A Pig's tale

With everything that we are cooking at school during this module, I had to create a rule for dinner at home; meat dishes we've cooked at school alternating with vegetarian dishes cooked at home. Otherwise we would be eating meat, meat and more meat. I know for some of you that probably doesn't sound so bad, but my husband and I have been trying to eat a more plant-based diet; for health purposes and environmental reasons but also last but not least for cost reasons. Meat is expensive, particularly since I prefer to buy quality meat and usually cook with widely available but relatively expensive cuts of meat, such as beef steaks, lamb shanks or pork loin roast.
Hence, it's been quite refreshing this week to take a look at the nose-to-tail approach when consuming an animal. It is a concept which has found increasing support over the last few years amongst chefs but I believe less so with the home cook. Liver, sweetbreads, tongue, tripe, tails and other organ and muscle meats are defined as variety meats and to most of us they are probably better known as offal.

Two of the recipes this week included the challenge of transforming pork tails and sweetbreads into appetizing dinner plates anybody would want to eat. I have to say, once I got over the fact that I was dealing with offal it was actually an enjoyable and interesting cooking experience.

BBQ pork tails

Pork tails have relatively tough meat and a thick fat layer under the skin, so they lend themselves very well to braising. Braising is a cooking method, where the meat, together with some vegetables and liquid, is cooked in a covered pan in the oven until the meat is tender. In this case it took somewhere between 2-3 hrs to braise the meat. In the meantime, I prepared a BBQ sauce with which  to glaze the pork tails and serve them with a side of vinegar-based coleslaw and home-made biscuit. Voila, one tasty pork tail appetizer.

Pan-fried Sweetbread

Poached Sweetbread

The sweetbread proofed to be a bit more of a challenge because it is so delicate. I had to find the right balance between getting a crunchy texture on the outside and, at the same time, not to over cook it on the inside. I pan-fried my portion of sweetbread with a little butter and lemon juice which gave it a nice flavor, but I wasn't thrilled with the texture of the actual sweetbread. It surprised me because I thought I would like it. My mother used to sometimes prepare brains when I was a child and I remember being very fond of it. But that was years ago ....

Before we launched into our Offal adventures this week, we started on Monday with the most  fabulous beef burger and potato fries for breakfast. Prepared the 'Heston Blumenthal' way! For all of you who would like to know more about this genius of a chef, check out 'How To Cook Like Heston' on YouTube. It is food science explained in an interesting and fun way.

We prepared the burgers from scratch and we decided to grind three different cuts of meat (tenderloin, chuck and short rib) to compare the different flavors  and textures of each cut. It made for a very interesting burger tasting. The majority of us, including myself, favored the burger made with short rib. It was the most flavorsome burger I have eaten in a very long time and from now on will be my favorite cut of meat for beef burgers. Include some pickles and bacon and you've got a great, great burger.
However, no such breakfast would be perfect without a side of fries. And here again we looked to Heston Blumenthal for inspiration and prepared the triple-cooked fries. The most common way is to cook fries twice, both times using an increasing temperature of hot oil in the fryolator.  Blumenthal adds an extra step by boiling his potatoes first and letting them cool in the freezer before frying them twice in the hot oil. It creates the perfect combination of a crunchy fries with a soft, velvety center. Incredibly delicious. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water. Yummy, yummy!
After such a gorgeous over-indulgence at breakfast, I did not need to eat for the rest of the day.

As you can see it's been another fabulous week at school and I can't wait to get cooking again on Monday. It will be Mexican Monday with carnitas, guacamole and tacos!  One more favorite cuisine of mine.

Have a great week and happy eating.

Duck confit or stuffed chicken leg?

This week has been all about cooking poultry.

