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.

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.