Today we made soups! Soup is such a wonderful thing, so much flavor packed into a bowl! And in the famous words of Mr. John Snow, "winter is coming..." so this is a great time to learn how to stay warm and well fed!
Consommé (a la bruniose)
This is such a wonderful soup. Used as a base in other soups, it is a flavor-packed broth. Consommé can be made from a number of stocks, we used chicken for today, including beef, fish and other game meats.
Starting our mise en place for the day (top) and then listening to Chef Marcus as to how to use the day. (Bottom) preparing the dish for service.
My team worked very hard today, we have really begun to master time to our advantage. Next time we definitely need to make sure we taste as we cook, something I always do at home and have somehow forgotten here in this kitchen. Our consommé was almost perfect, a great color (though Chef did suggest we use his burnt onion trick to add a golden color) and good taste, we could have used a tad more salt.
Vichyssoise
A very popular cold soup, vichyssoise is a creamy potato and leek soup. We started off again with clarified butter, something I've never used before but seems like the best kind of butter, and browned the leaks before adding the potatoes. We didn't use enough potatoes I admit, our soup was very tasty but it was a bit watery. I was very focused on finishing all the soups on time that I didn't even think about the consistency, we even talked this morning about how M. Escoffier used rice to thicken his version of this soup.
This is the "winning" soup. Team Kelly (or B2) made a perfect soup. Wonderfully thick consistency, perfect cream color, and it tasted fantastic!
Shrimp Bisque
This was the best sauce of the day. So much flavor!!! I will also be upfront and say my team's soup was the best! You better believe it! Chef did like Team Rigo's (top right photo) sauce the best, he added a bit of cayenne pepper to top it off, the most :'( but for a traditional shrimp bisque our's took the trophy!
I didn't personally have too much to do with this soup so I don't have much else to say about it. We split into teams to have better use of time and although we were all 7 minutes behind on plating we ended the day quite ahead of schedule. Anyways, this soup was amazing. So full of flavor! It was very smooth and creamy, great hints of the stock and of course shrimp flavors, definitely going to be a go to soup on a cold snowy day!
Overall we all had a great day, there was only one mishap when some shrimps were stolen...? But besides that we all are getting into the groove of working in an extremely busy kitchen. I don't even think that I have ever been to a restaurant that had around 30 chefs in the kitchens so I'm quite looking forward to a few months from now as far as the kinds of meals we can put out as a team.
Chef Marcus showing the proper way to flambé the soup. It got a little out of hand when some of us tried it later... :P
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