Stuffed Chicken legs with Pecan Butter

As I mentioned last week, the current module is structured in two-day sessions, one day prep and the other day is reserved for cooking. As you may remember, last week I wrote about the importance of mise en place and being prepared. Having been able to get more organized on my prep days this week, I was able to think a little bit more about cooking methods. I believe the recipes for this module are being put together to maximize our exposure to a variety of different ways to cook vegetables, starches and, of course meat. How else would one justify cooking a recipe of Stuffed Chicken Legs with Pecan Butter, Vegetable Curry and Potato Pancakes or Grilled Chicken Breast with Grilled Vegetables and Masoor Dal (Red Lentils with spices)? I am surprised my stomach still knows in which country it is in.

But to be serious, although the recipes as a whole sound strange, the individual components require different techniques and skill sets to be prepared. And since the protein is usually the most expensive item on one's plate, it pays (literally) to showcase it as a tasty centerpiece of the plate.

With regard to the two chicken recipes mentioned above, we cut up a whole chicken and then, to be able to stuff the chicken leg (in this case it included the chicken thigh), we de-

Stuffed Chicken legs, ready to cook

bone them as well. Without getting into too much detail here, there are different methods for de-boning, but the final goal with all of them is to be as precise and non-invasive with the cutting as possible. A little bit like a surgeon's skill set; small incisions but cutting out everything that is unwanted. I can tell you right now, it takes more practice than I thought it would. In the end, my stuffed chicken legs looked okay, but it took me a while to get there. The effort turned out to be very worthwhile particularly as I happen to love the pecan stuffing. It was very tasty.

Grilled Chicken breast

The second recipe included a Frenched chicken breast supreme or as it is also called airline chicken breast or Statler chicken breast, that latter name originating from the Boston Hotel Statler, which is now the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. It is essentially a semi-boneless chicken breast with the 1st joint of the wing bone still attached. Unfortunately I don't have a picture which shows just the breast piece, but if you google any of the above names you will find some images.
The other items of the recipes were fairly easy to prepare, as I had taken Indian vegetarian cooking classes when we lived in Chicago, and, of course growing up in Germany, we ate potato pancakes at least once a month.

The second set of recipes of this week, focused on duck (a favorite of my mine) and turkey. Although I really like duck, until now I had only ever prepared it for Christmas dinner and only roasted it as a whole bird. For a while now, I have been meaning to buy some individual breast pieces but their shrink wrapped size in the store never really seemed to justify the price tag. Hence, I usually bought chicken instead. See what I mean by protein being the most expensive part of your meal?!
So, for the duck recipe, we were asked to prepare duck leg confit and to pan-fry the duck breast. I was getting really exited since I had heard a lot about the exquisite task of duck confit, but so far had not eaten it myself. According to my course book "Professional Cooking" by W Gisslen Edition7:"...confit of duck and goose originated as a  by-product of the production of foie gras...". What a nice by-product it is. The seasoned duck leg is placed in a small sauce pan, completely covered with duckfat and cooked it until tender at a relatively low temperature, which, depending to whom you speak, is between 250°F to 300°F. Once tender, the leg is removed from the sauce pan and place under a broiler to brown and crisp the skin. Yummy.  The meat, because it is braised in it's own fat, is very flavorful and tender. Again ....... yummy!

Duck leg confit and pan-fried duck breast

After this wonderful experience, I am reluctant to admit that I totally over-cooked my pan-fried duck breast. Something went wrong when I was trying to render the fat from under the skin and the breast piece never quite recovered from it. Nor did I. After talking it through with my teaching chef, I will certainly try again, because it's actually not that difficult to make. A duck breast is put skin-side down in the frying pan to sear the skin and render some or all of the fat from under the skin. Depending on how one would like to serve/eat it (rare, pink or well-done) it can be finished off in the oven or served straight from the pan. I guess the fact is, things do go wrong in the kitchen, particularly when one (in this case me!) is confident that one can do everything perfectly. It is how we learn from our mistakes that make us better cooks in the end.

