23 Sept - Macaroon Demo with Adriano Zumbo

Adriano Zumbo is currently one of the hottest patissiers in Sydney, particularly famous for his macaroons and V8 Cake (8 different layers of vanilla all rolled up into one cake) after his appearance on Masterchef season 2.  Ryde TAFE (where I am studying Pastry Baking) hosted a evening with Adriano demonstrating how to make his macaroons.  This event was sold out before I had even heard about it, but luckily Elke had an extra ticket and at the last minute invited me along.  Sadly, I was a bit flu-y, so can't remember that much, and my notes are a bit hap-hazzard, however, i do remember tasting 3 yummy macaroons,  finding out his Freeze Dry fruit supplier (which I need for my cakes), and finding out that Adriano has a tattoo of Willy Wonker on his upper arm.  So, a great evening out!  Thanks Elke, for the ticket.

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Le Cordon Bleu - Gravalax Anyone?

Also knows as Gradvalax, Gravlax, Graflax, etc.   Salmon cured in salt, sugar, white pepper corns and dill, wrapped up and let to extract liquid, for a few days, then served thinly sliced.
This curing process extracts water from the fish, intensifying to the taste.  One of my personal favourites and just scrumptious with pouched eggs, or served on blinis or crackers.

Chef John Daly demonstrated preparing a Gravalax in Thursday's class and Chef Elke finished off the final product in Saturday's class.

As you can see from the top collage, Chef John filleted and cured a whole Salmon, but sadly we did not get a whole salmon each in class to test our filleting skills on.

That, together with the fact that my instantly marinated salmon mysteriously disappeared from the fridge at the end of Saturday's class inspired me to visit Sydney Fish market on Sunday morning to get a Salmon of my very own.

So, 4.5 kg's and $58 later, I put myself to the challenge of filleting my own Salmon.   Stupidly I left my Wursthof knives in my locker, at Le Cordon Bleu and my globals, although good, just don't really compare.  Together with stonking hot day of 43 degrees and me jumping around the kitchen in my underwear, with a cut open finger covered in paper towel, plasters and gloves, working quickly against the heat, repetively returning the fish to the fridge to prevent it from heating up too much, I managed to fillet my salmon.  wow!  Admittedly my job didn't compare to the likes of Chef John, Werner and Elke, or the willing staff at the Fish market, but it was fun.  Next time, I might just get the Fish market to do it for me ;)

I now have 1/2 the salmon being cured in my fridge and the other half in my freezer, cut into beautiful fillets.

I feel a few salmon salads coming on for lunch in the coming day :)

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 18

Saumon de Tasmanie marine aux fine herbes - Marinated Tassie salmon

Today was definitely a day of Salmon at Le Codon Bleu.  First we started with our gravalax (which you'll hear about later), then we went onto our Instant marinated Tassie salmon, which was served on Wattleseed blinis.

A Blini is a little Russian pancake, which differs from crepes in the way that it gets its lift from yeast.  This also means that you need to give your yeast time to rise, so when making blini batter, you will need at least 1 hour of resting time in a warm place.   After it has rested we whisk in stiff peaked egg whites.

Wattleseed is a native Australian bush tukka seed that tastes similar to coffee.  Ideally you would want to first make a wattleseed mud or essence, but in our case, we infused our Wattleseed directly into warm milk that was later used in the batter.  Although this is fine, it only utilizes about half the taste.

Besides the use of yeast, making blinis is very similar to making little pancakes.  Melt some clarified butter and fry little pancakes, turning them over when they have a bit of colour and bubbles have raised through the batter.  Add more clarified butter between each round.

Instant marinade refers to a marinade that is added to the meat/fish just before serving.  In our case, we were instantly marinading Salmon.  The marinade was an emulsion (similar to mayo) made from lime juice, grape seed oil, and many finely chopped herbs.  The lime juice cooks the salmon instantly, so it really is important to have everything ready before you marinade your salmon.

For Mains on today's menu we have a Club Sandwich.  I'm not entirely sure if this is french, but it was delicious!

The reason why you have 3 pieces of bread in a club sandwich is to keep the warm meat (chicken and bacon) separated from the fresh crunchy salad.  This ensures that you do not cook your salad and your meat stays warm.

