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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.

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 14

Continuing on the theme of emulsions and fish from yesterday, today we were exploring permanent emulsions, or everybody's favourite...mayonnaise and aioli. 


For starters we served Goujons de Poisson frits (Goujons of flathead served with Aioli and Sauce Remoulade).


Unlike yesterday's Hollandaisse sauce, mayonnaise can be made at room
tempreture (without a baine marie) and once mixed, it will not seperate again.  By over whisking your mayonnaise you will introduce too much air, which in turn will make your mayonnaise runny.

What really gets me, is that in a kitchen of 15 students, all of which watched the same two and a half hour demo and were provided with the same recipe, not one will produce the same result.  Some results don't resemble the demonstration and then on the other end of the scale, some are better.  This makes me realised that it must be extremely hard for a restaurant to consistely produce the same dish if you have different chefs working in that section of the kitchen.  Perhaps a thought for another time, back onto todays emulsions.

First we created our mayonnaise by starting a sabayon (egg and liquid - vinegar), and mustard and then add the oil.  All that whisking, turned out to be a fabulous work out for the arm.  So you whisk up your sabayon and slowly
start to drizzle in the grape seed oil, while whisking.  This theoretically sounds easy, but when you have one hand holding your container of oil that you're drizzling in and another whisking, there is nothing to stop your  bowl from flopping all over your workbench.  So you need to stop drizzling your oil (spilling oil all over) to stabalize your bowl and then stop stabalizing your bowl to pour in more oil.  Of course, you could work with somebody and drizzle in their oil for them, but being that its pretty much a competion to get your food our first, well that means that is really everybody for themselves.

Continue incorporating the oil until you have mixed the lot (which in our case was 500ml), season and taste and then it is ready.   To create the sauce remoulade, we added finely chopped capers, gherkins, fine herbs and anchovy to the mayonnaise.  Always add the mayonnaise to the herb mixture instead of the other way round, this allows you to control the amount of mayonnaise you add.

Then onto the Aioli, which is a garlic mayonnaise.   First we roasted our garlic and add the garlic paste to the sabayon, and then well the process resembled the mayo.  Mine was a little runny, so I must have been a bit enthusiastic on the whisking.  I also seemed to pull a mussle in my butt, which makes me wonder if I was standing on one foot or what?


Todays flat head was already beautifully filleted and all we needed to do was cut it into goujons, batter and deep fry.  Easy, delicious, and totally unhealthy.  Complimented well by aoili and sauce remoulade, and a little
slice of health, in the form of a lemon :)

For mains, we created Supreme de Sauom a l'oseille (Salmon Fillet with sorrel cream sauce)  The cream sauce was a Beurre blanc, a reduction of white wine, vermouth, shallots,  fish stock, finished off with cream and then butter.  The reduced wine and vermouth create a beautiful sweet taste and the cream and butter leave it creamy and silky.  The final addition of butter also acts as a thickener and needs to be done JUST before serving.  Once the butter has been added you cannot boil your sauce. This is similar to previous sauces we had made for our meat dishes in earlier classes, and again, very delicious.  

The salmon was shallow fried in butter (obvioulsy), crispy on the outside and pink in the middle (just the way i like it).  Mine could have been finished off in the oven and it was still a little too pink when cooked. The Sorell adds the bitter touch.  Apparently Sorrel is a popular herb in France as they are not big producers of lemons and sorrell produces that bitter taste needed to compliment fish. 


Chef Werner demonstrated filleting a whole salmon (pictures below), which I found amazing.  I've seen it a few times before at fish markets, but generally they're so quick that I'm unable to catch any details.  I've included some pictures of the step by step process, of this during this demonstration the poor student on kitchen help duty got to be the one to pull the remaining bones out with pliers, not the best of jobs.  Sadly we didn't all get our own salmons to fillet, so I will need to go out to the fish market to get my own.

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 13

This week we focussed on Emulsions and Fish.  

An emulsion is the combination of 2 or more unblendable liquids, for example mixing oil and liquids - they don't naturally want to stay together, but if you get them to stay, they are very delicious.  :)

There are two main types of emulsion - temporary, where it will return to original form after an amount of time, and permanent, where, once mixed, they will stay together.  Hollandaise falls under the temporary category, making the challenge even harder.

We started the week with the Hollandaise, which needs exactly the right temperature to hold together. Too hot and it will scramble, too cold and it won't mix.   This careful work takes the care of a baine marie.   Mine was one of the many in the class to split, so i had to make a new sabayon (egg and liquid) mixture and essentially start over, all good practice and a good workout for the upper body).

