BULLETIN: Egg demand falls as market bottoms out

Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but I wasn't necessarily looking at it as a good way to start final exam week in culinary school today.

Cooking eggs -- omelets, over easy, scrambled and elsewise -- by classic French standards hasn't been my forte. Suffice it to say that in learning to make a proper omelet, I've had to break many an egg, several dozen in my first practice round a few weeks back.

Today, however, the demand for eggs declined significantly as I rolled out three egg dishes in decent fashion.

Key was the omelet, which like the other egg dishes in classic French cookery, must be done without browning, cooked through and not runny. On my first try, for a grade, I left it a bit runny, but scored well because all other components on my plate, roasted red potatoes with a paprika dusting and country gravy, were done well.

Chef suggested I make a second try on the omelet, albeit not for a grade. I completed it without runniness and little browning. The mechanics are key: moving, moving, shaking, shaking, rimming the egg in the pan, flipping, folding once in the pan, a second time onto the plate. Done. Order up!

The egg market had a crack in it today.

Makin' bacon and other culinary delights

Making one's own bacon, from the raw, just-cut pork belly, seemed as foreign to me a week ago as growing one's own wheat in pots on the back porch for making bread.

Once the process began unfolding, the peculiarity went away, largely because the formula is fairly simple: Cut the pork belly slab (left) into appropriate sizes and thicknesses, coat thoroughly in a salt cure formula, consisting of Kosher salt and brown sugar, wrap tightly in plastic for a wo-day cure, turning the package over after one day. Then one towel dries the meat, hangs it to dry for a day or two and then puts it in a smoker for a couple of hours.

On Monday, we will cook the bacon as part of a breakfast comptency test in which we also must prep, cook and plate a French omelet, eggs over easy and a poached egg.

Any bread that comes with the breakfast won't be from wheat I have grown on my back porch. I won't be doing that.

Today's menu: Could be flounder, could be omelet

A dose of reality for the culinary classroom today: Depending on what is delivered, and what is not, we will cook either a flounder dinner or an egg breakfast.

Chef said Thursday that he put in an order for fresh flounder, and if the flat fish with the bulging eyes arrive, each of us likely will get a whole one to clean, fillet and cook to chef's specifications. First course will be a salad that hasn't yet been defined and second course a soup, possibly based on cauliflower.

If the fish don't arrive, we will cook breakfast -- French omelet, eggs over easy, scrambled eggs in a vol au vent tube of pastry or poached egg. And, maybe, bacon. Our bacon slabs are at the end of their curing, hanging in the walk-in cooler to await today's smoking in cherry-wood chips.

That's the reality. In a restaurant, one must make do with what is available.

Chef and we students are banking on the fish coming in. Then we can cook breakfast on Monday, our final daily cooking lesson before the midweek final exam.

Egg on my face ... and everywhere else

Egg day dawned bright and prospects were good going into the kitchen Friday in Culinary Foundations II class. Then clouds began gathering -- clouds of too much browning, over-cooked and poorly folded omelets, pan too hot, not hot enough, too sticky, too oily.

"If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs," Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once said.

We culinary students wish it were just "a few eggs."

Instead, to make perfect French omelets, by Chef Dan Fluharty;'s standards, we had to break many an egg.

When thinking omelet, one must disabuse himself of the image of a good old-fashioned veggie and cheese omelet or of the offerings at IHOP and the Denny's Grand Slam or anything approximating them. As we should know by now having been steeped in French culinary standards for 10 weeks, the omelet is the height of delicacy, perfect in constitution, shape and presentation.

"We will learn to cook the French omelet," Chef Dan had said earlier in the week. "Why French? Because this is a French culinary school, (affiliated with) the Cordon Bleu."

Learn we did. Well, sort of. A half-dozen tries into the process, I presented Chef with my latest effort, a somewhat sadly shaped mass of yellow.

"It has good texture, good color," Chef allowed. "What about this shape? You want something more shaped by the contour of the pan, like this." He put his hands on it and began shaping it to his liking.

"This isn't for a grade, is it?" he asked.

"Well, Chef," I stammered. "Uh, no." I then hurried off to try another.

Eventually, Chef joined me at my stove top, showed me two straight times how, even lent me his magic spatula (certainly, that was the key to it all!). My next two efforts were disastrous, and with time running out on the day's exercise, I finally plated one that led Chef to show me mercy: "That's better. A little brown. I'll call that an 8." Eight, meaning out of a possible 10 points. Most generous. I took it and moved on to egg poaching.

Nothing like going from the frying pan to the near boiling water.