Putting the sandwich together is pretty basic, the work comes in getting all the ingredients together:

Roast Chicken

Grilled bacon

Toasted bread

Mayonnaise

Slice tomato and crispy cleaned and dryed lettuce

butter and assembly

Order of layers (from bottom to top):

bread, butter, mayo, chicken, bacon, bread, butter, mayo, lettuce, tomato, mayo, butter, bread, toothpick

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 17

Today's Menu

Boeuf Bourguignon with Pomme Puree

Beef Bourguignon, also known as Beef Burgundy because of the Burgundy wine used for cooking, started as a peasant dish that was refined by Haute Cuisine (French cuisine).

This dish takes tougher, cheaper cuts of meat.  The method of simmering this dish helps to tenderize the meat by breaking down the muscles, fat and sinew, while keeping the flavour.   Generally the pieces of meat used are tougher because they come from parts of the animal that carry out lots of work, e.g. the shin, and therefore have more developed sinew and fat.  This is also where the taste comes from.

The dish is also flavoured from the bacon lardons, butter, veggies, mushrooms, garlic, shallots and rendered fat and bouquet garni.

We used duck fat, that we rendered from fatty duck skin.  We rendered the fat by boiling the skin and fat up with a bit of water, as the water evaporates, you are left with liquid fat.  This adds a delicious taste, but is not good for the cholesterol, and probably increases the chance of a heart attack.

Tips for a good bourguignon:

• Clean your meat by cutting off excess sinew and fat
• Dust your meat with flour before browning, this will help thicken your sauce.
• Use rendered fat or lard to seal your cuts of meat.
• Make a bouquet garni using parsley, thyme, rosemary, peercorns, bayleaves, juniper berries and cloves
• Use both dried and fresh mushrooms, no need to soak your dried mushroom, just rinse before use.
• Cook your veggies separately and then add at the end of cooking.  This helps to keep their colour.
• Once cooked, remove your meat from the pot and reduce your sauce into the consistencly that you want before returning your meat to the sauce.  

Perfect Pomme Puree (mashed potatoes)

In class we roasted our potatoes separately wrapped in foil, but a better way (and one favoured by our Chef) is to peel and boil the potatoes until cooked.

Then push the potatoes through a sieve and whisk in cream and a bit of butter.  Season with Salt and Pepper.  Make sure you don't make them too runny, or you won't be able to pipe them into the pretty designs.

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 16

Mains

Medaillons de veau sautes a la sauce au tarragon

served with Gratin dauphinois

Desert

Crepes aux poires 

Aka Juicy soft veal medallions with a creamy tarragon sauce (of course) served with Gruyere cheese potato bake and if you're not full yet, we'll throw in a couple of thin pancakes with pears (that have been macerated in sugar).

Before we get started with the cooking and eating of veal, I'd like to take a minute to talk about what veal is and where it comes from.  Veal is the meat from a young calf,  mostly a byproduct of dairy farming.  In order for diary cows to continue to produce milk they must give birth to a calf once a year.   This fuels the production of veal calves and bobby calves (which I'm not going to go into). Across the world veal is a controversial issue due to the treatment of veal calves.  Different countries treat their calves differently, resulting in different types of meat produced.  

In France, and other parts of Europe, veal calves spend their entires lives in individual crates, where they are unable to turn around, they do not see the light of day and they are fed a nutritionally complete milk formula resulting in a classic white or ivory to pink coloured meat.  They are slaughtered 18-20 weeks old.

You can feel a bit better about enjoying your veal in Australia as here the calves are generally reared in groups (unless they have been quarantined due to illness), enjoy a diet of fed milk, milk substitute, grain and cereals.  They are reared until they are 7-8 months old resulting in the meat being pink-red with a texture not quite as silky as the French version, but with very little taste difference.

Since ancient times veal has been an important ingredients in both Austrian and French cuisines.  Generally the same cooking rules apply to veal as they do to Beef, using the same cuts for the same methods of cooking, with the exception of the rareness.  Because veal calves are slaughtered so young, they have under developed immune system and are more prone to illness and so veal should be cooked a minimum of medium.

Returning to our French cuisine, we were using the tenderloin, which is the premium cut of veal.  It consists of the eye meat above the backbone, is nice and tender and has very little fat and sinew.  The tenderloin gets cut into the 3 main parts: tournados, chateaubriand and filet mignons.

