Thursday, September 9, 2010

Wednesday, 9/8/10 – Level 5 Day 20 (Saucier)

And so it begins…the final stretch of my time at the French Culinary Institute. On our last day of Level 5, we moved up a level so that the graduating students could take their final upstairs. It's known as the "cross-over" day, when we learn our new recipes and meet-and-greet the new kids. Well, I seem to be the only one meeting and greeting, but I'm always about 35% cornier than the average person so it doesn't really surprise me all that much. "Hey dudes…ya ready? Getting' excited??" I asked the Level 5 Saucier students working right next to us. Had it been a movie, there would have been crickets. Lots of them. Along with someone yelling, "You suck!" out of the silence.

Our usual chef is on vacation, so we had the pleasure of being led by a kind and skilled chef who often bounces around to different classes. He also happens to be the one who taught us the sous vide lesson in Level 3, and if you'll remember, he's incredibly hard to understand. I wanted so hard to follow his orders and impress him, but it took my non-French brain approximately 10 seconds to decipher every word he said. "Coo zee lah teel meed rah." Ok, I can do this. He's heating up a pan and grabbing a lamb loin; lamb is usually served at medium rare, so…he wants us to cook the lamb until its medium rare! "Yes chef." I couldn't tell if his confused look was because I answered him wrong or because I stared at him, eyes glossy and brain elsewhere, for a few seconds longer than is socially acceptable. "Don, blah-nch zee kay." Blanche the kale. "Saw-tee ze cham-piy-no." Saute the mushrooms. We made some good headway, but there was a ton of prep to do. Our recipes are pretty complicated, and they require days of preparation to pull off one night of service, so we must not only plan for the night, but we must also plan for the next night and the night after that. I know it will get easier, but the first night in Saucier was borderline overwhelming, with two brand new recipes and a whole slew of new techniques and things to keep in mind.

One of our dishes, Duck Breast with Duck Leg Confit and Kale and a Sweet and Sour Sauce with Shiitake Mushrooms, requires a duck stock to be made in advance. We were preparing for next week's service and decided to make our duck stock, roasting the bones in the oven first. It was my job to pry the sticky, steaming brown carcasses off the pan to cool, so I started carefully jiggling them loose with my tongs and placing them nicely and neatly, all lined up like a macabre fairy tale, in another pan. They weren't fitting properly, perhaps because I was treating the little duckies too tenderly. Chef came by and, seeing my obvious hesitation, took a side towel, laid it on top of the skeletons and leaned his entire weight down onto them. The crushing, crumbling and (imaginary?) screeching was almost too hard to stand.

We had about three different things on the stove, along with one water bath that was on a quick track to boiling over. I was manning a sauté pan and reached down to adjust the temperature…and there was no knob. The problem was that we only had one knob to control six burners, so I had to play an arcade game all night jumping from burner to burner with our one knob. When you're rushing, you're not always careful with minute details, and since the knob has a flat side that must be lined up in order to be fit there were a few close calls. I did get compliments for a perfect medium rare lamb that I cooked as a demo for chef…so maybe that sweaty time at the grill paid off. Or the sweaty time at the oven. Then again, it could have been the sweaty time at the sink.

It's exciting to be on the last leg of school. I'm definitely ready to get my life back to normal…if there is such a thing.

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