Successful meat cookery is all in the squeeze

Chef Dan Fluharty took his time critiquing my entrée plating (right)  on Friday.

First, he looked a the texture of the hollandaise sauce, then tasted it and commented that it had good flavor.

Then came the asparagus, which he judged to be just the slightest undercooked.

He inspected the potatoes for browning and tasted one. "Well done," he said.

With a spoon, he dipped into the demi-glace and mint sauce beneath the lamb chops. "Good flavor, good seasoning," he said.

Finally, Chef picked up a knife to cut into a lamb chop to check for doneness to medium rare. I told him with confidence that the squeeze, pinching a chop between my finger and thumb, told me it was cooked correctly.

"That works," he said. "It's the only way to check on a small piece of lamb like this. You're not going to stick a meat thermometer into it."

He cut in and exposed the meat, cooked just right. "That's perfectly medium rare," Chef said. "It's turning to medium here on the edge, but it's medium rare in the center. Good job, mate."

The squeeze worked. It had a resilient firmness, showing some resistance and then springing back. That means medium rare.

Today's menu: lamb, asparagus and hollandaise, soup

Another challenging three-course meal is on the board for today's Culinary Foundations III class. This will be our fourth three-course plating this week. Not complaining; the cooking practice and learning are why I'm in school.

First course: Salad of unspecified ingredients and dressing.

Second course: Cream of mushroom soup.

Main course: Roasted rack of lamb, accompanied by a sauce from the pan drippings; poached asparagus with hollandaise sauce; Potatoes Anna (sliced, arranged in an iron skillet in circular pattern with butter for sauté, then baked into place before being sliced like pie for service).

My biggest challenges will be: cooking the lamb to medium rare; extending my streak of five straight successful hollandaise sauces without breaking one.

As always, the key to success will be timing.

Culinary school quotes of the week, Week 10

Call my lawyer
"You don't want egg shells in your pasta. What's that going to do? Probably get you into small claims court."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty (right, with pasta) as he pulled a small piece of shell from the mix in a pasta-making demo.

Call 911
"I had a knife emergency."
-- Culinary student Aline Brown explaining why her pommes duchesse overcooked. She dropped her chef's knife, bending its point and having to work it back to sharpness. All the while, her potatoes were in the oven, getting browner and browner ... 

Call the seasoning police
" It was 'just' beans and rice. But it goes to show you the importance of good seasoning."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty revealing that in another class, students neglected proper seasoning because they thought the food was too basic for it.

Call an audible
"I'm sticking with aioli. Hollandaise is too much pressure."

-- Culinary student John Briggs (left) after I said I would make hollandaise sauce to go with my artichoke for our competency exam. Despite making hollandaise successfully in practice, I decided at the last minute to go with the relatively easier-to-make aioli.
Call the doctor
"Lola's pans had butcher twine wrapped tightly around the handles. The dishwashers knew never to wash those pans or Lola would come apply those pans to the sides of their heads."
-- Chef Dan Fluharty on how a breakfast cook he knew cared for her egg pans, seasoning with salt, a little oil, a little heat and a lot of towel massaging rather than applying soap and water.

Taking stock ... no, that's making stock

Wednesday's session in Culinary Foundations II was about as real as it gets when it comes to simulating restaurant kitchen work.

Besides the final practice run for today's five-dish vegetable and sauce competency exam, two of us had to start and mind a big pot of chicken stock. We did so under the watchful eyes of Chefs Dan Fluharty and David Isenberg.

Into the huge pot we dumped 75 pounds of chicken bones (photo at left) for a pre-heat and rinse to get impurities out. Then we emptied and discarded the water, refilled and added 15 pounds of mirepoix -- coarsely chopped onions, carrots and celery. Fellow culinary student Alfie Regadio prepped the herbs for inclusion once the temperature came up to simmer. He also did one pass of dégraisser and ecumer -- degrease and skim -- to remove excess fat and foam from the simmering stock. The night class would finish the stock, we were told.

Amid it all -- mostly getting the stock started and occasionally eying its progress -- we did our prep and cooking work on vegetables and starches.

If my artichokes (photo at right, with hollandaise sauce), rice pilaf and pommes duchesse turn out today as they did in Wednesday's practice, I will be happy.

Midterm week looms in culinary school

Chef Dan Fluharty (left in the midst of a cooking demonstration for his Culinary Foundations II class) has one more demo to do early this week before we have two days of tests -- one day written, one day cooking.

Chef will show us pommes duchesse, a mashed-potato concoction that must be piped for plating in a fancy design.

More importantly, it must be piped in a swirly, fancy design for Wednesday's competency exam on vegetables and starches in Chef Dan's class.

