Pancakes up first today. Well, crèpes really; French people generally disdain ‘pancakes’ as overly-thick English creations suitable only for use as fireblankets and airplane wheel chocks. For my response to this, see last week’s mention of pudding.
‘Nuff said.
So, crèpes are lace-thin pancakes, as you probably alread know. And, as most of us in class are either French or cooks or both, most of us have already made the odd one or two in our lives. So today’s competition is to see who can make the most crèpes with the half-litre of mixture we make up. I get 24, Eric – who makes these damned things every day (note I’m getting my defence in early) – managed 30. but they weren’t all complete, and didn’t taste as nice as mine anyway.
We use them to make ‘Aumonières Normandes’, small parcels with butter-fried diced apples inside. Very yummy and, for once, we get to eat them as we take them over to the self-service cafeteria where some of us eat every week.
The quality of food in the cafeteria is, as I may have mentioned before, variable. This week’s it’s edible, though, veal chops with mixed vegetables. The veg look very regularly diced into a lovely brunoise from a distance, and tasting confirms that they’ve come out of a tin. Our class doesn’t get to do TPs (Travails Pratiques, practical work sessions) in the caféteria kitchen, but the youngsters doing the same course as us but full-tiem over two years get regular sessions there. Some, it’s obvious, like it more than others.
There’s a big debate going on in the French catering industry that this qualification, the CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnel) should be more oriented towards opening cans and microwaving vacuum-packed mush. A debate led, of course, by Big Business, the sort that have large chains of restaurants where economies of scale (the scale economy of employing low-talent droids to push microwave buttons instead of people who know how to prepare fresh veg) are important. The small businesses want cooks who can cook, of course, but lots of little voices are drowned out by the few big, loud ones.
Me, I’m happy to be getting a classical French cooking training in the heart of Provence from a great school chef and an excellent restaurant chef. I count my blessings daily.
Or at least weekly. During, for example, our ‘Droit’ class, which we have this afternoon. ‘Droit’ strictly speaking means ‘law’, but in our case means general business administration as well. Today we learn about “business partners” – clients, suppliers, “l’état et les organimsmes sociaux” financial partners, banks, investors, you name it.
And then, just for fun, we do a household budget – work out that, if Monsieur Marsaud spends X on electricity, Y on food and Z on his mobile phone bill then he has only 38 cents a month left to live on. Or something like that. Perhaps he can eat microwaved meals in a local chain restaurant.
This afternoon we do ‘Carré de porc poëlé ‘Choisy’ – Choisy in this case meaning ‘containing lettuce’. Our lettuce is first poached in hot water (départ à chaud – I’m learning about what vegetables to cook in hot water, cold water, and how important it is to refresh in iced water immediately after cooking to preserve the vitamin and mineral content, enhance the colour and halt the cooking process before it turns to the sort of mush you get from microwaving vacuum-packed rubbish…(OK, I promise to stop going on about this. Can you tell my Chef has been indoctrinating me? Although we use sous-vide – vacuum-packing – a lot in the restaurant, he hates the microwave and doesn’t actually have one in his home kitchen. The one at work is used for defrosting breadcrumbs).
Then we have to form them into a ‘fuseau’ which is either a spindle, or one leg of a pair of ski pants, so I’m going for ski pants and achieve the required effect (if you wear huge, baggy ski pants like I do). This is then cut in two lengthways and braised in the oven at the same time as the Carré de porc, the section of pork ribs we each have to de-bone and cook.
We were going to have a run of four ribs to de-bone and cook whole and my restaurant chef has been ordering them in all week for me to practise on. Which, as it turns out, means I’ll be the only person doing such a thing this week since our school ones arrive frozen and already sliced into individual chops. We do get to cut one of the bones off each chop, but it’s no real challenge.
We do try following the rest of the recipe (cooking the pork in the oven with a regular GA, garniture aromatique of onions, carrots and a bouquet garni) but it seems slightly futile to try and re-assemble the chops into a joint at the end. So we don’t do that.
The lettuce are very good, though, I’d never really thought of using them as a cooked vegetable. Like radishes, which we also cook at the restaurant.
Next week: I’m a chicken plucker!

…pimp your snack.

http://www.pimpmysnack.com/

Good grief.

