The Culinary Tales Week 5: The Real Kitchen Nightmares
Week 5 turned out to be a kaleidoscope of highs and lows.
The Lows:
We had another pop quiz and this time, we had to make glazed carrots and risotto, with little under an hour to get them
done. That was technically a LOT of time for just two items, but let me remind you that I have time management issues. Not to mention that we couldn’t use our recipe cards.
But we had made risotto so many times that it didn’t matter whether I memorized the recipe or not, it was the kind of dish that I could wing. The great thing about cooking, which is why ultimately I prefer it to baking, is that amounts do not have to be precise. There are ratios, which can be important (especially for roux and many liquid-to-starch combinations) but as far as produce, aromatics, meat, stock, etc. are concerned, if your final product looks and tastes right, it doesn’t matter how you get there.
It took me until the last possible minute to get my dishes done. I was a little worried about my risotto because it didn’t look like my classmates’ risottos, but Chef said it was “spot on.” I got a 100 on it. The glazed carrots, on the other hand, were overcaramelized to the point where the glaze was a little too tacky.
Most of the week’s menu items were stuff we had done before to get a refresher since a lot of these were going to be recalled during finals. We got to do rice pilaf (overcooked, again) and ratatouille (also overcooked.)
The trick, ladies and gentlemen, is that if you’re going to err at all, it’s better to err on the side of undercooked. You can always cook it more, but you can’t go back on an overcooked product.
The new recipes we did learn included (guess? wait for it, wait for it…) MORE soups! There was French Onion Soup, Vegetable Barley Soup, and Cannelini Bean soup.
Now, I never really liked onions. As a kid, I hated them so much I couldn’t eat them. Mostly because my mother chopped them too big and they were too crunchy most of the time (HATE crunchy onions.) I don’t mind them when they’re soft and tender and cut very, very small so I almost don’t notice them, but I will go out of my way to pick them off salads and pizzas. (Of course, I’m just in love with fennel, which is a member of the onion family, so why I take so much offense to regular onions, I have no idea.)
And almost everything we made needed those damn onions. I came to tolerate it because the reason we use onions so much is that they impart flavor.
But let me tell you something: French Onion Soup is the absolute bomb. It’s so much fun to make (okay, not really, it takes a lot of time but it’s served in this cute little soup crock, topped with toast and LOTS of gruyere – and come on, who doesn’t like cheese, especially, good, expensive, yumilicious gruyere? Then the crock is tossed in the salamander to melt the cheese, and it’s got a drop of sherry – and who doesn’t love food with alcohol in it?) Not only did I cook this well (Chef took more than a couple of bites of it), I actually, really, truly loved it! Enough to take it home for lunch the next day.
I did appreciate the fact that the new soups did not require the Vitamix. Those hearty pureed soups were just a pain, so making what’s categorized as “thin” soups wasn’t as painful as our previous few weeks when we made the chunky, creamy stuff. (Plus, one thing that always held me up was that the blenders were never free when I was ready to use them. I usually had to wait until others were done, and a lot of time was wasted on waiting when I could have been cooking.)
We also learned a few more sauces, tackling Bearnaise (technically a Hollandaise with the addition of a tarragon/shallot/vinegar infusion, though it’s considered by some to be the sixth Mother Sauce) and Bearnaise’s daughter sauce Choron, which you get by adding tomato paste to the mix. I didn’t get to it in class, and spent yet another Saturday afternoon in skills lab making it. (Chef Jolly gave me a good appraisal on my efforts.)
We also made mayonnaise and aioli. It’s weird to think of mayo as a sauce, but it is one. It’s made like hollandaise, except without heat, and one uses vegetable oil as the thickener instead of clarified butter. I haven’t been a fan of mayo since I was a kid when I used to smear it on everything from fruit to crackers (sometimes, I ate it straight out of the jar with a spoon) but it’s not a pain to make. There’s still that whole whisking action going, but unlike hollandaise or bearnaise, the lack of heat mitigates the risk of screwing up. Success, however, depends on pure muscle power and speed, which help to avoid what we call “breaking” the sauce.
Interestingly enough, water gives mayo its white color. Until water is added, mayo is a light yellow color and looks just like hollandaise. Aioli is a variation, made with olive oil instead of veg oil with a little garlic added. (Anything with garlic gets an automatic thumbs up in my book.)
And as a final starchy treat, we got to make polenta. I say “treat” with utmost sarcasm here, because I’m not a big fan of cornmeal. Like most foods I have no particular affection for, I only tolerated it, especially when it came with caviar and creme fraiche, or its Southern version as “grits” with shrimp, or its Mexican interpretation of tamales.
