Useful info picked up in my international class!

l.b. mentioned i should post some tips of the Latin cuisine i delved into last week, which got me thinking, i picked up a lot of useful info in this course and i'd be more than happy to spread the love! here's some key things i learned:
-most countries have their own "salt" medium. In the U.S., for example, salt is usually used to give items some taste. but say in south east Asia, they use fish sauce which is a good medium if your sick of using plain old NaCl (sodium chloride or salt, for those unchemistry oriented folk). Italians tend to use salty cheese like Parmesan or peccorino. The french like sea salt and items like capers. But try not to use too many salt sources in one dish. If you make a Parmesan risotto, don't add salt, or at least go easy on it. And i suggest trying sea salt. it might seem like a minor difference but don't think so, i think it gives this nice, fresh taste. Now that its summer, there really is nothing like biting into a fresh heirloom tomato with some sea salt (strange, but i swear, delicious!).
- just like every country has a preferred salt medium, they also have a preferred fat medium. In the U.S. (unfortunately) we tend to use a lot of criso and shortening. But in France they use really good quality butter, but they are also big on using the animal's own fat to cook a product (otherwise known as the "confit" method). In Greece, Spain, Italy and other Mediterranean countries, they use olive oil. In Mexico they use pork fat (aka, lard) and in Asian countries, they use nut oils like sesame or peanut oil. So when your making a dish, think about you fat medium. Don't think all oils are healthy. In South America they use Dende oil (or palm oil) which is actually very bad for you. I like flavorful fats, so i try to avoid bland ones like shortening. I prefer butter to crisco any day, even for the flakiest of pastries. Also, and i didn't really pick this up from class, i like to use naturally fat fill foods to substitute for stuff like butter. For example, i like to make cookies with 100% peanut butter or avocado.
- There are sooooo many ways to thicken sauces and soups! We made a very nice sauerbraten sauce when we did Germany and its made with prunes and thickened with ginger snap crumbs! for the Indian dishes, we used chickpea flour (mind you a very good substitute if you need a thickener and want something healthier than white flour). For my final menu, i need to make a hot and sour soup (although its also knows as egg drop soup) which is thickened with a slurry (a teaspoon of cornstarch and water poured in). So you see, thickeners can very so try a different thickener to give your dish another dimension.
-cooking methods really differ from region to region. I noticed a lot of the south east Asian dishes were made very quickly (e.g. pad Thai ). Most of the cooking time is just prepping the ingredients. Italians i think prefer the "low and slow", like osso bucco (also on my final menu) which requires a braise of a couple of hours. I think its pretty neat how Indians use the tandoor (a clay oven) to not only cook chicken but also their bread (naan which is actually pictured, its from the buffet so i didn't make it myself, but i can atest it was very tasty!) which they stick on the outside of the oven like a magnet.
-degreasing soups. ahh well i should have posted this in the beginning way back in intro I where i first learned how to make consomme. a good consomme is grease free and as we all know, water and fat are not friends, so when fat falls in the pool, its easy to spot. Although the method of making consomme does a good job of degreasing the broth and concentrating the flavor, sometimes grease still gets there. Even after to strain it through a coffee filter, you might still spot some grease so here's what i do when this happens: at this point, the soup is already nearly grease free so i would not recommend this if your soup is really greased out. take a couple strips of parchment and just run them through the soup very quickly. If you let it stay in the soup to long, the grease come off the parchment, initially, it sticks right to it so do this a few times very swiftly.

so those are some tidbits i picked up this term. I interviewed my chef so stay tuned for the quick Q and A i had with him!

catching you up...

i know, i haven't updated in a while, and so much has happened. too much to cover in one post, so real quick I'll just first explain that today was my last day at my International, the last day of the term where all we do is clean the lab (or kitchen as normal people might call it) and get our final grades and such. so yes, this was finals week, but you missed a hell of a week last week so I'll fill you in about that week now.
Our lovely chef had a family reunion and was out for all of last week. We knew this when we first started the class but didn't think much of it. We've had substitutes before and they've been nice enough. Hmm, maybe we got spoiled. The sub was the chef that teaches our class but on a different schedule (as you may remember i do the "c" schedule which runs from 6pm to 11pm, she teaches from 12pm-5pm). A friend of mine in class (yes, believe it or not even after the whole class finding out about my blog, some people apparently still think i am cool enough to talk to) told me her boyfriend had that particular teacher and that she was scary. how bad could it be???
I guess bad, real bad. On the surface, she was quite friendly. But she ran the class in such a way that EVERYONE was getting upset and angry. and angry and negative atmosphere is terrible for an effective. She was super strict, which i suppose is good, but I've had strict chefs before and there was this unfriendly aura about the way she followed "the rules". She spent a lot of class time lecturing about the recipes which really didn't need it so we got out very late. She would not let us really venture out of the recipe. Our regular chef told us before, i don't care how you make it, but make it taste good. This is our last formal class in the program so we're fairly advanced, this should be our time to glance at recipes to get an idea, and sort of build our dishes on our own. Everyone, and i do mean EVERY student in the class was very unhappy with this teacher. the class seemed like work or a boot camp and the joy of cooking that we had before was gone. As a result, people started to get snappy, no one was relaxed and everyone could have used some Prozac (me included). I didn't actually go on the last day she was teaching (last Thursday) which is rare because I've never missed a day of class throughout the whole program. Apparently, people got so on edge that there was a actually a physical fight between the students! i wasn't there thank god, bu i know enough simply from this blog not to get into peoples business so i am forever going to stay on the sidelines when it comes to personalities clashing.
The animosity aside, the theme of the week was south America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. this is my dish from our south American day, its a achiote marinated pork chop (which the chef referred to as so overcooked that it was "dead")with grilled cactus (not so bad tasting, and apparently very rich in vitamins!), and rice. the one good thing she said about my dish was that the rice was nice. And i suppose that was good enough for me. If you may remember, rice was the first dishes we learned way back in our Intro I class and people forget how to do it right. And its fundamental, i think every eatery serves rice of some sort. anyhow, more about finals week in my next post. thanks guys, for those still reading this!