So, if you were even under the impression that Hollandaise sauce was healthy, let me take a moment to tell you that it isn't!  Similarly to the saying of 'if its too good to be true', the same applies to 'if its too delicious to be healthy, you can bet your wobbly thighs it isn't'.  Hollandaise sauce consists of egg yolk (the fatty part of the egg), a dash of vinegar, and lots of clarified butter (all dairy fat has been removed, like ghee).  Its straight to the hips material.   But of course saying that it is also the 'Mother of all French sauces' and it just divine when served on veggies, or eggs benedict or in this case, fish.

Our first dish was Trout au Bleu (shallow poached trout), poached in a court bouillon, served with sliced carrots and onions and turned potatoes, and finally a serving of our beautiful Hollandaise. We poached the trout whole, with it's mouth open.  (poor trout).  I've never really been much of a fan of trout due to all the tiny bones, and this one was no different. This is also the main reason you don't find fillets of trout for sale, as no fishmonger wants to be involved in deboning a trout and no chef wants to do it either, which is why you don't see trout on many menus.  To keep the beautiful shape of the fish, we tie string through it's gill and through its mouth and through a hole at the base of its tail and poached it in the C shape.  The fish is cooked when the flesh above the spine feels like jelly, this is due to the fats throughout the fish raising to the top while poaching.  

My trout turned out well and the hollandaise very yummy, I don't know if I will go to the effort of cooking trout again at home.

Our second menu item was Filet de saint pierre a la meuriere (Fillet of mirror dory meuniere).

There are two main types of Dory in Australia, Mirror Dory, called so because of it's reflective skin.  He sells at approx $18 p/kg. And then there is John Dory, which sells at approx $30 p/kg.  Mirror Dory is normally sold as a whole fish.

Today we had a Mirror Dory each, which quickly became the first fish I had ever filleted and de-skinned.  Luckily Mirror Dory has no scales, making the job a whole bunch easier.  We used our filleting knives, which are sharp, long and bendy, allowing you to press it against the skeleton on the fish to get as much meat off the bones as possible.  The bones and other wastage of the skin can be used to create a fish stock (within 20 minutes) and then reduced to make a sauce.

We flour dusted and shallow fried our Dory fillets in a bit of grapeseed oil, this only takes 1.5-2 minutes per side, and was great.  Our Dory was served with Beurre noisette (browned butter, where the butter is browned just until the nutty flavour is released) and sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.  Very delicious, definitely a repeatable item.

Birthday Surprise!

Sorry for my mysterious disappearance.  As some of you know, last week was my birthday (yay me) and it sort of threw my week out, not that I'm complaining, in fact I wish every week was birthday week!!


Thank you to all those best wishes, emails, phone calls and pressies, they were great!  My Aunty got the time difference between South African and Australia a bit wrong and phoned me one day early, but was happy to hear that she was the first to wish me happy Birthday :)


I was spoilt enough to receive some yummy cooking items from Simon Johnson (thanks Abby), 2 beautiful Tassie chopping boards (thanks best Sister, niece and brother in law ever!), the cutest lunch box (for school from Brigitte) and a popcorn machine (from Ryan) and finally (and certainly the highlight of my birthday) a degustation dinner for two to Becasse - which was divine and Justin North is my hero.


At Becasse, Ryan and I took careful notes, analyzing each of the 10 courses, rating each for Food (taste, quality, texture), Wine (did it match the meal, portion, description accuracy), Presentation (temperature of plate, polished, first impression) and Consistency (were our plates the same).  We also took note of the time served, as we got more tipsy and more drunk (as the wine portion were very generous), our descriptions got slightly less descriptive.
Best Course (course no.5) - Poached fillet of jewfish
Food = 5
Wine = 4.5
Presentation = 5
Consistency = 4.9
Description on Menu: Prawn croustillant and sweet corn
My notes: PERFECT!  Best combination of fresh corn (still with a bit of crunch) and creamy pureed corn sauce.  Fish moist and the skin was perfectly cut with 4 perfectly matching sides.  Soft and melts in your mouth. served at 10.10pm.
Desert (course no. 10) - Mango Mousseline
Food = forgot to fill it in (but it was SO good)
Wine = forgot to fill it in (but it was a yummy desert wine)
Presentation = forgot to fill it in (but it was amazing)
Consistency = n/a as we had different deserts
Description on Menu - coconut sorbet, warm doughnuts, macadamia nuts and tropical vinaigrette
My notes:  the lightness of mousseline, the creamyness of the macadamia nut.  Bit of heaven.  Amanzing.


Actually I'm very impressed with my last write up, as we were pretty drunk by then.  All I got out of Ryan for his desert of Coffee & banana!!!! OMG!  (hehehe)


I'm still a bit confused about the consomme, which came served in its gelatinous state and I'm still not sure that I was comfortable eating that.   Anyone who has not been, i truley recommend you go, even if it is just for the desert.  SSOOOOO goood!!! Yum..yummmmmmmy!

