First burn!

poulet poche sauce supreme 4, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

It’s kind of weird and annoying, I keep having decent days, great days and sometimes bad days. Today however I had a great day in practical class, yesterday’s demo is just demo there isn’t much to say about it. In the demo class yesterday the chef touched up on the different mother sauces which are veloute, espagnole, béchamel, tomato and hollandaise. We also learned to make riz pilaff, which has to be done at the exact temptature, water ratio and procedure else it will be made wrong. The riz pilaf is later on used in the new recipe we learned, poulet poche sauce supreme. At first the poulet poche sauce supreme seemed really hard, because we had to truss the chicken. This is something I’ve never ever done in my life, I might have seen trussed chickens, but never have I done it myself. I think I went over my notes about 30-40 times before class to make sure I got the trussing down. During the practical class I start trussing the chicken, at first I wasn’t sure where I was suppose to truss, but after reading my notes again (and after the chef showed us again) I finally understood. Once I got the hang of it, I finished it up in about 15 minutes or so and went on to the next preparation. Next we had to take the chicken and boil in water to make stock, so diced up the vegetables, did a bouquet garni and tossed it all in. While cooking the chicken we had to make sure that any impurities were taken out. While that keeps boiling, I made the roux and prepared the rest of the ingredients I needed for when the stock was ready. Finally the stock boiled for long enough to use, added the stock to the roux and made veloute (which is made up of white stock and a roux), after the veloute is made sauce supreme can be made. Sauce supreme is the veloute mixed in with some cream, chicken skin, reduced a tiny bit and strained out to make the sauce. Before or after the sauce is done I had to make the riz pilaf, which you have to suer (sweat) some onions with butter first, then add the rice and mix together. Once the mixing is done the rice can not be moved around anymore, add in the chicken stock, bouquet garni, a paper lid with a hole in the middle, a lid to cover the whole pot and off to the oven at 400°F for 17-19 minutes. Once all that is done, I had to form an island on the serving tray with the rice, then place the chicken on the rice, pour sauce to cover the whole chicken and finally circle around the rice island to finish it off.

I feel today was pretty productive, I worked well, got pretty good results but the only thing was I need to work on timing and speed. When I brought my dish up to the chef, he told me that everything was good but I was about 10 minutes slower than everyone else. The good thing is that I’m getting better and better, now I just have to work hard and work faster as well as time things better.

Oh today I also got my first burn on my finger, I was handling a hot pan straight from the oven. I forgot that it was really hot and grabbed it to move it aside. After that split second I felt a sharp pain and knew I had gotten burned by the handle. After wards I showed the chef my burn, now usually most people tell you to run the burn under water or to put the cooling gel to sooth the pain right? Well guess again the chef asked me if I trusted him, I was a bit scared in saying yes but in the end said yes. He took my hand rubbed butter on my burned finger and turned on a gas stove and put my finger close to the flame. At first it wasn’t so bad because it felt like my finger was warming up, but then he put more butter on my finger and this time put my finger closer to the fire. Then he did it one more time this last time hurt a hell of a lot more than the first two, since my finger was pretty much touching the tip of the fire. Even though I was pretty scared and a bit freaked out that my finger was dangling over an open flame. The chef was a genius about doing the butter and the fire thing; I still had a bit of pain but after about 2-3 hours the pain pretty much disappeared. When the burn first happened I had this big blister on my finger, then after the chef did his butter trick the blister swelled down and is now almost gone. The pain also disappeared, well physical pain at least, when I touch it I still have a psychological pain.

Great Souffle! mediocre salad

Salade Nicoise, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

Let’s start off by saying today in class I had THE hardest time trying to stay away for some reason. It wasn’t that the class was boring or that I only had 4-5 hours of sleep, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. Even though I was struggling to stay awake, I still managed to pay attention and learn a few things. Today in class we learned about different kinds of salads, the main one we had to do for practical was salade nicoise, we also learned frisee aux lardon, salade des nonnes and salade francillon. Salade des nonnes is a rice and chicken salad, salade francillon is a potato salad with mussels and frisee aux lardon is a hot salad which contains frisee and prok belly. Salade nicoise is a vegetable salad made with tuna and garlic vinaigrette. The dish over all isn’t too bad to make, the hard part is chopping everything to be the same size and making sure that everything is seasoned properly. I managed to finish everything in time but was still one of the last ones to present to the chef. When I present my dish to the chef, I told him a few mistakes I made, I over cooked a few of my vegetables and because of that some of them broke apart easily. Other than that he said that I didn’t dress the salad with enough of the vinaigrette and pointed out that many spots were dry.

