Menu No. 4: veal scaloppini

The fourth and last plate for the Culinary Foundations II competency final exam, to be prepped, cooked and plated on Friday, will be veal scaloppini, with a marsala wine sauce, sauté of greens beans or brussels sprouts, pommes duchesse and a garnish.

The veal presents a dichotomy in handling and preparation. It's a small cut of meat that must be treated carefully. That is, seemingly, except at the beginning, when it must be pounded with the spike side of a meat hammer (left) to tenderize it, then with the blunt side to tenderize further and flatten uniformly for cooking. But even those actions must be done so as not to break the fiber of the meat entirely.

Even before that, one must prep the ingredients for the marsala wine sauce -- diced shallot, sliced mushrooms and fresh thyme -- and have on hand butter, the marsala wine and demi-glace (highly concentrated veal stock).

When those are ready, the sauté is heated, the butter melted in the hot pan and the veal lightly floured before going into the sauté for a couple of minutes on each side. The desired effect is a little browning before removing the veal from the heat to make the sauce. When the sauce is nearly finished, the veal goes back in for a few seconds before it and the sauce are plated.

Whether it's green beans or brussels sprouts, they are cooked similarly: blanched in salt water, shocked in ice water, followed by sauté in rendered bacon fat with julienne of red bell pepper and diced onion.

Pommes duchesse take the most prep, starting with making what in essence are mashed potatoes, adding cream, butter and seasonings, then putting the concoction in a pastry bag for piping into elegant little "cakes" that then are baked until golden brown (right). The keys are no lumps and the right color and crust on the finished potato.

The shallot: a celestial beauty

Consider the shallot.

This small, unobtrusive, sometimes hard-to-find aromatic may well be the Pluto of the culinary solar system. We know it's there, yet we accord it little respect, often ignoring it completely. We prefer the bigger, stronger Jupiter-like onion. Or, we're drawn to the shrouded mystery of the leek: Like Venus, we surmise, something amazing must lurk beneath all that layering.

Yet it is the shallot that provides a sweet balance to a sauté, a delicate flavor to a sauce, a quiet complement to a simmering soup. Just as Pluto provides a delicate balance to the solar system, complementing rather than competing with the bigger orbs. It is small but significant, celestially speaking.

A shallot brought me to a small but significant moment of awareness Thursday as I completed my culinary school competency exam on vegetables and starches. Behind schedule, I was rushing to get green beans and red peppers into a sauté. The bacon fat was rendered, and next came the shallot. But in my haste, I had neglected to dice a shallot.

When I began culinary school just 10 weeks ago, dicing a shallot would have been a show stopper. I would have wrestled with cutting it open, removing the papery skin and figuring out a way to slice into the small object without slicing into a digit. The entire operation might take five minutes.

But now, in a seemingly magical transformation, I do it with ease. On Thursday, without pausing, I grabbed a shallot, sliced it open, peeled off the skin and fine diced the 2-inch beauty with a 9-inch chef's knife, all in 30 seconds. Into the sauté went the diced shallot, and I completed my dish with minutes to spare.

The episode was an emblem of my culinary progress, a small but significant moment with a small but significant shallot. Kind of like that small rock way out there in the solar system -- Pluto. Small, yes. Yet it has its significance.

Learning (not) to boil water

A final practice session today for the big competency exam in vegetables and starches led me to conclude that, largely, we students in Culinary Foundations II class are being taught not to boil water.

At one point in the two-hour session, I had five sauce pots on the stove, four with water and one with chicken stock, all related to the five dishes I was preparing. As they perked, simmered and bubbled, it occurred to me that my key task at that moment was NOT to let any of them boil.

Slow warming, sure. Simmer, fine. Bubble a bit, OK. But hard, rolling boil -- NO!

As Chef Dan Fluharty and others explain, a hard boil knocks the food around and damages it, cooks it too fast in many instances and unevenly in others.

One can recall foods that were over-cooked because they were plunged into boiling water. They came out mushy, flavorless and even discolored.

The practical exam will show if we can cook veggies -- artichoke, carrots and green beans -- and starches -- potatoes and rice -- so they are solid and intact with good shape and crispness, flavorful and of good color.

In short, we must show that we have learned not to boil water.

(Photo shows my pots NOT boiling.)

Battle of the bulge still on, but I'm winning for now

Still no weight gain for me -- in fact, a self-impressive 3-4 pound loss -- after six weeks of culinary school.

As has been said to the point of cliché, given a situation in which one must literally eat his homework and his in-class work, putting on pounds would seem to be part of the program. Executive Chef Tim Grable of the California Culinary Academy warned us about the issue at the beginning of the term, as shown here.

The scale read a hair over 180 pounds this morning. On Sept. 28, the first day of class, it hovered at 184.

Bigger tests are yet to come. In Culinary Foundations I, we didn't cook every day, and with one or two exceptions, we consumed only bits of what we made, adhering to Chef Grable's admonition to "taste, don't eat."

Starting Monday, in Culinary Foundations II, we will be cooking nearly every day, over a four-hour span. That will increase the challenge.

And, yet to come, in the early spring, is high potential for falling off the wagon: Baking and Pastry class.

Post Script: Any reader who interprets my small weight loss over six weeks as a sign that my cooking isn't all that good won't be invited to the next feast of braised short ribs with a wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes and green beans in béchamel sauce.

Everyone, including the dog, ate my homework

Practice, practice, practice makes perfect, and while my culinary skills are far from that, they took a big step forward this weekend.

I practiced braising, making stock and creating sauces. All went reasonably well, making Sunday dinner a decided hit among family members. "Oh my God, it's delicious," was No. 1 fan Hilda's reaction. Zipper the Shih-Tzu rated the espagnole sauce, drizzled lightly onto his kibble, "two slurps."

Here's what transpired as I endeavored to take on techniques learned in the first four weeks of classes at the California Culinary Academy:

* On Saturday, I found veal bones at a local meat market, and that led to my making a brown stock. To my delight, it congealed nicely, just as I have seen in school, where we are under the careful supervision of the master chefs who are our teachers.

* On Sunday, I prepared to braise two meaty beef ribs, for which I had asked the butcher to leave the rib bone long. I dried the meat, tied it to the bone and browned it. Forgetting to season it before it was browned was a mistake, I admit, but the quality of the sauce pretty much made up for that.

* Two and a half hours of cooking time left the meat tender on the bone and the pan drippings rich with the meat flavor and that of the mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery). I strained it, skimmed off the fat and added some of the brown stock. Now came sauce-making time.

* Into the concoction, I added a few ounces of diced fennel and the rubies from one pomegranate. The combination was Chef Tony Marano's suggestion, saying the contrasting flavors would complement one another and add a sweetness to the finished sauce. He was dead-on correct, and the resultant sauce, after two more strainings and a reduction by half and then half again, was the hit of the meal.

* Green beans called for a béchamel sauce, as described by Julia Child in her "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." So I used clarified butter and flour to make a roux, stirred in the scalded milk, flavored it with onion, bay leaf and a whole clove. It came out very tasty, but the texture was a tad pasty. More milk might have helped.

The short ribs were falling-off-the-bone delicious, and I must pronounce my first major venture into multi-tasking a French meal a success.

Can coq au vin and sole meunière be far behind?

(In my rush to serve dinner, I neglected to take photos of the finished plates. This photo shows the gelatinized veal stock and the deep brown espagnole sauce.)