CIA French Cuisine Boot Camp Day 3: Bacon Galore and Botched Boeuf

Protein bar again for breakfast. I knew I should be taking advantage of all the wonderful food available to me at the CIA. But I am NOT a morning person, and these 7am starts were tough for me as it was. Besides, we'd had dinners at the student-staffed CIA restaurants for the past two nights, a French cheese tasting Tuesday afternoon, and a fois gras tasting scheduled for this afternoon. The idea of adding a full breakfast on top of it all was overwhelming.

Part of the benefit of attending the Boot Camps was enjoying a few dinners in the school's professional restaurants. These restaurants are the last classes the students have prior to earning their culinary degrees, and the students staff the kitchen and the dining room under the guidance of a Chef in the kitchen and a professional at the front of the house. There are four restaurants: St. Andrews, the least formal, featuring local and sustainable foods; Caterina de Medici, the Italian restaurant; American Bounty, featuring regional American cuisine; and Escoffier, a formal French restaurant--which had our very own Chef Remolina as its executive chef. We ate as a group at Medici on Monday and Escoffier on Tuesday--fantastic food, and a wonderful opportunity to get to know our classmates.

Our lecture and recipes for the day spanned several regions. There was a heavy German influence in Alsace & Lorraine, and a Roman influence of cured fish (anchovies) and cured olives in Provence, Alpes and Côte d'Azur. In-between we had Burgundy and Franche-Comté, where apparently they have a sense of humor because the name of their signature deep-fried fritters, pets de nonne, translates to mean "nun's farts." My sons were going to LOVE hearing about that one.

We also learned that the difference between a tarte and a quiche is the eggs. Chef talked about the tight specifications around weight and quality for chickens raised in this region.

"You like gummy bears?" he asked as he reminisced about eating cock's comb as a child. Oy, I thought to myself--add that to the list of things I don't plan to try on my next trip to France.

As Chef talked through each team's recipes, he mentioned to us that we will would need to start our boeuf bourguignon right away. We had started marinating it yesterday. In addition, our menu included braised Swiss chard, quiche Lorraine, and tartiflette (potatoes au gratin), plus soaking beans for tomorrow's potage garbure.

We headed to the kitchen and J got started on browning the meat. The cubes of beef needed to be patted dry, then browned in batches before the next step can be started. And there were many steps in this recipe. If you read the book Julie & Julia, you may remember the author's stress in trying to replicate Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon. She stayed up late preparing the dish, set her alarm so she could snooze while the dish simmered, slept through her alarm and awoke to a charred dish. Hopefully we would fare better.

T was our bacon man for the day. Amazingly, all of our recipes contained bacon, so he set out prepping the bacon for the boeuf bourguignon, the Swiss chard, the tartiflette, and tomorrow's potage garbure. I got started on miscellaneous prep for the various dishes, including peeling pearl onions. I had eaten pearl onions before--usually mixed in with cafeteria green peas--but I never thought about having to peel them. It was as putzy as it seems.

Peeling pearl onions

The three of us seemed to have reached the point where we were comfortable enough with each other that we could hand off recipes to each other midstream and not stress about it. We each took a run at a portion of the boeuf bourguignon--prepping, cooking stages, commenting. It all felt fairly fluid and comfortable. Yep, Team 2 was hitting its groove.

. . . until Chef stopped by and told us we were too far behind on the dish to complete it in time for lunch. Really?? We all looked at each other, not having expected that commentary. Our cooking time had barely started. We looked at the recipe and saw that it was supposed to cook for three hours, which meant it needed to go into the oven within 30 minutes of when we started our cooking time in order to meet our lunch deadline. Crap. OK, we'd serve it with tomorrow's lunch. We put the various components into the fridge.

The guys refocused on the other recipes, and I decided to make the crust for the quiche Lorraine. The recipe calls it "Pâte Brisee," but as I read the recipe I saw it was really just a pie crust dough with an egg in it. I had made plenty of pie crusts over the years, including at the CIA's Baking Boot Camp two years earlier. It was nice to work on something that felt somewhat familiar and well within my capabilities. I followed the recipe in the binder, wrapped the ball of dough in plastic, then put it in one of our mini-fridges to rest. Next?