I was lucky to pick up a piece of the chateaubriand, with the smallest amount of sinew, so after cleaning up the tiny spec of sinew and fat, I cut it into 3 medallions, tied them with twine (to hold their shape) and let them rest in the fridge to set their shape.

We sautéed our veal medalions medium-rare, to an internal temperature of approximately 60 degrees, in a splash of grapeseed oil.  When sauteing any meat, put the meat into a hot pan and then try not to touch or move it before it has had a chance to develop a good colour.  The brown colour holds lots of taste and looks great.  Nothing worse than a grey piece of meat on your plate.   Sneak a peak at the colour, once you are happy, turn it over and repeat on the other side, adding another splash of oil if your pan has dried up.   I then tested my internal temp on my thermometer, and if you have the colour you want and its not yet cooked, pop it in the over to finish it off.  After the cooking is complete, remove the veal and leave to rest.  Then comes the sauce; degrease the pan by wiping off any excess oil using paper towel, deglace your pan using 100mls of white wine and let it reduce to 1/2.  Strain and remove to a clean pan (one that won't discolour), add 100mls of stock and reduce again to approx 1/2.  You sauce should be starting to get thicker and stickier by now.   And then finally, add 100mls of cream and reduce again.  Just before serving, add a blob of butter and finely sliced fresh tarragon.  YUM!!

Serve your medallions in a puddle of your delicious sauce.

While this was all going on we also get our Gratin Dauphinas on the go...Dauphine is a region in France. Its cuisine relies heavily on cheese, freshwater fish, crayfish, mushrooms, potatoes, and fruit, making our Gruyere cheese and potato bake very traditional, and with no shortage of cream, also very delicious and fattening.

Start by taking a few peeled Desiree potatoes, slicing them about 1.5cm thick, par boiling them in milk that has been seasoned with salt, pepper and nutmeg (and maybe a bit of garlic).  In the meantime heat 300ml of seasoned cream, strain your potatoes and carefully layer them into a pre-buttered and dish that has been rubbed with a garlic clove.  Pour over the warm cream to 3/4 full and bake at 180 degrees for 5 minutes.  Cover in grated gruyere cheese and bake again until cheese is golden and potatoes and soft all the way through.  

Finally to finish off with the crepes.  Crepes originate from Brittany, a region northwest of France, but are now consumed across France and are considered a national dish.  

A crepe is a thin pancake made with a trace of butter and then fried in butter or oil.  They are eaten both savoury and sweet and today we made sweet crepes with macerated pears.  

You can macerate fruit by sprinkling it with sugar, this allows fruit to release and stew in their own juices making them tastier and easier to digest.

It is best to use fruit that is still firm. We macerate our pears by peeling, de-coring and then slicing them into thin slices.  We layered them onto a tray and sprinkled them with sugar.  This was then left out while our batter rested.  Oh, I haven't mentioned that yet, yes... it is very important to make your crepe batter ahead of time and let it rest for at least 1 hour.  This is so the gluten in the flour is given time to relax before cooking.  If you are resting them in the fridge, return them to room tempreture before cooking.

Finally, before cooking, make sure you are using a frying pan that is smooth.  Most restaurant serving crepes will keep their crepe pans separately, so that they are kept beautifully smooth so that your crepes don't stick.  

Heat up a blob of butter and just before it browns pour in your crepe batter.  Spread evenly over the surface and when you have colour, turn it over and cook the other side.   We layered our slices of pear into our batter, but you just as easily add your pears after cooking, fold them up and serve with some cream.  We finished our crepes off by brushing them with Poire Williiam liqueur (pear liqueur), but you could use any liqueur of your choice.

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 15

Today I felt was Le Cordon Bleu's first slight on their so far fantastic repertoire of French foods, by unsuccessfully stealing a perfectly good Asian dish and adding nothing but confusion.  

Today we had Crevettes sautee avec legumes et tofu, aka, Prawn and Tofu stir-fry!  And to add to the fun we weren't given woks, but instead had to cook our stir fry in a pot.  So to demonstrate the ridiculousness of this execution, i have decided to replace all 'c's with 'k's (and 'k's with 'c's) for the rest of this sektion of this blog to prove how silly this really is.

In the normal world, a woc is used for its large surfake area, this helps to disperse the heat quickly, allowing you to get krispness without over koocing your food.  Konfused, yeah, me too!

