Seafood Feuilletee with Beurre Blanc
When was the last time you either ordered a Mousseline in a restaurant, or,better still, made one at home ? Well we had our first introduction to Mousseline making on Monday and Tuesday this week, the first Salmon, the second Scallop.
It’s a painstaking process of ensuring all your equipment is fridge cold, blitzing up the product in question in a Magi, and then using a dough scraper to push the salmon/ scallop through a Box Sieve to achieve a super fine purée. You then have to emulsify it by adding double cream,gradually, on a one to one basis in a bowl over ice, which takes forever. You sort of lose the will to live and then – if like me – you accidentally get some of the cold water from your ice bowl into your mixture it does not emulsify properly which you only understand when you try to gently poach it but it just collapses into a pile of nothingness. Well worth all the effort !
Not a great start to the week, but at least the lemongrass and ginger broth for the Salmon Mousseline was very tasty.
The scallop Mousseline ended up in Tortellini married with crab and prawns in an enriched Pasta we had made earlier. This was another bit of a fiasco with not enough Pasta machines to go around, people getting their pasta stuck on the bench, on each other’s pasta (as there was not enough space on the bench), and most people rolling to thin in the machine causing many headaches when shaping. Notwithstanding this chaos I ended up with a dish that looked somehow presentable and tasted pretty good even with a collapsed scallop mix – gratefully masked by the addition of crab and prawn.
The following day we were all so happy to put Mousseline behind us and move on to something new. However it was not really new – we had to debone a chicken again but this time stopping at the legs/ thighs so that we could use the meat from them to mince up with other ingredients for a stuffing that was to go into our Chicken Ballotine. We had to recall how to debone the chicken as there was to be no new Demo in class – albeit we thought there would be – and this caused a headache for some. I find it quite satisfying deconstructing the chicken to its skin and then filling it again with the breasts and stuffing – beats Mousseline any day of the week.
Skin before being reloaded
Thursday was an all day cook utilising Puff Pastry made earlier in the week to make Seafood Feuilletees with a Beurre Blanc sauce. We all think we can make a Puff blindfolded now, so we are Masters of the Universe Puff Wise ! With our “Roasted in a JClothe Ballotine” we had to make a Chicken and Thyme Jus – basically a posh gravy with great depth of flavour and silkiness, if you get it right, and some Veg and a layered potato accompaniment – Chefs choice. 
This dish all went well for me other than the Potato which ironically was the only thing I had bothered practising at home. In my kitchen at home I had use waxy Charlotte Potato’s with clarified butter to make a Pomme Anna in a small frying pan (Jamie Oliver recipe) and it was fab. In school they had different Pots, I used duck fat which made it grey and greasy and the pots just collapsed as either I had cut them too fine or they were not waxy. I will know better next time. But the Jus was perfect and Chicken pretty good too.
Had an unfortunate accident with our Apricot Sorbet during the week. I had left it on the side whilst being marked and one of my erstwhile colleagues dropped a heavy large saucepan from the top shelf which crashed down on top of our sorbet spraying it in all directions. I laughed at the culprit whose apron and jacket had been splattered only to be told that I had not seen my own Orange back yet which was somewhat resembling a Jackson Pollack painting. My Chef Whites will need a good wash this weekend !
Our Non cooking activities started off Monday morning with an extremely entertaining Spirits session. The presenter Peter Wilson was very engaging and used pictures of his dog Ruby in his slide presentation to indicate it was time for a drink. It was a little challenging for some to start their Monday morning drinking Vodka/ Gin/ Whiskey and Cognac before lunch, but made all the more memorable by Peter, not once, but twice, tripping over the wires to his laptop bringing the slide presentation to a stuttering stop, his laptop crashing to the floor and on one occasion with accompanying glassware. His Irish humour shone through and we all enjoyed his 3 hour lecture.
We also had a Chocolate Demo and tasting which was quite popular and certain students became excited by the knowledge we would be experimenting with chocolate next week. 
The final day of the week was an all day Demo that in the morning involved Terrines,Confit And Foie Gras, and in the afternoon a Croissant masterclass. I love Foie Gras and some of the food plated up and given out to taste was some of the best we have had for the whole course , even if some people had ethical issues with the Foie Gras process. We were all a little shocked to learn that each 100 grams of Foie Gras contains 400 calories so we probably all consumed in excess of 2000 calories during a two and a half hour Demo!
Who knew that Foie Gras was also behind the invention of the Sous Vide ? A producer of Foie Gras in France was tired of losing 50% of his produce when being cooked as it was melting away. He came up with the idea of sealing it in a bag and cooking it in water to ensure none of the product disappeared, and thereafter, after this success, he went on to work with Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller and came up with the Sous Vide method of cooking and machine. Good food history there !
Another good week, and a long weekend to look forward to before next weeks sweet offerings.