The Classes with the Hard Peaks and the Sweating Onions

Interesting Fact: The traditional thickening agent in a bisque is rice.

Damned work, keeping me busy and interfering with my updates. Damned! OK two classes, one post and a whole lot of information so lets get going.

We spent Tuesday's class learning all about thickening agents and egg foams. Why, you ask? Because you need to know these things to know how to thicken a soup. I won't go into all of the different thickeners in detail because my chef said that most of them she's never seen used in a real kitchen, but a roux is used constantly (and is a necessary component of veloute - one of the 5 mother sauces). So here's the skinny on a roux. It consists of clarified butter and flour in equal parts. Its made by heating up the clarified butter and then adding all of the flour and stirring constantly until it mixes into a paste that isn't too far off from wet sand in consistency. There are 4 types of roux (white, blonde, brown, and black). They're made by cooking the roux at longer temperatures. The black roux is used mainly in Cajun food and has no thickening ability, its used mostly for flavor. The more a roux is cooked the less it thickens. Generally you should use 10% by volume of the liquid your adding the roux to and its got to cook out otherwise you get a starchy flavor in your soup or sauce. Very exciting stuff, I know.

We made a roux. It looks like wet sand, but smells pretty damned good.

Then we learned about egg foams (ie. whipped egg whites). Some important things to remember:
- a speck of yolk in your egg whites will inhibit volume when beating
- copper bowls produce more volume and stability
- room temperature eggs will also produce more volume

there are 3 stages to whipped eggs:
soft - where droopy white peaks form
medium - rounded but stable peaks (dirty)
stiff - peaks stand upright (really dirty!)

we whipped the crap out of those eggs, it takes some muscle (my arm is still a little sore)
and then we whipped some cream for good measure. the same rules apply to cream as it does to eggs. If you overwhip cream it becomes butter (be careful).

Then last night the cooking actually began. We were broken into teams of three and were each assigned to soups to cook, my group got the honor of making a puree of butternut squash and a cauliflower soup. We started by roasting the butternut squash in the oven, and then chopped our onions for both soups and our cauliflower. We let the onions sweat, and didn't pay close enough attention to our onions and cauliflower sweating because we burned them. So we had to start over, it was the best thing that happened to our group, because we then realized how much we had to care for our ingredients. We followed all the steps for both soups, and even though it took us longer than every other group, everyone agreed that our cauliflower soup was the best of the bunch. And that's saying a lot because, I mean come on, its Cauliflower! But it was delish! I was so proud of it.

Tonight. My team has been assigned a chilled pear soup, onion gratine, and oyster bisque. I promise a much bigger post tomorrow.