Meringue

Er... meringue... nothing very much to say about it, just that there're basically 3 types of meringues - french (or ordinary), swiss and italian.  Each has its own uses.  It's a basic building block to make more complicated cakes/pastries in future lessons, and decorative show pieces such as marzipan, and chocolate works (last week).  I can't wait to start sugar works.

Fish Week

In addition to the girdled salmon last week, we continued with various types of fish - pollock, sole, brill, and different ways of cooking - poaching, braised, pan fry, deep fry.  AND of course, we were tasked to make the infamous sauce Hollandaise!  Plenty of whipping, be careful of the heat, be careful when you add the butter..... in the afternoon in pastry class, we made more praline cream, whipped cream, meringue... my arms were falling off.

Pastry week 4 and 5

Back in week 2, we made Genoise sponge, these versatile (dry) sponges hold up creams and fillings very well, and can be turned into a variety of cakes.

By the way, I might have to add that at Basic level, we do all whipping by hand, no machines at all, and making praliné cake (Mascotte au Praliné )or the white cheese mousse cake (Schuss) is torture for your arms. 

 I'm amazed how the petite Thai girls in the class man

age.

Next you see a trio of pot de crèmes - Earl grey, vanilla and caramel, and the tiramisu' turned into plated desserts.  

This week, we started on chocolates.

  We made a chocolate

 mousse cake with chocolate genoise sponge (Mogador) - delicious!  We made artworks made with chocolate drawings and writings used to decorate cakes.

Black forest cakes.

Cuisine week 4

Last week, we made 

pork escalope rolled up with stuffing, the one on the left is my hearty version, the one on the right is the chef's version.  We made gridled salmon (mine turned out to be a little undercooked on one side, but I guess it's better than being overcooked!  we should get it slightly just moistly cooked, but mine was a very thick slice to being with.)  Chef made a demo on roasted pork cutlets, but we didn't have to make it for practical.

You see those cute rugby ball shaped potat

oes and carrots, it's called turned vegetables, and I say the French are sadists.

In addition, we cooked rabbit!!  Rabbit in mustard sauce with sautéed potatoes.  The rabbit (already de-furred) came in a bag with its head and feet still intact.  We had to chop it up into parts, pan fry a little, throw in some vegetables, boil down with white wine, strain the vegetables, and finish the sauce with mustard and cream.  Saute-ing the potatoes need a little co-ordination, you want to brown them evenly and cooked through.

*Roooarr* Rabbits.... tremble in fear!

(Gourmet) Leftovers

Ok, enough of all the good looking platters and gourmet names - with an average of 3 cakes and 12 main dishes of dinner-sized portions per week, what do you do with all that food?!?!

Here is the answer....

Roast chicken  - is a pretty neutral base to start.  It has good aroma and base already, so what I did was to sweat some green peppers (i'm using this longish yellowish green chilli that you can find easily in Thailand, midly spicy, not sure if you can find something back home) with some chopped onions in olive oil.  Add shredded roast chicken without skin, toss it around, throw in half of cup (adjust to your qty of chix) and let it bubble away to just a bit of juice.  Add a teaspoon of (spanish) paprika, mix around, squeeze half a lemon in.  Adjust with salt and pepper and serve!  Great with beer like in the pic! 

Tune in for more ideas, lol!

Choux Pastry, Roast Chicken, Omelette

This week in Pastry, we started on Choux Pastry.  The light airy crust that holds the filling together.  "Beard Papa" was the rave all over town in Singapore about 2 yrs ago.

The trick in Choux pastry is that you want to cook the flour, but cool it down to incorporate the eggs.

It's really low in fat... whipped cream is just full of air.... 

I think these swans look evil - they look like the boat-mobil of The Penguin in Batman.

100 baht/bag? Nah... more!

On the other hand, in Cuisine, we finished the week with a roast chicken and jus, with jardiniere de leg

umes.  Not easy carving the artichokes into little saucers to hold the veg!  

The classic French omelette.

To finish up with Choux Pastry, we made Paris-Brest, with praliné cream.

More praliné preparation to come....

Puff Pastry and Red Meat Week

Puff pastry - Used in both Cuisine and Pastry, there is very little difference in its fabrication.  Basically it is layer of flour/water and butter, folded over and over again to achieve that puffy flaky crunchy texture that is known the world over.  Do you know how many layers are there in a typical puff pastry?  ok, you start with a block of butter enveloped by dough, that is 3 layers (dough, butter, dough), you roll it out (huff huff!) and you fold over 3 times of itself, that is 9 layers, but the dough and dough side by side will be counted as 1, that is, 3x3=9-2=7x3=21-2=19 (second turn), 19x3=57-2=55 (3rd turn)x3=165-2=163 (4th turn)x3=489-2=487 (5th turn, where we normally stop, cos' the wheat flour in Thailand is stronger, ie more gluten, more elastic, risk breaking if continued, or in France, for the 6th turn: 487x3=1461-2= 1459 layers!!  No wonder it is called millefeuille (1,000 layers).

Next turn you bite into a (well-done) puff pastry, appreciate all the work went into it!  For basic course students, all work is done by hand.  so we've been making these pastries withrolling pins and our aching tired hands.  You can only work this dough when it's very cold, so you can imagine the energy put into it.















In Cusine this week, we started on Red meat/Roast.  I have an almost 1 kg of roast striploin and plentiful of mash potatoes for the rest of the week, to add to that, a huge pot of Beef Burgundy tomorrow and by Friday, a Roast Chicken!  

Ok, plenty of butter, and red meat to clog up my arteries, I swear to you this course is hell!  Share my sin, have some free food!

This is a picture of preparation before our practical classes.  2 students on rotation will be tasked to fetch the ingredients from the storeroom, measure and distribute for the class.  At the end of the practical, all equipment are checked and counted, and kitchen declared clean before we can all leave altogether.