Finished Products

I don't have much time to write, because I am officially on winter break (!!!) and about to catch a flight. But I wanted to make sure that I wrapped up my Garde Manger experience and posted some pictures of the beautiful plates we presented in the last few days. The assortment of dishes above was the end result of our group practical yesterday. Our team of five was presented with a mystery basket of ingredients and from them, we had to make five plates: one cold soup, one salad with emulsified dressing, two appetizers, and one mousseline. I made the mousseline for my group (it's the sushi-looking thing on the green plate) with shrimp, scallops, and tilapia and an interior garnish of bay scallops. My mom hit the nail right on the head when I told her about making mousselines: "That's just fancy gefilte fish." Tastes like it, too!


This is the first of our aspic-lined platters from Monday, with our pate en croute and sauce cups (made of cucumber) filled with the cranberry-ginger chutney that I made. Aspic is just gelatin and water, and you can make different colors using natural dyes--we used spinach for the green and beets for the red. When it sets, you can make designs and fill them with other colors. See our lovely snowflakes? We printed them out, stenciled the design on the green aspic with an exacto knife, cut them out, and filled in with white aspic (made with Bechamel sauce). Very tedious work!

Our second platter, with sliced mousseline and sauce cups (made of carrot) with mango-and-mint salsa. I don't know who actually spends the time making aspic-lined platters anymore, but it was a lot of fun to play with (even for the totally non-artistic like myself).

Not as glamorous a shot, but here's our pate de campagne (in front), the country-style pate made with liver and garnished with pistachios and dried fruit. In the background is our chicken galantine, a chicken forcemeat rolled in chicken breast and chicken skin and poached. Not my favorite--it was really dry. The rest of our pates and terrines were quite delicious, though...classmates who had never tried any of this stuff before and were a little hesitant at first were soon coming back for more.

I'll be back after the break to report on Intro to Baking and Pastry. Very, very excited about this next rotation! But in the meantime, I'm excited for some time off and trips to New Orleans, Costa Rica, and Miami. Happy holidays!

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.

Insights from a French Chef

I find the French Chef B. so hysterical and lovable that I've actually started jotting down the funny things he says in my notebook, right alongside my notes for how to make cheese or pickle cucumbers. Some of his comments are so classic "French chef", straight out of a movie.

A few snapshots of his daily musings in class . . .

During our tasting on Cheese Day, the chefs arranged this spread of various cheeses for us to taste, compare, and discuss. French Chef B. holds up the log of fresh goat cheese. "Zees is really bland. Zees doesn't turn me on very much." He proceeds to tell us that fresh cheeses need the addition of herbs and spices for extra flavor, so he rolled the second log in chopped fresh herbs (a you can see above). He moves on to the soft-rind cheeses. "Zees is a crappy Brie. Anything that comes in a can, be suspicious." Takes a bite of the Camembert. "Mmm. Zees, zees is just like eating butter. A piece of cheese and a glass of wine, now zat is good living."

On Sandwich Day, we made Reubens with brisket we had cured earlier. "Zees is a very fatty cut of meat," French Chef B. explains while trimming a whole lot of fat off of the briskets. "Now, fat is good. You'll die from it eventually, but in the meantime, enjoy it!" He cuts off a piece (of meat, not pure fat!) and eats it.

Our sandwich platter: Reuben on the left, portobello on focaccia on the right, club in the middle, egg salad tea sandwiches up front

He moves on to the vegetarian sandwich we'll be making with portobello mushroom. "Portobello mushroom is an invention! Do you know zees? I never heard of portobello mushroom until I came to United States. It's just an enlarged cremini mushroom, you know? But you can make a lot of money off of zees thing!"

Today he cooked a big pot of delicious lentils to go with the duck confit we had made. "We eat lots of zees in Europe. Lentils are very healthy for you, you know? But I cook them with bacon. We French always use bacon. I guess it is a good thing I am not Jewish, I could never live without bacon." Don't worry Chef, some Jews couldn't live without bacon either--like Zack!

More of the food I've been making with the help of French Chef B.'s many words of wisdom. . .

On sandwich day, we also made cold soups. This cantaloupe soup that I made was nice and refreshing, but I kind of felt like it belonged in a smoothie cup instead of a soup bowl.

Today, we made our own pickles--and that doesn't just mean pickled cucumbers. My traditional sweet-and-sour pickle chips are on the left; pickled pineapple with dried cherries, dried cranberries, and mint on the right. We'll taste them once they've pickled a few days...stay tuned.

A Salad Buffet

My class's salad spread on Day 2, including garden pasta salad, Ceasar, Cobb, and shrimp-artichoke-orzo salad

So far, I'm a huge fan of Garde Manger. I'm only two days in, but it's really kind of nice to--literally--get away from the heat for three weeks. However, it would be misleading to say that we don't use ovens and burners at all in this class. We have used them for components of cold dishes--like bacon for the Cobb salad that we made today--but we're no longer hovering over them for four hours each day.

