The Post with the Two Classes (again!)

Interesting Fact: The french term Nappe refers to a soups ability to properly coat the back of a spoon.

Sauces and pandemonium have ruled the kitchen for the past two days. When we cook we're broken up in teams of three or four and this week I had the honor of being paired with the two worst fellas in the class. I like to think its because chef has faith in my abilities and thought that I could carry the team. Monday night and Tuesday night's classes consisted of learning briefly about sauces and the mother sauces (that can be remembered by the handy anagram BETH has VD - bechamel, espagnole(brown sauce), tomato, hollandaise, veloute, and demi-glace (people argue about whether or not this one is really considered a mother sauce)). And then we got into the sauce making. Each group had to make the same sauces : Espagnole (brown stock, pale roux, tomato paste), demi-glace (brown stock, espagnole, reduce by half), jus lie (nasty, lots of ingredients), chasseur (a demi-glace derivative with mushrooms), and fines herbes (a demi-glace derivative with fines herbes) and then last night: allemande (veloute, mushrooms, hint of lemon), bechamel (milk, white roux), mornay (bechamel derivative with gruyere and reggiano), tomato sauce, and roasted red pepper coulis.

Teamed with dumb and dumber we went about our cooking in this fashion. We did our mise (all of the prep cutting and measuring), and while they continued to do that for each sauce, I managed 3 saute pans and a sauce pot on the stove. Basically for the past two nights I've had prep cooks, leaving me to manage the flames. Sounds like a good deal, right? Leave all the chopping to someone else so you can actually cook. And for the most part it was ok, I got a decent sense of how it would really work on a line, working 4 different sauces at the same time, making sure the right ingredients went into the right ones at the right time, reducing them properly and for the correct length of time and managing not to burn a damned thing including myself. The only problem? Thing 1 and Thing 2, couldn't even follow the directions for what needed to be cut and how. For the tomato sauce they brought me whole canned tomatoes without crushing them. If I walked away from the stove for 2 minutes to wash a dish - the flames would be turned up or turned down. So I stayed by my sauces and they managed to survive. And while the whole thing was seemingly chaotic, working that many pans and pots at once is like dancing a waltz, if your timing is right, its beautiful.

Tonight is our last night in module one not including our practical and written exams tomorrow, (already?), and our last night of sauces - we're tackling hollandaise (eggs benedict anyone?), bernaise (don't get saucy with me Bernaise!), lemon beurre blanc, maitre d'hotel compound butter, balsamic vinaigrette and aioli. The good news? We all have to make our own hollandaise and our own aioli.