There are, it turns out, rather a lot of soups. Going back to the days of Escoffier and earlier, rather than calling soup with carrots in it, ‘Carrot Soup’, the French call it ‘Potage Crécy’, named after either Crécy-la-Chapelle in Seine-et-Marne, or after Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Somme. Both claim they grow the best carrots and the best soups, both claim Potage Crécy (and anything else containing carrots) as their own whilst declaiming the others as lesser, impostering, worthless, tasteless, rank rubbish-vendors. Or something like that.
I mean, just look at the table we got given today; there are potages where you start with carefully sized vegetables, puréed vegetables, puréed dried vegetables, with creams and cream-liasions, consommés (aka clear potages), bisques, cold potages, regional specialities…”You need to know all the families plus one or two examples of specific soups within them,” says school Chef. So yes, we have to know that split-pea soup is really Potage Saint Germain and not just split-pea soup, that a Consommé Madrilène (served with straw-diced red peppers) is chicken consommé with chopped fresh tomato pulp in it, and that if you really want to start an argument in a room full of Provençal cooks you start telling them what to put into a Soupe au Pistou – man, the guys and gals in class went over that one for a good quarter of an hour. It’s a good job our knives were across the other side of the building in the kitchen, otherwise blood would have flowed. Not least mine for suggesting that, like bouillabaisse (fish stew), it’s really made up of whatever vegetables and herbs you have lying around. Blimey, you’d have thought I’d asked for a well-done steak.
So, over in the atelier we do a Potage St Germain aux Croutons – split-pea soup with croutons, as I think you say in English (I’m remembering fewer and fewer words of your language with each day that goes by. Sorry.) It has the washed and blanched split peas, blanched and fried lardons of bacon, leeks, white veal stock.
Then we do a Velouté Dubarry, which is a velouté of veal with cauliflower, cream and egg yolks. With both I learned something I’d never thought of before – after mixing them with the giraffe (the large, hand-held mixer you plunge into the saucepan and which, in our indistrial-sized case, is about the size of a decent pneumatic drill) and then passing the mix through a chinois, you should re-boil it again since you can’t guarantee the cleanliness of the giraffe and chinois.
This afternoon – after a singularly unappetising lunch in the school canteen of very wishy-washy cod mornay (we’ve discovered that the stuff we cook is usually served on Tuesdays when the school director makes a big deal of eating in the canteen with the plebs instead of in the private staff dining room or the gastronomic restaurant next door where the final-year kids get to cook) – it’s Entremets Singapour. What’s an entremet? Well, the fact that the Larousse Gastronomique feels it necessary to devote nearly half a page to the subject should clue you in to the potential problem here. Basically, it’s anything served after the meat course. Generally it means puddings, but in big restaurants the entremettier will do soufflés and savoury pancakes and pastries plus sweet entrements like sweet omelettes, rice puddings and ice creams. But then Taillevent reconed to also include things like oyster stew and almond milk with figs and “swan with all its feathers” in the list, although this latter item is apparently not something we’d be expected to produce for our final exam.
Instead, Singaporean Entremets are a Genoise sponge (this is a very international dish) cut into three horizontal layers with crème patisserie between the layers. Again, I have trouble getting my Genoise frothy enough because of my RSI-ed wrists. I must think about having an operation again when the restaurant is closed in January.
Next week: Pancakes, Law and cutting up pork ribs.