This was kind of a downer, there I was thinking oh man I could have so done better, and I wish I had done better and so on. So lost in thought, I just kept myself busy with cleaning my station. Then the chef announces that we have to get out our frozen soufflés from last week, garnish it and then present it as a class. He gave us about 20-30minutes to complete the task; we had to bake these almond cookies, assemble the soufflés with the candied oranges and place our soufflés in the order of the class list. This all seemed quite easy to complete, but the trick to this was to get everyone to finish at the same time. This meant everyone had to be baking all together so no one is dragging behind. We managed to completely present the soufflés all together except for the fact that we were 5 minutes late. After we were all settled down, the chef walked around looking at the soufflés and gave us an opinion on it. The first few were pretty good, then he got to mine, I started to feel a bit nervous. The almond cookie we had to make wasn’t made very well, mine didn’t roll into a cigarette properly and the other style I did kind of shatter into pieces. After going through different scenario in my head about how bad it might be, the chef complimented me about the soufflé. I was shocked that the chef said that about my soufflé, after getting a mediocre review on my salad this compliment on my soufflé made my day.

As the days go by, all I can ever think about is how much I’m learning everyday even with my bad days and my good days. Good or bad they all add up and equal into the amount of information I’m learning. We’re on lesson 10, the lessons are getting harder and hard but I’m still loving every minute of it.

Salade des nonnes

Frisee aux lardons

Salade Francillon

Frozen Souffle

Filets de sole dieppoise

Filets de sole dieppoise, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

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

Sweet Treats!

Sweet Treats! , originally uploaded by FinasZ.

Okay so today was another one of my killer days, 3 classes in a row starting at noon going all the way till about 10pm. The day started out as usual, waking up, getting dressed, etc and off to school I went. Today was a pretty cool day in demo; we were doing ice cream like dishes and a soufflé glace. What was even cooler was the fact that the chef was using one of those ice cream machines, man he said that a good house hold one can cost up to 1000 dollars WOW! The dishes that the chef showed us were glace café, crème glace vanilla, sorbet, granite, soufflé glace and cigarettes aux amandes. The glace café and crème glace vanilla were quite similar, since you start both off with a crème anglais. Sorbet was pretty easy to make too, you need to first make simple syrup (water and sugar bring to a boil), add lime, add to a tourbine (ice cream machine name in French), add egg whites when almost done, freeze again and then serve. Granite was a lot simpler than the three above, all you really have to do is make simple syrup, put it into a large pan, freeze and then serve when ready. Making the dough for the cigarettes aux amandes is really easy too, but actually baking it and giving it some shape looked a bit hard. The hardest out of all of the recipes is the soufflé glace, the process is quite easy, but the actual work involved is really tiring. To make the soufflé you need to make 3 different types of crème, first a whipped crème, then a meringue, then a sabayon and mix the three of them. You also need to make some candied oranges to go along as decorating; the cigarettes aux amandes is also part of the decoration. So the ingredients in making the different crèmes are really simple, the method needed to make them is pretty simple too, the extremely hard part is constantly whisking the crèmes. Yes I know it doesn’t seem so hard right? But it strains your arm a heck of a lot, I thought ok I’m a strong guy maybe I can last quite a while before tiring. Turns out I lasted maybe 2 minutes of constant whipping with each hand before they became too tired. After finishing the 3 crème I thought my arms were going to fall off. So I mixed the 3 together and it made this nice, smooth, velvety texture. When I was done placing my soufflé into the ramekin, I tried a bit of it WOW it was sooo good!!!! After an enjoyable demonstration and practical class, we had a seminar on hygiene, some of the things they mentioned was I’m guessing common sense to some, but not to all. I did however learn a few things about what temperature cooked meat should be kept at and about dealing with leftovers.

After a long day I’m pretty spent, but I still love every minute I’m at school. These past few days of class have been great and I’m looking forward to even more great days.

