Intermediate Week Four

Only four weeks into the new term the exhaustion has been hitting hard, but Monday was class-free--the perfect opportunity to take a day trip to some place like Omaha Beach or Strasbourg and enjoy the beautiful weather; however, by the time that I got out of bed my plans had changed to staying in my pajamas, catching up on some reading, and organizing class notes and recipes. I reasoned with myself that it was the best thing for my budget. Yeah, that's it--not laziness.  The metro was also under some sort of ISIS bomb threat, although I didn't learn of this until Friday (should I feel insulted that no family or friends sent me overly-panicked messages warning me to stay away from the metro?).

Tuesday

The warning light in my head went off when I saw that our cuisine demonstration and practicum were going to involve lobster. While the live crabs in basic cuisine may have taken me by surprise, I was just familiar enough with lobster to know that it's generally served very fresh--seafood restaurants don't keep those large tanks in public view simply for decoration. Chef Caals showed us two methods for preparation: tie up the live lobster and drop it into the boiling cooking liquid or shove a knife through its head and end things quickly. Neither option sounded particularly appealing, but I was leaning towards the latter. Caals additionally prepared a tomato and fennel tart, rice pilaf with raisins, and a fabulous chocolate cream soufflé with orange ice cream.

Tomato & fennel tart; Lobster & rice pilaf with raisins;
Chocolate cream soufflé & orange ice cream

Practicum followed after lunch. Korean lady chef had gone into the room next door while we began to select our victims. Using my tongs, I carefully picked up my lobster. Although the claws were shut with rubber bands, it suddenly arched its back and hit my arm with its flailing tail and arms, causing me to emit a scream that sent two chefs running into the room. My preferred method of slaughter didn't matter in the end, either, because our chef wanted us to tie up the lobster, rip out its claws, and plunge its squirming torso into the boiling water. The chef only shook her head as I closed my eyes and twisted off each arm, apologizing profusely in the process.

The lobster ended up being the only thing that was done well--the rice was undercooked and I forgot to add the raisins, and my sauce had too much coral and tomalley (green stuff that you scrape out of the lobster's head and use as a thickening agent). It was, however, one of the faster and simpler dishes that we had prepared and I found myself hoping that I would get it on the final exam.

Wednesday

Our cuisine demonstration was the first of a two-part lesson on making consommé and aspic jelly. Chef Poupard began by making an aspic-coated chicken terrine with pan-fried foie gras. He moved on to the dish that we would be making in our practicum that evening--a chicken ballotine. It involved deboning a chicken but leaving all of its skin in one piece with the meat still attached, and then filling that chicken with a blend of pork fatback, pork shoulder, diced ham, pistachios, and foie gras mousse before rolling it up into a thick log and poaching it in a court bouillon. He finished the demo by making white sausage... because the French can't get enough of blended and poached meats. It was the only dish that we actually sampled--the other two would be served cold the next day.

White sausage with apples

Chef Cotte prepared three-chocolate Bavarois in the next demonstration. The bottom consisted of a ladyfinger sponge cake imbibed with chocolate syrup. The next four layers were dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate Bavarian cream topped with dark chocolate ganache. Like the Opéra cake, we would have to draw some designs on our finished product (only with white chocolate). The cake was delicious, it seemed straightforward, and I was feeling more confident in my cornet drawing skills. It was my week to be the class assistant in pastry but even that didn't appear to be too worrisome for this recipe.

Chef's Bavarois

We calculated that we should be out of our cuisine practicum early that evening because we were preparing only the one item--the chicken ballotine--but when we reached the classroom the group before us was still frantically laboring. Even with me in the group we're one of the faster ones, though, so we weren't worried. As it turns out, deboning a chicken while keeping its skin all in one piece is much harder than it sounds, as is rolling up the ballotine. All of them were poaching after about 90 minutes, though, and we used the wait time to practice making Hollandaise sauce, the technical part of our intermediate cuisine final exam. At least some of us made Hollandaise--the school ran completely out of eggs.

After about an 45 minutes of poaching our ballotines the chef told us to take them off the stove and strain the cooking liquid. The internal temperatures were supposed to be 65°C but most of ours were around 45°C. We were also supposed to leave them refrigerated in the strained cooking liquid until our next practicum, but all of the kitchen refrigerators felt more like ovens thanks to the previous class's hot pots of ballotines. Grabbing both their pots and ours we began transferring them to the refrigerators next door where we collided with irate pastry students hurrying to finish their Bavarois. We did at least manage to finish a half-hour earlier than the first group.

