CIA French Cuisine Boot Camp Day 4: Fish Stews and Purple Teeth

CIA French Cuisine Boot Camp Day 4: Fish Stews and Purple Teeth

 

After discussing the regions of Central France, Bordeaux and the Atlantic, Gascony & Basque Country, and Languedoc-Rousillon, Chef introduced us to the concept of Hangover Day.  Chef explained that since Friday was graduation day for a group of students, those students who had been working in the restaurants would have their last dinner service that night.  After that, they would go out to celebrate the end of their schooling. Many of their non-graduating friends would join them in the celebration and pay the price as they would start a new term of classes on Friday with a hangover.

Ironically, our class was scheduled for a wine tasting this afternoon. Hopefully tomorrow wouldn't turn out to be Hangover Day for any of us.

Our team had two stews on our menu for the day: potage garbure (cabbage and meat stew) and marmitako (tuna and potato stew). In addition, we had souffle au fromage (cheese souffle), daube d'oignons (red wine braised onions), and needed to deconstruct and marinate chickens for tomorrow's coq au vin. And, lest we forget, we still had to cook our boeuf bourguignon from yesterday. 

For my first feat, I decided to prepare the tuna for the marmitako. I had never worked with tuna before.  Fish (as a food item) rarely entered our household during my childhood, and it was only since getting married that I had started eating it.  In the past few years I had cooked fish a handful of times, but typically I relied on restaurants to prepare my fish for me. 

 

I turned the dark red piece of fish over in my hands considering how to approach it.  My task was merely to cut it into chunks for the stew--not too complex. I conferred with the student assistant about the darkest red spot across the edge of the cut and confirmed that the spot was a vein that should be cut out. From there it was just a matter of cubing the meat.  That I could handle.

For our class demonstration, Chef showed us how to cut a chicken into eight pieces. I watched carefully and recorded the demo with my phone so I could replicate the experience later, knowing I'd have a hard time remembering the steps at home without visual aids. I had learned this same procedure at my first Boot Camp and forgot it before I returned home. This time would be different: not only would I record it, but I would practice it.

Chef made quick work of the chicken. He showed us how to remove the wishbone so that the breasts could be removed cleanly.  He cut the legs off the bird, maneuvering the knife to capture a small piece of flesh he referred to as the 'oyster'.  The legs and wings were then cut  into pieces using tricks that made everything come apart effortlessly.  Easy peasy.

I volunteered to break down the chickens for tomorrow's coq au vin.

I took the wings off first, then the legs. So far, so good. As I fought with the wishbone, though, one of the student assistants came over to help me. I broke the wishbone but managed to remove it anyway with some help. Separating the leg from the thigh was more troublesome. I tried using the technique Chef had shown us but I was making a mess of it. 

"Let me show you how I do it," the student said.  "I think it's a little easier than what Chef showed you." How could it be easier? What Chef demonstrated was so simple--look at the skin to see where the change in texture makes a line, and slice cleanly through that line. Effortless. But, then, it wasn't so effortless for me so far, and I was ending up with mangled limbs--chicken limbs, that is.  

Instead of following the line on the skin as my guide for where to hold the knife to separate the two pieces, the student recommended flipping over the thigh and cutting along the line between the thigh and leg that was visible from the underside. I tried it and got a clean cut. Perfect! Clearly the students had some great tricks up their sleeves, too.

Once again, the three of us handled most of the dishes as a team, preparing or cooking some aspect of several dishes.  We had thought we were in a groove yesterday, but today seemed to flow even better.  The cheese soufflés, handled primarily by our egg master J, were gorgeous.  The two stews--potage garbure and marmitako--were both quite wonderful. T turned out a beautiful, deeply red braised onion dish. And our overdue boeuf bourguignon benefitted from its extra day of flavor melding and tasted terrific.

The afternoon lecture on Thursday was our eagerly anticipated wine tasting. Two of our classmates weren't wine drinkers but attended the lecture to learn anyway.  Most of afternoon activities started shortly after lunch, but this one had a delayed start time of 3:15. The tasting, scheduled for 90 minutes, included six different wines--three white, three red--from different regions of France. Our instructor for the afternoon was John Fischer, an enthusiastic, funny CIA grad who shared different tips and tricks for matching food and wine.  He drew maps of Italy and California on the flip chart and enlightened us about the invisible "butter/olive oil line" that divides Italy and its regional cuisines which, in turn, helps guide pairings.  All the way along we sampled the different wines and attempted to describe their flavors and other characteristics.