Turkey Scaloppine with Shiitake Mushrooms

The other recipe of this two-day session featured turkey scaloppine with shiitake mushrooms, potato croquettes and spring vegetables with a light mustard&honey vinaigrette. The turkey scallopine is very delicate and went well with the shiitake mushroom sauce and the spring vegetables (asparagus, green beans and snow peas). These vegetables were blanched and than shocked in ice-water so that they stopped cooking immediately and kept their green color. What I didn't know is that acid turns green vegetables brown. That meant that I was only able to dress the vegetables with the vinaigrette immediately before plating and couldn't 'marinate'  them a little longer in the dressing as I had done previously at home. I was convinced that that meant they vegetables would lack flavor, but I was wrong. It actually worked well; the crisp taste of the fresh vegetables with a little spice and sweetness from the vinaigrette. I will repeat that again to experiment a little more with the flavors.

But for now, I hope you have a great week and happy eating.

Mise en place - 'Everything put in place'

It has been a great week and a good start to my Culinary Foundations III course. I think we have started to cook with the 'grown-ups'.

Each cooking session is divided into two days, one day for mise en place and the second day for actually cooking the dishes. The emphasis of this module is on cooking techniques and the recipes are less descriptive than they were in Culinary Foundations II. We are encouraged to interpret the recipes in our own way, for example by adding additional spices or seasonings if we feel it will benefit the dish. Another focus of this module is on plating. All plates are a complete entree, which means each plate contains a protein, starch, vegetables and a sauce. The question is how do we want to present the dishes so that they are shown to there best advantage?

You can imagine that all of this requires a lot of planning. Planning my preparations for day 1 of the session and planning my cooking routine and my plating for day 2. That's where the mise en place comes in. It's literal translation from French means 'everything put in place'; for me it means 'know what you are doing, have a plan and get organized'. It's a phrase we've been talking about since day one at the school, but now it's really coming into it's own right. One of my chefs once said that " the best chefs are the ones who are most calm". I now totally understand why. Proper mise en place definitely makes the difference between frantic chaos and frantic cooking.

Let me explain what I mean. Our first two dishes of the module were beef stew with vegetables together with tournéed potatoes, and roast pork loin with apple & sage sauce and Bulgar pilaf. As you can see this is a lot to prepare and cook. On day 1 we measured out the portions for protein, vegetables and starches, chopped all the vegetables, and got the seasonings together for the protein and the vegetables. While performing these tasks, I was also thinking about how to plate my dishes the next day. To what size should I chop my vegetables for the beef stew? Was I cooking them with the beef stew or separately? If I 'd cook them with the beef stew at what point during the cooking time would I add them so that they wouldn't totally lose they color and shape? In the end I decided to cook the vegetables and potatoes separately, which meant they would retain their vivid colors and be very visible in my dish, which in turn demanded that they had to be cut in visually pleasing shapes and all the same size. The same decisions needed to be made for the roast pork loin dish.

Roast pork loin with apple & sage sauce and Bulgar pilaf and carrots etuver

Once all my preparations were complete, all the little prep bowls labeled and I had visualized how to plate my dishes, I needed to decide on a schedule for my cooking processes for the next day. I knew my beef stew would take a long time to cook, so that needed to be my first priority on day 2. That in turn meant that I would need to switch on the oven immediately when I came into the kitchen the next morning. I would get the beef stew in the oven and than focus on the pork loin dish while the beef was cooking for about 60 to 90 minutes. The pork needed to be browned on the stovetop, than cooked in the oven, and subsequently rested once the cooking process had been completed. I was evaluating those times against the time the Bulgar pilaf would take to cook in the oven. And what about the reduction of the cooking juices to make the apple & sage sauce for the pork loin? I decided to get the pork going first than get the Bulgar pilaf in the oven and as the pork was resting, concentrate on the preparation of the apple & sage sauce. In between those steps to prepare the roast pork loin dish, I was also keeping an eye on the beef stew so as not to overcook the beef. Luckily, the beef took it's time, and I was able to prepare and present the dish to my Chef instructor, before I needed to focus on the beef stew.