I have two chefs in this class, and my referring to them by initials in this blog now poses a problem: they're both Chef B.'s. There's the American Chef B. and the French Chef B.--the first real French chef I've had so far at Le Cordon Bleu. I love his accent and he's absolutely hilarious, always commenting about the eating habits of Americans, but never in a snooty way. "Don't go home and eat some Hot Pocket," he said as we left on the first day. "Go home and buy a whole chicken! Practice! Practice!"

On Day 1, we started out with vinaigrettes. I made a really yummy basil vinaigrette that I wished I could bottle and take home. Then, we experimented with infused oils. You see them on restaurant menus all the time--chive oil, garlic oil, chili oil--and I never realized how ridiculously easy they are to make. I heated up some oil and added basil and lemon zest, then pureed and strained it. The result was a vivid green lemon-basil oil!

My lemon-basil oil infusing

Today, we moved on to salads, using some of our vinaigrettes from yesterday to dress them and also learning some new dressings. We learned how to make a classic Ceasar, the most popular salad in America. I had a huge Ceasar salad phase around sixth grade when it was the only thing I would order in restaurants, but since then I haven't been so into them--quite possibly due to the insane amount of Ceasar salad that I consumed during that period. This from-scratch version gave me a new appreciation for an old friend. Our anchovy-spiked, garlicky dressing had great flavor--just a light coating was perfect on crisp leaves of romaine. We also made our own garlic croutons with leftover bread from the Baking & Pastry class across the hall.

I was responsible for the pasta salad for my group. The "Garden Pasta Salad" recipe we were to follow called for half a dozen different vegetables, giving me a great opportunity to brush up on my knife skills, which I've kind of neglected since Skills 1. The chefs told us that all of the vegetables should be cut to about the same size. I thought small dice would work nicely with the bow-tie pasta. I blanched my haricot vert, carrots, zucchini, tomato, and red pepper, then diced everything up. It looked like colorful confetti. Then I chopped some black olives to roughly the same size and minced a bunch of basil. All of this, plus the pasta of course, was tossed with the basil vinaigrette that I made yesterday. It turned out really tasty and refreshing and colorful--a breath of fresh air from all the butter and sauces and meat from Skills 2.

Pasta salad up close

Sauce Fest

Over the holiday weekend in Las Vegas, my family didn't do much gambling, but we certainly did a lot of eating. As I perused the menus of some of the country's most famous chefs, it was pretty exciting to spot several sauces that I now know how to make. Before culinary school, I didn't have even a vague idea of the ingredients in a Soubise or Mornay or Chasseur sauce. I found myself wondering what I used to do when I saw those terms on a menu...I probably asked the server to describe the unfamiliar sauce. On Sunday at brunch, I was able to inform my sister that the Mornay poured over her decadent croque madame at Thomas Keller's Bouchon was a Bechamel sauce derivative with gruyere and parmesan cheeses, and proudly added that I'd made it just the week before.

It was very fitting that I returned to school--still very full--on Monday morning to take my sauce practical. We had two hours to prepare two sauces assigned by the chefs, with no recipes. They could be any of the mother sauces or derivatives that we've learned in Skills 2. That's about 20 sauces total--a lot of recipes for me to study on the plane ride home. Fortunately, it was a pretty long trip back to Atlanta.

I was assigned Tomato sauce and Supreme sauce. Sure, I've made tomato sauce many times at home, but this is classical Tomato sauce. The kind made with diced salt pork. Still, it's a pretty straightforward sauce: render the salt pork, then cook finely diced carrots and onions in its fat. Add whole canned tomatoes, tomato paste, and a sachet. Bring to a boil, then cut to a simmer for at least an hour and a half.

My only problem was that I got it started too late. We only had two hours total, and first I had to gather and prep all of my mise en place for both sauces. Then, for some reason, I started my Supreme first instead of getting the Tomato sauce on right away so it could have simmered longer.

For the Supreme, I had to first make its mother sauce, a chicken Veloute. This begins with a blond roux, so I clarified some butter and added flour to it until I had the perfect peanut-buttery roux texture. It should look pretty much exactly like creamy PB--but don't be fooled. It tastes like starchy butter.

Once the roux cooked for a few minutes, I whisked it into hot chicken stock. For Supreme, you add heavy cream and lemon juice to the basic chicken Veloute, then monter au beurre, then season with salt and white pepper (so pepper flakes don't show up in the light-colored sauce). This one turned out perfect except that the chefs said that I added a little too much white pepper.

Today was our last day of Skills 2, which involved a final written test and a thorough deep-cleaning of the kitchen. Taking apart and scrubbing the stoves and washing every pot and pan= fun times! Tomorrow I'm on to Intro to Garde Manger. This is a classical term for cold foods: we'll be learning to make everything from salads to pates and terrines. I even spied some tasty-looking sushi on a few students' plates as I passed the current Garde Manger class presenting food for their practical. Sushi fiend that I am, I'm pretty psyched.