Cigarettes aux Amandes

Candied Oranges

charlotte aux pommes 5

charlotte aux pommes 5, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

Hello everyone, I had class today at 7pm the latest class possible in any given school day. At first I thought it was going to suck, since most of my classes generally end at 6pm or 3:30pm. Other than having such a late class, my day went by pretty good, watched some TV and played some games. At 6pm Josh comes to pick me up and off we head to school, today we did the practical lesson. As I mentioned from my last blog post, I learned to make Charlotte aux pommes, crème anglais au calvados. This recipe seemed quite simple, since the only things you needed were, bread, apples, eggs, calvados, butter, milk, sugar and vanilla extract. I walked into the practical room quite confident and ready to rock and roll. The class quickly got settled down and off we went to gather materials and begin the recipe. First thing I did was cut out the bread pieces I needed, then melted some butter and cored/peeled some apples. After that I took the bread pieces and dipped in the melted butter and placed them into a shallot pan. Then I sliced up the apples into square and cooked them in butter till they were somewhat mushy on the outside but still solid in the inside. I however made one small mistake which lead to my crust fall apart afterwards, the mistake was that I prebaked the bread a tiny bit before I added in the apples. Since I did the prebaking thing, my crust got a bit over cooked and didn’t stick together like it should have. After that I took out the shallot pan out, filled it with apples and back into the oven it went! This was the easier part of the recipe, the next part is a tiny bit trickier, but I managed to do it alright. We had to make a crème anglais, to make this I took two egg yolks, sugar, vanilla extract, milk and calvados. So first you have to bring the milk to a boil, beat the two egg yolks quickly with sugar and vanilla extract. Then combine the egg mix with the hot milk, add the milk slowly so the heat doesn’t cook the egg mix and mix the two together with a wooden spoon (not a whisk, I made the mistake of doing that, but fixed it in the end). Afterwards pour back into the russe and let it slowly cook, while stirring with the same spoon till it reaches the right thickness. When that is done pour out the crème anglais, pour into a bowl in an ice bath and then add in some calvados to give it an extra kick (trust me adding in the calvados add so much flavour!). By this time the charlotte aux pommes should be pretty much done now, so take out let chill, chill the crème anglais. Then when chilled enough flip over the charlotte aux pommes onto plate and serve with the crème anglais on the side. This dish is supposed to be served in between the courses of the meal, it’s not really meant to be a dessert dish. I was able to finish the recipe before the allotted time and was allowed to bake the puff pastry I made the other day. I forgot to add egg wash on the dough before sprinkling it with cheese, but it didn’t make a huge difference.

I had a really great day today in practical class, as I think about it now it feels like as the days go by and classes completed, I feel more and more confident. The first week I was insanely excited about going to school, then the second week I lost a bit of that excitement and some of my self confidence. Now with the third week coming along, I’m feeling great, getting my confidence back up and loving school way more than before. I just hope that the rest of the session goes on like this, I have a feeling it will and every day I will love school more and more and more.

Charlotte aux pommes with no sauce

Charlotte aux pommes, creme anglais au calvados being poured over

Charlotte aux pommes with the creme anglais au calvados on it (sauce should be served on side not on top)

Day of Confidence

Pruneaux au vin blanc, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

Hey look! It’s already Monday; wow the weekend went by really really fast. On that note it’s already the start of my third week at Le Cordon Bleu! WOOOOOOOOOO!!!! For some odd reason, last night I only slept for 4-5 hours, either way I was able to survive through the day. Today was a normal day with 2 classes, since I had a triple threat on Friday and ended off with a demonstration class. We started the day out with a practical class, I worked on the dreaded puff pastry, and in the end it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Although a few of the layers of the puff pastry ripped and some butter leaked out, the chef helped me out a bit and in the end it turned out alright. Other than the rips in my puff pastry the practical class went by pretty good and smooth, not major problems.