A side of English

The French people with whom I work are always smugly pleased when one of the two English dessert dishes they know of comes up. The first is Crème Anglaise which they translate as English Cream and English people translate as Custard. The French make this by beating together 8 – 10 egg yolks, stirring in some boiled milk then returning the whole lot back to the heat until it reaches the thick coating stage. If they’re trained professional patissiers like me (OK, five minutes’ coaching by my Chef but it amounts to the same thing) they only add half the boiled milk to the yolks and sugar, whisk well and then return it to the pan – this avoids the mixture getting too cold.
The English make Custard completely differently; they open a packet of Custard Powder – Birds in the yellow and blue and red packet is the traditional one – and add a couple of tablespoonfuls of milk from a pint to the powder along with a random amount of sugar, stirring it into a sticky goo. When the milk boils, they mix it into the goo with a spoon and then re-boil the whole lot. Birds’ custard powder contains, as far as I can tell, powdered eggs and cornflower and nothing of any nutritive or flavour value whatsoever. But it is yellow and sweet.
The other English dessert French people go on and on and on about is Pudding, pronounced ‘poodeeng’. This, they fondly imagine, is called ‘pudding’ because it’s what English people always eat for dessert, in much the same way that the French live exclusively on snails, frogs and baguettes. Well, if you’re English or have ever eaten in that country, see if you recognise this: Take all your leftover bits of ‘biscuit’ (this means sponge, not real biscuits); soak them in milk; add a few beaten eggs; pour in a little rum; pour the whole lot into a terrine mold and bake in a bain marie for an hour until it’s perfect. ‘Perfect’ meaning ‘gooey mess’. Might be nice with some custard, I suppose, but the French will insist on serving it cold.
So we do crème anglaise at school today, to go with the Genoise sponge we also make. I have problems with this, mostly because of my old journalistic injury – messed-up carpal tunnels. I had the left one operated on at the start of last year and it only hurts occasionally, but the one in my right wrist needs doing to return my whisking hand back to decent, frothing form. This means I find it hard to whisk stuff like egg whites and genoise sponge mixtures long and hard as one needs to do, so my sponge failed to lift as much as it should have done. This is one area where Pascal, the chap with whom I share a workstation at school, excels over me – his right hand is a blur of motion as he beats away…And again, this is one area where we do things differently at work – at school we beat the genoise over a bain marie; at work it’s directly on the hotplate, one hand on the side of the saucepan to guage the temperature (‘When you smell burning flesh it’s too hot’, says Chef).
But my crème anglaise is fine and I manage to slice my genoise into three layers despite it being Not Very Thick and fill it with apricot jam (the French love apricot jam and treat it as if it were edible, good grief).
While all this is going on, our stock pots are bubbling away in the background. Stock is something I’ve sort of always known to be important, and indeed we made a pot of it during our first weeks at school. Now we make it every chance we get, and today we’re practicing making a fond brun lié with the carcasses of our Poulet Sauté Chasseur. Which is, in the end, a lesson in why Stuff tastes nicer in restaurants than it does when you try to make it at home: it starts off by being made with decent stock and finishes off by being, er, finished off with real butta (that’s ‘butter’ to those of you who come from south of Birmingham, UK, or West of Wales).
The chickens – two of them – we learn to cut up raw, removing the suprèmes – the breasts with a wing attached to each – and the legs, complete with the ‘sots y laissent’, the ‘idiots leave behinds’s, what in the UK we call the Oysters, the small round oyster-shaped bits where the legs attach to the body. The idea is to take all the skin and flesh and leave the bones – for a fond brun.
Brun – brown – because we roast the bones in the oven first until they’re brown with a garniture aromatique of carrots, onions, garlic, tomato paste and a bouquet garni. The ‘lié’ – liaison – part comes when we add some powdered stock powder which contains cornflower. Quite why we need to do this both I and David, the only other chap in my class who’s working in a posh restaurant, agree is impossible to know so we both leave it out and get the thickness required by reduction and, if necessary, a little Maizena at the end. No no, says school chef, we need to know how to use PAI, Produits d’Alimentation Intermediare or mid-way food products (mid-way between raw ingredients and finished items, i.e. something which has already had something done to it and which needs something else doing to it to make it edible – like frozen peas). These are becoming Very Big in the French catering industry, he tells us. Indeed there’s a huge discussion going on about how the entire qualification I’m doing, the CAP, should concentrate on using PAIs instead of how to make stock. This is because the big chains like Accor who have a lot of money to lobby the government like using PAIs because they get consistency of product on their dining tables. It may go that way, but it won’t be me opening the packets for them.
So while my chicken portions are roasting in the oven (12 minutes for the supr̬mes, 15 for the thighs) after being browned on the stove top, I make my Sauce Chasseur from the Fond Brun li̩ again with some chopped tomatoes, finely chopped shallots, mushrooms, fines herbes, white wine and cognac. Reduced down to a decent napping consistency I then monter it au beurre to give it a really delicious taste. A handy tip this for working on sauces at home Рnever be afraid to whisk in a little (or even a lot) of unsalted butter to many sauces.
Next week: Sole filets, Hygiene and a LOT of potage.

I know, we’ll run big lorries up and down a great London street until it’s buggered.
http://www.littlegreenstreet.com/
I know Little Green Street well, I’ve been welcomed there a lot by some of my very best friends in the world. Please sign the petition and don’t let the council mess it up.
Thankyou.

The secretary of the Ecole d’Hotellerie d’Avigon where I did my CAP just called.
I got the best mark of all my class in our exams.
Cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu9A0LlLyvo