Days 90-91, France:

Cherry Clafouti

So this will be a longer one, encompassing the remaining days from the first week of Classical Cuisines. I'm on break between shifts at work and I want to get some work done.

Day 90 - Northern France:

The northern part of France contains the regions of Normandy, Brittany, Pas de Calais and Picardy. The cuisine of the region is heavy on using cream, butter and has very delicious and borderline unhealthy hearty meals. Typically they use Normandy butter and cream in everything they can, the cows up there eat mostly apples so they produce amazing sweet milk. Why do I have to live so far away!!! Creamy sweet butter that comes from apples, that sounds incredible! We just used normal, lame, unsalted, run of the mill butter :(

Today was also the day that Chef Bob showed us his proper way to make a baguette. They really turned out fantastic, and now (it's a week later actually) we are really on track for making very good breads!

The most important lesson here was to really treat the bread gently. If you are too aggressive you will ruin the bubbles, making the bread flat and sad. Be gentle!!!!

 To help maintain the correct shape of the bread we used a cartouce, a linen sheet generously coated in flour and shaped to hold four baguettes. It's a bit hard to get used to this but it absolutely makes a difference!

 When scoring the bread you have to be fast and unafraid! Use an extremely sharp knife and a smooth motion, you can see we didn't quite have it down, it isn't as easy as it sounds.

The end result! Soooo good...

Crepes:

 Chef gave us a crepe demo also, we made these back in Culinary Arts, so many weeks ago. Keys to successful crepes are runny batter, hot-seasoned crepe pan, speed and finesse.

Pour the batter so it just coats the pan, if it's too thick you are just making pancakes.

We also made mussels, sole and a cherry dessert. I didn't do a super good job taking photos of all the dishes, I was making the baguettes and it was more of an intense process than the last time. Overall it was a tasty day.

Day 91, Northeastern France - Champagne, Lorraine, Alsace:

This is where the true bubbly drink is made. I didn't know until know, but the drink originated by mistake and wasn't very popular once it started out, producers marketed champagne as a festival drink and it eventually caught on around the time of the first World War.

This area is right next to Germany, Alsace was part of Germany until after the Allies reclaimed Europe from the Nazis, and still today is a mostly German community. As a result the area is heavily influenced by German cuisine, beer is much more popular than wine and is used in foods for flavor.

I didn't realize it until now but this photo is a bit blurry :(

Quiche:

Lorraine is where this custard originated from, (didn't know that,) during the war English soldiers fell in love with it and brought it back to the UK. I like them, so apparently that makes me a fake man :P

Choucroute Garni (above) is a German inspired dish that is basically an excuse to eat even more sausage, just in a soup: sausage, bacon, ham shanks and sauerkraut. Looking at the ingredients it's easy to see how it was created as a hearty winter soup to use the preserved foods back before electricity.

 Green Beans with shallots and almonds.

Baba au Rhum

Rum cake

It's a cake soaked in rum, 'nuff said...

Laurice and Kurtis made these tasty treats. I definitely recommend soaking them in the rum sauce for longer than we did, I feel like it should be borderline too much rum. They were very good and full of flavor but the cakes really soaked up the rum and were still a bit dry sauce-wise.

So far I have really enjoyed this class. Chef Bob absolutely knows what he is doing and I really look forward to picking his brain on techniques and styles as we go. France has an amazing culinary history and really we could spend a year learning about it and it wouldn't be enough. Hopefully by the end of the second week we will be experts at baguettes (we make some every day).

I can't say enough how good it was to have a break before we started Classics. Each one of the main courses we make has so many technical components, it would have been a disaster if we had jumped right in after Regional Cuisines.

The last day of the first week will be it's own post, we made frog legs and escargot! It is definitely a day worthy of it's own, it was quite interesting and I'm not sure how I feel about both of those dishes... (It's snails, bugs, they eat dirt... Should we really still be eating them in 2017?)

So I totally fell asleep today....

I passed out today and didn't get anything done, aside from homework. I was for sure going to make a post about at least another day from last week and I just couldn't do it. Time, as always, is the enemy.

It's kind of annoying, I want to post about everything we learn in class, but class itself takes up most of my day. So when I get home, I'm usually (except a few days this week and last week) totally exhausted from getting up before the sun, cooking my mind out, and then having to drive home and reflect on the day.

If only we could master dark energy and force the solar system to give us an extra 8 hours a day. I really think 8 more hours would make everything we do, all of society, function a bit better once it adapted.

Food:

Here is a quick glance at what we accomplished today. Aside from almost setting Celeste on fire, (sorry miss!) it was a very good day. Incredible foods! I will expand upon it soon and let you know some more about the recipes and the prep, we could definitely have used at least an extra hour today, someone get on that dark matter!!!

 The first course was a Veal Soup (left), followed by a beef paupiette (right).

 The main course was a rack of lamb. Absolutely cooked to perfection, this dish was a highlight of the week! Look at that!!!

For dessert we had a cornbread-like cake with raspberry jam and an infused whipped cream.

I am so glad to be back in the kitchen! I can't wait to see where we go next (Spain) and what we create. I'm in the process of possibly going up to a mountain town for my externship, I need all the good energy for it, it would be a dream to do!

Good night and you will hear more about all of French cuisine soon.

Eh, I ain't need no Stinkin' Sleep!

Chef Mark Kalix's new Culinary Arts class prepared a Grand Breakfast Buffet today. It smelled really good! Look at that crazy "flower" arrangement! 

So I am just amped up and decided to not sleep and continue writing. It might have been that tasty glass bottle of Coca-Cola, they still use sugar in the glass ones, but maybe it's just happiness and enjoyment of being back on track.

Either way I'm going to write until I have to go in to work. I promise, absolutely PROMISE, that you will get to finally read my interviews with our executive team and get some more insight on the academia side of school. I also can't wait to get back on my Super Secret Project and make it come to life. This site is wonderful, Blogger powered by Google (TM) [ha that is hilarious to me to write! :-P ], but it still is tedious and drives me up the wall. Every day I find a way that I could make this journey better for the person who comes next and just that alone gets me excited for the future.

I'm rambling on now, it's a bit cold here in the car and as fun as work is I am honestly not super pumped to go in. Everyone come into Eureka! Boulder to make my night more fun! Seriously, we have great food and amazing beer! Wednesdays you get a free beer glass starting at 6pm!

I am really cold now so I am signing off and heading in early to where it's warm :D

Stay frosty and I will be writing in a few hours!


Post note update:
The blog has well surpassed 15,000 views since I started, well over 7,000 in December alone. I can't thank all of you enough for at least pretending to be interested in this!!!!!!!!

Classical Cuisines: France week 1

Days 88-92, Northern & Central France Part Un:
Yeah, that says those high numbers, where has it all gone... I never let you know :'(
Anyways... (I will get around to it someday soon!)
(This post will mostly be about day 89, it went a bit long in that day and I don't want you to have to read a full novel about a week at once. More to come soon.)


We are now back in class from break, what a wonderful 3 week vacation! It also means we are starting a new block, Classical Cuisine, we only have 1 left!!!

As with every new block, we have a new Chef Instructor, Chef Bob Scherner. A man after my own dreams, Chef Bob spent around 20 years as a chef in the amazing ski-town of Telluride, Colorado (or To-hell-u-ride as my father used to say it! I'm so jealous, I would do anything to work as a chef in Steamboat for 20 years!!!!!!). He brings in a range of skills that he has learned in the industry and a taste for the simple things. That means he wants to taste the ingredients that make up the dish, no hiding by using a ridiculous amount of seasoning; broccoli should taste like broccoli, potatoes like potatoes.

This week in class (I'm behind still...) he told us something that I think is incredibly important, "at the end of the day, your food should taste what the guest wants it to taste like. Even if they want me to grill a steak on my truck engine, if they are paying money for what they want just do it, your own opinion is for you." I doubt that he has literally done that but the point set in, we don't need to get all crazy and creative on dishes that already have a flavor profile. Make the dish like it was meant to be made, that is what someone on the outside would expect it to taste. Anyways I'm getting carried away...

