Cooking -- and eating -- like Julia Child

Julia Child, the mother of American gourmancy, experienced what she called her culinary awakening with her very first meal in France more than 60 years ago -- sole meunière.

The almost-too-delicate-to-handle sole, filleted from the dover sole or other flat fish such as the flounder, is cooked in a butter sautè and served with butter sauce, or beurre blanc.

Sole meunière was on the menu today in Culinary Foundations III as the entrèe in a three-course offering for Chef Dan Fluharty. It was one of our last efforts before next week's final exams.

We cut the fillets from whole flounder, no mean feat. The trick is avoiding the nasties inside the fish, getting as much of the flesh as possible while avoiding bones and cutting the skin off without massacre of the delicate flesh. I nearly managed, getting one almost perfect fillet and a second that was -- well, suffice it to say that I served its two or three broken pieces hidden beneath almost perfect.

The cooking is lightning quick, two minutes or less on each side, and is the very last task in a rush of heat on the stovetop. The beurre blanc is a finicky sauce and must have one's full attention to avoid breaking the emulsion with too much or not enough heat. I managed mine well and turned out what Chef called a winning sauce, including mushrooms and capers.

The sole and sauce were plated with couscous, which I cooked right but slightly under-seasoned, and sautè of broccoli that was cooked and seasoned well. I garnished with tomato provençal, a crowned roma tomato with the seeds removed, stuffed with bread crumbs, herbs and parmesan cheese and baked for three minutes.

First course was clam chowder, which turned out as I like it, if a tad thick for Chef. Second course was a fennel and red pepper salad, marinated in a lemon zest vinaigrette. Chef said mine was seasoned as it should be.

Experiencing the delicate flavor of the sole meunière, accompanied by the mushroom and caper beurre blanc, made clear to me why Julia Child's inner gourmand was stirred when she partook of this most French and most gourmet of meals.

(Photo credits: Sole meunière, www.sunset.com; Julia Child, www.awardsdaily.com.)

Chicken slightly overdone? I beg to differ

Chicken roasted just so, accompanied by roasted root vegetables, a flavorful pan sauce, browned small potatoes and roasted mushrooms for garnish. Ah, culinary perfection.

Hold on there, rotisserie boy!

Chef Dan Fluharty didn't think so, calling my roasted chicken "just slightly overcooked." But Chef, I protested, it's moist, it's succulent, it's ... It's 2 points off, Chef concluded.

And another 2 points off for the thin sauce. All right, that's true; my sauce nateur just didn't have it today. Too thin, too buttery. I could blame it on the frozen demi-glace we had to use. But I won't.

Chef did very much like my vegetables and potatoes (yes, potato is a veggie, but in Culinary World, we count it as a starch). They were roasted just right.

Thirty-six points out of 40 for the roasted chicken plating.

Another 36 for my poached salmon, which he also called overcooked, deducting 2 points. It had a touch of pink inside, but ah, well. He very much liked the rice pilaf and was as happy with my beurre blanc as I was. The turned zucchini pieces ("turned" refers to the knife cut on them) were tender but a couple of pieces got just a little too brown; 2 points off.

All in all, a good first day of the cooking competency final exam. We complete the six-week term on Friday, when I will prep, cook and plate a grilled pork chop with risotto and broccoli and a veal scaloppini with pommes duchesse and a marsala wine sauce.

I made a duxelle -- minced, dried sauté of fresh mushrooms in butter, onion and a splash of red wine -- to prepare a compound butter. If it tastes good upon unwrapping Friday, I will use a piece for garnish atop my pork chop.

Cramming for exams? No, for everything else

Learning the culinary arts will last a lifetime, say the chefs who are our teachers at the California Culinary Academy. If so, why does it seem that they are trying to cram it in all into this one week?

Culinary Foundations II class is in its waning days; the written final exam will be today; cooking competency exams will be Thursday and Friday.

Yet on Monday and Tuesday, Chef Dan Fluharty was still pushing new dishes and techniques. On Monday he demonstrated, and put us to work practicing, two stuffed poultry dishes. On Tuesday, he demonstrated and again put us to work making a braised duck leg and fillet of sole. Both were appropriately challenging, the fillet especially so, because each of us started with a whole fish from which to exract the fillets.