Besides the piped potatoes, we must make, plate and present sauté of carrots, an artichoke with either aioli or hollandaise sauce, green beans in a sauté with red bell peppers and a dish of rice pilaf.

In number and variety of of plates, it will be our most extensive competency exam. We began with presentation of three sauces, followed by a competency on three soups. Cooking, plating and presenting five plates moves us closer to the end goal for the class in three weeks -- being able to assemble four plates of five items each for two days of final exams.

Monday will be the pommes duchesse demo, review for the written midterm exam Tuesday and a practice session for Wednesday's comptenency exam.

Culinary arts: my new world

My new world is heated with cast-iron burners throwing off 65,000 BTUs of flame with the flick of a wrist.

It has the inviting smell of roasting veal bones, the hiss of sweating shallots, the pale yellow of hollandaise sauce. It is a world of creamy soups that come about as if by magic from seemingly disparate pieces.

My new world is knife blades that rapid-cut carrots and onions, leeks and celery. It is is framed in gleaming, sterile-looking stainless steel.

It is butter that's clarified, pepper that's white, sauce that's deliciously brown.

My new world has a language all its own -- "umami" and mise en place, onion piquet and cartouche, velouté and demi-glace.

This new world tugs the imagination out of one's soul and turns it into a new reality, of flavors and seasonings, all evoking even more imagination that in turn brings more new realities in what is literally becoming a delicious cycle.

(Photo shows the "hotline" -- row of stovetops dominating the center of our kitchen classroom.)

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.

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.

Culinary school best advice so far: 'Taste, don't eat'

One can see wisdom in Executive Chef Tim Grable's warning -- "Taste, don't eat" -- about weight gain when studying at the California Culinary Academy.

Chef Grable (left) offered the advice in an orientation session the week before classes started. He said watching your weight can be a problem when you find yourself eating your homework and your in-class assignments, literally.

In school's first three weeks, we culinary students have made: butter-heavy béchamel sauce; a butter-laden brown roux for espagnole sauce; pasta and tomato sauce topped with Parmesan cheese; hollandaise sauce, full of butter; mayonnaise, with a cup of oil.

Granted, we had only small tastings of those delicious items, but it's easy to see how when we get to the preparation of foods that those creations become accompaniments of, the potential problem will be at the fore.

For the record: I have lost two pounds since school started.

Further for the record: We did start off with low-cal healthy stuff: learning to cut vegetables including spinach, tomato, carrot, onion and garlic.

But next comes some tempting carnivorous offerings as we learn the basic techniques of braising, sauteing, poaching, grilling and roasting. All accompanied, of course, by those sauces.

Wonder what the pastry and baking students are making?

A 'point' of cayenne and other fineries of sauce sorcery

The saucier is the first among equals in the classic French kitchen.

It is no wonder. The word pronounced in proper French sounds a bit like "sorcerer." And that is what the saucier is, a maker of magic.

Chef Tony Marano, who is teaching sauces to us as part of the Culinary Foundations I curriculum, is a big believer in the magic of the kitchen.

"But don't confuse magic for mojo," Chef Tony says. "Magic is the way we explain science that we don't yet understand."

Aw, man, no! The magic explanation is more than good enough for me. Taste a well-made espagnole or perfectly balanced hollandaise. That's magic.

Sauces come from combinations of butter and flour and water flavored with meat bones and chopped vegetables and butter combined with egg yolks and a dash of vinegar. Oh, and a "point" of cayenne -- the amount that fits on the point of a knife, that is.

What could at first reading seem like composting materials are the ingredients with which the saucier makes magic.

The magician we are learning from -- Chef Tony -- is modest yet factual about his sauce-making abilities. He has whipped up a half-dozen sauces from scratch before our eyes this week and then patiently walked us through the steps it takes to do it the way he does. We are thrilled to need a lot of practice.

Chef Tony was saucier for at least one French restaurant in the Bay Area, where he ran a station that produced all the primary sauces and many, many variations of them every night.

In class on Thursday, his magic -- or was it his mojo? -- was on full display as he demonstrated the makings of mayonnaise and hollandaise, both egg-yolk based sauces. When finished, we all eagerly lined up to taste, and as we passed the bowls for a dip, Chef Tony allowed as to how "this isn't the best hollandaise I've made."

He could have fooled all of us. There were plenty of "yums" and not a single "yuck." It was by far the best hollandaise sauce I had ever tasted.

Or had I tasted magic?

(Photos: Chef Tony Marano upper left; his student sauciers trying their hands lower right. That's me second from right. Lower right photo courtesy of fellow culinary student Keejoo Hong)