Sunday, June 20, 2010

Friday, 6/18/10 – Level 4 Day 7 (Buffet)

In our first real day of preparation for our buffet, we piled into the small side room to receive direction. Our chef instructor was my BFF Chef Marc, so we knew we'd be working hard regardless of what we had to make (not that we always don't work hard, but with him we just work…harder? More afraid?). With the buffet rotation, we're given a few requirements: pick a theme and make canapés, hors d'oeuvres, meat dishes, vegetables and dessert for about 75 people, sticking to your theme. We're also required to do a carving station and advanced charcuterie, which is basically the making of sausages, pâtés, terrines, prosciutto, etc., regardless of the theme.

Since it's a little early to start making the actual dishes for our buffet, we started planning the charcuterie. Chef decided we would serve a duck terrine, andouille sausage and a roasted pork butt, so I started by helping to remove the meat from the three ducks we had resting over ice. Of course chef wanted every single little last piece of meat, or anything that looked like meat, removed from those carcasses, so we spent a crap ton of time peeling, cutting, removing, slicing and picking. Ducks are very fatty animals, so near the end our fingers had a ½" layer of slime on them, making it even harder to peel off their thin skin. We made a pile of meat, and then used the big grinders to grind it into a thin paste (ew). It was tossed with pistachios, dried cherries and little cubes of fatback and piled into little loaf molds lined with deli ham (seriously, I'm not making this up). Our terrines will get cooked in the slow cooker and be ready for our buffet! The French eat some strange things…

We then ground up some pork and pork fat and mixed it with a ton of herbs for our andouille. We'll be using pork casings for the sausages, but decided not to stuff them this class due to time constraints. We had a lot of discussin' to do to plan for our buffet, so we took our stack of recipes (we had each contributed 10 – 7 savory and 3 desserts) and gathered on the tables upstairs to go through them one-by-one. Our theme was street food, but some people decided just to print off the entire recipe database on FoodNetwork.com despite the overall theme on which we had clearly decided. This did not please our chef…not one bit. "Non, next. Non, next. What ees zis? Non, next. Non, how do you eat zis on ze street?? Non…NON!" Seriously people, meatloaf is not mobile. I contributed a few that required explanations; apparently the French have never been exposed to knishes, and you cannot mention New York Street Food without bringing up a knish. We also have the famous Wafels & Dinges cart in Astor Place – Belgian waffles that they serve with myriad "dinges", or toppings, so I brought in a great cinnamon waffle recipe with a list of potential dinges. He thought that was worthy of considering, so I made the "maybe" pile. The cart has won a few NYC Vendy awards (given to the best street vendors) but I've never personally tried them. I do fondly remember an afternoon of chicken and waffles in Harlem, though…but that's a different story. Despite all the crap we did find some suitable recipes and will be whittling away at them next class with Chef Jason to determine our final menu and get started. Things are coming together nicely and I predict we'll put on quite the memorable buffet on the 30th! I'll be sure to take great pictures…I'll break the rules for you any day.

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