Wow, so the new term started and boy i am i in for a whirlwind. first of all, my apologize for not posting sooner, this class is major busy! Its actually infamous around the school as being the toughest because A LOT of material is covered in a very short period of time. As i explained in earlier posts, Garde Manger is a lot about cold food and buffets. Presentations are a big chunk of the class as well. On Monday, we had a long lecture about preservation methods like curing and confit. I am sure if you watch top chef (review of this weeks top chef to come soon!), you may have heard that phrase such as "duck confit" or "tuna confit". Well let me tell you, if your watching your weight or fat grams, stay away from anything confit. Confit means preserved and cooked in its own fat. So we made duck condif this week. Duck has a thick skin (which equals fat) and so we rubbed a curing mixture and let it cure in the fridge overnight, rubbed off the mixture the next day to let it form whats called a "pellicle" which happens when you let stuff air dry. Then we cooked it in the rendered duck fat and cooled it in the duck fat. We are going to use the duck probably next week, and guess whats going to keep it nice and fresh until then, yep the fat. We began to make smoked salmon, gravlax, bacon, turkey, corned beef, and sauerkraut. You see, we are doing a whole week of sandwiches week 3 so this stuff needs to cure. It amazing how long it takes to make things like turkey and bacon, I mean its there ready to eat at your local grocery store. So the first few days we worked on stuff for next week and the week after. We did do a few cold appetizers because we had an Asian appetizer buffet (pics to be uploaded soon!). It was actually very delicious we made tea smoked duck (smoking using tea is genius!), fragrant chicken, five spice beef, chui-sui pork (i dont think that means anything, but maybe they though chui sui is some word in Chinese of whatever), spring rolls (very fun to make! a great idea to for a dyi dinner party, its like a step above dyi burritos and tacos, and probably healthier as well!). We also learned how to carve since its all about presentation in this class. So i had bring in 5 radish roses Tuesday for homework and a "kissing swans" melon carvings. I got home tuesday night and began to work on my melons, when i woke up the nest day, my dad's girlfriend's daughter decided to have one of my swans for breakfast! it was so embarrassing to tell the chef, "um, this little brat ate my homework!".
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