First thing on Monday morning, we had our class photo. I was really excited for this, but it was quite disheartening to see that most of the class didn’t show up. We are a batch of 38 students at the Intermediate level, but you can see just 17 of us in there. Oh well.
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This week, I also had to get to school earlier than the rest of my classmates for practicals because I was class assistant for the week. Each week, two people are delegated as class assistants to help the functioning of the practical classes This means, we must get to the sous sol cuisine (basement kitchen) and bring up all the ingredients for the class (luckily there’s a dumb waiter for this), setup the workstations for the entire practical class of 10 students, and make sure everything is ready to go before the chef arrives. I took my recipe along with me to make sure I got every single item because there’s nothing worse than running all the way down to the sous sol to fetch something as little as a slab of butter, cutting into my practical time. Even more annoying is when the walk-in is locked and you have to make another round trip to grab the keys from the chef. The sous sol kitchen is pretty much the heart of the functioning of the school – it’s where all the ingredients are stored, it’s where all the stocks are simmered and the butter clarified. It’s also where the school staff and chefs descend for their meals. Back to being class assistant – this week was a cakewalk with just two practical classes to set up for.
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Typically, we have a 2.5 hour demonstration where the chef shows us how to make three recipes, usually an entrée, plat and dessert. We replicate one of those recipes, which is almost always the plat principal (main dish) in our 2.5 hour practical class. This week during the practicals we made:
Magret de canard (the breast of a foie gras fattened duck) with potatoes, porcini and lardons: This is probably the easiest recipe this term – we finished everything from start to finish, within an hour. I took great care with everything: cooking my duck to the perfect pink rosé, crispy bacon, crispy porcini, well turned potatoes. I had thought my plating through – that I’ll let the duck breast sit on a bed of potatoes and three mushrooms of different heights “mushrooming” from the side of the breast and the crispy lardons scattered near the potatoes behind the duck breast. Everything looked perfect until the chef came over and stood over my shoulder to watch me plate. That made me so nervous, I kept adding more sauce because I couldn’t get the perfect streaks of sauce. Finally, I spooned in a lot more sauce than there should ever be on any plate and it looked ridiculous. “C’est dommage!”, the chef exclaimed.
The second dish we made this week was a three meat pie with guinea fowl, pork shoulder and chicken livers. I loved how flaky my pastry dough turned out, but I didn’t stick the top layer of the dough well enough to the sides, so it separated in some places. I also forgot about brushing the egg wash at the bottom of the pie. Whoops.
That’s was it! A short week at school.