Neither duck leg nor fillet of sole will be on the competency final exams. But several of the side dishes that we made will be, so we got to practice making rich, creamy risotto, rice pilaf, sauté of broccoli, turned zucchini, beurre blanc for the fish and a rich pan sauce for the duck.

Any and all cooking practice serves to improve our knife skills, our attenton to the details of the stove top and the oven -- temperature control, that is. It also improves our organizational skills and efficiencies, all headed toward the plating and service.

Menu No. 2: poached salmon

Part 1 of the Culinary Foundations II competency final exam on Thursday will conclude with preparation of poached salmon. The complete dish will include a 4-ounce piece of salmon fillet, rice pilaf, sautéed zucchini, beurre blanc (butter sauce) and garnish.

Preparation of the poaching liquid, called a court bouillon, is the first step in getting the salmon just right. The liquid is one-half gallon of water, 1 cup dry white wine, 2 ounces of white wine vinegar, 1 cup mirepoix (diced onion, carrot, celery), herbs and spices and a bit of fresh lemon juice. These ingredients enhance flavor and cooking, including coagulation of proteins in the fish.

The salmon goes into the simmering liquid for no more than 6-8 minutes. The key is to cook it to moistness, leaving it slightly pink in the center.

Rice pilaf is cooked using a long-grain rice that has been coated in hot oil to opaqueness before chicken stock is added for a 15-20-minute simmer. It should be flaky and a bit moist, but not wet, and flavored with herbs added at the beginning of cooking.

The zucchini should be cooked to tenderness but not mushy, accompanied by crushed tomatoes, herbs and seasoning. Chef Dan Fluharty showed us a method using canned crushed tomatoes. I hope to use fresh roma tomatoes that I will blanch, concassé and dice before putting them in the pot.

Beurre blanc is a rich butter sauce made with shallots sweated in a reduction of white wine and white wine vinegar, thickened with introduction of cold butter bits at a time until an emulsion forms. Vigorous and simultaneous shaking of the sauté and stirring of the ingredients is required to create the emulsion.

(Photo: my practice poached salmon dish from last week.)

Heat is on: culinary school final exams

Time to pull on the big boy pants -- checkered chef's style.

Hone knives on the steel.

Check stove burners and fire up the oven.

Se habla culinario. Solamente culinario por este semana.

We students in Culinary Foundations II have our menus for the final exam, cooking four fully plated meals over two days. Here's the rundown:

Thursday's first plate: Roasted chicken, braised root vegetables, turned potatoes, sauce nateur from the roast pan drippings and garnish.
Thursday's second plate (photo at left): Poached salmon, rice pilaf, squash and tomatoes, beurre blanc (butter sauce) and garnish.

Friday's first plate: Brined and grilled pork chop, polenta, braised fennel and apples, sauce chasseur made from scratch and garnish.

Friday's second plate: Veal scaloppini, risotto with saffron, sauté of turned zucchini and broccoli florets, marsala wine sauce from veal pan drippings and garnish.

Practice sessions begin tonight with poached salmon.

Life is one deadline after another

Today's cooking exercise in Culinary Foundations II came as close to feeling like my days as a newspaper editor as anything I have experienced since leaving that career 17 months ago.

Deadline loomed, as the pieces came together. Nothing was quite finished, yet everything was well in the works. The key factor was putting it all together in a complementary way -- as a story, a headline and a photo would complement one another on the front page of the newspaper, all the while making sure words were spelled correctly and everything fit.

In this instance, it was keeping the poached salmon warm so I could finish the beurre blanc, check the seasoning on the rice pilaf and spoon the squash and tomato provençal onto the plate. Oh, and make sure the plate was warm.

It worked, all coming together in a furious two minutes. The adrenaline rush was very familiar. And there was a great deal of satisfaction in having completed it with accurate flavoring and saucing and attractive plating.

(Photo shows, clockwise from top: rice pilaf; squash and tomato provençal; poached salmon with beurre blanc.)

Conquering those stove-top bullies: classic sauces

Hollandaise sauce is mine; I have conquered it. Same with Sauce Robert, mornay and an array of other leading and small sauces in the repertoire of classic French cooking.

Even that stubborn stove-top bully beurre blanc has been felled.

What they call in culinary school a competency exam, also known as a practical exam, was held today for sauces. I proved competent in all four, as did every other member of my class in Culinary Foundations II at the California Culinary Academy.

Laying down French sauces as the basis for a culinary education is a smart approach. They feed (pun intended) most of what will follow in fairly rapid order, starting with soups.