France part 1:

Chef Bob teaches us his way of forming baguettes, they turned out so beautiful.

The first day back in class we didn't cook anything. We spent the day learning about the basics of wine, French in particular. It was a good way to come back from a 3 week stint out of the kitchen, I definitely was not ready to prepare a full meal after being gone so long. Our class has gotten progressively smaller over the last 4 months (yikes! It's already been 4 months!), and we moved into a new kitchen, which might still be a bit too small for the 22 of us that remain...

I really enjoyed the first day, now I kind of want to run off and start a vineyard and winery, but maybe that should wait a few years until I get one of these projects complete... We didn't get to taste any wine yet, we are supposed to be doing that next week on the last day of France.

Day 89 Central France - Paris, Ile de France, Loire Valley, Pays de la Loire:

Mashke and Megan prep for the day. 

Chef Bob Scherner prepares a demonstration for making caramel, it turned out really well, no rock candy!

Once the sugar begins to melt it starts a chain reaction and the whole thing melts very, very quickly. 

From the time the sugar began to melt to when it was completely molten was probably 2 minutes. You can see an ice bath just off to the left of the burner, this is CRITICAL when making molten sugar, it is upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit and will do serious damage if it gets on you (Chef told us about the worst kitchen accident he ever saw, it involved a caramel burn, and said he was very surprised the guy lived through it).

To make a caramel sauce you whisk in scalded cream and re-melt the caramel on medium heat, ensuring you don't curdle the cream.

Today I made a cheese souffle, a delicious treat that I will absolutely have to make at home, it is quite unhealthy but totally worth it.

Cheese Souffle

This was a straight forward dish, however is a bit technical. Souffle's are basically puffs, whether it is a chocolate dessert or in this case a savory custard. To get the cloud into the dish you need a way to capture air and incorporate it, we used egg whites as a meringue to get the poof.

If you have ever made a meringue you would know that once you get it to your desired stiffness you need to bake it, serve it, or freeze it to maintain the bubbles and not let it deflate. Well Patrick and I were not thinking about that and ended up prepping that part way too early, like 1.5 hours before we needed it.

OOPS!

Not only did we do that once, but a second time too early.... It was a bit of a rough start for us being back. Finally we were ready for the meringue and folded it into the souffle to find out that service had been pushed back 15 minutes. Ugh. The proper baking time for these was around 6 minutes and they must be served IMMEDIATELY so they don't deflate. With quick thinking I put them in the freezer to maintain the bubbles as best as I could and in the end it worked quite well!

They puffed up much better than I hoped! This was a highlight of the meal, you can't go wrong with fluffy cheese eggs. 

My P.I.C. Mitch (that's Partner In Crime) made the souffle for the other team (foreground). He used some extra seasonings to be a bit different, I just went with what the recipe said. Chef Bob prefers the "natural way" anyways so I was very pleased with the result.

A seared pork tenderloin was our entree for the day. 

A tasty Parmesan crusted broccoli made by the Power from Down Under: Kurtis. 

Our first go at baguettes, we are making them every day we are "in" France. 

And the crown jewel of the day, Tarte Tatin.

Initially this post was going to be on multiple days but I really miss writing about a day as we go so you can keep up with all of it. I just kind of re-found a mini-laptop and am trying it out to be more mobile about writing. 

This post definitely took me a bit longer to write and I absolutely went into much more detail than I initially planned for, last week was so fun and I really love France so these might just be individual posts again. For now I'm going to try and get a touch of sleep before I go into Eureka! and I plan on writing another post before I go to bed. I have gotten used to staying awake for the full day when I don't have to work and I am trying to get better about writing again instead of wasting time on TV or games or even just gazing into space.

As soon as I get used to the quirks of using this new technology you should hear from me a lot more! I want to get back to being active in writing, interviewing, and working on my projects like the beginning; I was much happier when I was running around doing amazing things, sitting at home helps no one! Anyways enjoy and I will be back soon!!!