So, back to the presents, Cornelius, the popcorn maker, is the newest addition to my kitchen family and as it was my birthday, the rule of one item in - one item out did not apply :D  Here is a picture of Cornelius in action!


Sadly however, with all this eating and a gratuitous week of emulsions (mayo, hollandaise and aioli) sauces at Le Cordon Bleu, weight watchers took a bit of a dive and now I need to get right back into it.  In fact this week at Le Cordon Bleu was so bad for the waist line even Ryan commited
himself back into a rigurous routine of golf, squash and weights.

But all of that in mind, it was worth the dieting pain I will need to endure this week.

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 12

Today was probably one of the more challenging days at Le Cordon Bleu, as the course slowly starts to introduce the creation of several components to a meal to be plated at once. The menu was Foie de veau saute au Lard - (Calf Liver with Bacon), served with epinard sautes a l'ail clouttered (spinach with garlic) and oignons fit ala francaise (french style fried onions).  The complication came in with the different methods of cooking needed simultaneaously, including shallow frying for the calf liver, sauting for the spinach, deep frying for the fried onions and reduction for our jus.



Peeling the liver was not only time consuming, but pretty bloody and gross, there is a thin skin, which needs to be carefully removed by pinching it between your fingers, getting your thumbs under the skin and slowly ripping it off.  In this process you board gets very bloody.  Also, of course, liver is not a favourite for everybody, in fact many of the students in the class wouldn't even taste it during the demonstation, and their loss really because it was quite good.  Later that evening, once home and serving two portions out of my days cooking for Ryan and myself, Ryan tried very hard to eat his portion but only made it about half way before he gave up.  I quite happy finished it up.  Liver is a great source of protein and in fact very good for you.





The French Style onion rings are delicious!  They are just like Spur onion rings (for you saffers) and they crispy on the outside and soft in the middle.  The spinach was great too, you just need to watch out for the water that runs out of the spinach, as the green liquid doesn't look so great on a plate.






For desert we made Bavarois ala vanille (vanilla bavarois - said "bav-wah"), which is an Anglaise (see lesson 9) set with gelantine, or aka a cold milk and cream based set desert, served with a sauce au cafe (coffee anglaise sauce) and in case you haven't had today's heart attack, we'll throw in some creme chantilly (sweet vanilla whipped cream).  Perhaps a little to creamy for my taste and for weight watchers, but Ryan had no problem gobbling that up.


Sadly, I had another injury today, (ARG stupid grater) while grating the nutmeg into the spinach, i accidently got my finger involved in the grater process (oooowwww :(  )  unyay me!

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 11

Soups! Yay, my favourite!  Nothing like a warm bowl of steaming pumpkin soup on a cold autumn day (or erraticly cold wintery Sydney summer day).

In demo, Chef Werner (our German chef with a developed sense of humour and sarcasm) brewed 3 pots of magic; pumpkin soup served in a golden nugget pumpkin, cold russian bortsch and lastly beef consume.  We got to recreate the pumpkin and consume (which we've been told is part of our final exam).

The pumpkin soup was a breeze, being probably one of my most popular home made dishes, although this recipe seemed a bit duller on the tongue, with the flavour of the bayleaf coming through quite strongly.

The difficulty came in on the consume, which is a clarified stock soup.   This means that you take a cloudy stock (which has already taken 2-4 hours to make), add a mixture of veggies, egg whites and mince meat (all robot couped and mushed up) and gently let it it cook in a big pot of stock.  As you can see in the collage of consume-stages below. As this happens the proteins in the meat and eggs attract all the impurities forming a raft on the top

of the soup.  This is not to be disturbed, otherwise you will re-introduce all the impurities back into the soup.  After slowly bubbling away for an hour or so (while you skim scum off the top), you'll see that the stock under the raft begins to clear.

Now if you're not managed to stuff this up so far, here comes the extremely tricky part - the removal of the raft.  (this is where you need to talk to your soup and really give it some love).  You carefully, a little bit at a time, remove the raft of gray cooked meat, veggies and egg white, until you have very little left.   Very slowly, patiently, slowly.

Then, you carefully, slowly, attentively pour the remainder of the soup through a chinwa covered with an extra filtering cloth.  Carefully, slowly (did i mention that already).

