Second Week of Culinary Techniques Class! Tournage & Glacage!

Week 2 - more knife work, as well as the proper way of caramelizing onions.  We learned the art of tournage, which is basically paring down vegetables by turning it to form a rectangular shape.  This was really hard, at least for me - my partner, on the other hand, got it immediately.  Here are the fruits of our labor (most of these were by her hand).

The carrots and turnips are cooked glacer a blanc - you add enough water to cover the vegetables halfway, add butter, salt, and sugar, and bring to a boil.  Once it boils, reduce the heat to low until the water is gone (the veg should be cooked with a nice butter glaze).  We also prepared fresh peas, which sit atop  a whole artichoke that we prepared.  A lot of knife work all around - my hand was definitely starting to cramp towards the end.

Here's a pic from my home application of this week's lessons - as a bonus, I got to practice my jardiniere cuts from week 1:

Next week we start on stocks and emulsified sauces!

A Demo from John Besh at FCI and Dinner at Despana!

I took a PTO day today to see a cooking demo by John Besh at FCI. Really awesome guy, very down to earth and told a lot of funny anecdotes while he demo'd coq au vin for us. We got to eat samples of it and it was really really good. He also gave us copies of his new book and signed them - I'm so glad I decided to go to this. Some pics:

A sample of the coq au vin that he made, served with cavatelli

John and I

 After the demo I went to Despana, which was close by - it's a Spanish food store that also serves sandwiches and tapas and has a small eating area:

Pulpo with Olive Oil and Paprika atop Mashed Potatoes: I've been obsessed with octopus for a while, this dish was really good - the texture was perfect and paired very well with the mashed potatoes

Chorizo in Apple Cider: the chorizo became sweeter from the cider and the cider developed a nice chorizo flavor - very nice dish

Marinated White Anchovies with Olive Oil and Garlic: really oily and fishy, perfect with bread

Afuega Cheesecake with Blueberries: this was really amazing - the afuega cheese they used is savory, and it's complimented perfectly by the sweet blueberry topping - a unique-tasting cheesecake, I loved it

First Week of Culinary Techniques Class!

So I've always been interested in cooking and toyed with the idea of taking culinary classes for years.  In March, I finally decided to take a tour of FCI  -  I was planning to take their Essentials of Fine Cooking class which is a 40 hour course. The admissions person asked me what I was looking for and suggested I go for the 110 hour class, which provides the foundations of classic French cuisine as well as basic skill sets (creating stocks and mother sauces, filleting fish, breaking down chicken, etc).  he 110 hour class was $7800, which really scared me off from committing and I thought that they were just trying to upsell me on class choice. But then, they allowed me to do an audit of one of the classes (I attended one week) and I loved the format - the class I sat in on had 8 ppl and there were two instructors (lots of personal attention). The format of the class is a quick lecture/demo from the chef, and then students return to their station to execute the recipe. I learned a lot from that one class and it convinced me to commit. I'll have a 5 hour class from 9:30 - 2:30 every Saturday for the next 22 weeks!  I'm excited to get started!

Well, class starts with an introduction to the kitchen and a log of all the tools that we received as part of the course.  I have a big tool bag with about 30 different items, I have six different knives!  (Chef's knife, paring knife, boning knife, fish knife, bread knife, and a knife that I don't even know what to do with).  Week 1 is all about knife techniques: we learned the different type of taillage (cutting) for preparing vegetables, and here are the results:

Taillage of Turnips and Carrots: Julienne, Macedoine, and Brunoise