The rest of the dishes came together really well. J, having mastered eggs in Day 1, used my pie crust as his base for a beautiful quiche Lorraine.

Quiche Lorraine

T made a fantastic cream sauce with cheese for the tartiflette (potatoes au gratin) and poured it over the fingerling potatoes I'd sliced and the bacon he'd cooked earlier before setting it in the oven to bake. And I learned how to work with Swiss chard--quite easy, actually, and very tasty when prepared with bacon and onions.

Despite our early delays with the boeuf bourguignon, we considered it a successful food day. Our lunch plates were again loaded like Thanksgiving but with bacon as a recurring ingredient. And I learned that nun's farts are actually quite pleasant. Who knew?

Pets de nonne

Tartiflette (Potato au Gratin)--Serves 6

Tartiflette

2 tbsp butter, plus extra for greasing
16 slices of bacon (really!)
6 cups fingerling potatoes
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1 clove
1 bay leaf
1/4 onion
Salt, white pepper, and nutmeg to taste
1/4 cup heavy cream
1-1/4 cups Reblochon cheese, grated
1 tbsp chives, snipped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 2-qt gratin dish.

Place the bacon on a parchment paper lined sheet tray. Bake in the preheated oven until cooked through and crisp, about 8-10 minutes. Remove from the oven and drain the bacon on paper towels. Cut the bacon into 1/4-inch strips and reserve.

Raise the temperature of the oven to 450 degrees.

Wash the potatoes and place them in a pot with cold, salted water. Bring to a boil and simmer until cooked through, about 20 minutes. Drain and keep them warm. Cut into 1/4-inch thick slices.

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour to form a roux and cook it for 30 seconds while stirring constantly. Take the pan off the heat and allow the roux to cool slightly. Whisk in the milk until the roux and the milk are thoroughly combined. Return the pan to the stove. Insert the clove and the bay leaf into the onion (this is called onion piqué) and add to the sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer over medium heat. Continue to simmer, stirring occasionally, until well flavored and with the desired consistency, about 30 minutes. When the sauce is finished, remove and discard the onion piqué. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and add the heavy cream.

In a large bowl, mix the potatoes, four-fifths of the bacon, and enough sauce to lightly bind the two. Add half of the cheese and mix together thoroughly. Pour this mixture into a buttered 2-qt gratin dish. Top the mixture with the remaining sauce, cheese and bacon and bake until it's golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Sprinkle with chives and serve.

CIA French Cuisine Boot Camp Day 2: Crepe Shards, Butter and Love

I bagged on the early breakfast this morning, opting for a little more sleep and a protein bar from my bag. No coffee at the bed & breakfast where I'm staying, though, so I made a quick dash through the cafeteria to fill my travel mug with caffeine before class.

Tuesday through Thursday cooking sessions would be focused on different regions of France. Day 5 would cover bistro & brasserie dishes.  Tuesday's focus:  Normandy, Brittany, Champagne and The North, The Loire, and Paris & Ile de France. Our lecture covered the geography, primary foodstuffs, and dishes for which the northern and western parts of France were known.

We were starting to get more comfortable with Chef Remolina and enjoyed his sense of humor.  He grew up in Mexico but his mother was French, cooking nothing but French food at home.  He regaled us with stories like of his uncle in France who started drinking wine at 8am--that wasn't unusual--and explaining the prevalence of pork in this region of France because it could be kept in the basement during the winter months. Given his upbringing of French cooking at home and surrounded by Mexican food outside the home, I figured he had some pretty diverse food tastes.

"There's a lot of food I don't like," he commented during the lecture.

Long pause.

"Well, not really," he chuckled.  "Even junk food is good."  Yep, I really liked this guy.

As we were released to the kitchen, we divided up our team's recipes and prep work: J would take the Sole Beurre Blanc, I would cover the Galette Complête, T would take the Salade Tourangelle, and we'd figure out the Sauté de Haricots Verts along the way. We also had to marinate the beef for the Boeuf Bourguignon that we'd be making on Wednesday.

