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.