Everything is going well. Very fast paced and a lot of work but the saucier kitchen is usually cooler than the bakery so it doesn't seem to sap my energy as much.
My last two weeks in bakery were awesome and I really liked it. the Roll-in station was responsible for laminated dough products like danishes ans croissants and getting them along with some other morning bread out for the morning breaks. After that was the bread station which I enjoyed even more. I was able to learn quite a few bread recipes and techniques. One of the more tasty breads is a cottage cheese dill roll which surprisingly almost everyone likes. Even people the don't like cottage cheese or dill love these rolls. For some reason the Combo works really well. A lot of the breads we made ended up being served in Du Jour and we got compliments on some of the ones we were able to get creative with. Especially a Cheese bread that we ended up rolled out more into a cracker than a bread and I chopped some jalapeños to sprinkle on top. Since the most of the Customers to Du Jour are elderly chef Foote wasn't sure they would go over well but we got back positive feedback.
I finished Bakery with an A so very happy about that.
Saucier has been challenging as well and has kept challenging me for the past 3 weeks now. My last day in saucier is tomorrow. The first station I worked at was Meat fabrication. I got a lot of good information out of it but did find spending most of my day standing at a cutting board a more tedious than I like. Good stuff to know but doing it all day? Bleh. Fortunately, it did get broken up now and then because we also made white chicken stocks, brown veal stocks and fish fumet as well as some Gravad lox (Scandinavian cured salmon) ground meats and sausages.
In fabrication we broke down just about every type of common and popular meat. We Fabricated multiple chickens daily because the whole school burns through them and chicken stock real quickly. We also worked with full pork loins and some beef tenderloins. We Fabricated multiple fish from the major groups; round fish, flat fish and nonbony fish. The nonbony fish was monkfish and that was a very different fish to work with. I am very glad they usually get them head and body removed since the meat is in the tail and they are some UGLY fish. Just working with the tail isn't a very pleasant experience. Though, after all that I did get to taste the final product and it was actually quite tasty.
After that I moved to Family Meal and really enjoyed that even though a lot of times it was more demanding because we had to have various products over to Du Jour each morning before break and then we worked on Feeding the school. I think a lot of the enjoyment came from being back to cooking after working meat fab for a week. Usually it was various soups that we had to make for the restaurant. after that we usually had some type of theme for family meal that we followed and Chef Siam would give us choices occasionally like what type of vegetable platter to put out or how to use a certain vegetable or starch.
Last but not least was the Saucier station this week. Today we had our final tests and cooking practical so no sauces today but still some tomorrow. Saucier is interesting because mostly its working with the mother sauces but there are so many ways to take the mother sauces after that and we made quite a few of them including some not based off of mother sauces. Just yesterday we made a sweet soy sauce recipe that was good and an easy recipe of just combining the ingredients and simmering for 20 to 25 minutes and then adjusting to the right consistency by either adding more liquid to loosen it or adding cornstarch slurry to thicken it. it did end up needing the slurry but the main thing that makes that recipe a pain is that there are around 15 separate ingredients at need to be collected and cut or measured so its all about the prep rather than the procedure on that one.
The market basket test is a day where we have an hour and a half to make an entrée consisting of chicken as the protein with starch and vegetable sides and a sauce but beyond that its up to us. We were allowed to get pretty creative but I chose to keep it simple to get a decent grade. Plenty of time get creative later on. I got a few practice runs in at home and at school but even with that when you are finally in the kitchen with a timer going and trying to work around 4 other people at a cluster of stoves it starts to get hectic. I ended up over reducing my supreme sauce to the point that I almost just had a charred mess in a pot while I tried to get the starch and vegetable ready. I added some more chicken stock and wisked it in but it was pretty much ruined. Maybe if I had more time on the clock i could have fixed it. Oh well.
Altogether I made a pan seared chicken breast with supreme sauce, Sauteed asparagus, and pan fried batonet potatoes with brunoise red and yellow bell pepper and minced garlic. The reason for batonet and bruniose is because we needed to choose two knife cuts off a list of four or five and include them in our entrée somehow.
OK, whew! one more day in Saucier and then I will be moving onto advanced baking.
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