at the edges of the pot, for another 6 hours or so, skimming it as you have time. (When I make a brown stock on a weeknight, I usually start around 7pm, have things browned up by about 8:30pm, and begin heating the stock and finally have it stabilized at a simmer around 9pm, and I've skimmed it enough by 10:30pm or so that it no longer cruds up very much or very quickly; at that point, I can go to bed with the stock over a very low flame, maybe not even bubbling, and finish the process in the morning -- since I've skimmed it thoroughly during that first hour or two, it won't cloud up if I very gently cook it unattended for a few hours.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyWCHeaFPTfw0YMWwGIKJYh0y7Pl3ucGX8eI1PwE2G6yP0HrGrAYas8-M0_uLQ46hp4bvvD31Qhy8lGctcCpA9LjskFxX2uL9aYI2wYWOPoZlaD31ENa_FEqxm4SKUuvNMKhyphenhyphenu6DJ-y-s1/s1600-h/IMG_2265.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyWCHeaFPTfw0YMWwGIKJYh0y7Pl3ucGX8eI1PwE2G6yP0HrGrAYas8-M0_uLQ46hp4bvvD31Qhy8lGctcCpA9LjskFxX2uL9aYI2wYWOPoZlaD31ENa_FEqxm4SKUuvNMKhyphenhyphenu6DJ-y-s1/s320/IMG_2265.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175213654960985090" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>A couple minutes after the picture of the foam<br />above, the stock has been skimmed.<br />(Apologies for this blurry picture.)</i></div><br /><br />Once it simmers for about 6 hours altogether, you can strain your stock. To keep it as clear as possible, you would ladle it out of the pot and through a strainer. In practice, unless I have some very special purpose in mind for my stock, as long as it looks pretty clear and free of foam and small particles (in other words, if you've skimmed it well), I just pour the whole pot through a strainer into another pot. Then you need to cool it as quickly as possible, because there's almost no better way to grow bacteria than to use a warm stock (in fact, labs often use warm beef stock to grow bacterial cultures quickly). One way to cool it quickly is to fill a smaller pot or metal bowl (glass won't really work, because it insulates too well and in addition might break) with a lot of ice and a bit of water, and set that small pot into your pot of beef stock and move it around to stir the stock with it. You'll get your stock below room temperature within 5 or 10 minutes, and you can refrigerate it after that.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeeIL4jLOkH0NXe8g1C5G0wtOPHTcea6lKqbKKdkn9PYKmTh3Clc6mAqBzqR11G9e7xSCSlJajrCfiGdWxezEy1gyI3zvWtUUWtaCe-C3AVDy6KmvgVAIISouFmabSRr8kAnJqNBW3I3Nv/s1600-h/IMG_2267.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeeIL4jLOkH0NXe8g1C5G0wtOPHTcea6lKqbKKdkn9PYKmTh3Clc6mAqBzqR11G9e7xSCSlJajrCfiGdWxezEy1gyI3zvWtUUWtaCe-C3AVDy6KmvgVAIISouFmabSRr8kAnJqNBW3I3Nv/s320/IMG_2267.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175213654960985106" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Cooling the stock with ice.</i></div><br /><br />The last step is to degrease your stock. As it cools, excess fat will float to the top, and eventually the fat will become solid and you can lift it off. Often if you trimmed the fat away from the meat and bones before you started, and skimmed the stock well during that first hour or two of cooking, it will have almost no fat in it. If you have a good clear stock that looks like it doesn't have a lot of fat in it, a good trick is to float a covering of plastic wrap on top of it when you put in in the refrigerator, and once it is cooled the fat will come off when you peel the plastic away.<br /><br />I used about 16 chicken wings and 8 chicken legs to make the stock pictured here, and started with a little more than a gallon of cold water. The final yield was about 7 cups (a bit less than a half gallon) of stock. I could have started with a bit more water, but I could also slightly dilute this stock to make a soup and I won't have to reduce it as much to make sauces.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhToQ7-Ui1yVUrYXLtd4Gz1hQyYRVS_ZWoxjzhyphenhyphenBBHqvoXSFa0xqyAOl_SsL9Ql_tYP4L1SGCa451IfgeM_4MmoLHW_Xod0RwXb1DmPRLRn360bzeV2Up6FwqV8NLHoK-4G_JSzN-6y4iHU/s1600-h/IMG_2270.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhToQ7-Ui1yVUrYXLtd4Gz1hQyYRVS_ZWoxjzhyphenhyphenBBHqvoXSFa0xqyAOl_SsL9Ql_tYP4L1SGCa451IfgeM_4MmoLHW_Xod0RwXb1DmPRLRn360bzeV2Up6FwqV8NLHoK-4G_JSzN-6y4iHU/s320/IMG_2270.