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.

Improvised Italian Sausage & Potatoes

When I eat something wonderful in a restaurant but can’t pry the recipe out of the chef, I often jot down some notes about it so I have a shot at recreating it myself. Many of these notes do nothing but accumulate until I or, more often, my husband tosses them as part of a much larger pile of papers. This afternoon I perused some notes I’d made on my iPhone and came across the following list of ingredients from a tapas dish I’d once eaten:

chorizo, red potatoes, red wine, onions, tomatoes, parsley?

I had an image of the dish in my mind, but I couldn’t remember the details. Then I recalled that I had purchased mild Italian sausage at the grocery store yesterday and had red wine and onions. And beautiful red potatoes were in every grocery store now. This was a great opportunity for my own interpretation of the dish, since I couldn’t remember the original perfectly anyway.

I ran to the grocery store for red potatoes and found some baby reds that looked especially good, plus a bunch of fresh Italian parsley.

What I came up with was a sort of hash that resembled the dish we’d had in the tapas restaurant but with a distinctly Italian twist. The verdict: Thumbs up all the way around. So here it is:

Italian Sausage & Potato “Hash”
Serves 4 with leftovers
2T canola oil
1-1/3 lb. Italian sausage (without casings, or remove casings if you purchase sausage links)
1-1/2 lb. baby red potatoes
1 lg onion, diced
1 red and 1 orange bell pepper, diced
3 tomatoes, roughly seeded and chopped
3T red wine (I used a nice Chianti. Save the rest to drink with dinner.)
Salt & pepper (to taste)
2-3T chopped fresh parsley
2 tsp dried Italian herbs or 2T chopped fresh cilantro and basil

Heat large pan over medium heat. Add oil and tilt pan to coat. Add sausage and brown thoroughly.

While the sausage is browning, slice the potatoes in half and place into a microwave-safe dish with about 2T water. Cover and microwave for 5 minutes to steam the potatoes.

When the sausage is browned, add onions and peppers to the pan and sprinkle with salt. Sauté until onions start to become translucent. Remove from pan into a dish, retaining as much oil in the pan as possible, and keep the mixture warm.

Return the pan to the heat. Add potatoes and toss them in the oil. Allow the potatoes to brown, then add tomatoes and wine to the pan and scrape up the bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the sausage mixture back to the pan and mix well. Sprinkle the herbs into the mixture and stir well. Bring everything up to temperature and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with bread.