Last of Superior Cuisine

In this week, we had the same 3 demonstrations, but only 1 practical. The other 2 practicals were taken up to prepare for, and the final practical exams itself.

Starters:

1) Green asparagus and crab charlotte, verjus sauce. Verjus is actually the juice made from unripe grapes and lends a tangy taste, thus an alternative to citrus or vinegar.

2) Lobster salad with citrus fruits

3) 'Greek style' artichokes with saffroned mussels

Mains:

1) Stuffed guinea fowl breaks cooked 'en cocotte'

2) Crisp wrapped lamb fillet with provencal vegetables

3) Roast rabbit legs tandoori-style with herb salad. The green juice in the shotglass is cucumber juice to reduce the heat of tandoori. Tandoori is normally served as a whole, but this was sliced to for the photo.

Desserts:

1) Warm mascarpone souffle

2) Raspberry souffle, tropical fruit salad with spices

3) Orange and lime sorbet, sweet wine jelly balsamic vinegar dressing

Thus ends our journey with Le Cordon Bleu Dusit, Bangkok, Thailand. I hope you enjoyed the sensory delights of these dishes, desserts, pastries and cakes as much as I did.

Looking back, it was quite a dive into the deep end, but the best part of all is the satisfaction of knowing your level skills have improved by a couple of notches.

Still a long road ahead in this absolutely fantastic journey! Stay tuned for more updates as I take up an internship and September in Paris for Cert IV "Professional Perfecting of Skills".

2nd last week of Superior Cusine

It's been almost 9 months since I'm in Bangkok, and coming to an end to my 3rd and last term in Le Cordon Bleu Dusit. Time flies... well, onto more photos!

Starters:

1) Line Caught Whiting fish (Fr: merlan de ligne) grilled with warm salad and condiments from Nice.

2) Lightly pan-fried Scallops with Scallop Parmentier and Carrot butter. Incidentally, this was our 2nd dish of the week to prepare for our practical. I guess the chef wanted us to work with live scallops. Yeah, live, not just in the shells, but their shells are clamped tight! We have to shuckle them as we would to live oyster, remove the 'beards' for the parmentier. They are very delicate and you have to be careful in handling them. I love scallops, as raw as possible!

3) Duck bavarois, mesclun salad and tomatoes confits. Bavarois is a term usually reserved for a type of cream based dessert mousse. However, over the years we have seen the lines of terms becoming blur between pastry and cusine, and I guess how this term was coined. It is in fact lightly cooked foie gras and magrets of ducks sifted and lightened with whipped cream and chilled to a paté consistency. Yummy! Served with smoked magret sliced thinly that taste like jamon.

Mains:

1) Thick Tuna steak with burgundy style garnishes and potatoes fondants.

It's your regular pan seared tuna, still rosé in the middle, but we added a bacon wrap. Served with red wine sauce, and potatoes slow-cooked in chix broth till melt in your mouth consistency.

2) Squab (Pigeon) wrapped in cabbage, legs stuffed, tartlets of wild mushroom.

3) Sole stuffed with mushrooms and glazed, with surprise crêpes parcels

We just finished with this dish today, it's quite interesting, the sole is split in carefully cut in the middle, fileted, but still attached to the body, and carefully, you have to remove the skeleton and keep the fish whole! So there is absolutely no bones at all when you cut into this dish.

Desserts:

1) French toasts (!) with berries and rhubarb compote.

I know traditionally we know french toasts as sandwich loaf dipped in sweetened beaten eggs and pan fried. Well, not the case in LCB! We make a crème anglaise to soak the bread, and sure it has to go with some healthy fruits!

2) Chocolate tart with marmelade filling. Marmelade is very easy to make, easier than jam. Prick some oranges, half submerged in water, boil till soft, take out, slice them (if you like, in traditional thick slices). Then cook them again peel, pith, and juice (except seeds) and all until a jam like consistency. Adjust to taste with sugar.

Chocolate sweet dough (pate sucree) half baked, fill with marmelade and cover with ganache lightened with whipped cream, and bake.

3) Cherries pan-fried in port wine and caramel ice cream

Fish and more fish!

Yeah, about half of superior cuisine's mains has to do with fish, I am guessing the chef who is in charge of us this term likes them a lot.

Starters:

a)  Foie gras terrine.  Cooked in a bain marie, it needs to rest for a few days, followed by..

b)Presentation of the foie gras terrine.  Foie gras should be eaten with something sweet and a little sour, it should work well with chutney, like this beetroot and red onion.  The pink swirls are tuiles made from rice flour colored with beetroot juice.  Also on plate, fig bread.

c)  Haddock and Potato Terrine

Mains:

a)  Red Mullet with Tapenade sauce.  We made the fresh egg pasta ourselves in class, it's so easy, I'll never pay for over-priced pasta at Da Paolo Gastronomia ever again!

b)  Herb crusted salmon supremes with mushroom flan and red wine sauce.  Delicious!  Who knew red wine can be paired with a fish!  You actually can, for fatty fish, e.g. tuna.

c)  Sea bream sauted, squid filled with cilantro flavored langoustine risotto.

Desserts:

a)  Frozen choc parfait, orange cream and citrus fruits and basil

b)  Inversed peach melba, red currant jus flavored with hibiscus (rosella)

c)  Crisp sweet puff pastry with berries

A Macaroon Diversion

Yes, macaroons!! Again!  This is the second time we made the little bite size macaroons, but this time with a slight difference in technique - we used Italian meringue instead of the traditional French meringue, and end result is that it holds its shape better and removing from the baking sheet is a piece of cake.  The large macaroon 'cake' we made earlier this month was also from the same technique.  

What's so special about macaroons, those who are not initiated, would ask, it's just ground almonds, sugar and egg white?  Or is it...?  There's a lot of care and preparation that goes into its fabrication and nothing less than love, one for its pure divine taste, and two for perfection, can one really succeed....  Of course, putting the fairy tale book down, you will need a good pastry kitchen, well-controlled humidity and room temperature, a good oven, a good hand and a good eye in the techniques required. 

As you bite into a (good!) macaroon, your teeth meet some resistance on the shell, which snaps and gives way completely to a soft crumbly, moist centre.  While grains of ground almonds play on your tongue, you slowly begin to pick up the flavors.  Cool, palatable, fruity, exotic, well-balanced.  Sometimes sweet, sometimes a bright flash of citrus, but always well-controlled, poised, elegant, much like the two berets of macaroon biscuits pieced together in total equilibrium.

I made those in the first picture, chocolate macaroons with a variety of fillings - a) chestnut cream b) banana chocolate, and c) milk choc with orange.  All with a light 'swish' of gold dust.

And I will be happy to try (again!) to reproduce them in Rumia.  

Current trend is to try out different shapes and sizes of macaroon and different style of presentations.  But classic still holds its grounds.

Also in petit-fours, last week, we made some bite size miniardises - choux with ginger lemon cream, green apple 'jelly', cheese mini-cakes, and soft almond mini cakes with passionfruit mango gel centre.

But still, nothing like macaroons.... of course!

Pastry and Desserts- Week 2

Check out the labels for this post and guess which is which....

Cuisine last week for basic course at LCB

This week is the last for us newbies, we looked at an escargots tart with wild mushrooms, the famous canard a l'orange with waffle chips (which is what we did for our last practical), pan-fried fish steak with ratatouille, jambonette of chicken thighs (partially de-boned) with caramelised apples, and warm goat cheese salad for starters.

This will be the last of this course at LCB.  Thanks for your visits to this page, and look forward to more dishes from 19jan09.