The Culinary Tales Week 29: It Takes A Village

August 21, 2014

 

 

Week Five of Garde Manger was mercifully easy.

 

First, we were given a mini-test on consomme and those who got As got to put their consomme in the “A” bucket, and only those people can use the A bucket for finals. After my disastrous early attempts, this was a breeze.

 

Then more pâte production with a pâte de campagne.

 

Making pâtes isn’t tough at all. For the most part, all you do is take your meat, seasonings/garnishings, a little cream and toss in the robocoup (professional grade food processor) to make a paste. Our pâte de campagne (meaning country-style paste) is wrapped in a basketweave blanket of bacon. Oh yes, that’s right: a whole blanket of bacon. A rectangular baking vessel is lined with the bacon and then filled with the pâte before baking in a water bath.

 

(The purpose of water bathing food is to keep the edges from burning.)

 

Our next project was to make a chicken galantine. First we had to take a whole chicken and carefully take the entire skin off, akin to undressing a baby, avoiding tears at all costs.

 

Next came preparing the inlays. The chicken galantine has three tubular inlays of pureed carrot, pureed spinach and mushroom duxelle which are cooked separately. Then they are formed in long tubes held together by plastic and then frozen to keep their shape.

 

Next was the meat processing, just like the pâte de campagne, and then assembly. The way this is done is to lay the chicken skin flat. On top of it, you place a layer of flattened chicken breast, which is seriously, the most fun you can have in cooking (playing with the mallet and pounding meats flat.) It’s one of the reasons I look forward to making scallopine.

 

Then you spread the meat paste across 2/3 of the pounded breast, the inlays with some paste between them, and the whole package is rolled up. Unlike a roulade, the chicken and skin layer shouldn’t overlap but just meet to close. You want to tightly wrap this in cheesecloth, and then poach to the correct temp. How do you know when chicken is done? When the internal temp reaches 165. You don’t want to overcook this.

 

After cooling, we had to coat with an edible chaud froid, which gives it a milky/gelatin-y coating.

 

This is one of those intricate, too-much-work-for-such-a-little-thing processes.

 

To make sure that the chaud froid coat is even, we had to stick skewers at the ends of the galantine and rotate the thing as we poured chaud froid over it, repeated several times until the coating solidified.

 

Were we done? No.

 

Next we had to add garnishing design on the outside. Whatever we did, it had to reflect the motif we were using for our chaud froid platter. Since diamonds were part of my motif, I cut some diamond-shaped carrots.

 

 

Once the garnishing was on, we had to do a second coating of aspic. This is a transparent cover which is just like the top layer of our chaud froid platters, only edible. Again, a few coats are required until it solidifies. (The difference between “edible” chaud froid/aspic and non-edible is that there is a lot more gelatin for the non-edible kind, making it more solid and therefore able to hold the heavy stuff placed on it. Technically, we were supposed to use consomme for the aspic gelee, but since we didn’t have to eat our chaud froid platters, we used water instead.)

 

 

Even though it wasn’t a team effort, our previous week’s group worked together in the same area. Vanishing Dude disappeared even more, not even bothering to show up a couple of days and on the days that he did show up, we had to help him with his work. Geez.

 

I didn’t mind working side by side with Annoying Girl. We had some kind of mutual admiration going on as far as our work was concerned (yes, it’s nauseating) but I actually took her opinion seriously. If she thought something I was doing was crappy, I revised it.

 

At the very least, Annoying Girl was a sharer. She was the type of person who, if she borrowed something from you, she’d return it cleaned. If she was getting some product that she knew you hadn’t gotten yet, she’d bring you your share. If you ran out of something, she shared what she had.

 

I couldn’t say the same for half the people in class. And half the people in class always borrowed something (like a bowl of egg wash or nappage) and returned it empty without refilling. Sometimes, you never even saw equipment returned to you.

 

There were certain things AG did to piss people off but I gave her a lot of credit for being an overall good person.

 

And I felt really sorry for her because even her bestest friends in class had stopped talking to her. The last straw had something to do with booze, pot and some kind of make-out session gone awry. (Kids.)

 

But since AG seemed to like me, I actually took the time to tell her to watch her mouth. Though not in those exact words. She had a tendency to mouth of to the teachers (I’m sure her pride and immaturity got the best of her) to the point that even the Chef told me to bitchslap her. (I told him he’s the authority figure and that he should tell her himself.) She had racked up an impressive reputation with the chefs. The teachers talked, so every subsequent class we had, the chefs had already been forewarned about her. I felt doubly bad for her because she was not necessarily starting with a clean slate with each new class.

 

I hoped she wouldn’t fail or be held back because she really was a gifted cook. Hey, I did my part, but it was going to take a village to get this one on the right path.

 

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