…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

Finished my last exam at 1030 this morning, got home at 1130, ate a sandwich and slept until 1700 this afternoon.
Said that the mystery missing ingredient in Sole Dieppoise was fumet de poisson (it’s cream), but did remember that it takes 20 minutes to cook a fumet (not 2 hours as everyone else was telling me).
I think I’ve passed, I’m certainly not going to do it again if I haven’t. I’ll just lie instead and say I passed, it’s easier and cheaper and I’ve never been asked to produce an exam certificate in my life. So I already have 10 O-levels, 4 A-levels and a BA degree in Geography. Believe it or not.
Now I have a CAP Cuisine.
Believe it or not.

Christian chefs? God has called me to this industry?