French meat is neat

Last week our class took a field trip to the Marché des Ternes. The goal was for us students to create our own menu and then shop together at the market for the ingredients. All went swimmingly, except that the sight of six multinational young ladies sniffing cepes and trailing a tall, jovial young Frenchman with wildly curling hair confused the shopkeepers and occasionally inspired lewd commentary from the saltier vendors.

"They are from all different countries!" our teacher exclaimed proudly in the boulangerie, the patisserie, the boucherie and the poissonnerie.

"Russia, Switzerland, America, Japan! And Australia!" he'd add, pointing at our translator.

The shopkeepers smiled gently back, always charmed by Chef David's exuberance. During the third introduction like this I began to skulk in the background, trying not to be identified as a member of our weird culinary harem.

After we picked up the goodies for our menu (we had decided that we would make crab and lobster stuffed zucchini cannelloni, guinea hen cooked en cocotte, and pears poached in spiced red wine with cardamom ice cream), we popped in to visit the school's official meat supplier, Boucherie Nivernaise on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Chef David sweet-talked them and before we knew it, they were offering to give us a behind-the-scenes tour of their processing facilities.

My classmate Nina was thrilled. At school we always discuss her dream of doing an internship at a butcher shop to learn about the different cuts of meat and, well, sometimes a girl's most lofty dreams can come true - even if for just an afternoon. We quickly donned white coats and hats and tried not to tumble down the series of wet, slippery steps that led into the work areas.

If we caused a stir at the market, you can imagine the kind of spectacle we created when we locked eyes with a roomful of greying, gritty men wielding huge knives and thwacking through even bigger pieces of beef.

Everything was cold, wet and white. Really cold. Meat locker cold. Oh wait, it was a meat locker. No wonder.

You know what else it was? It was exceptionally, sparklingly, pristinely clean. Everything was organized, sanitized, labeled and arranged. My friends know that on occasion I display irritatingly anal-retentive tendencies, and I freely admit that the immaculate white expanse of Boucherie Nivernaise spoke soothingly to these most uptight, obsessively tidy parts of my soul.

We learned a bit about how their products are processed, and how the French system of meat tracking works. Everything that enters the facility has been previously tagged with a label describing the type of meat, the place it was raised, who produced it and when. Accountability is a good thing.

After touring the place, I can't say that I myself am dying to intern there (too chilly!), but our little side trip certainly provided a clearer picture of one small part of an animal's journey from field to table.

Halfway through the journey.

Boucherie Nivernaise
99 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
Paris 75008

Boulangerie menagerie

Bread is one of my favorite things to bake. There's something about the tactile pleasure of kneading dough and the necessity of delayed gratification in breadmaking that I find wholly satisfying.

In our first boulangerie class last week, we made viennoiserie - the French term for various breakfast pastries. Before class began I could barely contain myself. I still cherish a memory from college when I made pain au chocolat for my hippie co-op (a group used to choking down burned rice and soggy tofu), and I overheard a usually reserved, arrogant hipster exclaim, "This is the best pain au chocolat I've had since I was in Paris!" I glowed for weeks.

On our recipe list were croissants, brioches au sucre and pains au chocolat. Croissants and pains au chocolat share the same basic dough, which has elaborate amounts of butter folded into it before it is shaped, risen, and baked.

You have to admit, that's a lot of butter.

We all shuffled down to the tiny breadmaking kitchen in the deepest depths of the hotel, where all the squat, humming machines always remind me of a mad scientist's workshop in a Tim Burton movie. There we used a kneading machine that stretches the dough into ever longer and thinner strips, and then returned to our kitchen upstairs to turn it into small horn-shaped croissants and cute little pain au chocolat rolls.

A small brioche au sucre is frequently my breakfast of choice as I race off each morning to school. I love its yeasty, eggy interior and the crunchy sugar nuggets that decorate the top. In class we made the larger version shown here:

I did perhaps more than my fair share of sampling when everything emerged from the oven. Fresh, warm pain au chocolat is one of those simple pleasures that tastes so good your eyes tend to roll back in your head. At least, mine do. Maybe I should get that checked out. Anyway, my favorite days in pastry class are when we make something delicious, and there's so much left over that the teachers beg and plead with us to take bagfuls home. I happily obliged.

