Getting Fancy

In this final week of Garde Manger 1, we've moved into elegant, high-end French cold food preparations: terrines, pâtés, mousselines, etc. We're finished with what Chef B. (American) calls "every day garde manger", the soups and sandwiches and pickles and platters.

I had a great time on platter day--I was thrilled when our group was assigned the fruit platter. I love fruit and have been known to do some serious damage to a fruit platter, especially at my Grandma's house with the help of my cousin Jenna. Grandma always has AT LEAST some cut-up melon with toothpicks on hand when we come to visit. Anyway...the whole point of these platters was presentation, and we needed to go a bit beyond melon chunks with toothpicks. I learned how to properly cut and core a pineapple and made uniform moon-shaped slices; then I did the same for cantaloupe and honeydew. I made the bottom of the pineapple into a bowl for our blackberry-yogurt dip. An artistic member of my group even made the watermelon into a swan! And of course, this was the one day that I forgot to bring my camera to school. Typical.

Now, after I've been through three days of forcemeats and charcuterie, I miss fruit platter day. But it has been really interesting. The meat grinders have been in constant use: first for sausages, then chicken gallantines (poached) and dodines (roasted), then shrimp-scallop-tilapia mousselines (my favorite).

Today, we took our leftover chicken-and-pork forcemeat from galantine/dodine day and mixed it with raw liver to make pâté de campagne, or country-style coarse pâté (the kind we're most used to seeing in restaurants). We also made a short dough to fill with forcemeat for the king of all pâté: pâté en croûte, which is baked in a pastry crust. There are a million steps to this process and I have to say that I felt pretty accomplished when they came out of the oven looking beautiful (ours is the first one on the left):


We left them to cool overnight and we'll add gelée (another step!?!) and then slice and taste tomorrow. I was amazed when the chefs explained why this time-and-labor-intensive process is worth it: you can typically sell a whole pâté en croûte for $1,000! Forget journalism...maybe I should go into charcuterie.