The Culinary Tales Week 2: Up Close and Personal with Starches

May 5, 2014

The teachers weren’t kidding when they said this was a “push” week, when we learned about sauces, soups and pasta. Sounded simple enough, but if you’ve ever tried making any of these, you’ll know it’s a lot to swallow (pun intended) for one week.

 

Sauce making is an art, for sure. There are five “mother” sauces from which most sauces are created. We made four:

• Béchamel (milk-based white sauce)
• Velouté (stock-based)
• Espagnole (brown sauce)
• Hollandaise (a monster unto itself and the only one of the sauces that can be served by itself)
• Tomato (which we would learn about later)

 

A French guy named Marie-Antoine Carême, considered the founder of classical cuisine, created this system of mother sauces in the early 1800s, devising a method in which sauces could share a base and then build from there. (He also created the toque, the tall, obnoxious chef’s hat.)

 

Béchamel is made by combining milk with a roux (a paste made of butter and flour used as a thickening agent), clove and bay leaf and requires a lot of careful attention. It needs to stay white, so once you burn the bottom, you’re in trouble with color and consistency. Mornay sauce, typically used for mac and cheese, is a daughter sauce, made by adding cheese to the béchamel base.

 

Velouté is French for “velvety” and is a blonde sauce made with roux and stock, what kind depends on what it is being served with: chicken stock for poultry dishes, beef or veal stock for red meats, vegetable or fish stock for fish. Herbs and other ingredients such as lemons and capers can be added for flavor.

 

Espagnole is the mother sauce for one of my favorite sauces: Madeira. And let me tell you, it is just about the easiest of the sauces to handle. It’s made like a velouté but because it’s supposed to be brown, it’s a lot less maintenance than the others. And a little burning doesn’t hurt it.

 

But Hollandaise is a downright challenge. I never needed so many pots/pans and utensils to make it… and it’s not even a dish! It’s tricky to master: on one hand, it needs to be warm, yet you don’t want to cook the egg that’s in it. It requires a deft touch at emulsifying (the process of mixing two immiscible liquids by rapid agitation), furiously whisking water, lemon juice, clarified butter and egg yolk together. It is not cooked via direct heat, but rather with a bain marie (also known as a water bath or double boiler.) This bitch of a sauce claimed a casualty this week: my class buddy burned three fingers when he grabbed his bain marie with bare hands. My aloe vera came in handy.

 

Now, there are a lot of gadgets out there that supposedly make life easier for the common cook. A double boiler is one of them, and a total waste of money. It’s super easy to make your own bain marie: bring a small pot of water to a boil, turn off the heat, and lay a steel bowl/container on top. You may put a towel between the pot and bowl to absorb some of the heat and also secure the bowl.

 

I batted.500 on the sauces: I rocked the velouté and espagnole, but burned the béchamel. My hollandaise turned out a little too thick and lemony (when tasted on its own) but the flavors worked well when paired with the blanched broccoli. At the very least, I walked away with my fingers intact so I ought to get credit for that.

 

Another victory for me was actually completing all the required dishes one night this week – a first! (I usually missed one or two dishes a night.)

 

Culinary school was a lot of work, it really was, but I realized that the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. And nothing was more satisfying than watching the chefs taste something I’ve made and see their expression change from guarded curiosity to simple delight.

 

Let’s face it… cooking is about pleasing yourself and others all at once.

 

While I had a great end to the week, the rest of it was filled with doubt and anxiety as I felt frazzled and wondered if I could handle this? If I shouldn’t just drop the whole thing? The self-doubt was about as thick as my potage parmentier. (Which, by the way, we turned into Vichyssoise the next day.)

 

For all the second-guessing that was de rigueur in week two, my salvation came in the form of pasta. For something I’ve never done from scratch before, I actually got it right. (All I needed to do was mix flour, egg yolk and water, and knead that mess into submission.) We made pasta carbonara with freshly made fettuccini (the “carbonara” is so named from the black pepper you sprinkle on it), pasta primavera with laminated pasta (herbs sandwiched between two layers of thin, flattened pasta) and ravioli with sun-dried tomato cream sauce.

 

The thing about homemade pasta was that it took quite a bit of elbow grease. I had to really work the dough, which makes up for having not visited the gym since school started.

 

Then I crashed and burned on soups We made a carrot and ginger puree (one of the dishes that I didn’t have time to make, but wasn’t a fan of when I tasted my classmates’; I did go to Saturday afternoon lab – our school’s version of remedial class – and made it then, and I still wasn’t a fan). Also on the menu: spicy black bean soup (yuck) and  potage parmentier (a potato-leek soup which, when served cold, becomes vichyssoise). If I never ate soup again, I didn’t think I’d mind.

 

We also made pomme puree, which is just fancy French shit for mashed potatoes, but made in the labor-intensive classic French cuisine way of running through a food mill and adding loads of butter so that it was oh-so-velvety smooth. (And it was delicious!)

 

Many of my friends and co-workers asked how I managed to do it all. It was a lot of work and figuring out how to get my head together was going to be a work in progress. At least I started to settle into a routine, with each day getting a little better than the one before. I noticed my best days were when I had time to prepare (which meant getting to school earlier than the established “early.”)

 

A social life wasn’t out of the question, but anything fun was going to have to wait until I was done moving. How I even found the time to move, I have no idea, but I was functioning on four to six hours of sleep.

 

But I must confess: the smoking helped. It really, really helped.

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