Pierre Hermé goes well with tacos

Two things happen when friends and family come to visit you in a new place. You're forced to confront just how much about you has changed, and you are reminded just how much about you has not.

When my boyfriend Randy arrived last week, I spent a few days grappling with a powerful wave of homesickness. The timing was right for the breakdown, since I usually spend the first couple months in a new place delirious with the fabulousness of it all, and the next two months in a cranky fog. All of a sudden the sound of spoken French, initially lilting and breathy and romantic, became irritating and overly emotive. Waiting in a long line to buy my baguette no longer provided an occasion to smugly celebrate my dedication to the pursuit of culinary quality over convenience. It was just inconvenient. And could that woman blocking my path and moronically cooing over a window display featuring a marabou pompon bra get the hell off the sidewalk?

After Randy noticed that I kept trying to kick pigeons, we decided urgent measures should be taken. He graciously allowed me to revert to my bloated, lazy American habits for the duration of his visit: we watched The Daily Show and lots of movies, we snacked and overate, and he listened while I bitched. Then he quietly engaged in various touristic and cultural activities in the city on his own while I was at school. I am a bad, bad girlfriend.

So what do lazy, temporarily Francophobic Americans eat in Paris?

Scrambled eggs, pancakes and bacon at Breakfast in America, a place that has managed to recreate the atmosphere of a diner in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Even the scrambled eggs had that same soft, powdery texture we know and love at home - and the coffee is bottomless!

Bloated, lazy anti-French Americans also hole up at home and make a giant casserole of macaroni and cheese. Okay, so you can't exactly find Cheddar 'round these parts - but the lazy Americans make do with Cantal and Comte.

Then the downtrodden Americans make their way to Thanksgiving, a store that sells foodstuffs typically only available in their native land. There they plunk down a deposit for a turkey, but soon will grow to regret this decision when it becomes clear that they have now signed up to construct a giant Thanksgiving dinner after a long day at cooking school.

They also buy hard taco shells and taco seasoning.

Later that night, they will make tacos, substituting creme fraiche for sour cream and rocket for iceberg lettuce. They will feel warm inside and regain optimism. And then they will finish off the night with a fancy white box of Pierre Hermé's finest work: an Ispahan, a Plénitude, an Instant and a white truffle and Piemont hazelnut macaron, which glows softly silver in the fading light of day.

And the lazy, homesick Americans might just fall in love with France again.

Ispahan: "Biscuit macaron à la rose, crème aux pétales de rose, framboises entières, letchis."

Plénitude: "Macaron chocolat, éclats de chocolat noir à la fleur de sel, mousse et ganache au chocolat amer, caramel croquant."

Instant: "Gelée de thé Earl-Grey pointes blanches, ganache au thé, mousse et biscuit moelleux au chocolat."

Foie gras four ways

The French have a different relationship with duck than we do. You can find it on just about every menu here, and one can pick up vacuum-packed sliced duck breast at any supermarket the way we might buy a package of salami. This is fortunate for me because I looooovvve duck, and I resent having to limit my canard consumption to Chinese restaurants and special occasions back in the States.

Although I was certain of my fondness for duck flesh when I arrived in Paris, my feelings for foie gras were a little hazier. I'd only had it a couple of times at upscale restaurants, and it typically arrived at my table so tarted up with fruits, booze and crostini that the kitchen could have swapped in a slab of Fancy Feast and I wouldn't have known the difference.

But just like duck meat, foie gras is a fairly common ingredient here. It's not exactly cheap - the liver pictured above sells for about $40 - but it's altogether more pervasive and accessible, and less likely to be served in overly frou-frou ways. So it was only natural that we would spend a few days learning the ins and outs of foie gras: how to select it, when and how to devein it, and what to pair it with. The only thing we didn't discuss was the raging maelstrom of debate going on in America surrounding the ethics of its production. And I'm not going to discuss it now either. Instead I'm going to show you what we learned.