Beef stew with tournéed potatoes and vegetables etuver

Once the pork dish was out of the way, I went back to my beef stew. I started to cook the potatoes and vegetables, strained and reduced the sauce for the beef stew, and finished off the seasoning. It all went smoothly and I was very happy with both dishes I produced that day.

However, things don't always work out that easily. Our next two-day cooking session consisted of cooking two fish dishes, Sole Meuniere with baked tomatoes, braised endives and farro-risotto as well as Paupiette of Flounder with Salmon Mousseline, Quinoa salad with bell peppers and buttered Asparagus. Those are two dishes that require a lot shorter cooking times and much of the work had to be completed in parallel, which meant that proper organization and planning were even more important. So focused was I on ensuring that I got the timing right that that I actually forgot to take pictures of my finished plates that day! I was trying to keep an eye on everything and more importantly ensuring nothing burnt.

To sum it up, before I started culinary school, I used to think that only dishes cooked in a wok needed prior preparation of all the ingredients. Now I am just starting to appreciate that mise en place should be a 'way of life' for everyone, never mind what one cooks and never mind at what level the cook operates. It's the difference between chaos and efficiency in the kitchen.

Have a great week and happy eating.

For the love of Chocolate

Today (Sunday) has been the last day of my Spring Break and I can't wait to get back into the kitchen at school. I feel like I have truly taken a break from cooking - I did nothing but bake during my short vacation. There was no rest for the wicked. After my Easter Bread baking marathon, I moved on to baking with Chocolate. Sometimes the stars aline and one is destined to bake great things.

Pecan Sandies

A few weeks ago my friend Eva posted a recipe for Pecan Sandies from the Thomas Keller 'Bouchon Bakery' book on her freshfromevaskitchen blog. I felt inspired to bake and the cookies were really yummy. We had been to the Bouchon Bakery a few times when we lived in San Francisco and so I decided to treat myself to the book. And what a fabulous book it is. I could hardly wait until my Spring Break to try more of it's recipes.
 The perfect excuse for my baking mania was the visit of my girlfriend from San Francisco who arrived on Easter Monday. She is a self-confessed chocaholic and has come to expect nothing less than being treated to the best chocolate creations when at my house.

So, I started by baking one of my favorites - Sweet & Salty Chocolate Cake. Co-incidentally, this is also a recipe from my friend Eva's freshfromevaskitchen blog. The cake takes a lot of preparation and assembly work, but once you taste it, you will notice it's worth the effort. The combination of sweet and salty really works, but you must spare no expense and buy some french fleur de sel salt as requested in the recipe. It really makes a difference and I speak from experience. Anyway, the cake is pure decadence, so I decided to scale down the recipe for a smaller version for next time. Nobody can deal with that much chocolate, although my girlfriend made a pretty good stab at it.

Three layers held together by salty caramel and chocolate ganache

The finished cake with more chocolate ganache

The next thing I baked were the brownies from the 'Bouchon Bakery' book; they contain more cocoa powder than flour: lovely. The great thing about the book is that the recipes have been adapted for the home cook and are very easy to follow. Some of the techniques used in the recipes are classical French but all are well explained and possible to re-create at home with little effort. As you know I am not a frequent baker (although after the last 10 days, one might think otherwise) and so I was surprised to learn that the recipes where measuring the eggs by weight. Why and how? It is done by cracking and whisking the eggs in a bowl and than straining the beaten eggs into another bowl as so to remove the chalazae (that's the white tissue that connects the egg yolk to the egg's membrane) and any tiny fragments of shell. A little bit more work, but genius. I found the egg to be much smoother and mixing better with the dry ingredients. The recipe also requires the dough to rest for approx 2 hrs before baking. Now, I don't know the scientific explanation for that, so I can only speculate that this helps to combine the various ingredients more effectively than when baked immediately. Whatever the reason, it works. The brownies are awesome and don't seem to last long in my house.

