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' ;)