We made soft and firm polenta, which required the use of two separate pots, and because I got stuck cleaning them, I have a sheer loathing of it. See, polenta (or cornmeal) hardens after a while. If you don’t clean the pot right away, or at least soak it in water, cleaning will be hell.
The dishes were a nightmare that night… we let the dishes pile up, and it sucked because each of us had all six burners on our stoves going. The polenta accounted for a lot of it: take about 10 students X 2 pots each (multiply this exponentially by the solidifying factor + the fact that some people actually BURNED their product). There were enough people at the sink, and I had hoped I didn’t need to do any dishes. But when it looked like class was going to go way over our designated end time, with the dishes nowherneare halfway done, so I pitched in to scrape the polenta pans in the utility sink.
I got a little help from Advertising Class Buddy (he, too, was a project manager in advertising and we bonded instantly over the shared experience, not to mention that we were both two of the oldest students.) We had intended to only scrape some pans, but everyone else kept bringing over their polenta pots every couple of minutes, each subsequent one harder to scrape off.
The regular scrubs weren’t working, so ACB and I grabbed large steel spoons and got violent on those pots.
We had determined that those pots belonged to spoiled assholes who didn’t do dishes at home. Because, if you’ve ever washed dishes, you’d know to soak pans when cooking stuff that hardens. Common sense right? (You may be asking, where’s Annoying Girl through all this? Hmph. We asked the same question.) And the pots were hard enough to scrape off even with pre-soaking.
Here’s the funny thing about food – and just about the best thing about it too – is that it’s a multisensory experience. It’s the only art you can evaluate with all five senses. That mixture of smell, taste, texture, appearance and sound make food one of life’s most unique, although pedestrian, experiences. You have it every day, so it’s easy to ignore how special it is. And what I think makes food so wonderful is its extraordinary ability to go beyond being a necessity: you can make a memory, a production, a life experience with it. How many of your favorite memories involve food? How many of your favorite people (living or not) are either kept alive or close through a food you associate with them? Even when it’s not a positive experience, food has that ability to create an opinion or a feeling.
I have a feeling (and it’s a really strong one) that I will hate polenta until the day I die.
If you really want to try your hand at it, the best advice I can give you is the second you take it out of the pot, soak it in cold water. It should be easier to scrape off. (My personal advice would be to not make it all.)
The Highs
Now… onto the more pleasant parts of the week. One day was Restaurant Day, when we broke out into groups and played
mock restaurant. We got to create our own menus and feed our classmates. It was the only day during the entire term when I
came to school completely calm. (Even student orientation was a tiny bit nerve-wracking.)
And it was actually fun! Our team made comfort food with a Southern twist: fruit bowl, fried chicken with homemade ketchup and honey mustard sauce with a side of four-cheese mac & cheese and sweet potato fries, plus apple crisp for dessert. (I got stuck with dessert because nobody wanted to do pastry, so we picked the easiest thing to do that went with the theme and it was mighty tasty.) Unfortunately, the sweet potato fries didn’t turn out, but otherwise we put in a splendid, admirable effort.
The team who served us gave us spinach salad, salmon, ravioli and panna cotta. They also served us some iced tea, which was so bland I had to mix in some of the lemonade *we* made to make an Arnold Palmer. The ravioli was forgettable but everything else was fantastic. Much to ALL the guys’ chagrin, and really, the words “I hate to admit it, but…” were thrown out a lot during this discourse, Annoying Girl made the salmon and it was pretty darn good. Well-cooked salmon is so hard to come by. I hate to admit it, but Annoying Girl’s herb-coated salmon was one of the better salmon dishes I’d ever had.
And I’ve eaten a heck of a lot of salmon.
The best part of the week was not having class Friday night, though I spent it working on my notebook (which accounts for about 6% of my grade.) And working on my oral presentation for my Sanitation report (I chose to do mine on Hepatitis A).
Sanitation was getting harder and harder to get up for. I arrived for class a good half hour too late. (The previous week, I was an hour late in the morning and an hour late after lunch break.) But our instructor was the nicest lady on the planet and she let us get away with it.
Chef Bad Cop went over what finals week will be like, starting with the written final exam and knife cut exam on Monday, followed by three days of menu prep where we were supposed to make 18 dishes.
EIGHTEEN DISHES. NO RECIPE CARDS. I felt like I was going to implode.
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