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175213659255952418" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>A bit of the finished stock in a saucepan,<br />along with some refrigerated bits of it on a saucer<br />(good stocks form a gelatin when cooled).</i></div><br /><br />Finally, now that we have a good brown stock, I'll show you a couple of the simple dishes we've made in class with brown stocks. Normally we use brown veal stock, the workhorse all-purpose stock of restaurant kitchens, but a brown chicken stock works just fine here.<br /><br />First, we have <i>Poulet Sauté Chasseur</i>, or Sautéed Chicken, Hunter Style. For this dish, I quartered a chicken, salted it well, and browned it in a skillet in a bit of oil over very high heat (the chicken goes in just as the oil begins to smoke), and then finished the chicken by putting the skillet into the oven. While the chicken finished, to make the sauce, shallots and sliced white button mushrooms are cooked in another pan, then flambéed with brandy and deglazed with white wine before adding the brown stock with a bit of chopped tomato and reducing it to the consistency of a sauce. Just before serving, the sauce is further enhanced with chopped fresh tarragon and chervil, and seasoned with salt and pepper. The version pictured below is less "saucy" than the dish is supposed to be, but it was good nevertheless.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjksue2gyj_w6xMIjUZdLh9HSmRb99OktFFl3plKGx_e0fFKbYWKi3OZbOZl8kJXzDIXKonBSv6A51YLrqxuTK5JoxCfXqLGVY4X57aJR2SQUHBxEE__rO4oHGNDf_qfm8giu3YT1HSdRqs/s1600-h/IMG_2275.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjksue2gyj_w6xMIjUZdLh9HSmRb99OktFFl3plKGx_e0fFKbYWKi3OZbOZl8kJXzDIXKonBSv6A51YLrqxuTK5JoxCfXqLGVY4X57aJR2SQUHBxEE__rO4oHGNDf_qfm8giu3YT1HSdRqs/s320/IMG_2275.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175213663550919730" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Poulet Sauté Chasseur</i></div><br /><br />Second, we made a breaded chicken cutlet, garnished colorfully compared to the many very brown dishes we've mostly made in the past few weeks. This dish is simply a chicken breast pounded flat by placing it between large sheets of plastic wrap and hitting it with a mallet, then breaded <i>à l'anglaise</i> (in flour, then eggs, then bread crumbs) and cooked in clarified butter for about 90-120 seconds on each side. It is garnished with hard boiled egg whites and egg yolks pushed through a sieve, capers, parsley, a slice of lemon, and an olive wrapped with an anhovy filet. The sauce is brown stock thickened with a bit of cornstarch dissolved in a couple tablespoons of water to make a slurry, then seasoned with salt and pepper.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXdeSuoVa0uFBx-s0BZtFiRG-KxGpsu9RaAi8ukXCxUtojgD9TLFY6oPFMvN0XIqIvypEsKS-xmxhF4jfZsP73BTYawg54eDnF-pVm7VE6fu0j6CFGsG70i93aQIQE6YsLTRx4GfosOf2p/s1600-h/IMG_2278.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXdeSuoVa0uFBx-s0BZtFiRG-KxGpsu9RaAi8ukXCxUtojgD9TLFY6oPFMvN0XIqIvypEsKS-xmxhF4jfZsP73BTYawg54eDnF-pVm7VE6fu0j6CFGsG70i93aQIQE6YsLTRx4GfosOf2p/s320/IMG_2278.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175214655688365122" /></a><br /><div style="text-align:center"><i>Chicken Cutlet with Brown Sauce</i></div><br /><br><br>Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-91322003009817305472008-02-24T01:12:00.001-05:002008-02-24T01:12:35.871-05:00Paper LidsI've come to appreciate the parchment paper lid over the last few weeks. We often cook things (usually cut vegetables) using a small amount of water (sometimes just the water already in them) where we want to gently steam them until any water we've added and most of the water in the food being cooked has been removed. The parchment paper lid, made by cutting a piece of parchment paper into a circle the size of your pan (by folding the paper like you did to cut out snowflakes in elementary school you can cut it to size in about 10 seconds), is more convenient in a lot of situations than a "real" lid. It offers a couple of advantages. Most importantly, it allows you to see and hear what's going on in your pan without removing it. You can go about other tasks, and if your food begins to dry out and brown, you will hear it begin to pop with the sound of sautéing instead of the sweating or steaming you want. With a real lid, you would not detect this without periodically stopping whatever you're doing to lift the lid and peek in for a moment. If you do hear your food cooking too quickly or overheating, one of the things you can do to prevent browning that you don't want is add a bit of water to your pan. The parchment lid lets you get water into the pan without removing the lid, because the water will run over the sides of your lid down to the bottom. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but when you're busy and you don't have a free hand to lift a lid or a place to set it down if you remove it from the pan, being able to see and hear and react to what's happening in your pans without having to handle any hot lids can save you a lot of time. Finally, there is the obvious advantage of having fewer lids to wash when you're finished cooking.Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4539252008408171411.post-49577992190872631852008-02-23T13:25:00.006-05:002008-03-28T00:00:33.550-04:00Recipe: Potage Parisienne (Potato Leek Soup)Here is a recipe for a simple potato leek soup that we made a few weeks ago at school, and that I described a bit <a href="http://yeschefnochef.blogspot.com/2008/02/release-starches.html">here</a>. It uses very few raw materials and they are simply prepared and cooked, and it illustrates a neat cooking process where you use the starch in the potatoes to thicken a soup into something like a light cream soup, even though there is no cream or milk in it. A quick survey of the internet reveals that "Potage Parisienne" always has potatoes and leeks, often some cream, sometimes flour, and occasionally other ingredients to flavor it differently. I would say that the cream is a matter of preference, but the addition of flour should only be needed if the soup is improperly cooked or the potatoes are handled in a way that their starch is lost before it gets into the soup.<br /><br />You'll no doubt notice that I have a tendency to write volumes to describe how to make even the simplest dishes. While I sympathize with you when you think, "Why does it take all of this to tell me to cut up a leek and some onion, cook them in butter, then add water and sliced potatoes and simmer it awhile?" I don't know a better way to convey to a wide audience the things worth paying attention to if you want to produce a dish that is surprisingly good given how little material and effort goes into it. If you're reading this at all, I assume you are not a professional cook; if you are, you already know how to make a soup like this and what to pay attention to as you go about it. One of the most frustrating things to me as a cook is telling someone about a great dish, and then hearing later that he didn't like it along with a reason for that dislike which indicates that although the prescribed ingredients went into the preparation, they were handled in a way that did not produce the dish that the creator of the recipe had in mind. In other words, the dish was judged and dismissed without ever having been really prepared or sampled.<br /><br /><b>Ingredients</b><br /><br />For 6-8 small cups or 4 small bowls of this soup, you'll need:<br /><br />1 medium-large or 2 small starchy potatoes (e.g., Idaho; but not small red or yellow boiling potatoes)<br />1/3 of a medium-large onion, or half or all of a smaller one<br />1 leek, white and light green parts only<br />1 Tbsp butter<br />Water or a light stock, about a quart<br />Salt and pepper<br />Chervil or parsley for garnish, if you like<br /><br /><b>Cooking Objectives</b><br /><br />There are a few general principles that you should keep in mind as you make the soup. First, you don't want to lose any of the starch in the potatoes, because the soup won't thicken as much if the starch is lost. When you cut up potatoes, you'll notice after a few cuts that your knife has a white watery coating on it: that is the starch from the potatoes. If you leave potatoes on your cutting board as you work, their starch will begin to turn your board white as the water that carried it out of the potatoes dries off. For this soup, you want to keep all of that starch in the soup, so you want to place the pieces of potato as you cut them into the liquid you're going to use in the soup.<br /><br />Second, this is a light-green soup, and you want it to taste "green" and not "brown," where brown here means the savory sweetness that comes from something like browned vegetables or meats cooked over high heat, as on a grill. In addition to the taste, you don't want bits of brown leek or onion floating around in the soup and distracting from its appearance. When you cook the leeks and onions, you want to use low heat so that they won't get browned at all as they get soft and begin to both release and concentrate some of their flavor, which is what you want.