Week 2 Day 2

Week 2 we were still focusing on sauces and also some knife skills. Before you ask....no I didn't cut myself on this day either. WAHOO

This is the infamous Chef Pierre. He's from switzerland and has quite a heavy accent. He's very funny though and takes his time when showing us how to do something. This first picture is him showing us how to concasee a tomato. Basically you cut a small cross on the top of the tomato then put it in boiling water. Then, you take it out and shock it in the ice bath and then voila you can peel the skin off.....Pretty cool huh?

We also worked on segmenting oranges...

HOW DID I DO?

I couldn't resist the temptation of the orange. As soon as he came by and checked mine it went straight into my mouth haha.



Next on the to do list: MAYONNAISE

After this day i loathe mayonnaise even more than i did before. I literally whisked for an hour. That is why this picture looks like my mayo was runny because after i was done i couldn't life my arms to even take a picture. It was brutal.

Just when i thought i was done whisking it was time for the Hollandaise. I have never had it before.

I was pretty surprised. It's not bad. I seasoned mine with a little bit of cayenne and a couple drops of tabasco.....good stuff!

After all the whisking i just wanted to sit down for the last hour. But there's no such thing as sitting in Chef Pierre's class. He whips out this recipe for Creme Brule and all of us are looking at each other thinking "isn't that going to be hard?" As Julia Child would say DON'T BE AFRAID so as you can see we tried it and they came out pretty well.

For those of you non-culinary buffs, there's a cutting technique called Tourne. This picture is of Chef Pierre doing a demo of this technique. Basically you cut a potato into 4ths, then with a pairing knife you trim the sides so that it is a 7-sided football shape. So hard to do. Mine didn't turn out good at all. Chef Pierre told us that if you can tourne you will have every chef's respect...guess i'll have to work on that a little but more.