Day 81: Silly Rabbit

We all have comfort foods. Sometimes its a nostalgia thing, and sometimes it's straight up goodness we're looking for, but either way, it's a combination of flavors that are reliable. As a home cook, I have a subset of comfort foods that are reliable in a slightly different way: they're easy to make. Obviously, I like the way they taste, too, but there are days where I just want to throw something on rice (actually, that's most days) or boil pasta and dump some sauce and cheese on it. It's the doing that puts me at ease.

After my maddening lamb failure, our next dish was lapine a la graine de moutarde (rabbit in whole-grain mustard sauce). We'd be making fresh pasta for it, a task I'd always wanted to attempt but shied away from because it seemed difficult.

It's not difficult. It's super easy. And it's exactly what I needed at that moment in time.

The dish as a whole was also easy. When I read or hear "sauce" in conjunction with a pasta dish, I imagine an old Italian grandmother stirring a slow-bubbling pot of red stuff for hours on end while her plumber son Mario is off saving princesses (apologies to people of Italian descent, but your biggest export to my generation of Americans came from Japan). This sauce was not that.

We slathered the rabbit in yellow and dijon mustard to marinate. We seared it off and braised it. Then we reduced the cooking liquid, added some cream and more mustard to our liking.

Oh, and the pasta. It's also one of those just-that-easy type of things. We made a well in some flour (we used half a cup each of semolina and AP), dropped in an egg and a pinch of salt and scrambled it. Then we started incorporating the flour and eventually kneaded the shit out of it -- it doubled as a decent stress reliever. Then we let it rest (like any other dough, the gluten needs to relax). The hardest part was the amount of water to use. We kneaded until it was smooth, not sticky (too wet) or crumbly (too dry).

We actually did the pasta dough the day prior and kept it wrapped in plastic in the refrigerator. On cooking day, we rolled it into simple tagliatelle-like ribbons cut by hand. If I were a chef, I'd market them as hand-crafted artisan pasta and charge $20 for it, but for a single batch it's actually less fussy doing it that way. We then boiled it in salted water for a few minutes. I used my tongs to grab it, let the ribbons hang over the pot to drain the excess water, then dumped them into the mustard sauce to finish.

My chef-instructor had nothing negative to say about my execution of the dish.

Comfort.

Bread & Beer

All Le Cordon Bleu culinary students (as opposed to the pastry and baking students) are required to take one pastry and baking class, which I'm in now. My chef-instructor introduced bread making to us by pointing out an interesting fact.

Bread is grain and liquid, and (typically) involves fermentation.
Beer is grain and liquid, and involves fermentation.

So they are, one could poetically/romantically/pseudo-scientifically say, the same thing. They're also two of the oldest foodstuffs in the history of man. Pretty much every culture has their version of each.

Cheers.

Brioche in two shapes: a tete ("head") and couronne ("crown")

Day 79: Failure Dominoes

The funny thing about the bad days is that they start so well.

During the previous term, I started to write out production schedules for our cooking days to help me multitask.

In Foundations III, we're required to create them. I find them invaluable, since we're now creating complete dishes with multiple elements – protein, vegetable, starch, sauce, garnish – that have to be ready simultaneously. The simple process of writing a schedule helps me organize the tasks I have to do.

The only thing I can't plan for: a complete culinary belly flop.

Today, our dish was roasted rack of lamb with jus, ratatouille, and fried polenta cakes. Individually, pretty straightforward. It went like so:

Three sauce pots go on the burner immediately, two with chicken stock, one with water to blanch a tomato. Cornmeal goes into one of the chicken stock pots. Occasional whisking whilst I also...

Prep all my vegetables. Cube zucchini, cube eggplant, chop bell peppers, mince shallot, mince garlic, mince onion, mince basil. Make a bouquet garni, rough chop some more onion, carrot, celery, and leek for mirepoix. Grate some cheese...

Polenta looks ready. Butter, cheese, salt, whisk, then into plastic wrap, into the reach-in to chill and firm up. Moving along...

The last piece of ratatouille prep is tomato concasser, which means: blanch, shock, skin, core, chop. Then saute zucchini, remove, then the eggplant, remove, then all the minced aromatics and bell peppers. In goes some tomato paste, the tomato concasser, the bouquet, a wee bit of water and to the back burner it goes to stew.

Check the time, clean my station. Still almost 45 minutes until our serving window opens, about 15 until I need to fire the lamb.

Grab my lamb, remove the excess fat and trim off the bones to create that standard rack of lamb look. Start searing the trim for the jus, season the rack with salt and pepper, begin searing it off.

After it's nice and golden, the lamb goes on a roasting rack and into the oven. I allotted 25 minutes to cook the lamb, plus five to rest. I'm right on schedule.

I caramelize the mirepoix with the trim, deglaze, pour in some stock from that third sauce pot and begin to reduce the jus.

