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.