Three hours later, after sipping wine and sharing stories through a thoroughly entertaining and educational lecture, Chef Fischer needed to go home to cook dinner for his wife. Several opened bottles of wine remained on the table as well as a half-dozen unopened bottles. The instructor told us to drink more if we liked and to stay as long as we liked--or until we were chased out of the room. Six of us die-hards stuck around to enjoy a few more toasts, knowing the opened wine would likely just get poured down a drain somewhere if we didn't. Or at least that's how we justified it to ourselves.  This was our last afternoon together, as everyone would scatter toward their homes after class was dismissed on Friday afternoon. So we savored the conversation and the wine until someone did, indeed, chase us out of the room.

Following the wine tasting I took a walk around the campus. Despite the fact that my B&B is only about 1/2 mile from the campus, I was not prepared to drive even that short distance in my current state.  Several of my classmates offered me rides, but I opted for my walk instead. The campus, which previously had served as a Jesuit monastery, is located right on the Hudson River and has a beautiful view. A few trails wind through trees and gazebos to provide lovely, quiet spots for walking, thinking, and, well, sobering up.  After about 45 minutes I felt refreshed and alert, though a little sad that my Boot Camp experience was almost over. It was a great group and the skills and recipes I had learned here were, as always, spectacular.  I used my phone to take a picture of myself in my Chef's whites with the trees of the CIA campus in the background---a nice Facebook profile picture, I thought.  I looked at the shot and saw that my teeth were stained purple from the wine.  Nice.  Maybe I'd just keep that one for myself.

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.

Embracing color on your plate: purple rice!

You probably know that serving a range of color in our foods is more appealing to the eye and therefore makes the food more appetizing. More recently, scientists are telling us that the natural, bright colors of foods contain anthocyanins that our bodies need, and serving a combination of colors can be quite good for us.

But have you ever tried colored rice?

Personally, I’m a big believer in the idea that kids are more likely to try and like new foods if you keep them interesting and fun, and that includes using color. No, green eggs and ham don’t count: too monochromatic, and totally artificial. Sorry, Dr. Seuss.

So in the warm summer months, I raid the farmer’s market for purple potatoes, red carrots, multi-colored bell peppers—anything to capture the colors of summer and put them on the plate. But since these options are most readily available only in a short period of time, colored rices offer a nice year-round source of healthy color on the plate.

One of our favorite restaurants in town, Koreana, serves a dish called bi bim bahb which consists of several different stir-fried vegetables over rice, with purple rice as one option. Kim, one of the sisters who owns and runs Koreana, explained to me that the purple rice is actually black rice cooked with brown and/or white rice. The color from the black rice bleeds into the cooking water and turns everything purple. In digging further, I learned that the black rice is a whole-grain rice and contains similar health benefits to brown rice.

This led me to search for and experiment with different colored rices. I had to look beyond our local grocery store to find these unusual varieties, but at Whole Foods and at Sendik’s in Whitefish Bay (WI) I was able to find black rice under the name “Forbidden Rice” as well as packages of mixed black and white rices that were marketed as “purple rice” and a different variety altogether marketed as “red rice.”

These rices require slightly different techniques for cooking from one to the next. In general I prefer cooking my rice using the pasta method (boiling it in a large quantity of water and then draining it) as opposed to the pilaf method (cooking the rice in a precise amount of water and stopping when all of the water is absorbed). I have been told repeatedly that the pilaf method is the “proper” method, but I have had much more consistent results using the pasta method and am not about to change anytime soon.

In using the premixed packages of black/white and red/white rices, I heat a 2qt. pot of water to a boil, reduce the heat, then stir in about 1 tsp. of salt. Next, add the amount of rice you want to make, increase the heat until the water returns to a simmer, and cook until the rice is al dente or slightly firm when you bite into it. This usually takes 10-15 minutes, so start testing it at 10 minutes so it doesn’t become a pot of purple mush. Drain the water and let the rice rest on the stove, lid on, until you are ready to serve.