Thursday

The pastry practicum to make the Bavarois was first thing in the morning. My fellow assistant Dao and I arrived early to begin gathering the ingredients but the chef was missing and the supply closet was locked. The one ingredient that we could get, the eggs, were still out of stock because the morning shipment had not yet arrived. We found just enough for everyone to do their ladyfinger sponge. About three minutes before the start of class Chef Jordan arrived. My stomach twisted in a knot--we had him only for one or two demonstrations and a theory class in basic, but we heard horror stories from other students who had him in practicals.

While Dao and I went with the chef to get ingredients the other students began their ladyfinger sponge. We were finally able to join them but before I could even measure out my ingredients the chef told me that the eggs had arrived and sent me to get them right then... from the basement kitchen. We were on the third floor (or fourth floor for my American friends). I descended the four flights of stairs two steps at a time, grabbed the first box that I saw, and ascended a little more slowly. Panting, I finally began my batter by the time that most of the class had finished with the chef yelling at me to hurry up and get mine into the oven. Things went only downhill from there.

In demonstration, Cotte instructed us to melt the three chocolates simply by pouring the hot Bavarian cream mixture over them. Because he was working with about four times the recipe, though, it worked quite well for him. The small amount of cream that we were using hardly warmed the chocolate. We were soon jockeying for positions at the stoves to heat up our bowls. Jordan stood by with his notepad, jotting notes and yelling at us to hurry because we were already late.

When it came time to add the last layer of ganache I knew that I was in trouble. Only after I began to pour it over the top did I realize that it was too thick and not heated enough--it began to coagulate before it spread evenly to the edges and my attempts to smooth it out only made it look worse. Out of my peripheral vision I could see Jordan staring at me, but I finally gave up and moved on to my white chocolate decoration. Everyone was finished and lining up to show him his or her cake, so I just did some quick shaky swirls knowing full-well that it didn't matter because my ganache looked so horrendous.

I stood at the back of the line of students and listened to him harshly critique each one, so when my turn finally came I preempted his remarks by saying, "My ganache is screwed up--it wasn't warm enough." He agreed, pointed out some other problems with my cake, and then gathered the whole group together. He began his speech with, "Everyone today failed--I gave you all zeros--except him. He's the only one who passed." He pointed to the rather boyish girl on his right as little whispers of "she" went around the room, although nobody dared to correct him out loud.

He then proceeded to tell us that our first mistake was not melting our chocolate before adding the cream even if the chef didn't do it in demonstration. He made a few other points that might have been helpful while we were actually in the process of making our cakes but he insisted that the fault for not knowing was ours because we don't ask questions during the demonstration. Not that he was in the demonstration ("I know--I've been in the demos before and you don't ask questions!") and not that we knew what questions to ask.

The majority of cakes looked really good to me (except mine) and while I appreciate discipline and honest assessments in the classroom I couldn't for the life of me figure out how every other cake but one was deserving of failure. My panic level rose when he boasted that he failed three intermediate students on the final exam last semester over that cake--a frightening statistic when you consider that only about seven students would have received that recipe. We left class a little shell-shocked with one Asian girl completely in tears and me praying that I don't get that cake or Chef Jordan on the exam.

Dao and I grabbed a quick lunch at a cheap Chinese place and returned to our afternoon cuisine demonstration with Chef Vaca. He unmolded Chef Poupard's terrine from Friday, sliced up the ballotine, clarified the cooking liquid, and made a sea bream and tomato jelly terrine... because who doesn't like jellified meats, fish, and vegetables? The final dishes were quite pretty, though, demonstrating once again that presentation is often more important than taste in French cuisine.

Ballotine on chicken jelly; Aspic-coated chicken terrine;
Sea bream terrine

Friday

Intermediate cuisine focuses heavily on chocolates, which might sound like a good thing but is actually quite stressful. A few chefs had already given demonstrations on tempering chocolates but up to this point we had never actually done it ourselves. To perfectly temper dark chocolate--get it to the stage where it dries with a glossy, smooth surface--one must melt it to a temperature of 45°-50°C, bring it down to a temperature of 27°C (we were to use the tabling method--spreading it out thinly on a counter), and bring it back up to 31°-32°C. Milk and white chocolates have a whole different set of rules. Chef Cotte made truffles, coffee creams, candied oranges, and mendiants (mixed fruit and nut chocolates); we would have to make only the first two.