A large surfaced area pot does a similar job, but with it's unrounded shape makes it hard to toss your food, also you run a risk of the food steaming instead of stir-frying due to it all being on top of itself. 

Here are a few pointers to making a perfect stir fry:

• Mise en place - have everything ready to go.  Once you start the cooking process, there is no time to stop and chop, or mix, etc.  As stir-fries to so quick.
• Cut all your veggies the same size, so they will take the same amount of time to cook.  We juilenned our carrots, snow peas and ginger, but you don't need to be that precise.
• Use a wok (or a large surface area pot), but I would suggest a wok.
• Use peanut or vegetable oil, as they can be heated to a high temperature without burning.
• Have your sauce ready on the side (we mixed oyster, soy, sugar and chicken stock)
• Have a thickener ready on the side (just incase you need to thicken your sauce at the end). Although if you're adding something that was already covered in cornflour (like our tofu), you might not need any.   However, we had a bit of cornflour and water mixed, ready.  Use corn flour instead of wheat flour as it doesn't take time to cook and thicken, corn flour thickens almost instantly after being added to your hot sauce.
• Cook your food groups separately - First your meat (then remove and rest), then your tofu (we dusted in corn flour and deep friend this first), then your veggies (withe garlic, ginger, coriander stalks) and then finish it off by returning your other cooked ingredients. 
• Add your sauce at the end, don't overdo it, just enough to cover the stir fry.  Otherwise you'll have soup.
• Don't over cook it, hard and crunchy is better than a floppy.
• Keep the wok nice and hot.
• Finally, add your herbs at the end, or just before serving to keep them crunchy and fresh.

Easy and so healthy!  You can add all sorts of things, like fresh corn, cabbage, capsicum, onions, chillis, chicken, egg plant, eggs, any thing you want.

Wonderful Chef Elke, again added in a few extras into the demonstration with regards to veggie options and showed up how to make deep fried eggs.  They were great, I've never seen this before.  Hard boil some eggs, boil and dry.   Heat your oil and then deep fry your eggs until they turn golden brown.  Finally as you remove them from the oil, drain and then marinate them.  You can also marinate them before deep frying.  Isn't that great!

Our main meal on today's menu was Calmar au sel et poivre (Salt and Pepper Squid) served with Eggplant and tomato relish.
A favourite in Australia (well the squid anyway)!  For this dish, we had to create our own salt and pepper mix by dry roasting  black and sichuan peppercorns, grinding them down and adding salt.  However, again with the day of non-matching utensils, the pestle and mortar that we were given was about the size of my thumb and the amount we had to crush was bigger then my foot!

The eggplant relish consisted of macedoine cut egg plant (1cm cubed), brunoise cut shallots (finely chopped), capers, anchovies, chilli jam, red wine vinegar, tomato concasse (blanched, de-seeded and sliced).  A relish is a cooked food that has been picked and preserved and mostly served as a condiment.  So with that in mind, there was a debate as to if this was actually a relish or a salsa.  Theoretically you can jar and store a relish, something you would do to keep something for a prolonged period of time as it has been pickled.   This recipe does have a splash of vinegar, but it really was for the eating now.  Either way, it was really delicious and later when reheating the stir-fry (in a wok) and added the relish and salt and pepper squid and it really added a great tang.  So I will definitely add a bit of ginger and a splash of vinegar in the future to my aubergine dishes.  Add some fresh chopped parsley after you have finished cooking, to add a bit of freshness.

Finally, the Salt and Pepper Squid!  We seasoned rice flour with some pepper mix (don't add salt, as salt can react with oil while deep frying) and set it aside.  We cleaned, cut and scored our squid (taking care to remove that top layer of skin both inside and outside of the squid), dipped them in slightly whisked egg whites, tossed them into the rice flour mix, shook loose any flour and threw them into a deep fryer at approx 180-190C (yes more deep frying, now can you see why i didn't loose weight this week!).  
When you hear noise starting to escape from your squid you know its cooked, as the noise is the oil reacting against the liquid in the squid.  This means that the oil has penetrated the batter.  Immediately after removing the squid from the fryer, sprinkle on the salt and pepper mix.  Dry off on paper towel and serve with relish/salsa, a couple of cheeks of lime and a few pieces of chilli.