With my lack of sleep, I continued onto demonstration class, feeling sleepy but I endured on. The class started off a bit slow and I really wanted to sleep, once the chef started to cook a few dishes and explain how to make this and that I woke up a bit. Today we learned how to make about 5 different dishes they were; charlotte aux pommes, crème renversee au caramel, poires au vin rouge, pruneaux au vin blanc and sobayon aux fruits. Charlotte aux pommes is kind of like an upside apple tart served with a crème anglaise (English sauce). Crème renversee au caramel is a dish that is made up with caramel on the bottom and an egg custard as the top filling and its baked. Poires au vin rouge is pear poached in red wine and pruneaux au vin blanc is prunes poaches in white wine. Sobayon aux fruits is a kind of desert that sort of looks like yogurt (look at the pictures below), we took strawberries and put some egg foam on top (it tastes better than it sounds haha). The recipes today weren’t so shocking as the other recipes we’ve learned so far, the recipe for tomorrow I actually have some confidence in reproducing it. For the first time during school, I’m actually somewhat confident in myself in reproducing what the chef has shown us. It feels great to have some confidence, I hope this feeling and this confidence stays with me through out the rest of the course.

Poires au vin rouge

Sobayon aux fruits

Creme renversee au caramel

Charlotte aux pommes

Madness DAY

Pissaladiere one i did, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

WOW so I’m alive ! Today was my first insane 3 classes in a row day; we had demonstration at 8:15am, then practical at noon and then one more demonstration at 3:30pm. Since I haven’t figured out which channel shows the weather like channel 24 back in Toronto, which was news and weather 24/7. I had no clue what the temperature outside would be, since the last two days were arctic hell I decided to dress super warm. I don’t normally wear a scarf out or a scarf with a hat, but when I do it’s a sign of how cold it really is out there. For some weird reason, the past two weeks I’ve been going to sleep pretty late and only getting like 5-6 hours of sleep on school days yet I still manage to function properly during school. I feel tired and all yet I don’t sleep till midnight or one to two in the morning. I guess that’s something my body has developed and my biological clock is telling me I’m messed up.

Josh came to pick me up at about 7am, I’m soo very thankful that I was able to meet him and he’s been extremely helpful in offering me rides to and from school. It was a good thing that his car had seat warmers, else I would’ve froze my butt off the whole way there. We arrived at about 7:20 am, got dressed, hung around the student lounge a little bit and hurried off to class in order to get some good seats. Today I managed to sit in the middle of the second row, it’s a pretty good seat considering the fact that you can still see the t.v. (it does up close angles on what the chef is doing) and still be close enough to see the chef. When we first walked into class I thought something was wrong since the chef wasn’t our usual cuisine chef, instead a pastry chef was teaching us. So on today’s lesson plan, we learned more on different dough and what they’re used for. The recipes we covered were pissaladiere, sugar tart, saucisson brioche and we got to taste the pate pantain from last class. The sugar tart and the saucisson brioche were shown to us just as a demonstration; the one we had to actually make in practical was the pissaladiere. It pretty much looks similar to a thin crust pizza with no sauce, onions, olives and anchovies. This dish is supposed to be served as an appetizer in restaurants. Making the dough wasn’t too bad, for me it was a lot better than what had happened on Wednesday. This time the dough was doing what it should have been doing, it also looked similar to what the chef had shown us. This is actually my first time making any kind of dough that contained yeast, I didn’t know that you can’t add salt to yeast else it dies. This was also the first time I ever had to make dough and then apply oil after kneading it. I think my dough wasn’t that great since the chef said when we were doing applying the oil, no oil should be left on the outside and it should be all incorporated into the dough. I however had some oil coating the outside of the dough and still some left in the bowl. Oh well I managed to somehow fix it and get on with the rest of the recipe. After the dough was put to rest, we had to emincer onions, I think I managed to cut my onions too slow and some of the gas got released, which meant me tearing up for a little while. After that we had to sautee the onions, and then cut up olives and anchovies. After all that was done, we’d have to get the now fermented dough and roll it, the shape was suppose to be a circle, but I managed to make it into an oval. When the dough is done, you have to lay it onto a baking tray and let it rest so it can rise a bit more, this was the one step I kind of overlooked (which caused me some trouble later). Then we just put on the onions, then place the anchovies in a decorative design and the onions in the holes the anchovies create. Leave about a 1-2 finger crust around the pissaladiere, cover the crust with some olive oil and bake for 10-15 minutes (or when it looks ready). I was finally done and I wanted to get my dish reviewed by the chef who was looking after us in class. But there was a big line up so I decided to clean up, one thing I didn’t mention earlier today was also my first time being the sous chef. The sous chef for the practical class has to come in early and grab the ingredients from the production kitchen. When class is over the sous chef has to get everyone to help out and clean the kitchen up. So today I was sous chef and I had asked Chris (one of my classmates, pretty cool guy) to go to class 20 minutes early and help me get the supplies. So due to the line up, I started to clean all my tools and then worked on the rest of the kitchen, by this time a few more people were done their reviews. I started to assign them some tasks, like sweep the floor, help the dishwasher, clean the counters and so on. Things went pretty smoothly and when I was about to finish up the final touches, it was my turn to get my review. I was a bit nervous since I knew that my pissaladiere wasn’t perfect, or at least the exact way the chef made it during demonstration. The first few things we talked about were what I did wrong, I listed off the things I knew was wrong, the chef however did give me some good points. He did say that my onions were cooked just the way he liked them, if I put in a tiny pinch more salt he would have loved them even more.