We all gathered around a cutting board at the start of class and looked at the two livers that our instructor had laid out before us.
"Which one would you choose?" he asked.
We peered at both of them and shrugged our shoulders. One was bigger, with looser flesh and a more golden color; the other was smaller and pink.
"The answer is neither."

Both livers had a few pink spots, which turned out to be hematomas. Chef explained that their presence indicates that the animals weren't raised well and were probably kept in tiny quarters. He said foie gras should have a golden, uniform color, which indicates that the animal ate a corn-based diet, and that a smaller, firmer liver will release less fat.

The first dish we worked on was foie gras terrine. We learned how to gently remove the layers of veins without destroying the flesh by using the back of a spoon.




We marinated the liver in white port, cognac and spices overnight. Then we packed it into a terrine mold, baked it in a water bath and then inverted the dish over a rack to drain off the excess fat that appeared during cooking.






We then strained this fat through a cloth-lined sieve and poured it back onto the top of the foie gras. At this stage, you can keep a terrine for about a week in the fridge because the fat creates an airtight seal around the edges and protects the liver beneath. Here's what it will look like when you unmold it:


If you did a good job of packing the terrine mold tightly with the pieces of foie gras, the result will be very uniform, firm slices that don't fall apart and go wonderfully with a toasted slice of Poilane bread and a sprinkle of fleur de sel:


We also made a second terrine in which the liver was poached in a Medoc syrup that had been spiced with cinnamon and star anise. It turned a scary shade of magenta:


When you press the foie into its mold, you want to be sure to pack it in extremely tightly. Our teacher found some small pieces of wood that had been cut expressly for this purpose:


Anybody that's addicted to collecting useless kitchen gadgets can now add a handcut wooden foie gras mold press to their Christmas list!

In another lesson, we simply sliced the foie gras into inch-thick medallions, scored and seasoned them, and then seared them in a hot pan. We served these atop a delicious curried lentil cream sauce (that sentence sounds vaguely Hannibal Lechter, doesn't it?):





To round out our foie gras education, we sauteed an entire lobe over high heat to give it a nice caramelly color, and then basted it in its own rendered fat. I got to do the basting, and let me tell you, I enjoyed it immensely even though all I did was stand at the range spooning dark brown oil over a giant, bloated duck liver for twenty minutes. The final product was velvety soft and smooth, and I am once again ashamed to say that we ate chunks of it with our fingers while standing around the stove. I am also a little ashamed to say that I totally forgot to be morally outraged on Foie Gras Day, probably because I was too busy channeling Caligula and gorging myself on many euros worth of foie gras. Perhaps gout will be my punishment.

Charlie Trotter, please don't hate me.

Pulling sugar, burning thumbs

Usually we bake a selection of toothsome desserts in our Friday morning pastry class, which we then lug home and try to pawn off on friends, family, concierges, construction workers and a random gentleman who had the misfortune of directing his flirtatious remarks at the gaggle of twentysomething girls stumbling down Rue Cambon with a bunch of identical cake boxes. (This same man scurried away like a frightened rodent when I screeched after him, "Voulez-vous une Buche de Noel, Monsieur? S'il vous plait! S'IL VOUS PLAIT!!" Be careful who you whistle at, men of Paris. Like those gypsy women in train stations who desperately implore you to hold their babies, I just might shove a crudely frosted Christmas log in your face and call your bluff. But I probably won't steal your wallet at the same time.)

Last Friday, though, there were no treats to tote home because we spent an entire class playing with ripping hot sugar, and now we all have the blisters to prove it. It's almost impossible to escape the sugar molding class unscathed; even with gloves, the sugar has to be hot enough to remain malleable and thus also hot enough to sear right through tender layers of finger-flesh.