South East Asian!

There are quite a few South East Asian students in my class, actually they make up about half the class i think. this is cool, but when we did South East Asia last week, i was so freaked out because clearly, they were in familiar territory. Case in point, the lumpia. its a egg roll, of sorts, but i asked a few of my classmates to show me how to roll it properly because once i hit the fryer, it sort of came apart on me. Actually, its quite simple to make, but i suppose there is a magic "southeast Asian" touch i lack. I served it with a hot sweet and sour sauce. I dont think my chef actually tried all of them, thats a lot of lumpias to try, but he said mine ok. I have loads more to dish about this week, it was a whirlwind like no other!

China!

so after Japan, which we did on Monday, we went over to china. Japan was a buffet style day so i volunteered to make desserts. My friend and i went online to try to make those mochi cakes. we did a few batches and needless to say, they were not very pleasant tasting. Not to mention, a total pain to clean, the gummi-goey-ness was stuck on all the pots which we had to scrub for about an hour and then try to boil down. Anyhow, we still needed a dessert so at the last second, we simple chopped some berries and wrapped them in won ton wrappers and fried them up. then we served it with wonderful fruit infuse gastrique (a sugar vinegar reduction which is actually used more for savory foods). Anyhow, we all had individual work when we did china. We needed to do two appetizers and an entree. So here's my won ton soup. There are some Asian kids in my class that folded their won tons impeccably, i asked one of them to show me, but still, mine looked a bit pathetic next to their little cute pockets of pork. They were very easy to make and i am wondering why people dont make these more often at home? seriously, try it, used group chicken, pork, beef, turkey, hell even tofu or veggies. Season in with some soy sauce and herbs like coriander or scallions, wrap them in won ton skins and boil in a good broth. tadah! no need for greasy American Chinese takeout!

Middle East? if you say so...

I apologize for not updating you about last week. After doing Great Britain, we did Russia (lots of Borscht, caviar, and blinis), and then Middle Eastern, or at least what's middle eastern in Le cordon Bleu's Book. My mom being Israeli and visiting Israel and parts of Egypt, i can tell you they might snub their noses at some of this Middle Eastern recipes we were given. What was cool about this day though was that we did something called an "order fire exercise". For those not in the restaurant biz, this means its basically simulating a restaurant situation. Threes an expediter (in our case, the sous chef) who calls out down the line for orders as tickets keep coming in. So for our "simulation" our chef would give an order to the sous chef, like say, two kabob plates, one moussaka, and three desserts. Then our class (most of which were working in different stations down the line) would have to get those meals out, all looking beautiful, identical, on hot plates (if its a hot dish), and FAST. ten minuets in the kitchen is like a hour to the customer. My friend an I made the desserts which was baklava (this is not that middle eastern if you ask me...). To make look pretty, we decided to make two different colored sauces, a pistachio creme anglaise and a yogurt honey sauce (My friend and i couldn't stop snacking on the yogurt sauce! we dipped all this fruit that we used as garnish in it and it was divine. anyhow, the baklava was a little over baked, so to compensate, we agreed the plate really needed to at least look magnificent. so we made about 16 caramel cages (very time consuming, but we had help thanks to some awesome peers that risked their fingers to work to make these cages (because hot sugar burns are terrible, and lord knows i left with a few battle scars that night). Our chef was impressed and it was overall a fun exercise. The one of the quickest hours of my life. It was stressful, but in a good way, kind of like working out, icky when your actually doing it, but the adrenaline is awesome and you don't regret doing it.

London Calling!

Wow am i sorry for not updating, and A LOT has happend. I've been very busy with work and school and not to mention had to deal with some personal stuff this week so its been a bit of a whirlwind. Anyhow, let me fill you in on this last week. We covered England of Tuesday and each student needed to present a beef wellington a cottage pie or pastie (pronounced pah-s-tee, not PAY-s-tee). I did the cottage pie (FYI, its a Shepard's pie not made with deer meat) and the wellington (that's the wellington pictured). Thank the lord we didn't need to make our own puff pastry! We were allowed to do whatever design we wanted and we needed to present it with tourneed potatoes and haricot vert. I was so proud of my sauce! it was reduced enough that it was super rich (you can tell by it's dark color) and it didn't break down on me (you know, when the fat and water separates..yea, no very pleasing on a fine dining plate). I thought my design was cute, but i saw some stuff the other students made and was a bit humbled, they really went all out and churned out some pretty neat wellingtons. I think that's the most expensive meal I've cooked, you know, it being a fillet Mignon, topped with mushroom duxelle, and foie gras. I should have pawned it! hey, i could use the money!