With the “straight” black rice (the Forbidden Rice), I start with the same 2 qt. pot of boiling water and add the 1 tsp. of salt. Then I add black rice to comprise about 2/3 of the total amount of rice I want to cook. Let the black rice simmer for about five minutes, then add basmati or jasmine rice to make up the remaining 1/3 of the total rice. Allow the combined rices to simmer, and start checking it for doneness after seven minutes.

Here are links to both of the rice brands I have tried for black/purple and red rice. I have not purchased from these websites and therefore do not endorse them, but you can see what the package looks like and generally what pricing would be for these items.
Forbidden Rice from Lotus Foods:
Alter Eco Purple Rice and Ruby Red Rice: You probably know that serving a range of color in our foods is more appealing to the eye and therefore makes the food more appetizing. More recently, scientists are telling us that the natural, bright colors of foods contain anthocyanins that our bodies need, and serving a combination of colors can be quite good for us.

But have you ever tried colored rice?

Personally, I’m a big believer in the idea that kids are more likely to try and like new foods if you keep them interesting and fun, and that includes using color. No, green eggs and ham don’t count: too monochromatic, and totally artificial. Sorry, Dr. Seuss.

So in the warm summer months, I raid the farmer’s market for purple potatoes, red carrots, multi-colored bell peppers—anything to capture the colors of summer and put them on the plate. But since these options are most readily available only in a short period of time, colored rices offer a nice year-round source of healthy color on the plate.

One of our favorite restaurants in town, Koreana (www.thekoreana.com), serves a dish called bi bim bahb which consists of several different stir-fried vegetables over rice, with purple rice as one option. Kim, one of the sisters who owns and runs Koreana, explained to me that the purple rice is actually black rice cooked with brown and/or white rice. The color from the black rice bleeds into the cooking water and turns everything purple. In digging further, I learned that the black rice is a whole-grain rice and contains similar health benefits to brown rice.

This led me to search for and experiment with different colored rices. I had to look beyond our local grocery store to find these unusual varieties, but at Whole Foods and at Sendik’s in Whitefish Bay (WI) I was able to find black rice under the name “Forbidden Rice” as well as packages of mixed black and white rices that were marketed as “purple rice” and a different variety altogether marketed as “red rice.”

These rices require slightly different techniques for cooking from one to the next. In general I prefer cooking my rice using the pasta method (boiling it in a large quantity of water and then draining it) as opposed to the pilaf method (cooking the rice in a precise amount of water and stopping when all of the water is absorbed). I have been told repeatedly that the pilaf method is the “proper” method, but I have had much more consistent results using the pasta method and am not about to change anytime soon.

In using the premixed packages of black/white and red/white rices, I heat a 2qt. pot of water to a boil, reduce the heat, then stir in about 1 tsp. of salt. Next, add the amount of rice you want to make, increase the heat until the water returns to a simmer, and cook until the rice is al dente or slightly firm when you bite into it. This usually takes 10-15 minutes, so start testing it at 10 minutes so it doesn’t become a pot of purple mush. Drain the water and let the rice rest on the stove, lid on, until you are ready to serve.

With the “straight” black rice (the Forbidden Rice), I start with the same 2 qt. pot of boiling water and add the 1 tsp. of salt. Then I add black rice to comprise about 2/3 of the total amount of rice I want to cook. Let the black rice simmer for about five minutes, then add basmati or jasmine rice to make up the remaining 1/3 of the total rice. Allow the combined rices to simmer, and start checking it for doneness after seven minutes.

Here are links to both of the rice brands I have tried for black/purple and red rice. I have not purchased from these websites and therefore do not endorse them, but you can see what the package looks like and generally what pricing would be for these items.

Forbidden Rice from Lotus Foods: http://www.lotusfoods.com/Forbidden-Rice/p/LOT-00210&c=LotusFoods@All

Alter Eco Purple Rice and Ruby Red Rice: http://www.worldpantry.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/CategoryDisplay?cgmenbr=688899&cgrfnbr=773890