First we watched our teacher pour a boiling pot of sugar, water, glucose and tartaric acid onto a silicone sheet. The sympathetic grimacing began as he started to pull gently at the edges of the sticky mixture, gradually peeling it up off the sheet and patting it into a sphere shape. Anybody that's accidentally burned themselves with hot sugar knows how wretched it feels, so it was hard not to grit my teeth as I watched our chef dip his fingers into this molten sugar swimming pool.


Pouring out the sugar mixture.


Beginning to peel it off the silpat.


Rolling it up as it cools.

Of course, there was a reason why HE was doing it and not us. He told us that he makes molded sugar sculptures for fun on weekends just to keep his skills honed for competitions and the like, so it's safe to assume that sensation probably sizzled away from his fingers decades ago.

We took turns whimpering and twisting the giant, creamy-looking globe into a rope shape. Eventually it was cool enough to work with, so we plopped our portions out beneath roaring hot sugar lamps, pulled on some dopey-looking pink gloves and got started. We were supposed to be making roses, but I think only Nastia came close. Hers was beautiful. I accidentally left the completed portion of my flower under the lamp while trying to yank more chunks of sugar into pseudo-petal shapes, so it quickly melted into a blob that only served to provide a glimpse of the shape a rose might take during a nuclear holocaust.


Learning how to pull the sugar.


My lump.


A model rose.

Meanwhile, our chef cheerily began crafting what would soon become a towering swan sculpture with stamped wings and hand-painted blue eyes, resting atop a series of marbleized sugar pedestals. At one point I looked up from my clumsy, painful sugar pulling to find him fiddling with something that resembled an enema kit. He pumped air through this rubber hose and inflated a tube of sugar to form the swan's belly and wings.

It was fascinating.


Inflating the swan's belly (in front of our stock-laden freezer!).


Shaping the swan.


Assembling the sculpture's base.

Eventually we were all content to give up on our roses, slather some burn balm on the pads of our fingers and gather around to watch the chef work. As Nina rightly noted, "There are so few people in the world who are capable of making something like this." It reminded me of the way crowds tend to gather around the windows of a glass-blowing workshop. There's just something mesmerizing about watching a skilled artisan creating something of such fragile beauty. The sugar was so delicate that the slightest misstep could shatter the whole contraption. In fact, our teacher told us how he had worked on one sculpture for months, left the finished product overnight and returned to find that someone had closed and then opened the kitchen door, causing wind currents to shift and knock it all down.

There is nothing sensible about molded sugar. You wouldn't even really want to eat it unless you're a five-year-old jonesing for a giant sugar buzz. But France forces you to make room in your life for such beautiful, fleeting, impractical things. Molded swans, rose petals, ten minutes worth of garnish on your chocolate cake plate, whatever. Like the filigreed ironwork that bedecks all the balconies in my neighborhood, a blown sugar swan doesn't serve any specific purpose. It just looks pretty. Sometimes that's enough.


The result.

Four prawns, three desserts, two hunks of lamb and one deep-fried truffle

Because we did so poorly on our midterm, the school has decided to help us review the techniques necessary to achieve the perfect rack of lamb until we all can get it right. I applaud them for this. However, every day that we review rack of lamb, we also have to eat rack of lamb. Today was Day Five. Or maybe Six. I can't really remember.



A long time ago (let's say, ohhh, late October), I used to really enjoy rack of lamb. I loved the buttery texture, the crisp layer of fat infused with the slightly astringent tang of rosemary and the rich, musky flavor of the meat. Today I officially hit my Lamb Threshold. I don't want to see lamb, cook lamb, smell lamb or eat lamb for a really long time - like, maybe even a whole week! Since our exam, we've continued to prepare our regularly scheduled menus (Honey/Soy/Ginger Glazed Cod with Pineau de Charentes Sauce, Pikeperch Mousseline with Julienned Vegetables and Beurre Blanc Sauce, Frozen Nougat with Apricot Glaze, Citrus Marinated Prawns with Pasta Crust and Citrus Vinaigrette, Herb and Mustard Rubbed Lamb Tenderloin Wrapped in Puff Pastry, and Grand Marnier Souffle - those were all made during the last two days, at least), but we also cook Something With Rack of Lamb every day as well.