With that class was over, now usually my days consist of going to one class, or going to two. But today was insane day, so I had one more class at 3:30pm which gave us about 30 minutes of actual break time, since we got out at 3pm. At this point I was feeling hungry and pretty tired since I only had really 5 hours of sleep the night before. Class starts up and the chef tells us we have a few more pates to learn, which would cover all the pates we’d ever need to know (in cuisine at least). We learned pate feuilletee, pate a choux, pate a nouilles and pate a crepes. Pate feuilletee was the one we were going to be doing in the practical kitchen Monday morning. The chef gave us an equation on how to figure out the butter, flour or water content. After the chef explained it to us, I came up with the equation of flour = X, water = Y to get Y you have to take X/2 = Y, butter = Z to get Z you have to (X+Y)/2 = Z (after writing this down, I’m thought quietly to myself, omg math is still haunting me). The pate feuilletee is suppose to be the hardest of the pates to make, since you require to knead the dough at cool temperatures. It’s pretty much just a mixture of flour, water, a pinch of salt mixed with a crap load of butter. Its extremely hard to produce, since you need to fold the butter into the dough and then keep folding till you arrive at 729 layers of dough, butter, dough, butter and so on. I’m sitting there going CRAP, one of the reasons why I didn’t want to go into pastry was because I knew I had pretty warm hands. With warm hands you can’t really handle the delicate cold pastries, well I’m sure you could, you’d just have a harder time. After the chef explained to us in full details, I was still quite freaked out about how I’m going to reproduce this, but at the same time it didn’t seem too insanely complicated. Its just the technical part, kneading the butter into the dough, was the hard part. The other three that we learned were pretty much daily stuff you see everywhere. Pate a choux was a paste used to make gnocchi (it can be used in other forms) in today’s class. Pate a nouilles is the dough used to make noodles and pate a crepes is used for making CREPES! (the crepes part of the name should have given it away).

Ding the chef is done cooking all the things he’s suppose to demonstrate and we’re allowed to do a taste test on the foods, WOW the gnocchi was amazing! I loved the sauce that was made with it and the crunchy cheese that melted away on the top. The rest of the dishes we tried weren’t that insanely special, pretty much reminds me of food I’d normally have if I go out. After the taste test, I hurried downstairs to change and head on home. Arriving home was such a joy, not that I don’t like school or anything, it was just after a long day of non stop classes going home to rest was great! Good thing today my roommate Andrew decided to make burgers and I could be lazy and not cook hehe. After dinner I lay on my bed and reflected on what happened today. Yes the classes were long and I was dead tired, but I thought this is pretty much what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life. Working long hours, doing lots of work and always feeling somewhat tired. It scared me a bit, since I kept trying to imagine when I’d have time to just sit back relax and do nothing. After a few minutes on this topic, I took this thought and threw it out, since the reason why I am willing to go on with these long hours is because I love cooking. I’ve always found joy when I cooked for my friends, sometimes cooking for my family and when I’m not so lazy, randomly cooking for myself. Even though today was quite a long day, I still had a pretty decent day. I managed to make the dough for practical right and was complimented by the chef on something.

The one that I made in practical class:

The one the chef made during demostration class: