Day 12: No Pain, No Mayo

I discovered a new workout: hand-whipping mayonnaise. It's better than the Lap-Band at toning the shoulders, plus it comes with the bonus of having mayonnaise to slather on sandwiches or dip fries in, if you're a kooky European-type person who's into that kind of thing.

I'm actually not much of a mayo person unless it's an aioli, which I learned is simply basic mayo made with olive oil, plus garlic. Which, yes, I have enjoyed whilst eating some lovely, crispy fries.

After my recent hollandaise fail, I was concerned I'd also screw up the mayo. Thankfully, mayonnaise needs no cooking, just the ability to stream oil into a bowl while whisking as if the continued rotation of the Earth, and by extension life itself, depended on one's ability to emulsify egg yolks with oil.

I actually went lefty because it took so long and my shoulder started to hurt, but the result is much tastier than store-bought mayo and head-and-shoulders better than Miracle Whip, which I'm pretty sure contains neither miracles nor whip. I'm starting to think, in the culinary world, pain and taste are never too far apart.

Vinegar, mustard, egg yolk, oil. Whisk until arm falls off. Voilà.

We also watched our chef instructor make two different roux for two different sauces; white roux for béchamel, blond roux for velouté. While I've made roux and béchamel a few times in the past, I did learn a good rule of thumb for roux: after mixing the fat (e.g. butter) and the flour together, a proper roux should have the consistency of wet sand.

Velouté and béchamel sauces.

Another neat little factoid is the difference between a gravy and a sauce. A gravy utilizes natural fat, like pan drippings from a roasted turkey, while a sauce uses butter or lard. Sure, that's not the type of information that makes one a genius cook, but it's one of those things that always gnawed at me, like the difference between a stock and broth.

Day 11: Tourné Around Again

Our weekend homework was to do potato tournés. I earned an 85/100 for mine. The chef mostly complimented my knife work, which have to be long, relatively wide, curved cuts (as opposed to shaving the potato as one whittles wood). He docked me for some smallish cuts and for the ends not being similar – as you can see, one end is pointed while the other is flat. I could've either pointed the flat end or squared off the pointed end.

So, there it is: what a solid B tourné looks like.

Fresh Food Reads

Here's some interesting food-related reading the interwebs has brought to me recently:

An organization called the Environmental Working Group has lists of food that you should or shouldn't buy organic, based on how much pesticide residue tends to stick to them. You can save some money by not bothering to buy organic versions of the "Clean 15."

Scientists have located the yeast that helped invent lager… in Argentina.

Serious Eats' quick guide to dill pickling.

Michael Ruhlman remembers the best tomato he ever ate, and provides 39 ways to eat tomatoes.

Cooking food apparently helped homo erectus evolve into homo sapiens. Nothing about the evolutionary benefits of food porn, though.

Tomato soup with mozzarella noodles from Ideas in Food.

Food photographer/blogger Jun Belen is doing the ABCs of Filipino Food. Probably you will drool while reading E is for Ensaimada.

Week in Review #2 - Tourné Around

We're still weeks away from doing actual cooking, but we're getting closer. I can, quite literally, smell it. I got to drop some stock on Friday, so I spent a good ten minutes ladling veal stock through strainers (which, if you missed it, are of the Asian persuasion).

Ten minutes standing over bubbling, lip-smacking, two-days-simmering veal bones and meat and wonderful, wonderful fat. We pretty quickly attacked some of the meat that had been set aside from one stock pot, and while most of the flavor had made its way into the liquid – that's pretty much the point, isn't it? – it was still pretty delicious.

By my count, we're up to 15 different knife techniques, which we've practiced on potatoes, carrots, zucchini, onions, shallots, celery, and turnips. I'm happy to say I've already shown improvement. I'm not happy to say we keep having to do tournés, which certainly make for cute little vegetables, but seem an awful waste, make my hands sore, and don't have an obvious culinary application unless I ever want to serve cute little vegetables that roughly resemble boat hulls or footballs.

Technique of the Week

Not tournés! I'm going to go with our basic 3-2-8-2-2-4 volume conversion shorthand. I have three refrigerator magnets for kitchen conversions that I can now retire because of 3-2-8-2-2-4. I'm trying to come up with a mnemonic device for this, or at least for the corresponding measurements (teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, pint, quart, and gallon). Alas, my mind keeps drifting to 867-530-niiii-eee-iiiine. Who can I turn to?

Injury Report

The consecutive non-cutting streak has reached double digits. Ten days!

Day 10: As the Potato Turns

I will probably remember day 10 more for the trip into school. Some highlights: a 3-year-old kid asked if I liked the bus and why I had whiskers (I didn't shave… go me!); I eavesdropped on a completely full of shit college kid who bragged to his friend about his fighting skills, including how he broke someone's arm and made it "look like a clock"; a homeless dude on Sunset Blvd. asked of passersby, "Excuse me, can you spare 10 million dollars?"; there was a near-throwdown when I spotted a culinary student from the Art Institutes board my bus. Okay, not really on that last one, but I imagined us unzipping our knife kits and julienning carrots for the honor of best for-profit culinary school in Los Angeles County.

As far as actual culinary schooling, day 10 featured more knife technique, including four new ones: carré (3/4" cubes) of potatoes, paysanne zucchini (thin triangular slices), oblique carrots (chunky triangle things), and ciseler shallots (a very fine dice, basically).

We also did more julienne and brunoise carrots, and most of the students have resorted to munching on our carrot trimmings. Because, you know, people starving in Africa and all that. Also, we get pretty hungry breaking down food and not cooking it.

Hands down the most painful thing so far has been the tournes. It's from the French verb for "to turn" and that's basically what we do: whittle with a paring knife, turn, whittle, turn, whittle, turn. Unlike most other techniques, which require one hand to hold and one to work the knife, tourné primarily requires my fingers to do things they have never done before.

I'm fairly certain it's also the only time the proper knife technique involves the blade coming back in your direction, almost directly toward the thumb. Miraculously, no one in class has cut themselves with the paring knife.