My dish translated into English as Buckwheat Crepes with Ham, Egg and Cheese.  My father had been making crepes since he was a kid, and I had never attempted it, so I thought this would be fun to try. It also seemed like something I might actually make again, which was a bonus.

The crepe batter seemed quite runny when I mixed it, so I checked with Chef and he just shrugged it off.  Then he demonstrated how to make the crepes.  Of course, it looked incredibly easy--a little clarified butter in a hot pan, scoop some of the batter into the pan with a ladle, let it set, flip it with your fingers, then slide it onto a plate. Piece of cake.

Not so easy for me.

Keeping an eye on my new friend L who was making sweet crepes next to me, I attempted to replicate the procedure. The crepe stuck to the pan, I singed my fingers trying to flip it, and ended up with several pieces of cooked batter.  This could not reasonably be called a crepe. Crepe shards, maybe.

L tried to offer guidance, but I still had trouble getting it right. My teammates were nibbling on the shards and encouraged me to place my 'mistakes' into a bowl where L had been placing hers. My stack of shards quickly overwhelmed hers.

Chef stopped by and looked over my shoulder.

"When are you going to be done with those crepes?" Chef asked, with what I read to be a tone of impatience in his voice.

"When I get them right!" I retorted with a mix of irritation and humor. I'll be damned if I'm going to give up now.  T & J each took a turn offering suggestions.  More butter?  Less batter? The trick was getting the right balance between the amount of batter, the heat under the pan, and the right amount of butter to get the crepe to set well enough that I could slide it to the edge of the pan and flip it with my fingers.  More often than not, the crepe would stick, tear, or otherwise resist my attempts to flip it neatly and therefore ended up on the scrap heap.

Eventually I had enough crepes for the dish and was ready to move on to the next step: frying the eggs and assembling the galettes, both of which appeared to need to be done at the same time. Chef came over to help. I put the crepes on plates and topped them with shredded gruyere and a slice of ham. Chef fried the eggs, one at a time, and slid each one on top of the crepe/cheese/ham stack. Perhaps he didn't trust me to make the eggs given the trying time I'd had with the crepes? I didn't know, but frankly I didn't mind either way.

J had plated his sole, and Chef took from his hand the pan he'd used to prepare the fish. Chef sniffed the now-empty pan and said, "Too much white pepper."

The three of us looked at each other in amazement.  "How can you tell that just from sniffing the pan?"

"White pepper can have a kind of a dirty smell when there's too much of it," he said.  "You can smell it in the pan. See?"

We each sniffed the pan. I didn't smell anything. Perhaps that's why he's the chef and I'm paying for the privilege of being in his kitchen.

It was about this time that I fell in love again. Completely head over heels.

Shallots.

The love child of onions and garlic.

Sure, I'd eaten and prepared shallots many times before.  But somehow this time was different.  Perhaps it was the excessive amount of butter in which they were sautéed, or maybe that Chef had us add extra shallots versus what the recipe required. It didn't matter. I knew shallots would never disappear from my life again. After being sautéed in the butter, the shallots were tossed with haricot verts (green beans) that had been boiled in water, shocked in a bath of ice water, drained and held until we were close to serving time.

Together we plated our dishes, put the beef in the fridge to marinate overnight, and put our platters on the table with everyone else's food. The spread of fabulous dishes was almost overwhelming. Everything looked amazing, and I wanted to try everything. After snagging at least a spoonful of everything, I made my way to the dining room to dig in.

Our team's dishes all turned out quite well. T's salad, which featured bits of pork belly and toasted hazelnuts, was excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed my galette--the nuttiness of the buckwheat crepe went quite well with the ham and cheese, and Chef had cooked the eggs so they were just runny enough to ooze over the entire stack. And J's sole was delicious. Just the right amount of white pepper, in my opinion.

Galette complête (Makes 6 crepes)

1 cup buckwheat flour

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

2 tsp salt

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup milk

1-1/2 cups water

1-1/2 tsp vegetable oil

1-1/2 tbsp butter, melted, plus more as needed for the pan

Filling:

2 tbsp butter, melted

6 eggs

2 cups Gruyère cheese, shredded

12 ham slices

Whisk the flours and salt together in a bowl. Make a well in the center. In a separate bowl whisk together the eggs, milk, water, oil and butter.

