Culinary School Chronicles: Mastering French Classics, Filleting Fish, and Crème Brûlée
Yesterday was another whirlwind in the bustling heart of our culinary school kitchen! Stepping into class each morning, the whiteboard, meticulously filled from top to bottom with the day’s culinary roadmap, always sparks a mix of excitement and a touch of apprehension. This particular day promised an intensive dive into classic French techniques, challenging us with a diverse menu that would test our precision, speed, and understanding of fundamental culinary principles.
The Day’s Ambitious Menu: A French Culinary Journey
Our official menu for the day was a formidable lineup, designed to push our boundaries and introduce us to several cornerstone techniques:
LE CREPE DE VOLAILLE AU GRATIN (Gratin of Chicken Crepes)
LE FILET DE FLET POCHE (Poached Filet of Flat Fish)
LES ASPERGES A L’ANGLAISE (Blanched Asparagus, English Style)
LA SAUCE HOLLANDAISE (Hollandaise Sauce…our recurring challenge!)
LES POMMES TOURNEES A L’ANGLAISE (Boiled Tourned Potatoes)
LA CRÈME BRULEE
This extensive menu was not just about the dishes themselves, but about the array of new and challenging techniques embedded within them. From the notoriously difficult “tourneeing” knife skill for vegetables to the delicate process of filleting a whole flat fish, and finally, the theatrical use of handheld torches for our Crème Brûlées, it was a day packed with intensive learning. It certainly felt like an immense amount of knowledge and skill to absorb in a single session.
Mastering the Art of Fish Filleting
Our morning began with a captivating demonstration by our chef, focusing on the precise technique required to fillet a flat fish. For our practical session, we worked with a very large flounder, but the chef emphasized that this method applies universally to all flat fish species, including the impressive halibut, which holds the title for the largest of its kind. Understanding how to expertly butcher and prepare fish is a foundational skill in any professional kitchen, ensuring both quality and minimizing waste.
The Chef’s Demo Plates – A vision of perfection. My tourned potatoes, sadly, were a far cry from this artistry!
Selecting the Freshest Fish: A Chef’s Guide
During the demonstration, we also received invaluable tips on how to identify truly fresh fish. An interesting tidbit we learned is that fish should be stored in a manner that mimics how they swim: flat fish on their bellies and round fish upright on ice. When purchasing whole fish, always look for these critical indicators of freshness:
- **Firm Flesh:** The fish should feel firm and spring back when gently pressed, with no obvious soft or mushy spots.
- **Clear, Bright Eyes:** The eyes should be firm, round, and crystal clear, almost bulging. Avoid fish with sunken, cloudy eyes (resembling cataracts), or red rims – essentially, it shouldn’t look like it’s had a rough night!
- **Bright Red Gills:** Gently lift the gill plate. The gills underneath should be a vibrant, bright red, indicating recent blood flow. Steer clear of brown or very dark gills.
- **Ocean Fresh Scent:** A fresh fish should smell faintly of clean, salty sea water, not “fishy” or strong. An offensive odor is a definite sign of spoilage.
The filleting process itself involves using a flexible boning knife to carefully cut along the spine, navigate around the head and belly, and detach at the tail. Subsequently, with great care and precision, the knife is used to separate the fillets from the bone on both sides. It’s a challenging technique to articulate purely with words; perhaps once I’ve had more practice and achieved a level of competence, I can document the process via video for a clearer demonstration!
Poaching Perfection and the Return of Hollandaise
Once our fish was meticulously filleted, the next step was to poach it gently. This was done in a seasoned liquid consisting of equal parts whole milk and water, infused with aromatic bay leaf, thyme, and black peppercorns. This delicate poaching method ensures the fish remains moist and tender. Our poached fish was then topped with a NAPE of Hollandaise, meaning just enough sauce to lightly coat the surface. Yes, that’s right – Hollandaise was back on the menu again! I’m delighted to report that this time, my Hollandaise turned out significantly better than my initial attempt, particularly in terms of seasoning, and miraculously, it didn’t break. It seems Hollandaise and I are slowly but surely becoming friends.
Accompanying our exquisite poached fish, we served simple yet perfectly prepared asparagus. These were trimmed, cooked briefly in highly salted boiling water, immediately “shocked” in an ice bath to preserve their vibrant green color and crisp texture, and then reheated just before serving. Alongside these, we presented the infamous TOURNEED potatoes, as vividly displayed in the chef’s demo photo above. Tourneeing is, without exaggeration, going to be the bane of my existence! It’s an incredibly intricate knife skill that demands transforming a vegetable, in this case, a potato, into an identical, seven-sided football shape with flat ends. The sheer difficulty is immense, and the thought of it appearing on our practical exam next week looms large.
Crafting Le Crepe de Volaille au Gratin
In addition to our time-consuming fish dish, we also tackled LA CREPE DE VOLAILLE AU GRATIN, which translates to decadent stuffed chicken crepes. This, of course, necessitated preparing our own crepe batter from scratch and expertly cooking the crepes. This part of the day was quite enjoyable, and I was pleased to find all of mine turned out perfectly – thin, pliable, and consistent.
For the filling, we utilized leftover roasted chicken leg meat, shredding it and combining it with sautéed mushrooms and spinach. This flavorful mixture was then bound together with a rich velouté sauce – another classic French mother sauce. Velouté, essentially a roux thickened with light stock, was enriched further with Gruyère and Parmesan cheese, adding depth and creaminess to our filling. We carefully stuffed this mixture into our freshly made crepes, topped them with additional velouté sauce and a generous sprinkle of cheese, and then baked them in the oven until beautifully golden and bubbling.
