Oh man oh man oh man! Today was such a crazy day, we’re finally starting to work with actual meat well fish but still! Today in class we learned what the 5 mothers sauces are, and learned how to make 2 or 3 I forget. We also learned how to make a chicken and veal stock and the differences between different stocks. In French stocks are called Fonds, the 3 that we learned so far were fonds blancs, fonds bruns, fumet de poisson. Fonds blanc is white stock generally kept clair (clear somewhat see through liquid and non thicken), fonds bruns can be made clair or lies (thickened) and fumet de poisson is fish stock. I was quite excited when the chef said today you will learn how to make meat stocks. So class rolled on we learned this and we learned that and soon after we had practical class
Today’s practical class was one of those days that I kind of was struggling in. We had to filet a fish, which I’ve never done in my life and after watching the chef I thought to myself OH NO! Class starts up with everyone scrambling to grab a piece of the dover sole and begin skinning and then deboning the fish. Skinning the fish was not as bad as I thought it would be, you have to cut a bit of the skin where the body ends and the tail starts, and then scrape towards the body a bit. Then after that you have to use your fingers and pull on the fish skin and rip the skin off, we had to do this to both sides of the fish. Now this fish, the dover sole is kind of weird its eyes are on one side and apparently it swims in an awkward way. The skin ripping was somewhat easy; the hard part comes next, where you have to debone the fish. I hated it every time I stuck my knife in the fish to cut off the meat from the bone, I would always hit into another bone. Every time I would hit into another bone I’d get scared since they chef said how easy it was to cut right through any of the bones with our knives. I managed to do one piece pretty good without cutting out any of the meat and had to get help on the rest from the chef. Afterwards everything went by pretty smoothly, except for the fact that I burnt my mushrooms and had to restart it. The mushrooms kind of made me lose some time and I was one of the last ones to plate my food, which made me panic. In the end I managed to finish it up, I also got a bit of help from another chef that was in the kitchen walking by. He helped me thicken and season up my sauce; he also taught me a few things about the dish I was making. In the end I panicked a bit, was quite frustrated but managed to finish off the dish, plate it and present to the chef. In the end the chef reviewed the dish I presented to him, he told me that over all it was pretty good but the sauce was a bit salty and the mussels were a bit over cooked.
Other than my mushroom mishap, I had a great day knowing that we’re moving on from vegetables and starting to do meat!
*note* The picture above is what the chef made in demostration to show us, that is not what I made. Mine looks similar to that but not as sexy looking
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