Truffles, coffee creams, mendiants, and orangettes

That afternoon we made our consommé clarification/chicken jelly and the white sausage (from Wednesday's demonstration). The clarification went well but I had a rough start to the sausage--the casing slipped off of the piping tip while I was trying to fill it up, creating a pink sea of meat mush all over my work space, but once I got the hang of it the process was almost enjoyable. After tying off the sausage links and dumping it into the poaching liquid I began decorating my chicken jelly as a base for a slice of ballotine. My first attempt at a tomato rose wasn't terrible and I made some semblance of a stem using leeks. The chef wasn't too impressed but he thought that everything tasted fine. When it came time to plate my sausage, though, I found that all of the casings had exploded, leaving me with a pot full only of mushy sausage innards; however, we were running so late and the chef was in such a hurry that I don't think he even realized that he didn't evaluate the sausage.

We had to make a dash from class to the locker rooms to drop off our knife kits, aprons, and hats in order to make it to the next cuisine demonstration on time. Student services were doing a uniform check at the door and, not having time to put on a clean jacket, I held my notebook strategically to cover up the stains from the last practicum. Finding a spot under the air conditioning that was actually working for once, I fanned myself as Chef Singer gave us a demonstration on cuisine from the region of Alsace.

Back in the summer of 2000 while staying in Nice I had made a weekend trip to Strasbourg and found the area to be quite charming. It's as much German as it is French (if not more so) and I looked forward to this lesson. The chef made a Flammenküche (a sort of pizza with cream, onion, and bacon), Alsatian-style sauerkraut with sausages and potatoes, and trout stuffed with mushrooms. Unfortunately, he was running late and I had to request to leave early because I was the assistant in pastry, so I never was able to get photos or, sadly, do the tasting.

A new chef was leading our practicum, an easy-going little man who gained instant popularity simply for not being Jordan. He really was very kind and helpful, though, and we soon had 14 puddles of dark chocolate being smeared all over the tables. The chefs encourage us not to test our chocolate with thermometers but rather to learn by touch. My touch apparently needs a little more practice because I overheated the chocolate, causing the cocoa butter to split. It still technically "worked" but my candies all came out dull with traces of light swirls in them. They worked in the sense that it didn't stop me from eating them.

Saturday

We had only our cuisine practicum in the morning. Chef Cotte took a break from his pastry duties and joined us in the kitchen while we made the stuffed trout. Like the red mullet, we serve this fish whole (i.e., head and tail attached) meaning that we have to remove the bones and innards while keeping the form of the fish. Cutting cleanly down the back to the central bone was a bit difficult, but once I found it the rest was easy. The hardest part was, as always, removing the pin bones with fish tweezers. For some reason it takes me a thousand times longer than my classmates and I still missed several as I would discover at lunch later. Cotte was shouting out reminders that I needed to hurry and that I was the last person, but in the end he declared that my stuffing for the fish was "so good" and gave me a high-five.

Having a cough and runny nose, I stayed home the rest of the day and on into Sunday, opting to listen to SermonAudio rather than go to church. Before I left Greenville to come to Paris, Pastor Conley was in the middle of a series on David. I had really enjoyed those messages and decided to start catching up, beginning with the first message that I missed on June 22--"Distress-Driven to the Lord." The passage was I Samuel 30:1-10 when David triumphantly returns to Ziklag only to discover that the Amalekites had plundered the city and taken all of the inhabitants captive. For the last few chapters we see no indication that David has been asking for the Lord's guidance in any decisions, but now as his own men are ready to turn on him he finally turns to the Lord

Conley makes three points: 1) Let your distress drive you to remember God, 2) let your distress drive you to ask God, and 3) let your distress drive you to obey God. I was for about the millionth time reminded that in every decision, no matter how big or how small it may seem, no matter how sure I feel of how I should respond, my first step should always be to bring it before God. That way, when things don't work out the way that I hoped or expected, when I fail, or when I succeed I can rest in the knowledge that God was directing me and that He will do only what is best for me.