Tarte Tatin
Monday morning and it’s Calves Liver – not exactly the food that would have been top of my favourite dishes to tackle at the start of a new week. It appears I was not alone in my thoughts as – guess what ? – not a huge number of liver fans out there amongst the students ! The positive elements to accompany the liver were a Tare Sauce ( involving Soy Sauce, Mirin, Sake, Ginger and other ingredients) and a Coriander Crumb with a Roasted Shallot- maybe these could help to disguise the taste of the liver ?
Yuck, Liver, but was praised for my presentation
Well they certainly assisted but for me it’s a textural thing, so although the dish was tasty, the sauce really good ( and it could probably work with other meats) the main element still made the dish inedible !
During this first morning we also started to make a Rich Vanilla Ice Cream ( not to go with the liver), and slow roasted Tomatoes (8 hours !), whilst scorching Red Peppers to loose their skins for the base of our Red Pepper and Tomato Consommé to be completed tomorrow.
Tuesday morning saw us hard at work whisking like crazy our Egg Whites and Shells for our next Consommé and who should pay us a visit at this precise time ? – none other than Prue Leith herself, performing a tour of the kitchens watching us trying to make our crust and getting it to rise to enable our Consommé to clear. She stopped and looked over my shoulder and made a comment about the rise on my crust which gave me an opportunity to have a quick chat with her about the alchemy of the process. She is quite an imposing and elegant figure and it was an unexpected pleasure to get to meet her briefly.
Maybe inspired by this little chat my Consommé was quite successful and clear, however my Pepper Brunoise were too small so I need to rethink my knife skills further to achieve what they are looking for. Mmmmmm………
Tuesday also saw us making Puff Pastry, I am quite happy with this process and even quite enjoy it – seems all of us are in agreement as it is much easier than Flaky pastry as you do not have to worry about adding the butter in stages – with Puff, once the butters in, its in ! Just remember how many rolls and folds and keep your edges and corners straight and you should be fine!
The Puff was to be used on Wednesday for a classic Tarte Tatin- something I have never cooked before. This process involves caramelising apples in sugar and butter, preferably without letting them burn, laying on top your chilled Puff Pastry, and then finishing it off in the oven still in the frying pan, before inverting on to a plate for service. The inverting process can be tricky as you can easily burn yourself with piping hot caramel splashing about, but I think we all managed to produce something worthy and no trips to A&E! We served our Vanilla Ice Cream with this, and the hot and cold Combo was a real pleasure to eat even if my Ice Cream was commented upon as having a bit a fudgy texture.
This week we also had our first experience of making a Jus. You see this in top restaurants all the time and other than appreciating it is some kind of sauce to finish and enhance a dish I was unaware of the real process involved to make it. In essence it is a stock based reduction sauce which starts off – in this case – by browning chicken wings to get a nice depth of colour and then using them with browned vegetables to make a stock. We would be making this over 2 days and end up reducing to taste and serving it on Friday with a Sous Vide Chicken breast. This involved another process new to most us – brining and cooking a chicken breast Sous Vide style. You could simplify this style of cooking by just saying it’s chicken cooked in a bag , which essentially it is, but held in a water bath at 64degrees for an hour and a half and when it’s finished you know that it will be cooked with all the moisture retained. 
Finish it off in a searingly hot pan for 30 seconds or so and you have a beautifully cooked, moist chicken breast with a crispy Caramelised skin, taking out the risk of over or under cooking it. Cheating ? Who knows, but as we were advised in the Sous Vide Demo, you should always ask yourself whether this way of preparation will enhance your dish or not. If not don’t do it !
The other very tricky task we “endured” this week was a Rabbit Ravioli. Whilst the rabbit filling aspect was relatively straightforward (braising, chopping small, sauce to mix through) the Construction of the Ravioli itself drove us all to distraction. We can all make Pasta now but we were advised to pass it through the machine to the final setting ( so thin you can read your time plan through it!) and then lay out on cling film on the bench before cutting out 7.5cm circles , filling with a teaspoon of rabbit filling, and enclosing with another pasta circle making sure you squeeze air out, don’t wrinkle it, make sure you have a good seal etc etc…….This was a nightmare as the pasta was sticking to the table, breaking up as we tried to close over the filling, and eventually our teachers decided that we should have gone to the penultimate setting on the machine and also used different size cutters.
Rabbit Ravioli with Mustard Sauce, so over it …..
Half of us had already progressed to far for this advice to assist and had become somewhat disillusioned by the whole process. “I am so over this” was heard a number of times around the kitchen. Next week we will have a similar experience making Tortellini so hopefully we can improve !
Demonstrations were varied as always including another Wine Demo focusing on Other Black Grapes And Red Wines ( ah …Malbec at last !) and a very time consuming process of making mousselines, which apparently we had to pay attention to very closely as we will be doing this next week to. Passing a chicken breast by chopping it fine and scraping it through a Box Sieve for 30 minutes or more looks like so much fun ! Roll on week 4 !