Chef Dan Fluharty dove in today, immediately after the competency exam and cleanup. He demonstrated classic French onion soup -- "It's still in vogue, and it's a national soup: French," Chef declaimed -- and cream of mushroom soup simultaneously. There's that darn multi-tasking again.

On Monday, he had sneaked in a demo of the classic of classics in soups, the consommé. It's a highly flavorful clear broth, and most chef educators and restaurant chefs would agree that it's one of a handful of fundamentals that a chef needs to know.

(Photo shows the remnants of my sauce practical exam. That's beurre blanc in the top pot, foreground.)

Drawing a blank on beurre blanc

Two tries in practice and two broken beurre blanc sauces. That means I will go into Tuesday's sauce competency exam in Culinary Foundations II having to do it right for the first time under the pressure of being graded.

The good news is that I know what I did wrong both times in making the sauce. I neglected to "pat the head and rub the belly" as Chef Dan Fluharty taught the coordinated, simultaneous double motion needed to make the butter form an emulsion in the pan.

While today's practice session left me without a successful beurre blanc, I did complete the other three required sauces -- mornay, hollandaise and Sauce Robert -- in fine fashion and with plenty of time to spare. Adhering to that timeline will allow for two tries at any one sauce -- if any, it will be beurre blanc -- during Tuesday's practical exam.

Pat head, rub belly at same time? You can be a saucier

To make beurre blanc, Chef Dan Fluharty instructs, "you have to pat your head and rub your belly."

The age-old motor-skills coordination game for kids works for we adults learning to be chefs at the California Culinary Academy. For one must do the equivalent to have a chance at getting beurre blanc right.

Beurre blanc requires that after the wine, wine vinegar and shallot reduction, introduction of cold butter followed immediately and continuously by a to-and-fro motion with the sauté pan across the stove burner and a simultaneous round-and-round stirring of the pan's contents with a spatula. That brings about the desired emulsifying of the butter with the flavorful parts of the reduction, and it is the essence of beurre blanc.

The pat-head, rub-belly coordination has become an apt metaphor for the multi-tasking it takes to handle the jobs in a commercial kitchen -- or any kitchen, for that matter.

"You are learning how to cook, how to be cooks ... ," Chef Dan said. "You have to do five or six things at once."

(Photo credit: www.gamerevolution.com)

Sauces challenge comes to a boil

All those sauces we learned and practiced last week will be on the agenda again Monday and Tuesday in Culinary Foundations II class. Only this time, it's for real.

Chef Dan Fluharty is generously giving us Monday as a dress rehearsal for making four key sauces -- mornay, Robert, hollandaise and beurre blanc -- in a timed exercise of 90 minutes. On Tuesday, we will have 90 more minutes to make them for grading, with 10 points for each sauce (4 for consistency and wheter it is emulsified or broken, 4 total for the right levels of seasonings and acid, 2 for temperature).

The practical exam will be 40 points total, or about 7% of our grade.

My Sunday has included practicing hollandaise, for a breakfast of eggs benedict. The effort went well until the end, when too much heat "broke" my sauce, meaning the emulsified egg yolk and butter separated. My second effort ended with an intact sauce, but it was too thick and would not have passed muster with Chef Dan.

Where salsa comes from (hint: not jars)

Epicurious is a regular stop for me in my Internet food prowl. But this week's Epicurious stopped me cold. It published Taste Test: Salsa, with the testing limited to jarred salsas.

From the article:

Store-bought salsa should be chunky enough that it dresses up a tortilla chip but does not run down the sides. It should be multidimensional, with the sweet flavor of summer tomatoes, some element of onions, and a subtle kick of hot chile peppers to top it off.

"Store-bought" is code for "in jars". One must make accommodations, even concessions, in many circumstances, but salsa from jars?

That's just wrong.

Most especially in the middle of summer, which is the middle of the growing season and the harvest, with fresh tomatoes and other ingredients available most everywhere. Would an Italian buy jarred pesto? Or a Frenchman buy jarred beurre blanc? Or an Indian buy curry in a container?

NO!

I was reared in my mom's and my tias' Mexican kitchens, where chopping, dicing and combining tomatoes, jalapeños, onions, garlic, cilantro and other fresh ingredients led to salsa. Many of the ingredients were grown in our back yard.

That's where salsa comes from.