Still here?  Okay, now for the finale - because now you need to degrease your consume, which means you need to get all the grease off the top - this is shear near impossible, especially if you actually want to have soup left by the end of it!  You take pieces kitchen towel and wipe the top of your soup, over and over and over.....

and Finally, you'll be left with a beautifully clear, sparkling, almost sticky to the lips, rich in taste Beef consume.  Served with a garnish and steaming hot.  So next time you come across a consume at a restaurant, don't think 'ooh, it's just a clear soup' when it arrives at the table, think of the love and care that took to create it.

Finally, and so worth mentioning, is the cold Russian Borstch.  So easy to make, beetroot cooked in stock, blended up with a bit of raspberry vinegar and cream (not too much or it will be pink) and then topped with a yummy whipped parsley and salt cream.  So good.  Remember to serve it nice and chilly.

Picture - stages of making bortsch.

Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 10

Slight amount of procrastination happening now, as really I shouldn't be writing my blog, but instead studying for our first theory test tomorrow (hehehe!). How could I go without telling you what we did?

Today was an interesting day, as our theory teacher walked out after the first hour of a two hour class to attend a union meeting, which as it turned out then lead to a 'walk out' of all teachers!

Chef John Daly was kind enough to still present our demonstration lesson before he walked out, but we were awarded a sub teacher for our kitchen class.   So, enter Chef Vito Mancino!

Chef Vito Mancino is about as Italian as they come and just willing to give out any information that he can think of.  This was great!   Sadly his accent is so strong that I was probably only able to understand about 80-90% of it, however I suspect that was a lot more than others in my class.

Chef Vito Mancino also has a well rounded belly, a sign of a good chef!

Todays menu was Chicken supreme chivry (aka poached chicken stuffed with mousseline and served with onions, mushrooms and a cream sauce).  The point of this dish is to keep everything blanc (or white), so the chicken is poached and not roasted, the mousseline (which is a chicken mouse) is kept white too, using white pepper to season, etc.

We were also supposed to have a cheese souffle on the menu, but that was scrapped due to the union strikes.

There are 5 main components to this dish:
1.  The chicken - needs to be trimmed, and a big hole poked through it.  Filled with moussseline then pouched in chicken stock.
2.  Pistachio nuts - these are blanched, refreshed and then individually peeled and sliced.
3.  The Mousseline (chicken mousse) - grind up chicken, add egg whites, cream then sieve, season and add pistachio nuts.  This took the most time as Jon and I spent ages trying to get the Robot coupe to work, and when it did, it stank like off chicken because it hasn't been cleaned properly by the previous user, so we had to stop, clean and try again.
4.  Beurre Ravigote - the compound butter made with finely chopped chives, tarragon, parsley and butter.  All ingredients are mixed together then you rolled into clingfilm and set in the fridge.  This is later sliced and added to the sauce and on top of your chicken.
5. Sauce (i have lost the french name for this) - this is made from the chicken stock used to poach the chicken, reduced down, cream is added, then again reduced down, then the butter is added and it is served.

This dish must be one of the most delicious chicken dishes I have ever made or eaten.  However, just looking at it undid my 3 days of weight watchers.  I think I would be expelled from weight watchers if they knew that when I got home Ryan and I enjoyed the chicken, sauce and butter!  Ryan even licked his plate (that might actually have been a first ever!).

Good news:  I did not burn or cut myself!  Yay me!
Bad news:  my onions were over cooked (i blanched them too long), and my chicken was sliced too big.

Chef also demonstrated how to turn a mushroom, which was very very impressive.  I managed to get a photo (first photo, top right hand corner), sorry about the poor quality, I left my camera at home today and my little iPhone had to step up to the job.

Weight watchers Day 2

Day 1 was a success :)  So onto day two and I excitedly have yet another great strawberry surprise install for you.  Today I wanted to get creative with breakfast.  I have a box of weight watcher cereal in the cupboard, but it's 1.5 points for 30g (which is nothing as it has heavy dried fruit in it), and its just really boring!  I'm hoping that it's stale and thats why it taste so bad, but sadly I don't think it is, so it might just be yuck!

So in a mission to find a breakfast that is filling, healthy, low in saturated fat and still delicious, I have mixed up 20g of some dried strawberries, 2 weet-bix and 1/2 punnet blueberries to give me an alternative cereal of sorts.

The dried strawberries are fantastic, they're slightly soft in the middle, sugary on the outside and extremely sweet, so when sliced in the cereal they give off a great sweet taste to each bite.   You can buy them in Woollies (aka Tesco or Pnp) in the same section as the other dried fruit.    

I used a splash of skim milk and a bit of cold water.  Without the milk, it's only 3 pts. :)  Only problem was that the cereal goes soft quickly if you break it up into pieces, but I didn't mind that so much because it didn't taste like cardboard!

Walking home last night from the pool, I realised that the new foot path under the bridge (across the grass) in just the right light looks like the 'yellow bricked road' ;)