This morning we were greeted by giant hulking sections of meat - basically a lamb's ribcage, complete with petite fillets, tenderloins and as big a rack as a girl could ever want. Nina and I were excited; we both enjoy butchery lessons and we're always eager to sink our knives into some animal flesh. Here's Nina after we've finished carving:



The tenderloins were quickly rubbed with a mix of finely chopped herbs and mustard and wrapped snugly in puff pastry:



Then we made Rack of Lamb. Again. God help me, but by the time it came out of the oven I was ready and waiting. We've dispensed with formality at this point; we just saw off some chops and eat our portions right off the bone in our hands, like a big bloody lollipop. Something's just not right about force-feeding yourself rack of lamb every day. I'm not sure what it is, but I'll let you know when I figure it out.

There was a brief lamb-free interlude while we prepared our appetizer, pasta-encrusted prawns. We marinated them in a mix of citrus juice, garlic and olive oil, wrapped them with fettuccine, pan-fried them and then served them atop some mixed greens with a citrus reduction. They were great, but each prawn was massive and we were allotted five each. Gamba overload. I ate four and gave up.



Then lamb reappeared, in both its tenderloin and rack form. I gave up trying to make my plate look pretty and just slapped yet another chop on top of the tenderloin-stuffed pastry, then wolfed the whole thing down before my teacher could see that I'd neglected my garnish and presentation:


And for dessert? Souffles, of course! Something light and healthy!


We lined each cup with a candied orange slice first.


If you wipe a towel around the edge of your souffle to create a ridge like this, it will rise more evenly.

Two hours later, we were battering and deep-frying chocolate truffles. This sounds like something only the Scottish could think up, but au contraire! First we prepared ganache by mixing chocolate and cream, then piped it out and chilled it:


Piping these into shapes that don't resemble merde is harder than it looks.
We also prepared a chocolate fritter batter, beat some eggs for dipping, and pushed a chocolate genoise cake through a sieve, making a pile of very fine, rich crumbs:



Finally, we dipped our chilled ganache balls into the beaten eggs, rolled them in cake crumbs, dipped them in fritter batter and then deep-fried them in peanut oil.

Did I really just write that?

After they drained, we nestled them into a pool of tapioca pudding, and topped them with a nest of frizzy chocolate fritters:


What can I say? Deep-fried chocolate truffles taste good. When you cut into them, they ooze molten chocolate. Not such a fan of the tapioca pudding, though. The dish seemed a bit incongruous to me, what with the stodginess of the tapioca on the one hand and the pornographic amounts of chocolate and fat on the other, but maybe that's the idea.

We finished off the day by making a banana coconut tart. The planets must have aligned in some beneficial way because I finally got my pate sucree (tart crust) rolled out and arranged in the metal ring without it breaking, ripping or dissolving into a buttery, gloppy mess before me.


My triumphant tart crust

Here's the result:



I was pleased. This is the first thing I've made in pastry class that has actually resembled the teacher's version. So what if the thought of eating it right now makes me want to keel over? It just might be the perfect conclusion to tomorrow's rack of lamb.

Our midterm: blood and sweat, but no tears this time

Today was really, really crappy. We had what was essentially our midterm for the Ritz Escoffier course, and the results were not good. Not good at all.

Like our previous exam, we were given a list of four dishes that we had to know by heart. We would all be assigned one of these dishes to cook in two hours and present it to our chefs and the director of the cooking school for judging. We'd all be cooking the same thing. This exam was ungraded; the purpose of it was to assess our skill levels for the final five weeks of the course.

And honestly, I stunk.

It's not that hard for me to admit this. I am trying to develop a thick skin about my cooking; I want people to be honest with me and tell me what needs work and what I need to practice. I am also hard on myself because this is something I really care about, and I want to improve.

And wow, judging from the way I cooked today, I have limitless room for improvement. Lucky me.