<br /><br />Third, you'll want to use your judgment about what liquid to use to make the soup. I would not use canned stock by itself for this, because the concentrated and somewhat artificial flavor might be too much for the light aromatics (leeks and onions) that you want as the main flavor here. Ideally, you'd use a light chicken stock that you made from leftover chicken bones or some wings or something that you picked up cheaply, but not all of us have that lying around. As a compromise, you might use either plain water, or 2/3 water and 1/3 canned stock, or a bouillon cube or powder in water at a lower concentration (maybe a quarter) of what its package suggests. At school, we used a light chicken stock that we had made; at home when I later made the soup for family and friends, I used about a quart of water and 2-4 tablespoons of a chicken consomme that I happened to have around.<br /><br /><b>Preparing the Vegetables</b><br /><br /><b>Leeks:</b> Using only the white and light green parts, cut the root end off, slice the leek in half lengthwise, and under running water fan the layers a bit like a deck of cards to rinse sand from between the layers. Cut each half crosswise into thin (about 1/8") slices.<br /><br /><b>Onions:</b> Peel the onion, take the root end off, and cut it crosswise (along lines of latitude) into two or three sections where each section has very roughly the same length (or a bit longer) as the width of a leek (about one to one and a half inches). Slice the onion lengthwise (along what was originally the pole-to-pole orientation of the onion) into slices about 1/8" thick. You want your piles of leeks and onions for the dish to be about the same size, or maybe a bit less onion than leek.<br /><br /><b>Potatoes:</b> Put about half of the (cold) liquid you're going to use in your soup into a bowl placed next to your cutting board. Peel the potato, and cut it into 4 to 6 pieces lengthwise, like very thick (about 3/4" to 1") french fries. Cut the pieces crosswise into thin chips, about 1/16" thick, and place the chips into the bowl of liquid as you go to keep their starch in what will become your soup.<br /><br /><b>Cooking</b><br /><br />Melt the butter over medium-low heat in your pot, and add the leeks and onions. Cook them over medium-low heat so that they softly hiss, but never make a popping or snapping sound. This is called "sweating" the vegetables; if they pop or snap, you are "sautéing" them, which will cause them to brown by the time they are cooked, and you don't want that here. You can sweat vegetables at different levels of heat, ranging from low to medium, and the higher the heat you use the more you'll need to shake or stir them to prevent them from beginning to sauté at the edges of the pan. Higher heat takes less time but requires more of your attention.<br /><br />When the vegetables are soft (after about 5 minutes, though it could be as much as 15 or 20 depending on the level of heat you used), add the liquid with the sliced potatoes. Add additional liquid to cover everything in the pot with room to spare (about 1/2" of liquid on top of the vegetables), and bring it to a simmer, so that it bubbles gently.<br /><br />You want to cook the soup until the potatoes have released all of their starch into the surrounding liquid, but have not disintegrated. It will probably take about 15 minutes, but could be 10 or 20 or 30 minutes, depending on how thick your potato slices are. You'll see the appearance of the soup change slowly from looking runny, like some vegetables in water where you can see things an inch or more below the surface, to looking more like a hearty soup, with liquid you can't see through anymore. To decide whether to stop cooking, try a bit of potato by plucking it out with a spoon and cooling it for a second in cold water (or just by waiting a minute) and eating it, to see if it could be cooked any more without falling apart.<br /><br />When the soup is done, season it with salt (a lot, but if you used some canned stock you might already have quite a bit in there) and pepper (white pepper if you have it and don't want to obtrude on the light-green color of the soup).Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08457616754474952925noreply@blogger.com0