Add the liquid to the dry ingredients about 1/2 cup at a time, blending after each addition. Whisk only long enough to form a smooth batter.

Heat a 12" nonstick skillet over medium heat. Brush the pan lightly with melted butter and add 1/3 cup of batter. Immediately after pouring, rotate pan to spread the batter so it coats the pan evenly. Cook until golden brown. Turn and cook on the other side. Transfer to a warm platter. Repeat process as necessary.

When ready to serve, place one crepe on a warm plate and scatter 1/3 cup of cheese on top. Place 2 slices of ham on top of the cheese.  Heat some of the butter for the filling in a nonstick skillet. Add an egg and cook sunny-side up, just until the whites are set. Slide the egg on top of the ham and, if desired, fold the edges of the crepe over the ham and cheese, leaving the egg exposed (we skipped this in class).  Reserve warm while completing the remaining crepes. Serve warm.

Sauté de Haricots Verts (Serves 6)

1-1/2 lb haricot verts (thin green beans), washed and trimmed

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp shallots, minced (we used more like 1/4 cup) Salt & pepper to taste

Bring salted water to a full boil and add the haricots verts.  Cook until al dente. Transfer to an ice bath to shock (stop the cooking process). Drain well.

When ready to serve, add the butter to a sauté pan set over medium heat. Add the shallots and sweat until translucent. Add the haricots verts and season to taste with salt and pepper, and toss to coat.

Sauté until the beans are heated through.  Serve on a heated platter.

French Cuisine Boot Camp at the Culinary Institute of America--Day 1

Note: I have had the good fortune to have taken several classes at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, NY as part of their 'Enthusiasts' offering of non-degree classes. This is the first installment describing my experience in my most recent 5-day Boot Camp. My views do not necessarily reflect those of my classmates, but I do hope they--and you--enjoy reading my perspective on the course. 

Day 1: Orientation and Mother Sauces

6am. Orientation begins in the dining room of the Continuing Education Center at the CIA. I'm just pulling into the parking structure. Frick.

Fortunately I know where I'm going, as I've been lucky enough to have attended CIA Boot Camps before.  I head straight into the room and quietly apologize for my tardiness.  I sign in & grab my new duffel bag--my fourth official 'Boot Camp' bag. I scan the room and choose a table near the windows where an older gentleman is seated. The crowd looks pretty much like every other at the first-day orientation: a mix of people in casual attire (first-timers) and chef uniforms (repeat boot campers).  Sometimes there are professional chefs in their own chef's whites, but mostly these classes tend to be made up of foodies.

After our run-through of rules and expectations, we grab breakfast in the student cafeteria. It hardly seems appropriate to call it a cafeteria when all of the food is made to order and the specials include things like egg white omelets with ham, goat cheese and pesto.  They also offer an almost overwhelming selection of daily options such as eggs any way with bacon, sausage, potatoes, etc., two choices of smoothies, baskets full of pastries, and so on.  Everything is made by a class of culinary students who started their efforts at 2am.

This is our first opportunity to get to know our classmates, and it's the typical opening round of questions: what's your name, where are you from, occupation, is this your first time here, etc.  The camps tend to draw a lot of people from the New England states, plus a smattering of others from the rest of the U.S.  I'm amazed to meet a fellow Wisconsinite who lives just about 40 miles from me. I've never run into another Cheesehead in class except for the time I came with one.

We return to the classroom, and there is little time to chat as Chef dives quickly into the lecture on sauces. He will demonstrate the "mother sauces" in the kitchen, after which we will make derivative sauces in our teams. Since we're only making sauces and not actual dishes, one of the full-time student classes will prepare our lunch for day one. For the rest of the week, whatever we make we will eat for lunch.

After talking through the recipes we move into the kitchen to declare our spots for the week.  The kitchen we'll occupy over the next five mornings consists of four team stations built around back-to-back stoves and ovens. Each station has its own mini fridges under the counter, plus two cutting board stations and a table behind it with a third cutting board station. Each cutting board station has an apron and two side towels folded neatly, plus a chef's knife and paring knife.