The resulting crepes were incredibly flavorful and satisfying. Although we had to rush during the final plating stages, which meant they didn’t achieve the ideal level of browning, the taste was undeniably delicious and a testament to the classic combination of ingredients and techniques.
Sweet Endings: The Perfection of Crème Brûlée
And, naturally, no culinary school menu is complete without dessert – a delightful and often challenging component that is becoming a regular fixture in our daily regimen. Our curriculum is structured around a menu format, guaranteeing a dessert daily, with increasing complexity as we progress through the program.
Today’s sweet finale was the exquisite CRÈME BRULEE, a close relative of Crème Caramel. Beyond the thrilling moment of using your own torch to caramelize the sugar, Crème Brûlée is surprisingly straightforward to assemble. The process begins with creating a quick, luxurious custard, which we delicately flavored with fragrant vanilla bean and bright orange peel. This custard was then baked gently in a water bath, a crucial step for all custards to ensure even, low-temperature cooking that results in a silky-smooth texture. After baking, the custards were cooled thoroughly in the refrigerator. Just before serving, a layer of granulated sugar was sprinkled evenly over the top, then meticulously torched to create that iconic, crisp, glassy caramel shell that is the hallmark of a perfect Crème Brûlée.
A particularly fascinating detail we learned while preparing various custards this week concerns the specific design of the ridged, shallow ramekins often used for Crème Caramel (and sometimes Crème Brûlée). These ridges are not merely for decoration; they significantly increase the surface area exposed to the oven’s heat, promoting more efficient and even cooking. Furthermore, the shallow depth ensures an ideal ratio of the delicate burnt sugar caramel to the rich, sweet custard, making every spoonful a balanced delight. It’s these thoughtful design elements that elevate simple dishes.
This Crème Brûlée was exceptionally good – perhaps too good. While I often find myself avoiding Crème Caramels in restaurants, considering them somewhat clichéd and lacking uniqueness these days, a truly homemade Crème Brûlée is an indulgence that is incredibly difficult to resist, regardless of its prevalence.
Navigating the Culinary Chaos: Kitchen Pressures and Teamwork
Our time in the kitchen often follows a predictable arc: starting calmly, with an illusion of control, only to rapidly descend into a frenzy of last-minute rushing, barely getting everything to the table on time. This seems to be a recurring theme in the high-pressure environment of a professional kitchen.
It’s the seemingly minor details that ultimately consume the most significant portion of our time. Daily tasks like clarifying butter, or the laborious peeling of close to 30 asparagus spears, are time-intensive. And then, of course, there’s tourneeing – an adventure in exacting knife skills that demands immense focus and patience, proving to be a true test of endurance and precision.
Yesterday’s challenges were amplified by the absence of two students, leaving my team with just two people instead of the usual three. While more hands are usually a blessing, at this stage in our training, each student is expected to perform a wide range of tasks independently. Typically, each table is responsible for plating approximately 4-5 servings of each dish (roughly 2 per student) to feed our fellow pastry students, the front-of-house staff, and ourselves. Unfortunately, our table had to compensate for the missing students and was tasked with plating a daunting NINE of everything.
Though it might not sound like a drastic increase on paper, this effectively doubled our workload. It required even more laborious fish filleting, an exhausting quantity of tourned potatoes, and a myriad of other intricate details, significantly eating into our already tight schedule and escalating the pressure in the final moments of service.
One of my partners for today, Hannah, whose enthusiasm for fish dishes is, let’s say, limited!
By the time we finally sat down to eat, once again behind schedule, my appetite had all but vanished. The rapid transition from an adrenaline-fueled dash to a seated attempt at relaxation and enjoying the meal is incredibly difficult, especially when you have even less time to consume it. All I truly desired was to quench my thirst with glasses upon glasses of ice water! Despite the constant race against the clock, I remain genuinely amazed by the sheer volume of culinary tasks we manage to accomplish by the end of each day – a quantity that, I’m told, is merely a fraction of what awaits us further down this demanding path. Lordy, indeed.
Kitchen Philosophies: Pastry vs. Culinary
Meanwhile, as we sprinted around like chickens with our heads cut off, the pastry students often observed our controlled chaos with serene patience. They would wait for our savory creations, sometimes even offering delightful gifts of homemade raspberry, vanilla, orange, and lemon macarons – a welcome and often much-needed sugary reprieve.
The pastry students consistently appear so much more composed and relaxed than us savory cooks – it’s quite amusing to observe the stark contrast. Driven by curiosity last week, I asked one of them about the typical pace of their day, and she shared a wonderfully enlightening analogy that I feel compelled to share:
“You know that episode of Grey’s Anatomy, where the surgeons rotate to dermatology and suddenly find themselves with an abundance of free time, unsure of what to do with it all?”
“Well… we, the pastry students, are dermatology. And you, the savory students, are surgery.”
This analogy perfectly encapsulates the differing intensities and pressures between the two disciplines in culinary training. And with that vivid comparison, I’m off to prepare roast chicken for dinner tonight. Here’s hoping it turns out just as exquisite as the one we made in class the other day – a perfect end to another demanding yet rewarding chapter in my culinary school journey.