Sadly for cows, our vegetarian streak didn't last long and today was STEAK day, mass excitement all round! They were obviously going to be left until the last minute and we spent the morning doing everything else - my list included brown bread, cauliflower cheese, a pear tart and a platter of smoked fish, honestly my ideal menu - smoked salmon to start, steak for mains and pear tart for pud, too good!
I kicked off with the pastry first which went so well, I'm frightened of jinxing myself but really, I love making pastry now and it's so satisfying to be getting at least something right - the less said about my bread making skills the better, pastry all the way please. So once that was done and resting in the fridge, I poached the pears (the Ballymaloe Way, lots of sugar so of course they were delish) and then made the frangipane which is a type of very light sponge mixture which you put into the tart before adding the pears, it's made mostly of butter, sugar and ground almonds, deadly!
Onwards to cauliflower cheese and WOW, was it cheesy - the ratio of bechamel sauce to cheese was pretty much 1:1, just the way it should be. I did manage to mess up the sauce the first time, can you believe it, I've been making cheese sauce for the last 20 years without a problem, how hard can it be, and yet when I'm here to learn about the really hard stuff it turns out that I can't even make cheese sauce anymore, the horror! In between checking on pastry resting and bread rising, I forgot to turn the heat down so the sauce boiled and split - there are way too many things in a kitchen cupboard that need relationship counselling. Second time lucky, doesn't it look delish, proper comfort food.
Onto the smoked fish platter and this was really only about slicing thinly and decorating prettily which works for me, I love fussing about making plates look nice and normally you've not much time because things obviously need to go out hot (not my strongest point, too much of a faffer, I might need a blow torch on hand during my final exam to give everything a quick blast on the way out the door) - so look at my plate, mussels with mayonnaise (homemade of course) on brown bread, smoked salmon and smoked haddock both with sweet dill mayonnaise, smoked mackerel and smoked eel which horseradish cream and a mini mountain of cucumber pickle in the middle. And after all that fiddling, it lasted about 2 minutes, so so good, I could have eaten the whole side of smoked salmon - wish my "slice thinly" skills were as rubbish as my bread making skills.
Last stop pre-steak was Bearnaise sauce which is a hot emulsion sauce, similar to Hollandaise, so basically you've to whisk a lot of butter into a lot of egg yolks over the heat, whilst flinging in other ingredients as needed (vinegar, touch of lemon juice, seasoning, what have you). So there's 3 options here - make a smooth, shiny sauce (a surprisingly unpopular choice), make vinegar and butter flavoured scrambled eggs or lastly, and by far the worst, make smooth shiny sauce and then watch it separate after that into two strictly opposing sides - there's a very small window of opportunity here to "rescue" your sauce by throwing a bit of ice cold water at it and whisking furiously and since sauce separation happened to the bulk of our kitchen, the dashing to and fro from the sink was a scream, William Shatner should have been on hand to do live re-enactments of all the 911 business going on.
And finally, the main event of the day, steak - it's harder than you think because you've to tell your teacher how you plan to cook your steak before you start and you're not allowed to cut it open half-way to check how it's doing, you've to guage "cooked-ness" by how it feels, proper restaurant stuff this! And it was a good thing we were relying on feel not sight because it was like being in a war zone anyway - 18 students hovering over super hot grill pans armed with thick sirloin steaks with a hefty bit of fat on the side makes for a fair amount of smoke, if we'd had a disco ball and some bass to hand it could have been a proper party.
One of the other students is a Zimbo who's lived in London for the last 15 or so years and before that in South Africa for many years and so he's very much an honourary Seth Efrican - shockingly though he managed to OVERCOOK his steak - we suspect it might mean surrendering his SA passport............
After the best lunch I've had for ages, it was time for demo with Darina and today was hot soufflé day for the first time, definitely something that freaks out most people. Turns out that it's not quite as bad as we'd all imagined it, as long as you whisk your eggs so stiffly they could double as scaffolding and don't mess about after that getting your soufflé into the oven you've a damn good chance of it all working. The second part of the challenge is to get it from the oven to the table in record time, no matter how good your soufflé is they do sink quite quickly and so you need The Stig on standby to do table runs.
We moved on then to a whole lot of classic French terrines, good but so rich and normally served with all sorts of relishes and so on - listen to this, Paté de Campagne with Confiture d'Oignons, translated means country paté with onion marmalade, doesn't everything sound so much better in French?
Lots of salads to go with these like celeriac remoullade, fennel and red onion salad, winter green salad with pomegranate and a few different grilled aubergine salads, yum.
There was a new bread dough to learn, one made with milk instead of water and ideal for pretzels, another yeast/kneading special, my worst. We also learnt how to make flaky pastry which we only do once apparently as it's basically just a mini-stop before the real deal, puff pastry which is equal parts butter and flour, can you just imagine what a shocker that's going to be to handle.
For pud there were crepes, paper thin and finished with a few different sauces - the Ballymaloe version of crepes Suzette which was so much better than the original, I'll have to make it at home, just deadly, and then another one with chocolate and toasted hazelnuts, need I say more!
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