I kicked ass!

Well, okay, maybe not quite kicked. Wound up, swung, sorta glanced it, but the effort was there.

Today was the Practical Exam for Cooking Theory. We were given two hours to present the Chef with a dish using the four basic items – protein, sauce, veg, and starch. He would tell us what to use, and what we did with them was up to us, but it had to make sense (i.e. you’re not going to serve fish with a brown sauce.) This would test us on everything we’ve learned over the past three weeks – sauces, poaching, pan roasting, risotto, blanching, etc. The catch was that we would not know what we had to work with until we came in this morning. Think Iron Chef, but with two hours instead of one, and we didn’t have Alton Brown or Chairman Kaga to host it.

I went in at 9 am (oh was it nice to be able to sleep until 8 for a change!) There were two classmates already there; one started at 7:30 and the other at 8:15. Chef started me out dicing carrots. Knife Skills test. I did well on that one (but I was nervous – I seem to have a problem with what I consider to be “medium” dice.) Next he gave me my assignment – grilled pork chop, russet potato, beurre blanc, and broccolini.

Allez cuisine!

I had until 11:00am to figure out what I was doing, prepare it, cook it, finish it, plate it, and present it. Grilled pork chop, no problem, I do those all the time. Russet are good mashed, and pork to me says chives and roasted garlic. Beurre Blanc is pretty much just wine and butter, and on the assignment card Chef suggested mustard in it (which I would have tossed in anyway, so I felt pretty good about that.) And, well, bleah, I have never cooked broccolini, but hey it looks sorta like brocolli, so it shouldn’t be too tough, right?

Here’s the trick about mise en place – you don’t even pick up a knife until you know what you have to work with and what you’re doing to it. Gather the ingredients for each dish, then figure out what gets cooked when and if it needs something preheated, soaked, marinated, etc. Ever since my father taught me how to brine a pork chop (and ironically enough I think he got the idea from Alton Brown) that’s what I think of, so that’s what I did first. Water, salt, peppercorns, red wine vinegar, plop in the pork, into the prep cooler for an hour and a half. Oh, and run up front to turn on the grill. Hard to make grilled pork chops on a cold grill, and a really great way to fail your Practical in one swell foop. Next I chopped up the potato and put that in the salted water to simmer. Then the ingredients for my beurre blanc, but that could wait. Cold sauce = bad = Below Standards. Finally the brocollini, which I did mention I had never prepared before, right? With broccoli, you use only the florets (the stems are too dense) but brocollini has smaller stems. Not knowing whether or not to use them, I cut them off but saved them just in case. The idea was to blanch them in salted water, toss them into an ice bath, then at the last minute saute them in butter to warm them up.

That was the plan, anyway.

The broccolini went into the water, but being more delicate than broccoli, I let them in there too long. When I put them into the ice bath, they looked a little droopy. I left them, making a note to do those again.

The potatoes were next. While they were cooking, I grabbed a couple cloves of garlic, oil, salt, and – erm… the convection oven I usually used was filled with quiche from another class. I didn’t think they would be too thrilled with garlic flavored quiche, so I tried to figure out how to turn on the other oven. Now, you may well think to yourself, “dude, it’s an oven! How hard could it be to turn it on?” Did I mention it was a dual-purpose steam/convection oven? And the indicator for temperature had worn off the knob sometime before I was born? I stuck the tray of garlic in, and did what any cook under the gun would do – I went and asked someone else. Now the responsibilty (blame) was off of me. 🙂 He came over and confirmed, yeah I had it right, then asked if I was roasting garlic. (I had told him earlier what I was planning.) He pointed out to me that there was some garlic in the prep cooler, already roasted, but I found those on my own in case anyone asked (technically we weren’t supposed to be helping each other.) I took the garlic back out and grabbed the roasted ones. Nice, time saved! Drain the potatoes and put them into a mixing bowl. Since I only had two potatoes worth, I decided to just use a whisk to mash them. Put in the butter, garlic, milk, chives, bit more salt, some pepper, mash mash mash! When they were perfect, I covered the bowl and put it near a warm burner.

Next was the beurre blanc. I had only made one once in my life, and that was last week. White wine, white wine vinegar, and shallots, reduce “au sec” (whatever that means) and then whisk in cold butter. Key here is not to heat it too fast or your butter separates, the sauce breaks, and your Chef kills you (breaking an emulsion is considered justifible homicide in the restaurant biz.) Then when it was done, I stirred in some grain mustard and mustard powder. Nummy! Put that aside so it stays warm.

Two hours seems like a long time, doesn’t it? In the time it took you to read this account to this point, maybe five minutes have passed. In the time it took me to DO all that, an hour and 45 minutes passed by. As the French would say, “eeque.”

Grab the pork chop from the brine, rinse it off, and up to the grill. Remembering the method I was taught – two minutes, rotate 90 degrees, two more minutes, flip, repeat. While it was cooking, I went back to our kitchen (the grill is in the restaurant kitchen area, our class is in the back kitchen) to start the saute pan for the broccolini. By this time it was five to 11. That end of the show panic you always see on Iron Chef where everyone is scrambling around to finish things by the buzzer, well, that’s what I was doing. Only I had no one to help me. Toss the butter in the pan, look at the clock, damn it’s two minutes already? Run back up to the grill, turn, go back, put the broccolini in the pan, back to the grill, etc etc. Bring the pork chop back to my station and realize it’s WAY underdone. There are five clocks scattered around the various kitchens, and apparently it’s against school policy for them to be synchronized. I was timing off two clocks that could have been in different time zones for all the good they did me. And, it’s 11:00. Grr… plate the mashed potatoes, the broccolini (which was nice and green and wilted looking) the pork chop, cover with beurre blanc, and the chef comes out and asks if I am done. Five minutes over, but he didn’t say anything about it. Whew.

We go into his office, he takes out forks and a knife, and tells me to taste. He does the same. As expected, he said that the pork was undercooked in some spots. Perfect grill marks, excellent flavor, just not cooked properly. He assumed, based on what he had seen over the past few weeks, that I did know how to cook a pork chop, so he gave me another chance to do it again. Same for the broccolini – I told him I had never cooked it before, which surprised him, but he said do it again and this time use the stems. He was very impressed with the mustard beurre blanc sauce, plating was done well. The mashed potatoes were cold, which he did not hold against me since we did not have a proper warmer in our prep kitchen. He was commenting on how perfectly they were flavored, then he pulls out a raw garlic. My heart sank as he asked me “what’s this?” I told him I had used garlic that was already roasted, but apparently a raw one ended up in there (and naturally in the pile I served for grading!) He pulled it out and laughed, but didn’t take off any points. I told him next time I would roast the garlic myself to be sure it was all done. He fired off some definitions at me, which I mostly knew, then he sent me off to redo the pork and broccolini. Thank god I kept the brine!

Second time around, everything came out perfect. Broccollini was nice and tender, pork chop was perfectly cooked but not quite as well flavored since it only got to sit in the brine for half an hour. Chef was happy with the results this time around. I probably only got Meets Standard though. Grades should be out within a week.

Next up – PM Cafeteria!