With all this baking going on over the last week, I have to admit that I sometimes had to cut short my dog walks in order to follow the timetables for the recipes. Not fair on the dogs, I thought, particularly since they weren't getting any of the goodies. So, feeling somewhat guilty I set out to bake some dog treats. Sure enough the 'Bouchon Bakery' book has a recipe for those too, and they sell the dog treats at the Bakery. According to the story in the book, the bakery used trimmings of fois gras from the restaurant for the dog treats, though the recipe in the book uses chicken liver and bacon. Very fancy, right?! My husband couldn't believe the smell of bacon streaming through the house wasn't destined for his delight but for the dogs. Since Easter was just gone, I decided to create some bacon and liver Easter bunnies. From the picture, it looks like quite a mess of blood on the parchment paper, but no worries as there is no real blood involved. In fact the dog treats are glazed with a ketchup mixture and then dried in the oven again. It surely smelled good in our house all afternoon and the dogs couldn't believe their luck.

Time to go and get my knife kit ready for tomorrow. I start again with a 4 am wake-up call and I am looking forward to the next 6 weeks of Culinary Foundations part III.

So stay tuned, have a great week, and happy eating. 

Easter Baking Marathon

Easter Bunnies

Happy Easter Monday.
After successfully completing my Culinary Foundations II course earlier last week, I seem to have taken a break from cooking and crossed over to baking. I love baking at Easter, funnily enough I don't really know why. I am not a particularly frequent baker but there are a few occasions during the year where I feel compelled to bake. Easter is one such occasion. Last year, I was totally obsessed with producing Gourmet magazine-worthy decorated cookies. I uploaded a picture of my efforts and you can make up our own mind how well I did. :-)

 This year, I have been thinking and talking about Easter Breads for the last few weeks and on Saturday I had an Easter Bread baking marathon in my kitchen. My husband asked the obvious question "What is an Easter Bread?" Well, for me it's a slightly sweet, yeasty tasting bread that is braided in a loaf or a ring shape. In Germany we call those shapes 'Osterzopf' or 'Osterkranz' and you will see them in the pictures below. Having said that, the definition of an Easter Bread varies depending on the country from which it comes.

Osterkranz

I've prepared 3 different Easter Breads. Each recipe appealed to me for a different reason and interestingly, each recipe used a different type of yeast.The first one I prepared is a 'Osterkranz' from an original German recipe sent to me by my mum. It uses fresh yeast which is actually quite hard to find in the US and is much more widely used and available in Germany. I really like the taste of fresh yeast in baked goods but particularly in an Easter Bread. It is hard to describe the taste to you, apart from the fact that it is a very distinctive. I like it, but it might not be to everyone's liking.

Osterzopf

I wanted to compare the 'Osterkranz' recipe to the 'Osterzopf' recipe, which has been my go-to recipe for the last few years here in the USA. It's a German recipe which I found on a blog called 'The Foreign Kitchen'. The differences in the recipe are that it uses instant yeast and honey is substituted for sugar. The overall flavor of the bread is a lot milder because of the instant yeast. I prefer the 'Osterkranz'.

Holiday Bread for Easter, NYTimes

The third recipe it actually a recipe I took from the New York Times Dining & Wine section. It is actually an example of what I was mentioning earlier, that each Easter Bread recipe varies depending on the country of origin. This recipe differs from the German ones, in that it contains currents, cranberries, etc as well as anise seeds and citrus zests. The type of yeast used is dry active. The bread is sweet, flavorful and the yeast taste is a little bit more prevalent than in the 'Osterzopf' recipe. Although I wouldn't necessarily associate this bread with Easter, I like it.

To summarize my Easter Bread baking marathon, it was an interesting experience. I love baking with yeast and I really enjoyed comparing the different baking processes and flavors. I've probably put on a couple of pounds while tasting the different breads. The good news is I found my favorite quite quickly. It's the basic German recipe with the fresh yeast, just as my mother used to make it. I guess my choice is no surprise. It's hard to get away from those comforting childhood foods with the happy memories attached.

Watch this space, I have the feeling there is another baking blog coming along next week.
Have a great week and happy eating.