We were clued in to the fact that we would be tested on the Rack of Lamb with Winter Vegetables dish when a giant box of lamb arrived from the butcher during yesterday's class. Since today is a national holiday in France, it was safe to assume that these were intended for our exam. Whoops! Silly butcher!

Some of the girls and I even met at my place over the weekend to practice the lamb and the vegetables, and made a fine dinner that became increasingly blurry and giggly at the end thanks to two bottles of wine (plus a third to cook with, of course).


Nina trimming the lamb.

Our home version of the lamb dish.

Finishing up with a cheese plate, bien sur.

I just love cheese. And figs.
The hardest part of this dish for me is the vegetables. Many of them have to be served in "turned" shapes, which basically means paring them down into tidy, compact little cylinders that look nice but require a hell of a lot of work and skill. I suspect that you could turn vegetables for a decade before really mastering them. I have probably turned them about ten different times, so they usually wind up in vaguely cubeoid shapes marred by nicks and divots. They're not even used very often in restaurants anymore because they're so time-consuming and wasteful. They are, however, pretty AND pretty classic, so learn them we must.


I was quite concerned about time management, because on our last exam I was not well-organized and ended up being really crunched at the end. Yesterday I penned a quick list of the order of steps in which I would work on my dish; unfortunately for me, turning just a small pile of vegetables can easily consume half an hour or more. And my tendency to tremble when nervous really doesn't help when one is trying to shave off milimeter-thick slices from a tiny carrot cylinder.

The good news is that time-wise, I was better. Still not great, still not quite on time, but also not quite so blind with panic when it came to plating as I was on the first exam. But here are some of the mistakes I made:

1) I cut my pinkie finger while turning vegetables.

2) I cut my index finger while trimming the lamb. This one was pretty bloody.

3) I burned my other index finger doing something else, but I don't know what.

4) I prepared my carrots and onions incorrectly. We were supposed to white-glaze them, and I blond-glazed them. In the first technique, you don't brown your vegetables at all; in the second version you give them a light color. I began coloring them and by the time my teacher reminded me they were supposed to be cooked blanc, it was too late. I don't think I even did the blond-glazing correctly, because my butter eventually burned and covered my vegetables with little black flecks. Clarified butter would have been better.

5) It ended up not mattering one bit that I over-colored my vegetables, because shortly thereafter I gave them what I like to think of as a black-glaze. In short, I burned the bejesus out of them and had to throw the entire pot of carefully turned carrots and pain-in-the-butt-to-peel-thin-skinned tiny onions in the trash.

6) Then I had to start them over. If I was going to cry, it would have been at this point. But I didn't.

7) I broke a plate by super-heating it for presentation and then slamming it down on the table.

8) My lamb was under-cooked by about four minutes.

9) My final presentation platter looked like it had been assembled by a mentally-compromised chimp. I don't know what I was thinking. Somehow I decided it would be a good idea to pile everything on one side of the plate and drizzle sauce over the remaining bare portion. This might have worked if the sauce was really thick and rich, but it was a thin jus. It looked awful. Easily the worst of the six of us.

I'm sure I made hundreds of other errors, but our final critique was group-oriented so we didn't get into the nitty-gritty of our individual mistakes. Basically the staff reached the consensus that we all presented fairly inept renderings of the dish, and that we would have to start the lesson over again tomorrow.


This is what our plates were supposed to look like. Mine wasn't even close!

Afterwards we all felt pretty blue. As we shuffled down Rue Cambon, Nina had a brilliant idea:

"Hey! Why don't we go to Starbucks?"

Until today, I hadn't crossed its threshold, even though there is one right near school. But yeah, I admit to dreaming of a big foamy latte. In a paper cup. That you can walk down the street with. That doesn't cost $8.

I clapped my hands and chortled like a toddler.
"Please, please, can we? Can we??"

And so we did. And lo, the lattes did taste good. Balm for the souls of some burned, bleeding culinary students.

And tomorrow, we shall revisit the rack of lamb. For the fourth time. And maybe eventually I'll get it right.