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?)