Temperature check on the lamb. 95-degrees. I'm aiming for medium-rare, which means take it out at about 130 so it hits 135 or so after resting.

I check and season the ratatouille, strain the solids out of the jus, clean my station some more, feel good. About five minutes later, another temperature check. My digital thermometer shows me...

145... 156... 164!

Way over. Way way over. I yank the thermometer, get the lamb out of the oven, but it's too late. Did I lose track of time? Did I not get the thermometer in all the way? Maybe I screwed up the reading by touching bone? It doesn't matter, I've killed the lamb. No saving it.

Crap.

I move to the reach-in and grab my polenta, unwrap it... and it's paste. It didn't firm up. I undercooked it and instead of a polenta cake, I have corn glue.

CRAP.

I ask my chef-instructor what to do. He helps me spoon and dredge some loose polenta quenelles in flour, plops one into my frying pan. It flattens and cooks up into a semi-crispy pancake. It'll have to do.

Instead of five minutes crisping up my polenta cake, I spend almost 15 trying to turn the paste into polenta quenelles, then change tack and fry them into thin polenta crisps because they won't even hold that football shape. Probably because I put too much cheese; the parmesan is separating and oozing out into the pan.

That's 15 minutes while the lamb is resting, carry-over cooking bringing the temperature even higher.

I salvage three reasonable looking polenta circles and plate them. The ratatouille comes out splendidly, thank God, and then I cut the lamb. The mildest of mild pink color in the center. At least it's not leather.

I mount the jus with butter... and it breaks. Instead of emulsifying into a nice, thickened sauce, the butter creates an oil slick. I didn't reduce the liquid enough before adding the butter.

Screw it. I slap some on the plate and present.

I try not to fret too much about failure. I'm in school, after all, and that's sometimes the point.

Oh, I also randomly burned my wrist. I don't even know how, I just noticed it throbbing on my way home. Later, I'll think about how I wasn't patient enough with the polenta, and too patient with the lamb, and how I put way too much cheese in the polenta, and how I didn't turn up the heat high enough to reduce the jus, and how do I plan for possible disasters like this that unfold like dominoes?

For now, I eat and move on.

The ratatouille was pretty good.

Day 76-77: Sausagefest

I was both proud and disappointed in myself after two days of making, stuffing, and cooking sausage. Proud because I was on team bratwurst and it was crazy delicious. Disappointed because in two days I didn't make a single sausagefest joke. Not one.

Maybe it was because our chef-instructor chided the room when he was demonstrating how to encase sausage meat and a few of my fellow classmates let loose with some laughter. Juvenile? Sure. But I was still hopeful I'd get in one inventive nugget about, oh I don't know, twisting my meat, or hanging it loose, or what have you.

Anyway, sausage. The basic recipe for any sausage is meat (or, I suppose, a meat-like vegetable doppelganger), fat, curing mix, spices, herbs, and aromatics. And they aren't kidding about the fat. Most sausages are emulsifications of meat and fat. Kind of like a vinaigrette, except you can stuff it into something and cook it and be thoroughly satisfied eating it with a beer.

The bratwurst I got to make is classified as a 5-4-3 sausage. Five parts meat and four parts fat emulsified with three parts ice, to add moisture and also to keep the sausage from cooking while it's run through a buffalo chopper. In our case, the meat was veal. And the fat? Bacon.

Bratwurst on the left, frankfurters on the right. Sweet and spicy italian sausages in the back.

Sausage party!

Day 74: That'll Do, Pig

I don't know what it is about the faces of mammals, as opposed to fish or lobsters, that makes butchering such a visceral experience. Certainly part of it is that their faces are much easier to anthropomorphize than, say, the cartoonishly flattened look of a flatfish. Mouth, nose, ears, even the body of a four-legged animal isn't that far, anatomically, from us.

For me, it was the eyes of our wee little piggy, stuck wide open, that made my stomach squirm as my chef-instructor's saw came down to behead him, briefly making me want to break out into a soulful rendition of Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" while the camera slowly pushes in on Babe's winsome, albeit dead, eyes.

The momentary uneasiness isn't nearly enough to shift my moral compass on the issue of stuffing my face with delicious animal protein. But I feel like I now know what all the farm-to-table, squeak-to-squiggle chefs are talking about when they wax poetic about respecting ingredients. I will certainly try not to let any more delicious cheeks go to waste going forward. In other words, sisig party!

Once the head was off, pig fabrication quickly shifted into pork lover's magic food porn time as one cut after another became visible. Count a few ribs in from the rear (to keep the tenderloins intact) and slice through the spine. Legs off through the joints. Then separate the tenderloins, sirloins, and ribs.

Just like that, I was staring at kalua pork, baby back ribs, St. Louis ribs, spare ribs, pork belly, pork chops, and ham. Really, how can you say no to any of that?

And then we chopped the head in half to expose the brain.

Squeak.

Squiggle.