My new Wisconsin friend invites me to join her team, but the linens are already taken from that spot. I wander until I find an open spot and find myself joining Team 2 with J and T. I take a quick peek at my binder to see what sauces our team will make: chasseur, fresh tomato sauce, soubise, and choron. We also need to marinate some pork for one of tomorrow's dishes, salade tourangelle.

Chef calls us all over to the stove on the other side to begin his demonstration of mother sauces. There are five basic sauces that feed all others in French cooking: velouté, béchamel, espagnole, tomato and hollandaise. He starts by making a roux, a roughly 50/50 combination of flour and butter that is cooked in a sauté pan until it reaches the appropriate color for the sauce you're making. The longer you cook the roux, the more it browns and takes on a stronger, nuttier flavor. For white sauces, the roux is left "pale" to "blonde," whereas a brown sauce will be cooked to the color of peanut butter. All of this has to be done while watching carefully and stirring, because a burned roux needs to be tossed.

After our demonstration we disperse to our stations to figure out who would prepare what sauce.  I take chasseur, a derivative of espagnole sauce with mushrooms and wine.  I keep thinking it's 'chausseur' which I think has something to do with shoes if I remember my college French correctly.  T takes soubise sauce, a bechamel derivative.  J accepts the challenge to make choron sauce, an egg-based variation on Hollandaise. I do not envy his task--working with egg yolk over simmering water scared the bejeebers out of me, and since I have no plans to recreate such a sauce after returning home, I'm not sorry to let someone else take it. 

We all dive into preparing our sauces, starting to figure out how we'll work together. There's a lot of bumping into each other initially, borrowing ingredients from each other, asking one another's opinions on what we're doing, and calling Chef over as needed.

My chasseur sauce turns out to be fairly straightforward. That's a very good thing, as we'll have to stop midway through preparing our recipes to have lunch. Plus, there's a photographer coming in the afternoon to take pictures of each of us with Chef Remolina, for which we'll need to step away from our sauces briefly if we're still cooking at that point.

After lunch the sauces are really rolling there's a crowd around the stove. The burners seem to be completely ablaze or shut off entirely, so we're all a bit on edge trying not to burn our first projects in the CIA kitchen.

J's tenacity impresses me.  After fighting with scrambled eggs on the first two tries, he presses on for a third attempt with his sauce with the help of one of our student assistants.  He continues whisking diligently, and reluctantly hands the whisk to the student and T in order to get his  photo taken with Chef. He returns afterward and produces a perfect sauce.

Everyone pours their sauces into tall metal pots--bain maries--and places them on a large table in the kitchen. Chef has us gather around the table and passes a plastic dishwashing basket full of spoons so we can try each sauce.  We follow each other in a circle around the table, ooh-ing and aah-ing over the delicious and, in many cases, decadent sauces we all created on our first day.  This is clearly the start of a delicious friendship.

Espagnole sauce

Brown roux: 3/4 cup butter + 2 cups all-purpose flour

1/3 cup vegetable oil

Mirepoix: 2 cups onions, medium dice + 1 cup carrots, medium dice + 1 cup celery, medium dice

2/3 cup tomato paste

5 qt brown veal stock

Sachet d'epices: 4 parsley stems, 4 bay leaves, 4 garlic cloves, 1 tsp dried or fresh thyme, and 1 tsp cracked black peppercorns, all tied into a cheesecloth sachet Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the butter in a sauté pan over medium heat until it stops bubbling. Add the flour and cook, stirring frequently, until it becomes a deep, rich, brown color (darker than peanut butter). Reserve.

Heat the oil in a saucepot over low to medium heat and sauté the onions until translucent. Add the carrots and celery and continue to brown. You are looking for a golden brown color from the onions.

Add the tomato paste and cook for several minutes until it turns a rusty brown and has a sweet aroma.  (This evaporates the acid and leaves the tomato flavor.)

Add the stock and bring it to a simmer.

Whisk the roux into the stock. Return to a simmer and add the sachet. Simmer for about 1 hour, skimming the surface as necessary.

Strain the sauce. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. The sauce is ready to be served now, or can be rapidly cooled and refrigerated for later use.